You can smell the quality of the late afternoon light in Lahore, specially when it is sifting through the muffled canopy of a tired banyan tree. It is a light that is older than the city itself, a pale, mellowed gold which has seen the march of Mughal emperors, British viceroy and now the ever incessant motorbikes, and concrete. On a newly paved sidewalk, overwhelmed by the drone of say, traffic against the ears, I was looking at ancient light pouring against the sterile face of a glass-fronted bank. Then a deep and a troubling feeling swept over me,–a feeling of heart-rending loss. It was a sense that you were on one of the incredible shores and could look at a magnificent, detailed ship dancing on the horizon and realizing that it would never come back.
It is, I would say, one of the emotional fingerprints of our contemporary world. It is a stodgy sorrow, a dull-feeling sadness that existed in a state of knowing that we are getting too far removed, too far out of touch with something important, something beautiful. We are living in a high-tech world that is more connected than ever known before, but even more alienated. We are so much provided with unlimited information, and yet we experience a shortage of wisdom. We are moving quicker, constructing greater, creating more but in our intense quest in search of the new, we have destroyed the sensitive ecology of beauty that previously extracted the human soul. This lost beauty is not one thing alone. It is a cloth stitched together with numerous strands: the dying magnificence of our built world, the loss of contact with the natural environment, the dissolution of profound community and the muffling of our own inner spaces. Saying we need to relate with this lost beauty does not mean sentimental nostalgia; it is spiritual survival which is a conscious move to rediscover that lost part of ourselves we are being pushed too far to regain.
We need to first of all identify the sickness before we will have a chance to repair our relationships. We must dare to draw the lines of the disparition, in order to know about the emptiness. The defeat comes in many various, but related, forms.
The first, and, maybe, the most obvious is our loss of a contact regarding the architectural spirit of our past. This is a day to day tragedy in cities such as Lahore. Where we walk there are grand old havelis, their pretty wooden balconies hanging loosely on creaking frames, their fresco walls flaking off to display the passively unconcerned brickwork. They were not buildings, they were living things, built and adapted to the climate and to the culture. Natural air conditioning, their soaring ceilings, thick walls and their central courtyards were the centers of family life, and their culture of co-existence. These days they are either collapsing because they have been neglected or demolished to allow ugly boxes made of plaster to be erected which are hot in summer, cold in winter but with absolutely no history or charm.
We have substituted the lingo of artisan-ship the study craft of the stone cutter, the kashi-kari (tile mosaic) worker, the woodman, in favor of the crude, impersonal, language of the mass product. Highlight of the lost language resides in the Wazir Khan Mosque which is located in the inner depths of the Walled City. All of its surface rustles with the dialogue of colour and pattern, of religion, art and mathematics. To be in its courtyard is to have the weight of centuries of fervor and of art reponsible to one. However, only several hundred metres apart dominant aesthetic is one of cheap plastic signs and hurriedly built commercial plazas. Our earlier tradition of creating forever has been lost, we now make time-bound and we make money-bound. This is not progress; this is an in-depth cultural amnesia.
The almost parallel loss has been our progressive alienation with the natural world. Our fore bearers were governed by the beat of the sun and the seasons. The sayings of trees, the ways of the birds and the secrets of the ground were filled in their folklore. To us, nature has turned into just an abstraction, something to serve as a screensaver on our laptops or something to enjoy in a specially created park. We have lost the names of the native flora, of the native and native birds. These sparrows and crows which had filled the soundscape of the city are less in number now with their chirping and cawing being silenced by the noise of generators. The seasons no longer signal using the smell of flowers or the definite angle of light, but through the positions on our air conditioners.
This separation is not merely aesthetic in nature, but it is one which breaks an important feedback loop. Nature teaches us to be patient, tough and interdependent. An old peepal tree growing through the crack in a wall is a class on survival. Butterfly is a metaphor of transformation since its lifecycle depicts the process. When we protect ourselves against these everyday lessons, we get hardened, less flexible, more vulnerable to the worries of our own hermetically sealed existence. We have lost the memory of the fact that we are not some parts that are independent of nature, but rather a part of nature. It is the beauty that we have lost on the wild, the beauty we have lost of our own wild nature.
Lastly and most personally, we have lost the beauty of slow and deep culture connecting man and man. Our former communities were created in standards where architecture favored interaction. A low wall structure, shared courtyards, the verandahs in front of their homes (tharras), the wells in the neighborhoods were all social technologies to bring people together and promote a community identity. It was not meetings, but life itself coming organically and daily that shared stories, wise traditions, and burdens!
Nowadays, we have castle-like homes and thick walls around them, we communicate, the cold, blue light of programs. The art of the conversation is perishing, giving way to share memes and bit size bulletins. We have thousands as our friends in the cyber world yet hardly do we know the name of the family living next door. It is replacing empathy, which the face-to-face commune): through subtle clues of body language, the twitch of emotion in someone eyes: bred, and with which commonality is cultivated. We have swapped out the dirty, chaotic, but intensely satisfying nature of real-world community to the smooth, streamlined, and ultimately meaningless reverberating chamber of the network.
It is the first step to recognize that this loss has occurred and this, by itself, is not sufficient. To dwell in it is to sink in wallowing nostalgia, romanticizing a kind of past that did not really figure with the problems of its own. The real task, and the real adventure, is in the processes of the seeking connection actively and consciously. It is not necessarily a matter of going back to the past, but it is a matter of attempting to trace the echoes of the beauty that was lost and learning to hear the music in this noise of today. It is a spectacle of archaeology of self.
