There was sun in my eyes as we passed through the automatic doors at a concrete box shopping centre at surfer’s paradise. My brother and I understood that mum would buy us both a cassette. I was giddy. At the age of seven the only cassettes that made up my collection were juvenile: Peter Coomb and things with names like The Jellybean Jar. This was my first venture into popular culture.

Reflecting enduring divides in white fancies for black music, I purchased Dangerous while Josh settled on Prince’s Purple Rain. I remember that the cover seemed like an incandescent whole rather than a set of elements. I can evoke only its aura in my mind, not the detail. And I remember the hiss of my cassette walkman more clearly than the music itself.

Some days later, my brother gently asked and then vigorously demanded that we swap Dangerous for Purple Rainthe tapes. But I resisted. I think that this was for me a formative event in the emergence of an independent psyche.

For many years he remained a figure of intense fascination. So intense was our attachment that I can still remember the pain I felt as the Jackson myth slowly capsized as the weight of rumour gradually convinced even the most hardened twelve year old Jackson fan that there was some truth to the claims that he was having sexual relations with children, that through plastic surgery Jackson was trying to assimilate the appearance of a white man, that he slept in an isolation chamber…

He became a figure of ridicule, emerging into our awareness now and then through yet another sleazy crisis. As we became adults we cared less and less about him, until he was revived for boozy, rowdy house parties, a convergence of pop tastes with the sensibilities of the musical sophisticate, pretentious twenty year olds dancing alongside their cruder companions in harmony.

So I was sad when he died, not so much because I am touched by the emotional intensity of the celebrity cult, but for the spotlight each song shines on disparate fragments of my past.

What I found most compelling about the documentary was Berliner’s ambivalence to this condition, or lifestyle, in so far as despite the torturous drowsiness during the day, he found he was most productive in the night. In fact, he even seemed to feel that the fact that he spent his nights cutting his films might have given him an artistic edge – not simply because of these few extra hours that amount to years over the course of a lifetime, but because the brain works differently, is stimultaed differently at these hours.

I’m not prepared to give up what I feel is a gift. My body and I cooperate over the amount of sleep I get. If I need to push it a little bit, go without some for a night or so, it plays along,  so long as I make up for it later. And becaue I like to get things done, we’ve agreed that seven hours per night, slightly less than ‘ideal’, suits my body’s self restorative designs and my own priority. The best part is, when I decide its time to snooze – bang – I’m asleep, no frustrating tossing and turning.

And yet, if I am to be the successful writer that I think I might some day be, I need an edge. I really need t movoe this thing out of mere fancy and into the realm of passion. At the moment, I can usually manage four hours in a day at best. It got me thinking, what if I could do, eight, or ten, or twelve hours in a day when I decided to? And what would the work be like without all the extraneous considerations by which we mark the day?

So here’s what I’m going to do. Today, I’m shooting for ten hours of work. Ten hours. No excuses, no four hours and then I’m going to the movies. No. Simply ten hours of work.

Let’s review my sustenance kit:

Coffee. I’ll drink one of these every two hours. Its a stimulant and I’m not going to be ashamed of it any more. Not now that I’ve read My Name is Red and divined that one of the writers I admire the most relishes caffeine’s illuminatory charms.

Sesame balls. A nutritious snack that became my guilty pressure during my ten glorious days at the Sivananda Ashram. Also comprised of Jaggery, and sometimes ginger God, we were so pure at that place that eating these things was like taking smack.

Philip Glass. I’ll probably listen to Einstein on the Beach, because it is good, and it is long. I need to listen to classical music, usually twentieth century piano concertos and often symphonies. I find that I write along the contours of the music to places I would not otherwise delve.

So, for the record, I’m going to write like I’ve never written before. I’m going to write fiction until my fingers bleed, and when I can’t write fiction any more, I’ll work on some of my lifestyle articles, and when I can’t do that anymore, I’ll email people to organise interviews, and when I tire of that, I’ll write more fiction, and when I can’t even manage that, I’ll type passages out of the novels that I’m reading, just to prove that it can be done, that time is not my enemy, but my friend.

I’ll keep you updated, it is now:

10:06: Making some coffee, starting work on my novella Dead Flowers. Technically, I’ve been writing already for 20 minutes, if you include this blog which started at 9:45. 9 hours, 40 minutes to go.

10:23: Still haven’t made coffee. Made some minor adjustments to my bio. That counts as writing, right?

10:48: Got the coffee by my side and I’m ready to roll. Fire up Philip Glass.

11:45: Philip Glass doing the trick. Have the urge to call my grandmother who is sick in hospital, but then, we all have to suffer for the sake of art, even those not making the art themselves.

Urge to look at Facebook ignored.

12:45: Two hours of solid fiction. Philip Glass became distracting, switched to Rachmaninoff. Heading out for lunch now.

14:30: Lunch was delicious.

