December 10 Forever

While marriages aren’t made in heaven, the fact is that they are indeed made, or made up. That should be a consternation to anyone who can think, but happily, we live in a time where thinking is gladly unpopular.

Marriage is a sort of mutual domestication, a necessary compromise after the agricultural revolution that diverted hunter-gatherers into monogamy as it proffered advantage in survival and inheritance; otherwise, romance of the biological sort that defines intimacy is due to nerve growth factors that don’t subscribe to the lived happily ever after, it can’t, familiarity wears it off.

So it is a good bit of something that was a really a sad cheap trick the cave-men hit on to enslave the feral females and later promulgate the perverted hypocrisy of religious, well, jibber-jabber jibberish, can’t think of a good word ever—nonsense to make it seem like an inevitable but permanent bond designed in the clouds; and like religious institutions, marriage never can, give people the sort of peace that happily-lived-ever-after; until or unless the protagonists are both dead, of course, which is why dead people are happily married; they look so cute side by side, sitting stiffly, black and white, in a photo frame.

Most iconoclasts have a lopsided view of marriage, a misguided romantic one, or, perniciously and problematically, a fictional spaghetti of their own making. I, as an iconoclast, would not make a good writer of such fiction, even though in my vision of the world, I tend to lean heavily on my misanthropic lens, which is beauty in its pathological strangeness, romantic in a roundabout way as my madness sees it. But I believe that in the near distant future, when we look back at marriage as one archaic term good as a catch all for bygone, primitive oxymorons, someone will remember that women, often having given up on the actual merits of a marriage, value the memory of the inferior pair on their recollection of a date as the last redeemable quality; that date for me was today, I should tell you, the tenth of December, and posterity should note that I am indeed good in that trivial sense. Except now I have to qualify the tense with “used to be”, it’s good that she moved on from what must have been an incorrigible nightmare and I am happy she has a different date to remember and remind fondly. But I’ll lurk in the background of forgotten items, hiding in the drizzle and haze of the everyday ordinary, in the small things that life decides to throw at unexpected moments, and the remembrances of our shared past, the good or the bad, will all come flooding back to her, like hard to contain emotions.

But what I feel is that the biology that was carved into us through the innumerable permutations of genes through evolution is what this shoehorn of social paraphernalia has accomplished to distort, disturbingly. People are animals, not the best kind to be with either, especially for life, and whether the level of vasopressin makes a claim for us being monogamous is debatable and a veritable bone of contention for a lived life of many more years that science may bestow in the future to come. At least we do oscillate between the horny bonobos and the occasionally doting chimpanzees in our marital escapades and duties, and it is the biological imperative that makes the males and females do what they ought to do based on algorithms that are now anachronistic for this ape with a smartphone.

Similarly, I point out that social forms of collective affirmation can never be a placeholder for the feeling you have about a person, and soon we will invent the technology to broadcast the vacillations. Most of my dreams still feature my past life more than the present, and the characters in the brain disregard with frothy disdain any of the features of prohibition that are looked down upon in the waking bengali reality or its physics. I’ve always been the offending partner in social parlance, but it befits the way that is imprinted in the biology of Homo sapiens.

All the square things that people say about themselves to fit into the rectangular aspirational picture frame are hollow, like the social customs themselves—the chanting around a ritual fire, the tribal feeding frenzy of the occasion. All the rites of passage culminate as an uncaring, thick layer of dust made from apathy, makes the cherished frame an antique or rubbish and the honeymoon pair get thrown away without impunity or concern. I can’t do that when I am still alive and even though I sit alone in the said frame, that is only for those who draw comfort in such things. You may be born alone, but you rarely die alone, you die with all the characters married to you in your head, one way or the other.

We are what we are in the cheesecake suspended inside a dark room; all actors on a strange stage we contrive to call our lives are the hallucinations of neurons. My neurons were thrown off more by the overreacting list of the polypharmacy, than with the pathology of bipolarity for which they were prescribed. I’m thankful only to myself for having had the stamina to live through the harrowing ordeals of antipsychotics, dopamine-agonists, benzodiazapine and ambien, hellish drugs and cocktails that some still don’t know are what they are, a trip that can be a seductive slippery slope to a trippy and excruciatingly excoriating end to the thin patina on the skin called reality. This pharmacologically induced distortion came at the time when I was trying on the shoes of a healthcare entrepreneur in a country that didn’t want me. Indian proclivities are reliant on the thoughts of its leaders, who will sell their own mother without scruples and don’t care about healthcare even a bit or anything that’s of any real benefit to its citizens, except for keeping their own malevolent chair, but I desist—this isn’t the place or paragraph.

But I can only say my better half wasn’t the bitter half, nor was she in any way the partner who caused the upheavals in my timeline. This is what I must say to a time traveler, and I want to make it clear now that I can lucidly put words together and I am still alive. I can only hope that good things happen to her, for all the reasons point clearly towards a well deserved life. I was an anomaly for her, as I would be for anyone else. I am better off on my own, that way harm is minimized. My aspirations are too lofty and my depressions too deep for a flat lander to understand.

I also think expectations from monogamy are an affliction akin to prayers being answered by a bearded hairy misogynistic crusty old scrote on a cloud; you, even the normal people who do not count in the blacklisted twisted minds like me, have limited ways to prevent multiple partners in your mind where it matters. People or things for that matter, or abstractions, love them or hate them, or have these feelings coexist or flutter like the wings of a cockroach. The people or objects in our winged perception of reality can’t matter, nor can what we think of them as real, when the “I” we hold so dear is itself a rotten construct of the mind. It doesn’t exist, and I don’t have to have a split brain to tell you that if the person who is thinking these thoughts is itself on such loose gravel, what can we expect of its tenacity to relate to the world? Being bipolar has that advantage, and I can speak for myself. It’s a strange world your children (not mine; I don’t have any; my gene ends with the sordidness in me) will inhabit in the next few hundred years, when we will be the first to taste how ultraviolet feels, the color of habareno pepper, or the aroma of a happy marriage as felt on the wedding night. Synesthesia will be the rule, not the exception, and people will know what it is to be bipolar and the depths of the affliction, both in the high and especially in the low.

I am aware that being mad makes little sense to most people, but that’s quite alright. I think it’s just that I know I have communicated what I wanted to say so that I can come clean as an examined life, albeit of little consequence.