1st Stage: Shock / Disbelief

Day to day, we uphold our promises and keep our word, ensuring expectations are met regardless of circumstance. Yet despite our intentions, we often lack control over what happens. We break those words, or at least fail to fulfill them. Human nature recoils from surprise even as our hopes get squashed. The world never promised to make sense; it only promised that nature is change, that nothing remains fixed.

Francisco Goya understood this intimately. After a severe illness in 1792 left him completely deaf, his work grew increasingly dark and introspective, culminating in his late series of prints, including the Disparates (Follies). Created during a period of political turmoil and personal isolation, these works satirize human institutions through grotesque, dreamlike imagery by commenting on social chaos, broken vows, and the absurdity of our attempts to impose order on an indifferent world.

In Disparate Matrimonial, Goya depicts two figures with their backs pressed against each other, one hunched and carrying an unbalanced weight, the burden of responsibility rendered visible and grotesque. Naked and vulnerable, they lean on one another while pointing toward a crowd of horrified, haunting, disfigured witnesses. This is the institution that first saw the upholding of vows, the witnesses who stood at the beginning when promises were made with conviction.

Now those promises have melted like objects losing form under heat and pressure. What remains is only a remnant of what was and a confrontation with what has come to be. The crowd’s horror reflects our own: the disbelief that strikes when we realize the world we created existed only in our imagination. The marriage, the promise, the sense that it was all supposed to make sense, were never guaranteed. We’re left staring at the grotesque truth that shocked Goya into his dark visions: the covenant was always fragile, and we were never as in control as we believed.