Notes From the Underground: A Subterranean Invocation

For people like you, who live above the city's surface, the image has its roots in vision. We, the people of the Underground, think of the image with our touch. You, with your preponderance of light, with your infinite urge to capsize every imagistic moment into a finite blunder, have thought of the image one way and one way alone for thousands of years. All your history, all your ideas, your techniques of envisioning the image has solely been about the limits of the visible frame. The people of the Underground have, instead, chosen unbounded infinities and the formless.

We see with our fingers. In the dark hostilities down here, where the sun is our enemy, We have trained our leathery, ill-nourished fingers to touch many infinities at each instance. Every swirl, every wave, every movement touched at its point of emergence, We feel continuously, not as a still being that operates inside of a frame but in its totality; We capture the image at the tip of our fingers, experiencing simultaneously the smallest part and the sum of all parts, continually relaying into our brains, as the image becomes infinite and recedes into the infinitesimal, all at once, all together. The platitudes and limits of your frames and your science of paint and study of light hold no value down here.

Yes, We, the gentle nigh indiscernible rumbling of the thousands of feet that you hear beneath the city's surface every time you press your ears too close to the ground; We, that lurk in the shadows away from the sun's luminescence, away from the confines of that which must be seen to be perceived, away from the possible terrors of too much exposure, of frailties of witnessing and substantive history, away from forceful shifts in narratives and states of being, from evaporation, sublimation, totalisation, away from the sun's rays that on an unfortunately bright day enters this ancient tunnel and stings our eyes and pierces our skin and emits a bubbling miasmic substance that our scholars call many names like subjugation and apartheid and injustice and oppression. How are We to know, you might think—We that were born with our chains intact; We, the children of lesser gods We who have lived like this, brutally, for who knows how many generations, from "before history was history" as our elders would say; We, who have our necks and legs fettered to the base of this surreal tunnel-like geography, unable to turn, unable to look beyond the shadows that pass through on rare occasions at the opening of this cave which you, the Upper people, degradingly call the Underground? Yes, We, the dispossessed, We, the monstrous, We, that have been forced by your chains and your geographic violence and your metaphysical sanctions and your unending desire to witness us as partial images but never whole, your religious need to maintain distance from us—always keeping us beneath your line of sight but never coming too close, forcing us to live our lives looking at our own tormented silhouettes projected on the wall in front of us and nothing else, every time the evil sun decides to let the light in for your entertainment, for your artistic bemusement, no, you see, We do not suffer in ignorance as you would have yourself believe. We pity you instead.

Yes, We pity you for being so enamoured by visions and idols, by images and icons, by worship and theology, by rituals and supplication, and the crystallised sacred that you have founded inside the visible image. Yes, We mock you in our silence, dear Upper person. You, with your sunlight and shame, and the city's vast expanses where, despite all your visible boundlessness and freedom you feel the need to create walls, walls that you hide behind, walls where you mount artifacts and call them art, walls where you project feckless fantasies that you call images, you with your immaterial pontification, your spineless philosophising, you, who thought me up in your allegory of the cave and kept me chained and refuses to see me as your equal, drawing pleasure and comfort from my tied-up shadowy being, conveniently forgetting me when you want because I exist so far beyond your imagistic frame. We jeer contemptuously at you, with rage in our hearts and hatred in our bellies, for all the lies you have invented to console yourself about the infinite injustice you have conserved us in, just so that you can close your eyes in the darkness of the night and the trouble in the image would mystically turn itself off, but that never happens, does it? I exist deep inside the recesses of your brain, like a pre-formed abyss of a memory, emerging as the incomprehensible terrifying unknown that attacks you, and suddenly, you wake up fumbling in the dark, you cannot locate your own being. Yes, you with your carefully curated body, you, who never dares go past the city's limits and approach this lightless terrain, you who has to conjure up incredible fictions about horrors that await inside the Underground just so that you don't have to come too close to me, or look into my obstinate eyes, you, who pronounces me as the absolute other, the untouchable, pronounces my very touch as divinely corruptible, yes, it is you who We feel sorry for; We laugh as we imagine a world where, in your fear of the boundless, unframeable other, the framed image visits as much ritualistic sanctions from you as the framed criminal and the chained Underground person does, where the image itself becomes untouchable, and you are driven to write in front of your beloved, framed images, in bold malicious letters: Do Not Touch The Artwork.

^{(Featured Image: Savindra Sawarkar, Untouchable with the Lalten. Image used with permission by Savindra Sawarkar. Image credit: Saurabh Dube.)}