Eyes Wide Shut: The Collapse Of Truth And The Refuge Of Memory

‘Violence is no longer something that happens to other people.’

confused the bird

straying

from its flight path

Being as ‘document.’ An archive that is neither ‘spoken’ nor ‘material’. Nor architectural. As in a visible symbol that ‘houses’ the historical. It simply resides within. With and in. As memory. And as in memory. The act of bearing witness to our vast ‘unfolding’ of what I call this ‘Cannibal Time’ has no concrete home to inhabit. The archive takes on the smell of a morgue where historical moments filed one upon the other lie interred. As an act of witnessing, it chooses to deliberately stay-hide-remain in the mind. A necessary refuge. The mind as a space for the ‘clandestine’; for remembering; which in turn translates into a ‘quiet resistance’ and ‘re-telling’ when and if the possibility of seeking ‘retribution’ for crimes committed against the ‘order of things’ arises. So, evidence. Of some truth or fact that may have unfolded in a particular moment in history. The evidence bearing document-being as witness. One who stands between the act of deliberate erasure and a historical ‘happening’ that needs to be made known in a ‘new ‘moment in time. New because of its immediate birthing even if the just born stature is brief transitory and its demise imminent. A moment that may or may not arrive during the witnessing being’s lifetime. Therefore precarious. Beyond the aftermath of what has been ‘seen’. The seeing and the manner in which we see; the reporting of what we have seen is also what makes us a witness. The world needs to experience through the ‘me as witness’ the trauma that I have lived seen been subjected to in as close to the original ‘event’ as possible. Even if the seeing that the viewing being is subjected to is full of horror or dismay. The unfolding of ‘history in the making’ or ‘war as you go’ on our screens and our print media has a different task. It causes an enforced numbness that is meant to normalise or in some cases obliterate our ability to feel-sense-imagine the horror of what we do to each other. There are no rules that govern traditional methods of gathering evidence any longer. History and decoding what actually happened is near impossible. You think you are ‘looking’ at history being made; history is looking right at you; staring directly into your eyes; questioning your role as a witness; who blinks first in this eyeballing; history not just in the making but also simultaneously overseeing its own unmaking? Perhaps. There is a palpable uncertainty about what is being manifested today. The recording of history has no moorings to rely on. This unfolding—a term I use to describe this time of perpetual war—is without anchor or precedence. And definitely without the underpinning of any morals. Or ethics. Therefore, the first victim is ‘truth’. We can no longer decipher the fake from the actual. Our ‘reality’ unfolds as ‘napalm’. The fire spreads destroying ‘history’ (and entire helpless populations) while it usurps the nomenclature of the ‘historical’ thereby installing the untruth the false the fake the fabricated as that which took place. An erasure as history. The act of erasing becomes our new historical fact.

As you and I share our feelings and lay bare that which is going on in our mind-lives in an urge to shake-free or is that shake-loose of our growing fear-despair. Our privileges; our luxuries; our plurals of every kind are no match for the singularity of the violence we allow as bystanders. It is not enough to drown-swim in our anguish at what is being unleashed in so many unequal wars around us. ‘Purpose’, the first part of purposelessness, of life, of action, of thought combines with a moral numbness that we can no longer hide behind. The ‘self’ metaphorised as a machine without content’. A void that re-presents our being as a shell filled with emptiness. An ironic ‘taking up’ of volume and space by what? Nothingness? Nothing. To be. Done. I punctuate the Godot oft-quote to emphasise the helplessness of it all. Strangely. This is the opposite of what the war-machine reduces the Other to. A dehumanisation that is on our side of the threshold and not something that happens to others. A ‘stripping’ that is so severe that it rejects the ability to act. Devoid of emotional depth. No. Recognisable. Human. Traits.

This, births the ‘indifferent-indifference’. An alienation from one’s self that is so extreme that ‘our being as shell’ loses all understanding. A meaningless that begins to fill the ‘nothingness’ I spoke of earlier. A sign of our distorted time where even time is dislocated from its moorings and fails to record the ‘dismantling’ that has visited us in this time of perpetual war.

I cannot escape the smell of darkness. Like the mongrel that dodges my feet every time I step into the street. The smell follows me around. Wraps itself around my body. Turning it taut. I cannot shake it off. It is as if the smell is grafted into my skin. Like the shadow that turns the day into night. I have no sense of smell. Except an imagined one. I just know what a certain something will smell like. Fear for example. I know what that smells like. I know its odour. I run from the smell of fear.

How do we prepare ourselves for embarking on a programme that genuinely responds to the growing plea: Enough! We do not want to live in a constant state of fear.

How indeed?

Particularly since we all appear to lead a protected life. One in which there are a number of buffers between ‘that’ which happens to other people and ‘us’. How many of us actually believe that the violence that visited the Muslims of Gujarat or the women and children of Iran is going to step over the threshold and stab you between the eyes?

I, on the other hand, strongly feel that each one of us is minutes away from becoming a statistic, a burning, a maiming, a rape, a killing, an image, a text, a report, a victim.

Violence is no longer something that happens to other people.

Naveen Kishore is a poet, photographer, theatre lighting designer and publisher, Seagull Books

This article appeared in Outlook's April 1st, 2026 issue titled 'ParaDime Shift' which looks at how the US-Israel attack on Iran has come home to India with the LPG crisis and is disrupting the nation's energy ecosystem, exposing policy gaps and testing the limits of diplomacy.