Kaleidoscope of Infinite Hope

If you’ve seen Home Alone you might remember the scene where the Wet Bandits are robbing a house, and just as a message on the voice machine confirms the McCallisters’ house is in fact empty, one of the thieves picks up a vintage gold-plated kaleidoscope from underneath a Christmas tree and we see the visual of geometric shapes and patterns, multicolored, swirling, merging, shifting, creating a beautiful sequence of images. I have never owned a kaleidoscope, I have never been robbed, and I have never been accidentally left at home alone while my family went on holiday. Yet, that’s the thing about memories because you can never choose the ones that are actually going to stay with you or somehow resurface in your mind. For mental clarity and peace of mind it would be a great superpower to be able to control that, but sadly, that’s not how we see things. Maybe that’s why we have things like kaleidoscopes so that sometimes we can look into something else entirely and get lost in a world of colorful glass, beads, and mirrors.

When I first started studying art as an academic subject I knew one thing for certain: I needed an outlet. And the world wasn’t going to hand me any. It wasn’t enough to just feel, no, if you want to survive by feeling too much you must create, and if you want to survive by creating, you have to be desired, and if you want that desire to last you have to belong. Those are a lot of things you have to do, and I found myself understanding a certain equation or formula, but no easy solution. People say be relatable, find the ways in which you are similar to everyone else, but my life like many lives wasn’t, and isn’t like that. I wasn’t interested in surface level connections. While I was in boarding school I got myself a few disposable cameras and took photographs over the course of a few months of places, some people, moments, whatever I felt like. Once I developed the film I cut up the photographs into pieces and sewed them on a piece of fabric to create a quilt. Obviously due to time and resource constraints I wasn’t able to make it as intricate or large as I would’ve wanted, but it communicated a theme that would carry on in my work for years to come: trying to piece together the past through fragmented memory. Everyone does it. Just the cameras contain different images, time zones, things, places, experiences, memories.

That leads me to why I struggle to find an easy solution and why I feel the need to explain myself. Given your situation or circumstance in life you will feel or not feel a deep sense of belonging. Those of us who don’t feel it often presume others have it easy, and those who do have it easy, wonder endlessly why those who don’t just feel what they feel have an issue with. It’s a mess. We as humans have created social mechanisms designed to organize us, to make us united and protected by tribalism, by ownership to a wide variety of social categories and identities, so that ultimately, our emotions are dictated by them. If you want protection or belonging you must subscribe to the values and the system followed by a certain group. If you don’t, you do not belong. That’s the way much of human society, and even the animal kingdom, is organised. But the truth is it’s far from perfect. What we do for survival and who we are are in constant conflict, which is probably why we do not have world peace. And much of it is beyond our control. Like my life, which I have spent even up til now not truly belonging to anything, making it genuinely impossible for me to find a simple solution to that equation or formula. Therein lies the great drama, the conflict, the ongoing saga of torture, delight, and fear.

Of course I’m afraid. Departing naturally from conventions is one thing and feeling like you have no choice is another. How non-compliant can someone be to be able to assert their autonomy or their sense of self? Sometimes people intentionally hurt others, sometimes people don’t. No one is a God. We’re all human. We can’t escape it. So how far are we going to push one another in order to live in a world that we think is under our control? To live in a world that feels safe to us? Will we ever reach a general consensus? No. We will not. All this time, energy, effort trying to become who we are, to express who we are, only to then be told that nothing is ever good enough, right enough, perfect enough, correct enough. I started having life experiences from a young age that I only realised much later are so different from so many others. When I gained the desire to expand the world, to let in as many people as I could, I naively never expected many of my differences to be an issue, neither did I expect theirs to be an issue for me. I expected a kaleidoscope. I thought I’d look in and see beauty. And there is beauty. There's so much beauty. However, that’s not all there is. It makes me rather uncomfortable to think that there must always be a foil - no good without bad, no right without wrong, no beauty without ugliness, no light without darkness. We can and should understand the grey, accept the grey, we live in the grey, but can we always condone the grey? I suppose it depends on which role in the court of law you’re playing: the defendant, the prosecution, the jury, the witness, or the judge? If I’ve learnt anything in my life so far it is that the courtrooms we create - both for others and ourselves - have no absolution. Especially the ones that we create only in our minds.

