Marriage

By

Gary Dorman Wiggins

At very lucid moments, people realize that the ultimate in vanity is marriage. Any fool who can delude himself into thinking he is giving the fullest emotional satisfaction to another by placing a hard circular piece of metal on that one’s finger and calling her “spouse” has partaken of possibly the only socially acceptable method of perpetual intoxication. Vanity is the fullest denial of man’s inability to comprehend himself. There has never been a vainer person than one who purports to comprehend another to the point of tying his life to that one.

I know him. I know her. He is mine. She is mine. These are statements which lack truth by virtue of their completeness. The removal of the last word in each case presents the truth and anti-truth: He is. She is. “I know” is the intoxicant. “Mine” is an unattainable absurdity. Negation can be created by man only in the world of the concrete, and that which is concrete is complete.

If life is abstract, then vanity and all things associated with vanity are negative. “There is no happiness” is false. Happiness is abstract and can only be realized. I am writing this because I want to be happy, that is, asleep, and when I started, I was not sleepy. I am now sleepy. I will be happy when I am asleep, I have realized.

30 November 1967