Auguries of the Unconscious

I am just 27 years old and yet I wonder about the human condition a lot, well, I wonder about my condition, and that by extension, becomes a reflection on the human condition. I admit, I put it like that to give a philosophical hue to my narcissistic ruminations, but are these intellectual pretensions exclusive to me? Aren’t all thinkers and philosophers just do the same, they introspect on their chronic grief and transient pleasures and then compulsively extrapolate.  Maybe I am being simplistic, yet, not absurd.

Now, one may ask what brings me, at this age, to reflect on life at the expense of experiencing it. Well, I think experiences, when had with deliberation and planning, have humbling limits. You see, I have been a thrill-seeker all my life and I really don’t know if I could have it any other way. Yet, it’s disappointing to realize that chronic adventurism engenders the most intractable monotonies.

I read an article once which said that the brain is prone to get dopamine tolerant and it happens very fast. As for me, I have not just surfed but dived in what seemed to my naive mind an endless sea of pleasures pulsating with the writhing waves of gratification, but rapidly it just atrophies into a pond and unless you continually dive into the really endless seas of misery, the appeal of pleasure is never revived. I, in the course of my career in hedonism, flirted and engaged with all pleasures of a mediocre mind. The visceral ones like sex (including deviant) and substances, demanding ones like sports and competitive sports, of course only to the extent that my biology allowed and when I despaired to find that virgin rush. I have found out, All human emotions plateau in intensity with a single exception—the fear.

Fear is the king of emotions, it dwarfs every other feeling by an unmitigable margin. There is no way around it, it demands to be faced, and all distractions are useless in the face of fear. And I am scared all the time, no emotion is as immune to the blunting effects of monotony as fear and it really never plateaus it spikes every time it is summoned and lingers on until it is replaced by a new intense wave. We can never become tolerant to it. That’s what I have found and every dose of it is as effective as the last one yeah the most visceral among the set of fears dominates and replacement is strictly homogeneous, I mean only fear can replace fear, it demolishes happiness, conquers ecstasy, and blows away sadness like storm does chaff.

Fear is admirable, the audacity, urgency, and its currency that never deflates!

My tryst with fear began with feel pangs of mortifying anxiety, the mutant cousin of fear.

Now I will come to how exactly I was initiated into the world of fear and how the intrigue of a most unusual kind and baffling prevarication unfolded before me. 

It started with a mundane party. An event for meaningless consort with all the glitter and pretentiousness that has the same effect on the occasion as a botched Botox has on an aged face. I went to the party on my friend’s insistence and there a lady with the strange blankness of the eyes caught my eye. Whether it was the cheap merlot the host had served or the oppressive table manners of the hosts I couldn’t figure out. Anyways, I was drawn to her. Our brain has a fetish for symmetry—visual and emotional, it seeks it out and the void filling her eyes mirrored the emptiness of my heart.

I don’t know when I began to stare at her, she must have noticed it but she seemed to be in a state where oddity of manners are too banal to respond to. Nothing could disturb the equilibrium which protracted despondency treated with indifference brings about, of course, fear can do the trick, it can do it every time and it did it with her too. Something jolted her and she masked it with a badly feigned cough. That night, after the social charade and rigmaroles of disguising the relief of farewell, I followed her without worrying about being discreet. And then she disappeared at the end of the road, as if she vaporized. So sudden was the event of her becoming a phantasm that I began to suspect my senses and searched frantically for an explanation. She was on her own walking oddly in her high heels, stumbling but sure of her destination, gait that looks eerily like a wave that want to be lost but has that condemning certainty of direction that infinity brings with it.

My sanity was challenged when I looked at the pictures of the night, they had her sitting at the exact place, well, that’s what you expect from a photograph, right! The unqualified visual record of the happening, but the smile she sported could have come from that hour of the evening when my eyes met hers. That’s an impossibility, yet here she was smiling and the vivacity in her eyes flew in the face of my memory of her. The vacuum replaced by hope, admiration, and all the paraphernalia of emotional investment, the resignation of the bankrupt heart had vanished and all antonymic shades that a face can afford a snap was there. I needed and demanded explanation, I surveyed all that there was to survey in the snapshot, there I was, captured staring at her.

No later than a week did I was startled again by the same visage, as if my thoughts have condensed into her form. There she was, sublime and filled with the original equanimity, her evanescence baffled me again.

