The urge for meaning is the strongest one. We have been feeling it since the earliest periods of civilisation. The creation of mythology was the first collective attempt to search and grab meaning. By resolving the mysteries of life and the universe, our ancestors would find meaning.

From then onwards, religion, philosophy and literature have proved to be a source of quenching the thirst for meaning.

We have ceased to experience mysteries like our ancestors, but new kinds of riddles have come to puzzle us. Instead of metaphysical symbolism, we now experience social allegories of modern day conundrums.

The urge for meaning operates unconsciously. So we are compelled to solve riddles and unravel the meanings of allegories. We have to persistently make sense of all that concerns us in one or other way. We desperately desire meaning.

We desire meaning mainly because we can’t afford chaos. Chaos is created by things that happen in reality or in our imagination, but stay unresolved. We can bear the state of meaninglessness but feel helpless while swallowing chaos. Meaninglessness might be regarded as a kind of meaning unfamiliar to us. Strangely enough, the state of meaninglessness can be meaningfully gestured or expressed in words. As soon as an absurd or purposeless state is given an appropriate expression, it becomes significant. A meaningful, well-articulated expression has a magical effect.

It is not surprising that meaninglessness can easily turn into some kind of philosophy or at least into an idea. But chaos makes us topsy-turvy. We are compelled to organise ourselves without delay. Disregarding this inner compulsion can lead us to a breakdown. The absolute absence of meaning can cause madness. Meaning comes to emancipate us. The creation of meaning is tantamount to building a paradise of our own.

But what kind of meaning can turn out to be our liberator?

The meaning of meaning has always perplexed human beings. Primarily, meaning is an outcome and form of organising ourselves, an indispensable remedy to chaos. Meaning glues together and patterns our wandering directionless thoughts in a manner familiar to us and others too. It may look strange but the reality is that our way of organising ourselves or ‘meaning’ must sound reasonable to the people sharing our language, values and worldview. To a large extent, we are compelled to feel an air of accountability to the outside world even in our most private situations.

It would be pertinent here to raise the question whether meaning is an effect of the process of organising ourselves or an already present category within the less known areas of mind, recalled in a state of emergency? In simple terms, is meaning a personal and private or social and individualised thing? Psychological or linguistic one?

Though meaning itself is a most problematic term, it has two distinguishable ‘meanings’ as described by Terry Eagleton, in The Meaning of Life. Eagleton separates between "meaning as a given signification and meaning as an act." The first exists in a system of language, in all cultural symbols, in stories, in narratives, in discourses, in sayings, in proverbs and aphorisms. The second is related to the intention of the speaker. This means meaning is simultaneously a private and public thing, but possessing a kind of dichotomy inherently.

When someone starts out his or her journey to fish for meaning, he or she actually will be harbouring that dichotomy. At best, the creation of meaning is the result of a fusion of both, private and public, given and spontaneous, psychological and cultural, bridging the dichotomy. But fusion needs a balance between private and public resources available for creating meaning. And acquiring balance is a Herculean task. And this is where politics enters into the sphere of mind where meaning sprouts.

Simply speaking, what we have termed chaos is the time being created -- giving chaos epistemic status -- intentionally and deliberately by authorities. These authorities might be political, social, religious and ideological ones. We may also name them, borrowing Louis Althusser’s terminology, Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). RSA and ISA maintain a tight control over the means of (cultural, social, educational) production, reproduction and their ways of dissemination. They manage or continuously seek to manage efficiently all linguistic, social, cultural, discursive and narrational resources required by individual for the construction of meaning. They use and devise all kinds of ways, strategies to make available only those ones, in that form only that would serve ingeniously their purpose. They sensor, re-edit, reinterpret, conceal and even destroy symbols, narratives, and proverbs that they find against their motives.

They try their best to generate and favour cultural dementia. All kinds of dementia appear to be the work of power. In this context, Milan Kundera’s words might appear more significant uttered in his famous novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’’.

The tragedy is we all have to constantly seek meaning but in a state of dementia. We usually fail in keeping the balance between private and public resources called for producing meaning. This may result in an extreme form of ‘intentional fallacy’. We may start intending what the RSA or ISA would be intending us to mean. Only very few are fortunate enough to start a struggle against power by fighting the loss of memory. It is literature that keeps reminding us not to stop struggling against memory.

One fine example of this we find in ‘Deewana Shair’ (Lunatic Poet), a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto. Written in the backdrop of the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy, that took place on April 13, 1919, a massacre which was the outcome of using brutally repressive (colonial) state apparatus, it is the best example of resistance against forgetfulness. These verses quoted in short story are unforgettable.

"I sing the song of those carcasses
That lend coldness to December."

The story revolves around a dialogue between a writer/narrator and a lunatic poet. The poet is actually a symbol of never-ending struggle against dementia. Their conversation occurs on how the well situated in the garden that witnessed the massacre of people by British authorities coped with it. The garden itself signifies the leisure associated with dementia but the well symbolises depth and the remote area of human psyche. The poet reminds the narrator what happened in this garden and how the well coped with it. He became "lunatic" because he didn’t forget that tragedy. Others forgot because they were forced to face the newest chaos.

Forgetting one chaos paves the way for a new one. The lunatic poet maintains balance and resists power. He didn’t allow authorities such as the RSA or ISA to make him a victim of ‘intentional fallacy’. He created meaning that testifies his intention, his struggle, and his resistance. He owned what he meant and he meant to own the memories of those being forgotten by his fellows. His madness symbolises his very act of asserting his own power of creating meaning and becomes an iron curtain against intrusion of politics into the process of creating meaning.