Yet Untitled 119 - The Era of Us
An instalment featuring big words and famous people
Dearest Yet Untitler
Ratan Tata died. Everyone’s saying that it’s ‘the end of an era’.
Last year, Daisaku Ikeda died. He was my Buddhist mentor who lived a full, dynamic life dedicated to peace, culture and education. He mobilised millions of people around the world including myself to strive for the ideals he fought for. For me, his passing definitely felt like ‘the end of an era’.
I turn to Leonard Cohen’s music for reassurance, clarity, and wisdom. When he died in 2016, I felt things would never be the same again.
Master animator and treasure of humanity Hayao Miyazaki is, thankfully, still alive. But in a bunch of recent documentaries I’ve watched about him, he’s constantly fretting about dying. Having relied on his films to rekindle my spirits when they need a jump-start, I’m really worried about how the world would seem when he’s gone.
Eras Like to End
From the dominant perspective, Eras seem to have only one irritating occupation - ending! I observe that we seem to register the End of Eras more than when they are robust and thriving.
Maybe it’s a little presumptuous to recognise and proclaim an Era while it’s ongoing. ‘Era’ is a big word, like ‘Eon’ or ‘Age’. It tends to be bestowed like a knighthood to the select few era-definers.
If you ask me, I find that labelling a period of time as an ‘Era’ is no different than labelling a shorter quantum of time as a ‘second’ - it’s giving something amorphous, open-ended and potentially unfathomable a defined shape. In the face of the annals of countless taxonomies created by humanity, it’s quite clear to me that as humans, we like giving things names.
One way to see it is that names make things feel finite. My Buddhist practice prompts me that see me that I am simultaneously all of life while also being simultaneously being Vasant. It’s definitely easier seeing myself as Vasant only. It’s convenient and something that I - the poor mortal with limited perspective, can work with - leaving the infinite to Buddhas.
Buddhism also prompts me to consider that it’s because of this limited perspective that all of humanity’s sufferings originate. As I see it, the big problem that we inherit along with the clean, clearly-defined understanding of ourselves as finite little individual sparks in the blackness of the void is ye olde problem of death.
An Era ends every moment
We’re literally burning through them, man! Things are ending around us at breakneck speed…
…and I’m not saying this as some dark, apocalyptic pronouncement while wearing a robe and sounding a gong. A few weeks ago, Flounder - one of two unsolicited goldfish sent to my kids by their doting sugar-daddy uncle, my brother Sumeet - died. When Flounder passed, my children mourned. But a few days later, we replaced Flounder with Momo.
It may sound ridiculous to say:
The Era of Flounder hath Passed. The Era of Momo hath begun.
It may sound ridiculous to equate one second with an era; but from a Buddhist perspective that deals constantly with Eternity, it’s not ridiculous at all.
The playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, and author Sam Shepard had something interesting to say about endings - something oft quoted in the annals of YU:
“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius.”
Sam Shepard
Eight years into Buddhist practice, I’m better at using ‘Eternity’ as a serious word than I was when I started; better at looking at life and time as a continuum. Still, like anyone else, I run into my own struggles with finiteness and endings.
Pop Quiz Hot Shot: What do you do when an era ends?
Couldn’t resist posting this clip from the film ‘Speed’, which marked me for life. Holler if it skid-marked you too.
Coming back: what do we do when an era ends?
Can’t simply end with it, can we?
I’m thinking about Miyazaki complaining about how his friends keep dying before him. The clip below should start at a point when he receives one of those dreaded phone calls:
What does Miyazaki do after not just his all mentors and inspirations, but most of his respected contemporaries have ended?
He just keeps going, doesn’t he? He doesn’t stop. As you’ll see in the clip above, he hurts. But he goes on, knowing that there’s no choice. But he doesn’t just ‘go on’ in the insipid ‘be calm and carry on’ sense of the phrase. He GOES ON to make yet another film - as he says, his most ambitious yet.
Early in his life, Bob Dylan lost Woody Guthrie, who is said to have had a tremendous influence on him. Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda also lost his Mentor Josei Toda early. But both kept GOING. If I examine both their lives, they more or less became the people who they lost. Ikeda kept up a dialogue with his mentor in his heart, going even further than Toda in propagating Nichiren Buddhism at a global scale, going further than Toda could ever go. Similarly, Dylan furthered the musical tradition pioneered by Guthrie and took it somewhere Guthrie could never have ventured.
But for both Dylan and Ikeda - not to miss Miyazaki - I imagine they would have all had to face a hard moment at a crossroads - with loneliness and a void on one side and an uncharted road on the other (reminds me of a poem).
All three chose to leave the void behind, as I strongly feel inspired to do, repeatedly. All three - Dylan, Ikeda and Miyazaki - lonely travellers and era-makers - have helped me aspire to this.
The Era of Us
There’s nothing that heralds the Era of Us more than the loss of a parent or a parent-figure. While parents are there, it’s so much easier to make sense of the world. Even if we don’t ask them to actively decipher the world for us, their presence anyhow makes the world comprehensible.
After they depart, I feel we are truly in our own Era.
‘Era’ is a big word, like ‘Eon’ or ‘Age’.
Occupying my own Era feels like a scary prospect for me - I picture myself alone in a William Blake inspired landscape, staring at tumultuous life-events forming like nebulae in the cosmos before me.
ChatGPT helped me a bit with visualising this image and it was interesting because when I got out of my head and looked at the machine-imagines, human prompted scenario, it actually felt less scary and more exciting.
If I were to put my present self into the heads of these lone figures staring at their Eras undulating before them in the above ChatGPT’s renditions, I would find myself thinking about Ikeda, Cohen, Dylan, Miyazaki and maybe even Ratan Tata. I would need every bit of help I could get from them.
I think that’s the right thing to do with Eras gone past. If it’s worth calling what has passed an Era-with-a-capital-E, then it’s worth continuing the conversation with such Eras once they have ended. After all, it was in those eras we sought refuge and found solace.
Now our own Eras must shelter others thus. Fear not, dear YU-er. I’m with you.
We occupy this Era together.
Thanks for listening!
Lots of love
V