Then she began to appear in the most unlikely places with the uncanniness of an apparition. I could see her in peering from the crowd and in the desolation of anteroom. Her indifference to my compulsive surveying vanished and she stared back although with that immutable air of indifference. And the day her stare turned belligerent and her smile became a haunting enigma is etched into my memory. It was the 11th day since I first glanced at and got glued to her existence at the party that she snarled at me, I could never have imagined that hideousness could colonize expressions so unannounced. This was the first encounter that marked the beginning of my desire to never see her again.

The train stations in Mumbai are cells on steroids, they swell up in activity and congest the heart. The constant reverberations of the tracks, the multitude of cacophonies, and drowning of individuality into a sea of human collective driven by urgency seemed absolute but there she was, the singularity of her presence unmolested by the entropies of the metropolis, glaring at me with the monomaniac’s fervor. I shuddered and yet despaired to see her again as she fleeted away, just to know wherefrom her derision stems. And then suddenly I was swept into the train which I did not intend to board. I was gasping for air and begged to stand at the open doors and I could do momentarily. And as I stood there staring at the endless track, I saw her again waking on the stretch. Now, that was an impossible sighting, she could not have landed physically to the place where I was seeing her that moment unless I am conjuring her up. That was the last straw and that evening I related the bizarre to our family doctor.

The doctor

He is as archetypical as they come and as old as they could become. My narration was carefully phased. I began by citing the manifest symptoms after which he sat me down and lay me down and began his customary research. And after his third question asked in a monotone, reeking of the imminence of a pre-determined diagnosis, I segued abruptly and described to him the exact event that threatens to bust my heart and precipitate a brain hemorrhage to boot. And the reaction of the good doctor surprised me. He was immediate in stopping the narration of his plans of visceral inquisition and asked for the details with curiosity matched only by patients expecting test results that may confirm a terminal diagnosis. The entire event was morbid. I proceeded with my story.

Abruptly, he shifted in his chair and said without a preface that he would visit me at my home and continue the discussion. He did not even tell me not to worry, no prescription no prescriptive epilogue.

The Revelation

Picture this, my parents, I, and the doctor sitting too close for comfort and he whispers, K, tell them what you told me. I did not waste time reflecting on the anomaly of the situation and the blatant demolition of patient privacy inherent in the exchange and narrated what had transpired.

The only question that emanated was, “how old is she?”, to which I replied “ in her thirties”. My father stood up went and retrieved an album that looked atrophied and smelled antique. Naphthalene had not preserved it all that well, yet it was crying to be acknowledged for effort. He flipped it and retrieved a photo and showed it to me, “Is this her?”, he asked. There she was, the evanescent woman with a child I don’t know why, but I grew tearful and embarrassed at the anticlimactic predictability of my nascent career in surreal visions.

It wasn’t as anticlimactic as I had imagined, look son we were warned that we might have to face this situation at some point and now by all appearances, it is the moment.

 “ You see, momentous revelations do not wait for the recipients to reach the threshold of curiosity, they just precipitate and their magnitude is independent of your preparation to deal with them. And he then went on to say, do you know her? It was too surreal to respond to cogently. That’s your mother, your biological mother.

I was as credulous as anyone could possibly be, it’s the perfect vulnerability of my mind that seduced my father into taking the widest latitudes in narration and abandon the burden of proof; at least, at that point, it seemed that way. 

He went on, it seemed as if he would break into a tenor any moment, it was theatrical, and it was not altogether inappropriate for there was virtually a Greek tragedy unfolding, the only thing that offset the build-up was his lawyerly tone and lexicon. 

“You were about 4 when you came our way. You were found in an obsessively neat bed in a posh home lying catatonic. The women were also found on the same bed holding you in an embrace. The autopsy revealed that she had been dead for 4 days, possibly a suicide. She had held you tightly to her bosom and your arms were bruised, possibly with the tightening that rigor mortis in her body brought about. And you were recovered and the subsequent examination revealed traces of arsenic in your tissues, there was heparin and insulin too. Heparin is a blood thinner you see. “

He must have expected me to pose obvious questions at that point—was I sick, what I was being treated for, and all that. But not a peep. I was a horrible audience. I believe if a Hamlet or an Oedipus sat in the audience while their life was being enacted by a caliber like that of a Laurence Olivier, I believe they wouldn’t have reacted at all. What can I say—the story of me being found in the arms of a dead woman in a catatonic state, left me catatonic?

