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regular-article-logo Friday, 13 December 2024

I am the bear and I am Polar

You are about to be driven into being a being of this side or that side, you are about to be pulled apart, yanked if yanking is what it would require

Sankarshan Thakur Published 11.04.21, 12:29 AM
I am a Polar bear. I do polar things, which means I separate ends, take things apart this way and that way.

I am a Polar bear. I do polar things, which means I separate ends, take things apart this way and that way. Anon

Bear with me, will you please. Because if you choose not to, you know what might happen. I might have to do my own thing. Polar things. I am a Polar bear. I do polar things, which means I separate ends, take things apart this way and that way. That is who I am. That is what I do. It is nothing I can help, I am a consequence of who I am, Polar; and I do polarity.

And I do what comes from doing polarity. I stretch it, I pull it till things come apart, this way or that, upper jaw or lower jaw. Can you not see that from the accompanying representation of who I am? At my very best? Things pulled apart? Upper jaw or lower jaw? And can you not see everything or anything between does not exist, as in it has been gulped down the abyss of my limitless hunger? Well. Now you know.

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Now you know what polarity means because you know polars, or polar bears. Grrrrrrr!

Here I come, prepare yourselves, get ready for what I am about to do to you.

You are about to taste polarity. You are about to be driven into being a being of this side or that side, you are about to be pulled apart, yanked if yanking is what it would require. I will tell you, in Shakespearean mien, pardon my pomposity, what differences mean and how fundamental and essential differences are. There is this side. There is that side. There is a separation in between. I occupy that separation, I am the Czar of Fractured Things, I break the world into this and that and I create spaces between them, and that space is my empire.

I shall sift and separate. I shall be the arbiter of good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, kosher and sinful, legitimate and illicit, and I shall bring down upon you the consequences of the scheme as I understand it. And as I want it put forth and effected. I am not the first one. I am, most likely, not the last; in fact I can assure you I am not the last of the breed, of the grammarians of polarisation. We are the breed that decrees upon our collective selves the singular essence of differences and what they should mean and require. It requires a bit of pain and the practice of prejudice and the shedding, quite often, of blood but it is an essential thing. Polarity. Polarisation. If we are not polarised, how are we to know one from another? Good from Bad. Pious from Evil? Ours from Theirs? How are we to decide what or who is with us, and who and what is not? We need distinctions. We need differences. We need the dialectic that will prevent us from cosying into the comfort of Oneness, that asinine thing that never got anyone anywhere. Oneness! Folks brag of it as if it were the greatest virtue. But consider how unthinking such bragging is. Oneness. Where would we ever have gotten with Oneness? We would have been a village, a global sprawl of a village. Satisfied. No longer ambitious. Like frogs in a well, croaking oneness and believing that croaking to be the beginning and end of things. Where would we have gotten with Oneness? Nowhere. Where are here because we tore at things, at each other, at each other’s possessions — territory, riches, palaces, provinces of people, women. We came at each other like poles come to poles, with polarity, polarised. That is how some of us became better and other lesser: that is how the world is, better and less. That is the polarity for us here — coursing, convulsing between who would be better and who would prove the other lesser. We did not arrive here from embrace, we arrived here from the emboss of the better upon the lesser, from polarity, whose consequence is polarisation.

Polarisation, the word. Where might it come from? Understand, that it comes from bearing fangs, and fangs that tear, from this pole to that. That is why polar. And that is why polarity.

Oh, but whatever do I wear

Please, I warn thee be ware

And get not beyond care

Please know, I am a bear.

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