Zia Haider Rahman

Zafar moved on to an explanation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but this took us along yet another digression carrying us further afield. He did not, in fact, lose his thread and, in due course, he returned to his story of meeting the Hampton-Wyverns and then the narrative of events in Afghanistan (in fact there was only ever just one thread, winding in ways that are now apparent). Even so, I am inclined to skip over the account concerning Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a digression too far, which should not be taken as an indication of anything other than my own need to keep a grip on the twisting and turning of Zafar’s discussion, the ranging back and forth.
In 2000, how many people know what sub-prime mortgages were? He asked me.
Hang on! How did we get to mortgages? I responded.
Zafar simply repeated the question.

I have always felt that choice is a rarity in life, that it lies in wait in the crevices of time, to surprise us when we seem to have the least room to manoeuvre. The grand architecture of our time on earth bears no choice at all, no trace of will, free or otherwise. Without our will we are born and against it we die. We do not choose our mothers, any more than they choose the children that they bear. We do not choose the circumstances of our parents, the home and inheritance, the unearned talents, or the circumstances of our formative infant years when our brains congeal into a steady state, and our neural pathways set us on the course of our lives. Most of the time, we heed unwritten rules. They may be rules of culture and conditioning, patterns imprinted on the tender firmament of youth, or they may be the rules knotted into our brains, woven with DNA by our biological parents, but they are all still rules, by which we live, by which we are governed. That notion of choice as we move through the world, the free will that we claim so proudly, is only the reflection of the body’s foregone direction, an image in the distorting mirror of ego, a trick of the light.

Look, said Zafar. It was he who now showed exasperation. I don’t know how to get anywhere close to my own life, he said. My drama, like everyone’s, goes on upstairs, in the head. And I don’t think you can write the drama of the mind. All you have are the things people do. It’s always about what they do, and yet the mind if where the battles take place, the tragedies and comedies that rule the day. So we fall back on metaphors.

It was only in those periods of concentration, when the self is abnegated and the mind and the subject are fused and all thought is governed by the matter at hand, determined by it, as if it is not you that engages the subject, the work, but the work itself requisitioning the tools of your mind for its inherent purpose – it was during those periods that ironically I felt most in control, that gave me the whole of time – before, after, and during – an aspect of will.