He continued, “Well, it was thought that you must have had some kind of congenital heart condition coupled with some juvenile metabolic disease, that could explain those drugs, but the arsenic shifted the course of investigation. It was theorized, after a lot of unprescribed controlled substances were found in that house and the toxicology report that you were being needlessly and maliciously being targeted, possibly by her. You see, she was the only caretaker and pathologically aloof and her elderly parents and a sister were only social contacts, so all other possibilities were ruled out and it was concluded that she was suffering from what they call what Munchausen Von- by- proxy syndrome. You had a history of hospital admissions, some of which were in the Intensive care units of 3 different hospitals in the course of a year and a half. You were resuscitated multiple times when you were not even of speaking age. And there was no congenital defect found that could have warranted and explained such an unusual medical record. Then, in her last 6 months she switched to arsenic and intermittently dosed you and then waited for you to recuperate, and by all appearances, cared and grieved for you. Anyways, the details of the case escaped the papers and we got to know about the entire thing and I was the district attorney and I fought against the custody claim by her sister, and eventually we adopted you. You got well eventually, but remembered absolutely nothing from the first 4 years of your life. It’s called selective amnesia, just a few months of night terrors, your mother, may god rest her soul, sat beside you for nights on end, were the only manifestation of trauma of the past.”

I blurted abruptly, “the past of a 4-year-old, I mean this is ridiculous“, I protested, despite my being all so resigned to the whole affair.

“It’s the mother, debilitation, death we are talking about here, these are potent circumstances and are bound to impact you emotionally. Unconscious defenses only go so far,” the doctor said, and I admit he seemed to have a point, but then, is there a point of having a point at such a point.

“So what now? You are suggesting that if I understand it, and accept it she will go away.”

“That’s the logical assumption, and yeah intellectualization, catharsis, and feedback will certainly help,” he tried to humbly show the promise in the tragedy.

The climax to the entire affair was rather precipitous, perhaps, they both thought that not prefacing my plunge into the new reality was best for me.

My psych profiling and a graphic recounting of an anomalous motherhood defined by alcoholism, pharmacological assaults, and child abuse. Particularly, the whole rigor mortis embrace got stuck in my mind. The deadpan narration did not blunt the inherent deviance of the imagery. And the days went by and I had no parapsychological encounters whatsoever. And then as the second week ended and I had just returned to the banal world of normal perceptions, I saw her again and this time she was back with a vengeance. It happened in a bar, she held in her hand a glass of wine with her stare alternating between me and the glass. It was not pleasant, for all my illusions of affinity for the exotic brain flavors, I was jolted and realized through that pervasive fear that I was as ordinary as the next man, and that realization was disturbing in itself.

Driven by disillusionment, I decided to expand the domain of commonsense and get uncommon help.

The hypnotist

The hypnotist, or the hypnotherapist (that’s what he called himself) office was in a nondescript corner of a suburb, a perfect setting, I would say for a professional practice that has been relegated to the margins burdened by the charges of quackery. But the confidence and verbosity of the therapist it was rather odd. I think all pseudoscientists have that kind of confidence of the pioneers.

He would surprise me with his acumen. He began by validating his science, or art, first. He said that Freud believed in hypnotherapy and mesmerism originates from the name Mesmer. I can’t say why, but his embellishments seemed customary rather than opportune and had a hint of acute intuition in them, he had perhaps sensed my suspicions.

Now, I was circumspect enough to not reveal anything to him in advance, if there is any substance to his craft, he will figure out, I reasoned.

And he started, he began with the stereotypical dangling, and I don’t know if it was autosuggestion or manipulation, but I do not remember what transpired and I suppose that I was entranced.

What he revealed to me with an air of vindication at the end were the details I already knew and had deliberately kept from him—“you were a child, have just started speaking, maybe 3 or 4. And you are with your mother and probably do not want the medicine she is giving you.”

After that, he hesitated...

 “Well, you said that she went to draw the curtains and you stood up, poured the bottle of medicine in her wine glass,” he recounted.

Upon hearing that, I tried to be as impassive as I could. I did not want him to understand the implication of what was just revealed to me by I. however, for all his airs of mentalism, It is reasonable to say that he had in fact guessed the sensitivity of the issue if not the import of it all.

So if subconscious is as candid and uncorrupted as it is theorized to be, then my mother’s death was not a suicide and it was a matricide, mitigated by self-defense on my part.

It is surprising how unusually comfortable I am with regard to the entire affair, I guess my mother has passed on to me some psychological deformities after all.

 I was relieved by the end of the psychogenic visions or but I confess that I miss them, you see, the boredom has been redefined for me, its dimensions have expanded, and it has given a whole new meaning to the human condition.