16:30: Spent two hours researching interview subjects for a couple of articles I am writing (ie finding emails etc). Not technically writing, but work nonetheless, and work I normally avoid. Looked at Facebook. ‘Networked’ with some people.

I will now spend following three hours writing fiction.

18:00: I didn’t really get cracking until 17:15, because I spilt coffee down the front of my vest and decided to handwash it and some clothes. But the last 45 minutes were productive.

19:00 Conked out. Consuming beer and KurKure with Monique.

In total, seven hours of work, although probably only three or four hours of solid writing.

Certainly, the role of caffeine cannot be undersold when it comes to my writing. Riding these highs, I delved into short bursts of mania from which I garnered little shards of brilliance.

The greatest obstacle was the Internet, where legitimate research very quickly crossed a grey line into procrastination.

Not a bad start, but do I have an edge?

I always understood the following phrases metaphorically: ‘I didn’t really feel like I was there.’ ‘I felt like someone else was inside my body.’ ‘I didn’t feel like I was alive.’

That is, I understood them to reflect a state of being, a being-blase kind of thing. But in my moments of recent epiphany, when the world floods my sensations with such rich impressions, I wondered if these statements had a literal truth.

Is it possible that in those moments where for whatever reason, perhaps because of a trauma, perhaps because we have become habituated to everyday life, perhaps because of a sensory overload from life in the metropolis, we really are in a state of non-being.

Does this imply a dualism? Because if the body is still functioning, and yet the mind feels as though it doesn’t really exist, surely this would only be possible if there was a separation between mind and body.

Maybe this is the case only if we choose a less nuanced concept of being. Having read Heidegger, and understood a little, we might be able to see parallels between the feeling of not being there and the state of being that he called ‘thrown’, I forget the German term. This is a kind of being in which we are not attendant to our own possibilities for being, but rather to those of the ‘crowd’ around us, we measure ourselves according to the standards of the faceless ‘them’ and live our lives accordingly.

I like this concept, except that I feel it might be a tad too action-oriented, that it implies that to really be we need to go out and satisfy our possibilities for being through doing something.

Even when we are completely passive we are still attending to our most basic needs. If we fail to breathe, after twenty seconds, thirty seconds, the air in our lungs expires and we very quickly learn a basic fact about our being in this world.

Does being ‘thrown’ also lie in not attending to the world at all of which we are a part. Are we not ‘thrown’ when we experience the world as a grey homogeneity, when we do not experience the world much at all.

Perhaps then, nichtdasein, the feeling or state of non-being, occurs when the self is disconnected from its own embodied nature and the fact that this self and body exists in a physical world.

But April is a time when the heat begins to sear in Northern India and having no other engagements in the city except to perform the role of tourist, we needed to find somewhere away from the sizzling public world of the Kolkata outside that I love, for some pleasures in life are so intense that they can consume us like a flame.

Three years earlier my eyes had fascinated over the grand dome of the Birla planetarium, and we’d eagerly lined up for admission only to find that the next show was in Hindi, and the following in Bengali.

I had retained the knowledge that a show in English took place at 1330 hours and we arrived early after a sojourn past the street food vendors down Jawaharwal Nehru Road, taking in a plate of incongruous Tibetan momos along the way.

With our tickets purchased, we scrambled into a queue of sari and kurta-clad fellow astronomical fanatics and orderly we filed inside the building.

This small, replica model of the universe was refreshingly cool inside and of a deliciously vintage nature. I was most struck by the arcane device in the centre of the room that rose like a marauding tripod from H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds and from which the stars, planets and galaxies spilled out onto the curved walls above as the lights slowly dimmed.

The convener began the program in a stilted, monotonous English and for the first few minutes, and for the sake of tradition, Monique and I fooled around in the near total cloak of darkness.

After some time, these impulses were exhausted by a growing fascination with the representation of the universe spreading around us. The constellations were highlighted, distant galaxies were given names and all of a sudden I was returned to that fascination with the cosmos that so thrilled me as a child.

I speak of that emotion, a gut-wrenching thrill at flashes of conception when the immensity of the universe bears down upon us, and we become infinitesimally smaller than the all-powerful beings we imagine ourselves to be.

It is a dual-response, at once frightening and also, somehow, permeating a kind of optimism, for in this state of mind we are immersed in that which remains at the threshold of human endeavour.

These senses of god, new plains of experience, understandings that escape the mind petrified in a quotidian world comfort us not as realties, but as possibilities. Suddenly, the world at hand does not seem so much like an enclosure, but an interlocutor in a whole that we barely comprehend.

I feel in this flicker of inspiration, that the hopelessness and the void of living in an exhausted planet, of depleted resources and a wearied culture, is only a frame, one of an infinite number that echo across the entirety of the universe. I feel that if I keep my mind open then I might perceive a fragment of these frames of possibility.

These insights electrified my mind in this dark, cool building as wordless impressions, and they united me with the child I was fifteen or twenty years earlier who saw the world as potential and not as limit.

