On Christmas Day, my son was hospitalized with the dreaded dengue. We also hospitalized ourselves, so we wouldn't worry. Dengue is a viral, buzz-borne, potentially hemorrhagic fever. It's deceptive and deadly. In bad cases, the blood vessels basically break down and people bleed to death internally. There is no cure, but in Sri Lanka the treatment is quite good, though it consists, mainly, of educated watching. The doctors watch the blood counts, the nurses watch the blood pressure, and the family watches measuring cups, one for drinks and one for pee. This is the water cycle of life. Life is measured out with coffee spoons, as the poets say, or in cups as doctors demand, more prosaically.

As Tyrannosaurus Simon (TS) Eliot said,

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
               So how should I presume?

All of our lives are measured, some just more immediately. My mother has done the measuring out for me, my wife has measured out my life in piss spittoons, and now we're doing it for my child. Some day my son will be measuring out my life, my precious bodily fluids, inshaitan. This is the water cycle of life, embodied in pee. The long golden stream.

Digression

People say you're born alone, you die alone but I have never understood this. Even the slightest amount of navel-gazing shows that we're all literally born out of someone. When you die, you require pall-bearers to leave. It's the same root word for the same root reality. Human beings are rarely alone, least of all near the exits.

In most cultures, people barely have personal names, most names are literally relative. You are either Abu Hamza (the father of Hamza) or Bappa (mother's younger brother), or some age-based family name, relating you to the community. Personal names are a modern invention, go a few generations back and most people barely have them. Hell, I can just visit family in India and their official names are like WiFi passwords, no one really knows them but they've got it written down somewhere. I discovered my (Sinhala) grandmother's last name at her funeral. I kept wondering who on Earth is Gunawardena? That was my Achchi's government name, but how would I know? I was just a gamaya. I only knew her as Achchi, grandmother, and all the villagers called her Kalutara Hamine, the lady who came from Kalutara. Every culture has relative names for parents, but most cultures also have relative names for almost everyone in the village.

Even in barbaric Far-West Asia, you were either the relative of so-and-so (Johnson), or doer of a job for the community (John Smith). Names still change based on your stage in life (Master, Mr), who's addressing you (Dr. or Dear), or where you're from (Baghdad Bob). The modern idea of a fixed identity is the same idea as ‘fixing’ a butterfly with a pin.

As the poet continues (PS Eliot),

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
               And how should I presume?

The question capitalism asks is not ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’, but how many poor devils can wriggle on the end of one. Individuals are pinned on a board room wall and their hopeless wriggling is monetized as productivity. Or as Leo Tolstoy said, “Now, it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished – sand of human souls – we should think there might be some loss in it also.”

Individualism is a western concoction to sell you sneakers and steal your labor time, your literal life, measured out with coffee spoons. The idea of firstname/lastname is just a password into prison. And we literally sign up for it, what is a signature, after all? What are you signing away, but having one in the first place?

The Buddha said the illusion of self was the mother of all fuck-ups. This is something babies know as well as Buddhas. Babies know very well that they don't exist on their own and immediately reach out for a titty. Buddhahood is simply remembering this as an adult, and not repeating the indignity. Even unenlightened adults express unintentional insight when they're mating. Adults subconsciously call each other baby as they make babies. As the Bee Gees wrote,

Islands in the stream
That is what we are
No one in between
How can we be wrong?
Sail away with me
To another world
And we rely on each other, ah-ah
From one lover to another, ah-ah

The Stream

So, anyways, I'm eyeballing piss in a cup while my wife eyeballs water in an unfortunately identical cup in the other room. We made this baby and now we have to maintain it forever. So we measure out the boy's life in plastic cups, recording the results in a sheet which the nurse checks like homework.

The main insight from those who died from dengue and those who lived is to measure liquids, before your internal organs liquify. My daughter has had what they terrifyingly call ‘leakage,’ which can lead to blood transfusions, which can simply not do anything. There's still not much the doctors can do about bad dengue, but they can at least do it quickly.

When you're in this situation—when you're completely dependent on family and society—you can actually situate yourself more accurately. With a patient perspective, every human being is just a thin and extremely fragile tube, connected to billions of other tubes that somehow make a robust network. Life is robust, but any one life is extremely fragile. I think of this as my wife measures liquids going into the tube and I measure liquids going out, to make sure the tube itself is not hemorrhaging. That's all the universe is, a bunch of relativistic tubes, atoms as well as atomized people, just vectors bouncing off each other as time splits us apart, with no fixed point anywhere in view.

Mashallah this particular tube is fine, the boy is fine. He's out of hospital and playing now, though he has to rest for weeks. Sometimes life in the tropics is a bitch but, as Nas said, God forbid the bitch divorce me. Or as the Buddha said, life is suffering, as almost every Buddhist ignores him. Life is a cycle, connecting intimately to other life cycles, most obviously your family but also your society, your species, and well beyond all artificial categories. Life is that which cannot be held on to but which must be held on to, this is the central struggle of the bubbles within the bubbles of multiverses we call human beings. The long, golden stream.