The process of search will start with a mere action of walking differently. It is preferring to park the vehicle and walk inside the maze-like interiors of the ancient city. There are some implications of doing so: it implies slow movement, purposefulness and paying attention to stones. In following the cool and smooth surface of a tile in the Shahi Hammam (the Royal Bath) the traveler touches the hand of the workman who set it down there all those four centuries ago. The moment to be inside the spacious courtyard of the Badshah Mosque at dawn is to experience the feeling of grandeur and smallness no marvel of modern architecture can call forth. These sites do not lie as dead relics they talk, they tell, they tell stories of ambitions, faith, love and loss. Then we have to be silent so as to hear them. It is the art of meditating, the art of training our eye to look behind the surface skin of decomposition and trace to the permanent soul within.
And there then the search should proceed out of the inanimate into the living. The lost arts: we have to go to the last practitioners of forgotten techniques. This involves locating the ancient man in a small shop where he continues to study the art of beating up copper pots by hand and the fluidity of his movements a dance that he had perfected in his life. It is listening to a musician playing the sarangi, a musical instrument whose mourning tones are claimed to be a copy of the human wail, and knowing he is not merely sounding tunes, he is keeping a whole language of feeling.
Getting in touch with these makers is an effective inoculation against our disposable culture. in their work we see a kind of devoutness, a meekness, and a religion of materials that is nearly virtuous. Their stained, twisted hands are the sign of the life spent in quest of mastership rather than profit. By purchasing their work, by listening to their stories, by becoming an eye witness to their craft, one becomes a part of a chain of transmission. To say that this beauty may be under threat but it is still not lost. It is a manner of informing them, and us, that a life of making a single thing beautiful and honest is still of infinite value.
This quest should also bring us to the earth. A relinking with nature in a mega city like Lahore needs imagination and a change of thinking. It can signify planting a small garden in the rooftop and growing mint and chilies in earthen pots and learning the modest miracle of making a seed to grow. To see the one good tree in your street a really seeing that tree–to see how the leaves have turned, what birds nest in it, how the roots have curled the pavement, in their own quiet silent and inexorable thirst. It involves finding the green lungs of the city such as the Bagh-e-Jinnah and lying on the grass and gazing around at the sky through a web of leaves. This resistance is through small acts. They are a statement that despite the world being made out of concrete and steel we may still make some small corner of Eden to remind us of the life-giving rhythms that we have lost track of.
The last and most important phase of the process is integration. It is not about residing in an art museum or escaping the modern society to the world of endless mourning of the past. That would be another type of disconnection. But the final task is to gather those remnants of this lost beauty, and to weave them again into the tapestry of our modern life. It is the synthesis of something new, the form of existence that is contemporary and at the same time venerable.
This needs to go past nostalgia. Nostalgia is a longing, of a passivity, of a bittersweet. The connective is creative, active. A nostalgic character says that nobody constructed havelis. An informed individual observes the rules of the haveli, wind ventilation, local materials, necessity of central assembly point, and tries to apply the same in the development of a contemporary housing or even a centre hall. They realize not only the aesthetic but the ethos which possesses the life-giving potency.
Similarly, we are able to be modern scribes. Not many of us will ever be great calligraphers, but all of us can learn to employ the ethos of the calligrapher patience, consideration and focus on the need to be elegant and precise) in our work. Depending on whether you are coding in a computer, writing a business plan, cooking a meal, or teaching a lesson, you can decide to do it with a sense of art and spirit. You are able to overcome the temptation of mediocrity and hurriedness and provide your daily activities with the silent commitment to excellence. That is the way a lost form of art is rediscovered not as a thing of the past, but a dynamic philosophy.
The new verandas also need to be constructed. The social systems that existed then are no more, but human need to be associated to community lives forever. We will have to employ our contemporary instruments with the ancient wisdom. This implies deliberately engineering our online existence which is to enhance as opposed to replace physical connection. It implies arranging a neighbourhood clean-up or a local book club through the use of social media. It is finding sacred, technology-free time with loved ones in which the only alerts you receive are when things change in the conversation and when one of you looks sad or happy. The new veranda could be a weekly potluck (potluck), a community belly garden, or just a promise among friends to meet frequently on as simple pretexts as a conversation. It is making an effort to establish sacred places where we engage in messy, slow and beautiful work about being human with each other.
This process of getting in touch with the lost beauty of the world always ends up in the landscape of the self. The modernity ruthless tempo can also turn our inner world into victims. We have a capacity to loose our sense of wonder, our ability to create something, our intuition, and our stillness. The route through which one establishes beauty in the outer world is a very strong way of reviving it in the inner world. When we are taught how to listen to the rocks of a forgotten city we are also told to listen to the voices of our own hearts. When we respect the patience of a craftsman we learn to be more patient to ourselves. With the reconnect with nature, we can renew our resilience in it.
Reuniting with lost beauty is to be on the most valuable path we can take that march toward home, within the home, that is ourselves. what is comprehended is that the golden light of a Lahori afternoon does not only light up the world outside; it is capable of lightening up the world inside. Not lost is really the beauty, but rather entombed. It lies in the air in a silent backway, on the palms of aged craftsmen, on the rebellious green of a rooftop garden and behind the true, and last and enduring human ability to look, and to discover, and to touch. The ship does not disappear across the horizon. It is there with us, moored in the still harbour of tranquility of our mind. All we have to do is to look in its direction.
