About delusions of grandeur
It’s biological, said the professor, evolutionary, attesting to the success of our species survival so far.
What is?
This removal from reality, this desire to live in the fantastical outcome, this vision of glory for the self.
As in the realm of teenagers, when the entire world consolidates into your domain. When you feel invincible. You stand over softly marked options and timidly suggested cautions, and the breeze of Absolute Success whips your hair back as you heroically face your glory.
No matter what the outcome, it can only be your glory.
Even instances of your most deplorable acts takes you towards a precient sense of your distinction. Even the absolute horror in facing your most dreaded misdemeanors is a thrill that sears through your body, briefly connecting your mind with your body again where the fantastical life reinserts itself, and at the end of the tunnel, there it is, that exciting friend — your glory. All narratives end with that, the end terminus is just that. An imagined suicide too becomes part of this glory parade. In imagining your death you can stand in person at your own wake, and script out the details that matter: a broad sweep of commemorative emotions for the entire congregation of mourners at your memorial service, and little spirals of fabulous thoughts emanating from individual heads, who are, everyone of them, veritable wordsmiths who compose glittering nuggets of literature about the person in the coffin. These elevated feelings rise en masse in choir, a privilege of tongues bestowed upon them by the incredible noblesse oblige of the superhero lying there, a dead gladiator.
In this realm limbs often commit acts on their own, in secret co-ordinance with a reptilian brain pulsing in some cavern in your head, un-beknowest to majors in the control room. And yet, there it is, the golden fleece, hanging above everything like a promise. The land below has been thrown into gridlock and gears can be heard groaning, and time gets deactivated, clearing the runways for the flights of glory to come in.
Kalpana Prakash
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