The Kaleidoscope of Infinite Hope. I remember camping in a Malaysian rainforest, sleeping in a tent in the middle of the jungle while it was raining, waking up to find a leech had bit my upper lip, and then getting up in the morning and putting on salted socks to continue hiking because there was so much more to see. I remember being in the Swiss mountains, on a mud bike, sliding and riding down a hill wearing rainproof attire, completely terrified and yet exhilarated. I remember waking up in Wales, rushing to my first class, running through the corridors of a castle, just in time to learn about economics. I remember eating wood-fire pizza in Melaka, and buying the smallest shoes I’ve ever seen, for Chinese women’s bound feet. I remember the first shot of tequila I drank at a bar in The Hague, and the first joint I smoked in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, and learning about the Holocaust with a visit to Anne Frank’s House. I remember riding an elephant in Thailand and then meeting lots of other baby elephants and feeding them bananas. I remember holding a Koala in Australia, and learning from an aboriginal leader how to throw a boomerang. I remember lying on the beach in Bali until my skin became toasted, swimming and floating in clear, salty water, feeling the weight of the world being momentarily suspended. I remember losing my ID in London after partying at the Plastic People club whilst attending art school and having to go to a police station by myself for the very first time in my life, when I was sixteen. I remember an old friend holding my hand while I got my first tattoo on my left wrist in Rio de Janeiro. I remember eating chocolate in Belgium and buying a small lace umbrella. I remember my white dog Lucy from when I was a very young child in New Delhi. I remember the smell of rain mixed with earth during the monsoon in Asansol, India, where I was born. I remember riding a horse on the beach in Doha, falling off, getting back on and then nursing a bruise. I remember going to the edge of Calton Hill in Edinburgh and praying, on more than one occasion. Praying in the only way I knew how. Praying that I’d forget the darkness; however, we never escape darkness. And at some point in time, I remembered the darkness and the darkness erased everything else.

Tragically, trying to do something about the darkness only led to more darkness. And at last, I collapsed. More than once. I’ve written about that extensively, the way I’m still writing about it now. Except now there’s one huge difference: I’ve had enough, of myself, and everyone else. I do not have an actual Kaleidoscope of Infinite Hope. I have my memories and experiences, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, and the traumatic. Then I have my diagnosis and treatment, and after that I have the entire world full of everything it has always been full of. So let me be very clear: when I say hope, I mean for myself. I do not mean hope for anything other than my own healing, resilience, and capacity to survive and make my best possible contribution to this world. That is my one and only hope. I have no more hope or desire to see change in anyone or anything aside from myself and my actions. If what I achieve has positive effects then that’s an added bonus. But I am not going to torture myself, burden myself, or even mount myself on the pedestal of righteousness. I’m as flawed as anyone else, as imperfect, and yet, I have my boundaries. There's a limit to how much I’m willing to give and tolerate, and I have high standards. Anyone who tries to negotiate my boundaries will be discarded, regardless of whatever consequences they may impose, no matter what I might lose in exchange. My soul is worth more to me than anything in the world. I am worth more to myself than anything in the world - and for that I will never apologise. Never. This conviction is what reminded me of how gorgeous my life has been and how much I have to be grateful for. Above all, it reminded me of what I truly value.

My suffering, the time I’ve lost to it, the agony and despair it has put me through, the pain it has caused me and others, the distress it has put me and those close to me through, all of it, has taught me one thing: the Kaleidoscope that shows you what was and is beautiful is the greatest Hope, and the only truth. All the rest of it, the noise, the human faults and errors, the inevitable damage and abuse of life - none of it compares to the beauty you have experienced. A traumatised and terrified mind will become defensive, a mentally ill mind will only hold on to darkness. I have taken a knife and carved my heart out of my chest to prove that it exists, that it’s real, that it beats and feels, and that what hurts it does genuinely hurt it. That I am telling the truth. I have no ulterior motives, no hidden agendas, nothing to hide and nothing to even be ashamed of. Not really. Unlike many others I’ve met, I don’t have a problem admitting my faults. I am not proud of my shortcomings, believe you me, I have punished myself for them and have been punished for them by others. I accept this. Yet, after all is said and done, what I’m left with is my Kaleidoscope of Infinite Hope. And I can choose to look into it whenever I want. No matter how much darkness exists or is inflicted - which tries to corrode and destroy and damage that which is pure, good, and sublime - only death can take away my Kaleidoscope, and at this point, I suspect that even after I’ve stopped living, someone, somewhere, will be holding on to my Kaleidoscope so that I can look at all the beauty again. And it is so unbelievably beautiful. I’m agnostic and I call myself an artist but that which we call the World and Life and Existence: it is the work of the Divine, the greatest artist, and I can only hope to replicate, and make more beautiful, the creation of the Divine.

After all, the Kaleidoscope of Infinite Hope can only be the work of the Divine. It isn't mine. It’s a gift and I don’t know why this gift was given to me but I promise, even in my darkest hour - and that hour is darker than you can ever imagine and I hope you are never able to - in that hour I promise to remember that having been given this gift is the ultimate privilege. The highest honour. And so, I must honour it.

We must honour it.