MONOPOLAR
For the magnets we cut, keep growing back their opposite
When I was a kid, someone handed me two magnets and told me to put them together. I pushed. They refused. I flipped one around, and suddenly they leapt into each other’s arms without my help. This was, as far as I can remember, my first encounter with the idea that the universe has preferences. That some things want to join and some things want to flee, and there is no third option where you just… stand there, neutral, unpulled.
Later I learned that if you take a magnet and cut it in half, you don’t get a lonely north pole and a lonely south pole. You get two smaller magnets, each with both poles again. Cut those in half and you get four. Cut those and you get eight. No matter how small you go, the universe refuses to let a thing be one-sided. Physicists have spent decades hunting for something called a magnetic monopole, a particle with only a north or only a south, pure and undivided. They keep coming up empty. The universe, it seems, is committed to the bit.
Monopolar. I’ve been thinking about the word. It’s not quite a real word the way bipolar is a real word, it sits in a strange grammatical limbo, like it’s waiting to be claimed. And what it would mean, if it meant anything, is this: one-poled, one-directional, pure forward motion. The thing that doesn’t flinch toward its opposite, because it has no opposite.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a monopolar person. I’ve met people who performed it convincingly, the zealot with no doubt, the lover with no fear, the artist who claims to want only the work. But if you live with them long enough you notice the basement. The doubt, the fear, the secret craving for the ordinary life they swore off. The more one-pointed someone looks on the outside, the more effort it usually takes to keep the other pole locked downstairs. Monopolar, it turns out, is expensive.
And yet we keep reaching for it. Every form of ecstasy is a brief taste of monopolar. Falling in love, when you want to dissolve into one. Meditation, when you want to become nothing, which is also one. Dancing until you forget which body is yours. Getting drunk enough that only the feeling exists. We go to weddings and funerals and concerts and temples because we want, just for a moment, to stop swinging between poles. We want the compass needle to settle.
But the compass needle never settles, or when it does it means we’re dead, or the magnet is broken. Motion between poles is the thing we call being alive, and the swinging is the point. This is what Murakami understands, I think, and why his characters are almost always split, the guy in Tokyo eating pasta while his other self is in a well, in a parallel city, in a dream. This is what Dave Chappelle understands on Midnight Miracle, where he’ll be cackling about something absurd and then drop a line about God or death and suddenly you can’t breathe. Both of them live in the swing. Both refuse to pick a pole. Both know that the holy thing is not the north or the south but the trembling between them.
So here is what I’ve decided, or half-decided, or decided the way you decide anything you’ll un-decide next week: monopolar is the beautiful lie we tell ourselves when duality gets exhausting. If I could just want one thing. If I could just be one thing. But the wanting of it is already dualistic. You only crave a single pole because you’re tired of swinging between two. The fantasy of oneness is itself born of twoness. Even the longing to escape duality is duality putting on a better outfit.
I don’t know how to end this. Which is maybe fitting. An essay about monopolar shouldn’t resolve; it should keep swinging.
This essay started with a song. Strange Fruit, a band of close friends from Jakarta, including my partner, who plays bass, just released a single called “Monopolar,” their first new music in a long time, from their album Drips. The song doesn’t resolve. It circles, presses, loops without release. They named something that can’t stand still after the only thing that can’t exist. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Go find it.