Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2026.
Outside, Looking in, editorial by Mark Ulyseas.
This is an excerpt from an essay that I am working on.
Travel doesn’t enrich oneself. It dissolves the memories of innocence and replaces them with usurpers of alien nature by dismantling the aura of engrained belonging. And this, perhaps, turns one into an outsider.
The chauvinism of language further alienates the self, leaving one adrift and alone in the crowd.
Imagination is the refuge of those among us who need to retreat from this alienation. The conjuring of images and words is an attempt to escape the solitude of living as an outsider.
We seek the wisdom of the intellectual sages to translate our own thoughts, our view of ‘outside, looking in’ to the throbbing life around. We attempt to understand the mindlessness of the drudgery of daily routines, of love, hate, violence and pathological mendacity. But the continuous din of conundrums deafens one to the rhythms of life on the other side.
Someone once told me that the only thing that we do without which we will cease to exist and yet seem unconscious of it is – breathing. So, is the outsider the one who listens to one’s breath and consciously lives within its periphery? And thus, encapsulates the self, shutting out the outside world and thereby remaining an outsider?
Every time one reads a book, reconstruction of the self begins. Continuous reading turns one into an ongoing construction zone with building materials others have created with their thoughts. It never ends. The self then becomes alienated from the self. The outer shell – a mask at a parade, while the inner self crouches in bewilderment.
Being an outsider is like being a chameleon, taking the colours of the background so that none can see you. And yet you can watch and listen to the wonderful and dreadful things that erupt ever so often in a volatile society.
Amidst the menagerie of meaning runs an endless deserted road, which the outsider treads seeking to connect the inside and outside worlds. The attempt is futile for without the self creating a bridge of tangible reality, the outsider remains thus – outside.
Is it possible that one has become the sum total of other people’s thoughts through their writings? And that the true essence of self is adulterated by this invasive species that present their own meaning of life, replacing one’s own meaning of life?
Does one become an outsider by rejecting this invasive species and carefully nurturing one’s own within the self-created parenthesis?
Unfortunately, most of us live willingly in a global ‘electronicity’ held captive in a net that continues to feed our primeval instincts, drawing us away from our own breath. Moving images and sound infiltrate our senses luring us into one compost heap of humanity.
Will the outsiders survive this aberration of human development and continue to breathe through their poetry and writing? Or, will they too succumb to the divided self – one wearing a mask at a parade, and the other cowering in bewilderment?
Peace and Love
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om
© Mark Ulyseas
Ulyseas is the publisher and editor of Live Encounters Magazines.