Back to Love...

A friend forwarded this …I’m reading it about 5 years too late..but it’s a good read ..has a lot of insight and funny too …(and you would expect that from the guy who wrote Munnabai MBBS..) I admit I had to read it twice, only because I read it too late in the night and second of all because I’m one of the more dopey Madhumathi types ;)

Groping with Love
by Abbas Tyrewala

For those who came in late…

Pentaxial Gropings is based on a simple metaphysical
theorem, which states that: "[The] Truth is nothing but a point: a set of co-ordinates on a pentaxial configuration -- the five axes being the three of Space, one of Time and one of Perspective."

Pentaxial Gropings is (whenever I get down to writing it) an ad hoc attempt to arrive at my personal, subjective truth of any random matter that seizes my arbitrary fancy, and is based upon the highly suspect assumption that someone gives a damn. (For further explanation and more adjectives, kindly refer to Pentaxial Gropings: "There's Something About Shiv.")



Today, I'm groping with love.

Actually, I groped with it last night -- not in any manner that Italians might find imperative, the French imaginative and the British irksome -- and woke up with a "Eureka!" at four in the morning. Actually I woke up with an expression I learnt from my new Sardar friend Raman, viz. "Fuck lag gayee!" But then, I'm pretty certain Archimedes must have yelled something like, "Told you NOT to fill it to the brim, you bitch!" and reverent students and/or kindly historians subsequently adapted the expression.
The reason I exulted in aforementioned Eureka-like manner was because inspite of (because of?) a number of practical failures, I had the theory cracked.

Love made sense. Not in any manner that's going to ensure happy relationships henceforth. If that's what you're hoping to find, I suggest you stop wasting time and read the Kama Sutra, or better still, What do you do after she says, "That's all?" I'm talking theory here. Pure, pristine, sanguine theory, unsullied by pedestrian notions of 'applicability' and 'point'. Before going on, let me quote a poem that my dear friend Ronnie Patel once dedicated to me.

"Oh vanishing moon,
There's much enchantment left
Beneath your ceaseless coursing…
…something, something…
…tire not then of romancing the youth
Its swoons, its sighs
The fickle promises of love
Ever doomed to be broken
For your charm is still a token
Of all that is good and well
And ravishing are the wounds
Of your aphrodisiac spells."

Why was a 63-year-old Parsi dedicating poems to me? Well, I guess he liked me. Also, he was probably the only man who understood what I was going through at the time. The head of the department at my then job, he had noticed subtle changes in my behaviour,a concept a week to nothing, and an intense desire to win staring contestswith the office wall. The poem was his way of saying cheer up little buddy it'll be all right.
,
Why did it need to be all right? What was wrong? All that had happened was that things hadn't worked out with someone, a classic case of love gone wrong.


Now, my trusty Webster's informs me that
love (luv), n., v., loved, lov·ing. -n. [is:]
1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent,
child, or friend.
3. sexual passion or desire.

After this it goes off into soft corn, including love for neighbor and love for dog but we'll leave the kinks out of it.

Looking at the understood meaning of love, there was absolutely no reason why I should have been feeling as devastated as I was in early '97. The first two contain no suggestion of the imperative correlation between love and the desire for reciprocation. The last in no manner explains why the loss of love generates the kind of monomania it does. Frankly, one would expect relief at having the functional domain of "sexual passion or desire" suddenly extended from Madhumati (not her real name) to the entire female species. The Reptilian Complex at the core of the brain -- repressed and catharticallynted in dreams but by no means dead -- should be waving primordial pom-poms and flashing its scaly green backside in glee. But no. We go unhappy. Extremely very unhappy. Something very disturbing happened in that winter of my discontent. A cousin of mine developed a sketchy idea of what was going on. He laughed and said, "Dekh yaar, har admi ki life mein yeh ek baar hota hai. Usske baad sab naatak chhod ke paise ke peechhe padte hai." Translated, that reads, "Buddy, every man goes through this once. After this, you cut the crap and concentrate on money."

And I remain perturbed by the sentiment. Not because it was pathetic, not because it was loser 'guy' bromide that I wouldn't even consider before discarding in disgust. This is a fellow whose idea of fun involved shooting at streetlights with an air rifle from a speeding van after downing what a six-pack meant before it meant an ugly stomach (ha! guess who doesn't
work out). I was disturbed because somewhere, somehow, in some perverse corner of my frightened mind, it made sense. It rung true and gave me hope.

Why? What possible obversality could conjoin love gone wrong and the ruthless pursuit of money? The answer is very simple. Money is a measure: the simplest possible parameter by which to gauge a person's value. Money becomes a standard of self-worth, an alternative standard of self worth. Money is a desperate.Plan B in the self-worth sweepstakes.
And thus I reached an a posteriori conscious awareness of an instinctive a priori knowledge. Love is when an individual ascertains that which all of life is a struggle to ascertain: self-worth. Who am I? What am I? What is my value? What am I worth? The key questions. Problem is, there is no existing scale, no existing parameter tocalculate self worth.

However, we live in an analogue world. ("Digital is for wimps" -- God.)* Everything is approximate, nebulous, comprehended largely via analogy. Things are understood not in absolute but in relative terms. All great religious texts are allegoric or metaphoric in nature. The closer a question gets to
being 'really important', the more difficult it is to obtain an absolute answer.

