Musings from my Light Cone

“Could I be falling in love with misery? Falling in comfort—certainly.”

The most terrifying thing about existence is how bland and monotonously surprising it can be. How predictably unpredictable, tastefully bland, and immeasurably steady it is. Even the mystics and the astrologers who make a living denying this fact do, begrudgingly, accept it in the end. Scientists and philosophers try to explain it. But explaining it and living it are very different things.

I have a love-hate relationship with cloudsーdespising them when they ruin potential astrophotography nights and watching them mouth wide open as they float on by during the day

March 2025

The Sun saying 'Hello!' from between the trees, 150 million kilometres away

February 2025

A crescent moon peeking out from between the trees in my neighbourhood
Shot with a standard cell phone camera
March 2025

There is a strange poetry to this drudgery—an elegance in the way life neither lifts nor crushes us completely. If life had been wholly cruel to me, it would have been easier to accept it and rage against it. But it hasn’t. It has been a distasteful mix of the two, and both are so inextricably entangled that any label feels laughably simplistic. Good and bad melt into each other like ink in water.

My rendition of the Horsehead Nebula

Acrylic on standard A4 canvas

January 2025

My rendition of the space station in the foreground of a nebula from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Acrylic on standard A4 canvas

July 2024

My rendition of the Enterprise NCC 1701-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation

Acrylic on standard A3 canvas

April 2024

I recently read Franz Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ and the nameless “artist” and his pursuit of perfection in futility, struck me as strangely evocative of the dull, frenzied existence we all live. The hunger artist had a desperate desire to attain perfection in a meaningless art— and I would argue we all embody the hunger artist for all endeavours wind up less than meaningful.

Our writings on paperー transient like ourselves, fadeーtheir translations and editions making their way into a world in which we don’t exist to explain them. Our bodies fade and degrade, and even in the modern age our tweets and YouTube videos can exist nameless and senseless in a world of their own. With no signs of aging, they exist in limbo with every fresh digital wave sweeping them away..into digital abyss.

A shot of my writing.

These loose-leaf sheets will brown and wither as the lignin in the wood pulp oxidises.

April 2025

And so I live life mired in that tension: seeking beauty in the chaos, and finding comfort—yes, even joy—in the slow-burning sadness that trails behind disappointment at the unmajestic majesty of this world.

Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” What he failed to add, perhaps, is that some of us live in that frozen sea—and words like his are the only warmth we know. One of the only islands of understanding I have found, atleast.

But then there’s astronomy. There’s the sky.

In the midst of philosophical despair, I can look up. There, everything is predictable and chaotic, ancient and brand new. The stars don’t care about where I end up or what I do. The nebulae don’t know my name. And in that indifference, I find peace.

I mistook a scattered shimmer for the Pleiades. Here's beauty in mistaken identity, if I may say so myself.

December 2024

(For more details check out my post on astrophotography)

 

In the ability to understand the expansion of the universe or the laws of the distant universe, I find power springing from powerlessness.

Funny how the blackest drudgery lifts one up into the light like that. Could I be falling in love with misery? Falling in comfort— certainly.

We are small. And so is our pain—and our joy. But small doesn’t mean meaningless.

It means we have room to grow.

“Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” — Albert Einstein