Becoming and Unbecoming
By Goirick Brahmachari
1
At class 12, the two-sector circular flow of income model taught us that we are humans and they are producers. We produce goods, for which we get money to buy the same goods we produce. That makes everyone else at our jobs an industry, while we remain mere labourers. When everything turns into a scary, fat, crazy, loud machine, ever rotating, exploding, we hold our faces tight and scream.
We arm ourselves with a joint and Coltrane.
We comfort our breath with hills and Olafur.
We eat up our mornings at night.
But the day eventually arrives and now you have to face them again. Face the light that shines like the Facebook profile picture of a guy I used to hate. Fight out another mushy, weekday wearing a lipstick and forced happiness to quench our biggest enemy, hunger.
***
Every time we said goodbye, we said goodbye. We meant goodbye. We screamed our lungs out saying, good fucking bye. But then, when morning came, like pigs, we took our time to dress up, clean up and get ready to greet the same people we abhor, with a polythene smile.
We come back to go again. We come back to eat, to sleep and shit, to get productive – to reproduce labour and start producing again. Apparently helps surplus value and generates higher MPL .We are now ready to fake our smiles for miles and miles again.
A diagram in my class 12 text book comes back to haunt me like a three dimensional circle I am locked in. While everyone around just keeps talking. Am I turning into a clock again? Is it all round that you see?
***
Existence is a curse. In ontology lies the secret of seduction. We drool over those who could not become.
Kejriwal became. Stalin became. Mao became.
But Ghatak could not become. There is something very seductive about this unbecoming.
Guevara, too, did not become.
If they did, they would probably fail, too.
What exists is just imagination. Or does it?
The confusions of being and nothingness, of form and formless remain. Sometimes, we all do feel deformed. Aren’t we all? It is this denial that makes me nauseatic.
Why, then, this abnormal fumbling towards ecstasy?
Why this morning? Why hunger?
Why this desperation to rub our faces with ice creams?
This vicious cycle cannot be biked through winter mornings.
Memory is the absence of a span of time.
Is it then, time?
Or, is it memory
that is intangible?
This question could turn into liquid right now and evaporate.
Patterns we see are structured through our a priori assumptions. What if we never looked for a form in the sky? Would the sky look just like water?
Becoming is a form we try hard to look for.
The absence of becoming is probably unbecoming.
Probably between these shades of becoming and unbecoming lies poetry.
But structured fascination for non-form
could often sketch genetically modified whines.
May be, poetry can lick it clean.
For with poetry, the question remains,
if it really exists. If it’s real.
2
Time too is a circle. It forces us to live. We do the same things every day, every year, for ages until the things we do lose meaning. Round and round, like my hands that glide through the white dial of an ugly fat clock.
This cyclical disgust, as I see it, is alluring to most. I used to like rectangles when I was young. Now I do not choose. Like Cage who falls, jumps and hops through his notes; sometimes for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, he does not give a fuck!
Out there the morning has turned into an ecstasy. Not entirely drugged but wishing for heights and cliffs and chill of mountains I do not want to forget. But we have to get back. We must not get drunk. For our only purpose in life is to get back to work. The trees ape happy aunts who attain hysteria over gossips. Those buses are all smirking, for they know they are taking you for another ride.
“Ghatak was murdered,” screams Nabarun. Evans has left his piano and gone fishing with a red eye. Burroughs doesn’t care. I even type my emails with line breaks. Only critics can heal our Cancers with uranium.
The machines are all lonesome – accumulating hate on weekends. They feed on your wounds. They who do not walk in sleep, who quote Rabindranath while buying underwear, who marry to attain civility, who ask us to run for our lives through the narrow lanes at midnight, who shoot us when we have fallen asleep.
***
Work is a minuscule part of our jobs. Everything else is just sales through the shiny glass wall.
Rivers have forgotten mathematics. They now count in rhyme,
through the lack of it.
They planned many rebellions.
Even yesterday they were dreaming.
Yes, time has decomposed us all and stripped us off our insanity.
May be it is your time now
Your time for mediocrity.
Let’s talk about responsibilities instead.
Author:
Goirick Brahmachari is a writer based in New Delhi. He hails from Silchar, Assam.
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***
Read the latest issue of Cafe Dissensus Magazine on ‘Gorkhaland’, edited by Dr. Rajendra Prasad Dhakal, Principal, Kalimpong College, Kalimpong, Darjeeling, WB, India.
One Response to “Becoming and Unbecoming”
Despite the big existentialist crisis I feel almost every day, I remember there is always someone who does not have time to think about such issues. There is always someone who struggles just to survive. My work clock then ticks a little bit faster, and I feel almost comfortable in the morning bus at 6 a.m. I don’t think about being a young homeowner in an unstable market. We cannot possibly overcome all of our insecurities, but we can help to provide for those in need (and feel good about it). Maybe the time is a circle, but if it is, I mean we can destroy it.