Back in the Kolkata outside I experienced the same kind of possibility in the city’s seething immensity and diversity that is, of course, present everywhere but to which my senses are dulled at home.

And I knew, and I know now, that this is why we travel, this is why we take ourselves to new locations, and this is why we stare up into the night sky. It is to ram ourselves against the boundaries of the possible, terrestrial, celestial and otherwise.

‘You’re here to pity me,’ he says.

The following inferences occur: the maladjusted person is a patient, the patient is sick, the sick is drawn to pity like a fly to cloying treacle. The patient is the fly, overcome, overwhelmed, suffocating, sinking in the noble concern of others.

The patient catches hold of this insight, even as the flux of images and representations engulfs his limbs and regards suspiciously those who come to visit.

I, the friend, say that there is no such thing, as far as I am concerned, that we are Nietzscheans in this regard.

The maladjusted person relaxes.

But in defending myself against this claim of pity, I am only plausible if I have an alternative explanation to our time spent together.

When the adjusted person encounters the maladjusted person there is the perpetual question, overhanging and fluttering like a curtain: ‘Why are you here?’ It is is the question of time spent. It demands an answer.

Someone for whom normal or should I say consensus meaning has broken down is both fascinating and terrifying.

While the connections that this person makes between things, concepts, and senses are not our own, they possess an undeniable logic. This logic reveals our own to be, while surely practicable, also disturbingly provisional.

Meaning and sense becomes a matter of stitching, of finding the peg that fits the hole, the number in the sequence, the missing letter that looms underneath the hanged man.

The same child-like game is played by both the adjusted and the maladjusted, but the latter play with a different set of rules that yield interconnections of an undeniable profundity.

Those of us with insight know that our own logic of meaning, while it allows us to be sane, also facilitates our adjusting to, and complicity with an established social order that in our analytical modes, but not in our everyday existence, we know to be unethical, nonviable, destructive and banal.

Whereas we the sane find ourselves not courageous enough to do so, the maladjusted person with her or his alternative logic of meaning wholly rejects this social world.

At the same time, the logic of the maladjusted person lacks the means through which any social order would be possible at all. Reciprocity is gone, much of the external world is hostile, the very universe itself is malevolent.

For sure, the hypocrisies of our own everyday existence are obliterated by this searing insight, but so too is everything else.

Consciousness becomes an apocalyptic force which does not allow for hope, or a resourcefulness to change the world, for all things in existence are touched by the decay of a malevolent social and psychic order.

This awareness does not permit friendship, mutual concern, or basic reciprocity.

It is here, I think, that we find the beginnings of a plausible answer to the question of time spent between two people at this exceptional moment in their lives.

In place of the ‘visit’, that the pitying do-gooder pays to the ailing patient, I would like to promote the ‘encounter’ between two friends.

With the benefits and shortcomings of both psychic states in mind it becomes possible to see the encounter as one of mutual benefit and ultimately of creative power.

To take but a small example:

The fabric of his pants was of a peculiar jarring contrast that words cannot evoke. My friend was able to express this experience in guttural sound. As such, we shared an experience of the visual that would not otherwise have been possible were it not for his synesthesia.

At other moments, in evoking his beautiful alter ego, and in discussing how her potential has been sadly denied, he showed me, as well as any novel or film, the compromises to banality demanded by the everyday.

And I think that, in return, I brought him back to social reciprocity in some degree. I revealed that not all parts of the world are hostile, that fixations are only attachments to chimera, that the real takes place in the social world of give and take.

It is this give and take that rescues the visit and transforms it into an encounter.

The well-intentioned friend is not there to dispense pity and the insight of sanity, but seeks to learn from the divine poetry of this other person who sees the world differently, while at the same time inviting this person into a world of others.

This other person is no longer psychically sealed from the world of others while being subjected to the authority of its doctors, nurses, police officers, and so on. This maladjusted person subjects their insights to this world of others and in so doing, become a participant in it.

For sure, the encounter can only happen gradually, over time, and always imperfectly. But the thing which draws two friends together is not pity, but that which makes the social world beautiful.

Together, in the encounter, we gather the elements necessary to turn insight into practice – the first delicate charge of revolution – and we are both changed by the experience.

Two things have occurred at the same time: my reluctant acceptance of the ‘reality’ of climate change, despite persistent concerns that its ideological dimensions have not been entirely narrated as yet, and despite an uneasiness at buying into a supreme scientific discourse that has a simple and bleak answer to everything.

My reluctant acceptance of my own limits, that it is not possible to do all things at once, and to do them all well, that self image does not equate with self-actualisation, that people may not, after all, scream my name out in the streets, or at least not in one united chorus of adoration.

From these twin epiphanies comes a tension which unites the story of myself and of the society I live in. Fear, utter fear and immobilisation, the temptation to withdraw. And at the same time a temptation to throw myself against my limits, and the institutional limits, like a rock against a window.

Or perhaps a better metaphor is to quarry away with a quiet determination.