[* The world goes digitalish when you descend to quantum exactitudes, but then Heisenberg coughs politely and tells you exactly where you can shove your exactitudes. Cool tangent for a later column: raving fundamentalists who oppose science on the premise that some arcane knowledge is a necessary barrier between God and man can chill thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, which ensures that we can never completely know the Mind of God. "God moves in mysterious ways" can be easily modified to "God moves in electrons."]

And so we grope with indescribables, grasp at concepts by relating their essential dimensions to quasi-absolute standards. As tall as a mountain.Faster than the eye can see. As pure as a virgin. As alarmingly banal as Reader's Digest.

"Who am I" and "What am I worth?" are questions for which we don't really have satisfying standards, no parameters that would make Sartre's soul burp in contentment. These are akin to The Ultimate Question that Deep Thought
couldn't solve (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and no one's about to accept "I'm worth forty-two" for an answer.

Love is the only answer we'll accept. Love is when we find a human standard that reflects our unconscious
awareness of our own self-worth. It is the rampaging amplitude of a soul that has discovered its naturally vibrating partner, and all 'really important questions' are answered -- cryptically but satisfyingly -- in a majestic surge of resonance.Love is the cognizance of standard. Reciprocation is the confirmation. Noticed how people tend to find partners of largely comparable social,financial and intellectual stature? More importantly, it will be the defining trait of a person for which he or she will naturally seek the greatest compatibility. A social animal will lay the greatest emphasis on social stature, a genius on intelligence, a celebrity on image. (Unless of course, their core defining traits are diverse from their observable traits.)

Each one of us is equipped with an innate awareness of 'a suitable match'. Our internal signal receivers are naturally unresponsive to transmissions at marked variance from a critical range. The greatest disasters in love occur when the ego sets up its own receiving station in blatant conflict with the id's; when one chooses a partner in accordance with conscious considerations (money, status, "Mummy said," etc.) rather than resonance. Sooner or later, the quest for self-worth will violently revolt. Or worse still, it may quietly die, leaving unhappy shadows where once were people. Consider the passion, the intensity of a first love…the first impact, the firstawakening of a sense of self. Given that impact helps define the edges (a thought loosely adapted from Le Carre's The Naïve and Sentimental Lover), first love defines the shape of the soul.

This is why young love threatened is more prone to the extremities of suicide and crimes of passion -- reflexive responses to the nascent awareness of'self' being threatened. The greatest legends of love tell the story of daemonic society trying to tear a young couple apart. The anticipation of this loss is agonising: if the mirror is confiscated, will my image remain? Without harmony, will I remember my rhythm? Without impact, can I define my shape?

If the quest for love is the quest for self-worth, then sex is the culmination,the celebration of a successful quest. Sexual habits, then, offer interesting glimpses into the soul. Consider promiscuity. Impact defines, but impact also erodes. Repeated impact denotes a frantic search for self-worth (absent, then, by obversion --the search for something denotes its own absence). Every subsequent impact corrodes and dulls; obscuring the edges, sapping vibrancy and vitality until the soul loses shape.

The absence of love is another extreme. No impact, no definition, no erosion. Only a loveless life: the atrophy of the soul. And the act of buying love may be seen as the final dropping of arms. It is the almost irrevocable surrender of The Quest, accompanied by the complete acceptance of an alternative standard. Sex, then, is no longer the celebration of souls in harmony. Reduced to a physical need, a minor irritant, it is to be dealt with quickly, cleanly (in a manner of speaking) and painlessly.


(ditto). Why does the memory of a first love remain almost palpable through life? It is a tribute to a worth once felt -- the person I once was -- that keeps one going through compromise and cynicism. It eases the dull ache of disappointment with alternative yardsticks like money, social prolicacy, and 'the score'.

Imagine, then -- if you haven't already experienced -- the anguish of love gone wrong. It is the rejection of self-worth. It is the complete breakdown ofan individual who has just discovered that he is not, or is no longer, whom he thought he was. It is the profound loss of person who has found -- and then lost -- his idea of self.

Why does this happen? For one, human beings are not consistent. We often play at whom we wanto be, or have to be. Roll playing, charades, masks and most importantly
phases characterise our behaviour -- our 'signals' -- at any given point. We are not always vibrating at our intrinsic natural frequency. This often tends to cause the illusion of a naturally vibrating partner (think pendulum --pendulums! This is scientific! God!)

Gradually the awareness of discord sets in, destructive interference of wave patterns replace the myth of harmony, and one of the partners mumbles in an adequately guilty (or vicious, depending) tone, "It's over. I'm sorry." ("It's not you, it's me." -- optional.)

Sometimes, people grow discordant. Sure, there was resonance once. But thing changed in the pendulum of the soul. Perhaps the materials were dissimilar. One string had the greater elasticity, one sphere the greater affinity for atmospheric oxygen -- whatever! -- and the specifications changed. Partners then part: sometimes gracefully, sometimes violently. Energies depleted, passions spent, they wander off in reluctant search of a new harmony, a new resonance, which must necessarily be of a loweribrancy.

And so I search. A slower, wiser, pendulous soul, not yet having replaced the quest for my analogue soulmate with the crude, discrete digitality of money. Oh string of corresponding tension, oh orb of matching metal, I know you're out there. Wait for me, my mirror in search of a mirror. Keep transmitting, keep receiving, and keep an eye on the red light. I love you.