Recursive Depression

The water swirls, and I am the water, and the swirl is me, and down we go. Not with the dramatic flush of cinematic surrender, no orchestral swell, no cut to black. Just the slow, obscene gurgle of consciousness doing what consciousness does when it has nothing better to do: circling. Concentricities. That word sounds like a Victorian diagnosis, doesn’t it? The doctor clears his throat, adjusts his pince-nez, informs the gathered relatives that the patient suffers from acute concentricities of the soul, terminal spiralment, incurable awareness of the drain.

I have been tired for so long that tiredness has become my resting state, my baseline, the ground note beneath the melody. When I am not tired, I am suspicious. What is this energy, this suspicious surplus of motive force? It will be reclaimed. The universe keeps its books balanced with the pedantic cruelty of a Bengali accountant, and I have been overdrawn since birth. Every laugh is a loan. Every moment of clarity, a advance against future fog.

The turd knows. Let us speak of the turd, that most honest of philosophers. It has achieved what I cannot: acceptance of its trajectory. It does not negotiate with the water. It does not compose mental essays about the injustice of gravity, the systemic bias of pipes, the way the porcelain gleams with institutional indifference. It simply circles, heavy with the weight of what it is, waiting for the inevitable descent into the dark dank deep where all things eventually go. And in that circling, there is a dignity I envy. The dignity of the truly helpless. The grace of the completely screwed.

I am not having a breakdown. I am having a continuation. The breakdown happened years ago, quietly, without witnesses, the way a building collapses in slow motion over decades. You do not notice the sagging beams until the dust settles. You do not notice that you have become a ruin until tourists start photographing the rubble, until someone writes a poignant piece about the tragedy of your architecture, the lost grandeur, the way the light used to fall through windows that are now empty sockets staring at a sky that has stopped caring.

Calcutta understands. This city is a masterclass in recursive decay, in the art of circling the same drain for centuries without quite disappearing. We build our monuments to empires that forgot us. We maintain our trams, those wheeled anachronisms, because forward motion is a myth we tell ourselves while we loop the same tracks, past the same crumbling mansions, the same tea stalls where men who have been dying for decades sip their cha and discuss politics with the passionate futility of theologians debating angels on pinheads. The city is a palimpsest of failures, each layer more eloquent than the last, and I am its child, its faithful chronicler, its most devoted symptom.

There is a particular quality to depression that nobody mentions in the brochures. It is not sadness. Sadness has texture, flavor, the sharp salt of tears. Depression is the absence of flavor, the flatness of water that has been standing too long, the taste of metal in the mouth of the world. It is the moment when the joke continues but the laughter has left the building, when you find yourself performing mirth for an audience of one, and that one is already checking his watch, already reaching for his coat, already gone.

And yet. The cruel joke of consciousness is that it persists. The turd circles, but it circles with purpose, with direction, with the grim determination of matter that knows its destination and accepts the plumbing. I circle too, but I circle with commentary, with footnotes, with the endless internal monologue of a man who cannot shut up even when the audience has left, even when the theater is dark, even when the only sound is the drip of water somewhere in the pipes of a building that should have been condemned decades ago.

The future is a septic tank. I have said this to myself so many times that it has lost its sting, become a mantra, a lullaby of despair. The dark dank deep awaits, and we all go there eventually, the optimists and the pessimists, the believers and the scoffers, all equal in the eyes of the drain. But the apprehension, that is the special torture of the conscious. The knowing. The turd does not know. The turd simply is, and in its being, it achieves a peace that eludes the swirling water, the swirling mind, the swirling city that never quite drains but never quite fills.

I have tried the medications. I have tried the meditation, the therapy, the desperate midnight geometry of trying to think my way out of thinking. But the spiral is recursive. Each solution contains the problem. Each ladder leads down. The light at the end of the tunnel is just the reflection of the flashlight you are carrying, and the batteries are dying, and the tunnel is not a tunnel but a circle, and you have been here before, you will be here again, the eternal return of the same tired water circling the same tired bowl.

Sometimes I think the only honest response is laughter. Not the laughter of joy, not even the laughter of madness, but the laughter of recognition, the chuckle of the condemned man who sees the absurdity of the scaffold, the joke of the executioner who takes himself so seriously. We are all so serious in our suffering, so solemn in our despair. But the turd knows better. The turd has achieved the wisdom of the truly ridiculous. It does not demand meaning from the water. It does not ask why. It simply circles, and in circling, it dances.

So I dance too, in my way, with my words, with my weary cynicism, with my Bengali soul that has been trained by centuries of colonial disappointment to expect the worst and savor the bitterness like a fine Darjeeling. I write because the alternative is silence, and silence is just another kind of circling, another drain, another dark dank deep. At least the words have motion. At least the words pretend toward meaning, even when we both know that meaning is just another story we tell ourselves to keep the water moving, to keep the spiral from becoming a stillness, to keep the future from arriving all at once like a flood we cannot flush.

The water swirls. I am the water. The swirl is me. And down we go, circling, circling, circling.