On Non-Linearity and Permeability: Field Notes on Attention
In the sandbox of ideas, experience matters more than rule.
My first experience of the outer world, of the shared reality and systems we build, was in Kindergarten. It was 1984, and I attended a grammar school down the street from our home in Karachi, Pakistan. I was not a willing participant in this charade of civilization. As a four-year-old, I thought the lessons were dull, the classmates were animals, and the environment was too rigid. I got through it by treating the whole experience like a kind of experiment — an experiment that created the foundational theory behind what would later become my legacy in this world: Dark Islam.
The grammar school I went to had no end of rules: a grey uniform, minimal accessories, and an expectation of submission to authority that is nothing short of a psychological wound from centuries of colonization. I made it a ritual to come to school with arms draped in glass bangles. No one else did; no one else tried. But then I’d find ways to push the boundary a litte more. One morning, I snapped on a ridiculous, absurd amount of barettes. Twenty or thirty plastic clips were scattered all over my head like a cultural landmine, an obvious provocation for the day.
That morning the principal, a patient and elderly woman, sought me out on the school playground during break. She walked over in the way older South Asian women often do, with a gait brought on by unleveled hips, a sign of centuries of epigenetic trauma. Coiled around her soft frame were the layers of saree cloth. I perched there draped like a wild cat across a jungle gym, awaiting her arrival and knowing there wasn’t anything she really could do.
I remember my attitude as she worked her way through her speech, gentle as it was. I saw that attitude mirrored in American films years later in the characters played by James Dean and Steve McQueen. Cool as a cucumber. Disinterested. Unaffected. But because I liked my principal, because she didn’t hinge her identity on shows of force, I submitted to her request to follow the rule. She wasn’t part of the experiment. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what the experiment was at the time other than to poke and prod at the world.
Little else stands out from my earliest school days, other than a lesson that was so painfully boring that I thought I would surely die unless I found something novel to focus on. It was just then, hinging on the verge of spontoneous combustion that would have been a welcomed exit “poofing” me out of that classroom, that I noticed a trail of black ants. Marching in unison at the foot of the blackboard, the ants became a living wall between the disciplinarian and the disciplined, between teacher and the student, between rule and the unruly. And so I made them the center of my focus for the rest of that class. I would look only to that formation, to that stream of ants. I studied their movement, the slight undulations their bodies made as one tried to follow another. I wondered where they were going and what I’d find if I followed them. I made them my entire world as a game of attention to ward off the misery of confinement.
Isn’t that what prisoners do in every movie when they’re in captivity? They turn their attention to some sign of life in a cell block of stone — an insect, a secret note, a crack of light? They find something small, something real to latch onto. In all the ways I spoke to this in my first book, The Song of the Human Heart, the world around me begged to be tested and teased for signs of permeability. Whether it was class hierarchies, religion, or socialization, I felt from my earliest days that brick by brick, I was being suffocated into a mausoleum of memory, a pattern on repeat, a template for human belonging.
Stranger still are the many lives we share this prison cell called civilization with. A prison made out of uniformity of codes of behavior and set to a distortion pattern that is almost invisible to the naked eye. A prison where we are each other’s jailors.
A cage can take so many forms. Even at a tender age of four, I knew my cage: submission to eldership that hadn’t been earned, submission to social cues, deference to those who had more wealth, and appreciation for external validation.
There were plenty of opportunities for external validation. Every season, I’d be given a trophy for proving I could rub two brain cells together to complete a task. The award shape and scope never changed. It was always a tin cup. It had been a tin cup last month. It was a tin cup this month. It would be a tin cup again next month.
“What is the point of this?” I thought to myself, deeply frustrated and without an ounce of agency to change any of it.
The small fountains of agency I did try to drink from often soured. I drank too much cherry cough syrup once when no one was looking, only to find myself in the hospital getting my stomach pumped. I tried to go to school without wearing any underwear, only to be dragged back into the house and get a verbal lashing from my mother who knew better. I tried talking back to my mother one time, only to have my father threaten to kick me out of the house.
“If you’re going to act that way, you can leave,” he roared as titans would, opening our apartment door and pointing to the stairs that descended into the pitch black of night. I thought about it for a moment. With the wisdom of hindsight, I know that a descent into the dark was still decades away.
“What’s the point of this” is a question I still ask, far more boldly now. Forty years later, I may finally have an answer to it.
For a long time, I reflected on these moments as vignettes of childhood. As I work my way through the sequel to The Song of the Human Heart, I realize there was more at play here: I was unhooking my eye from the world around me. I was finding small ways to practice seeing differently.
What that looked like any given day varied. As the star student, I would sometimes purposely make a mistake in my lessons so I could see what it felt like to have my hands whipped by a ruler. And when that happened just the once, I remember studying my hands to see if it felt different — not the pain, but something within. Did the lashing somehow snap into place my hand’s wayward way of writing in that moment? Did it align something in me? Did force change anything?
It didn’t. It only aligned my vision that I disliked this teacher even more — not so much because she hit me, but because she thought her system worked. One teacher was just like another. They all demanded devotion to the system because they believed themselves to be prime authority — but they were nothing more than keepers of a mausaleum, a tomb of a dying culture. The demands then are the same demands I see in the world now: to bend the will, to bend the knee, to see the world as they do. A distorted kind of submission.
“Falling into line” is what they call it no matter what part of the world you’re in or what generation you’re from. Manipulation of organic life formed into prim little rows, pruned of authenticity, to lend our bodies and minds toward uniformity, linearity, and compliance. I was lost to that long before I clumsily rebelled as a young adult, and long before the feral self I am evolving into now, a jungle cat draped across the linear mind as if it were a play thing. Long ago, I was a lost to the gaze of the undulating walk of ants across a cold floor, to the crooked and zig-zagged lines of clips across my head, and to the forbidden crunch of glass bangles that became my secret rite at the temple of my headboard. Linearity wasn’t my experience of things — and in the sandbox of ideas, experience matters more than rule.