Modern Problems Require Unmodern Solutions
Pertaining to our sorrows and confusions
The concerns addressed in the essay arise from three primary issues that have become prominent in today’s modern world; they are:
1) The lack of childhood innocence which, once, allowed us to enjoy the simplicity of the world without unnecessary complications;
2) Growing up in the city with a complete separation and disconnection to the natural world; and
3) A disconnect between one’s spiritualism and materialism (or, to put it differently: the preference of the mind over the body and vice versa).
Childhoods that were once full of the joys of natural splendour get drowned by the worries and anxieties that follow those stages of innocence. To escape this confusing labyrinth of labour one must reconnect with nature and reestablish their natural innocence.
Boleros, Blues, and the Bliss of Oblivion
Man is the embodiment of nature. He springs from the sperm of the sun and rests on the bosom of the moon. And while his sun and moon are kept in check by illness and death, he alone experiences the paradise of infancy which has escaped the arms of fallen men. But until the time where he is forced to leave paradise and walk away from his innocence, the child breathes and laughs like no adult ever has, for the child sees the earth with a virgin mind and with childlike eyes; the child dances and sways close enough to hold hands with the sun, jumps high enough to rest on the chest of the moon, and opens his mouth wide enough to drink the tears of the sky; and only the heart of the child is courageous enough to swim in the belly of the sea.
But never long, never long! For, like the sun which breaks through late afternoon clouds, the child will soon cease to be a peaceful being on an odyssey afar and instead his eyes will open not to the innocent world inside his cocoon, but to a different world, to one that is cold and unfamiliar. And although he may try, the child cannot stay in his cocoon for long: he, of course, has to finally break out. And when he does, he does not experience the warmth of a familiar sun but the harsh rays of a strong fluorescent light; and blinded by this light, the child falls down to earth, growing a hard and coarse shell before hitting the floor, and becoming a man along the way. But the child does not become any man but a man of the city, he whose veins flow with absinthe and whose mouth greedily swallows the smoke of wrath; and that very same smoke which covers the sky leads to the child losing his sight, clouding his judgement.
Thus, now lost in the city, lost in the labyrinth of labour, the child blindly follows a paper trail which leads him nowhere in particular but somewhere all the same. He travels this new world with an unwilling mind stuck in an unfamiliar body; he falls in love and forthwith falls out of love; his newfound passions never last and his hobbies never endure. But whether all this originates from a problem in the mind or in the body, he does not know, but he knows that it’s easier to cure the body of pain ‒ albeit temporarily ‒ than it is to solve the riddle of the mind. So in order to remove his body’s depression and attempt to cure his mind’s abstraction, he is prescribed pills and drinks which only work at numbing him to his new reality. And as a result of being smothered in this new cocoon of misery, all he thus desires is escape; and not even pills and drinks could take that heavy desire away.
And sometimes small rays of happiness will break through, wrapping a straitjacket of warmth and gaiety around his despairing soul. But no matter how hard he tries the city man is unable to capture those fleeting moments. He will try to catch them in a jar and present it to his soul but he only succeeds in deceiving the world. That is the man’s routine. And when day is done and spirit is calm, this man, amid continuous sobbing and lamentations, returns to his thoughts of tomorrow.
“What I seek… or perhaps what we should all be seeking is to become children once more,” he might say, before throwing these words out the window. And that, too, is man: marrying these thoughts but rarely making it past the honeymoon period. So again he withdraws into his troubles. “Man enters the world through one hole and exits through another; and spanning that gap between entrance and exit is: life; but does he ever live? Or does he simply withdraw himself into pain?” That is, after all, the curse of man: to retreat into despair and yet still refuse to give oneself over to one’s melancholy fate.
So, on a most breathless noon, the city man will walk to the sink and splash his face with water. “O how good the cool water feels on my face!” he will say. Then he will do it again ‒ in order to wake himself from this dreamlike state. “To be awake is to be alive,” he will say, and then splash his face again with the twilight puddles that flow out of the faucet; but it won’t always work. “I’ve forgotten the feeling of natural vitality,” he will thus say. And so, on the third or fourth time round, he will splash his face not with water but with whiskey: ice-cubes and dry.
That too is to be a man. And his eyes, which were yesterday overlayed with melancholy and grief, are then blanketed with protective shades of intoxicity. And the sun, which at one stage illuminated the eye and heart of his infant soul, now shines neither into his eye nor his heart.
The mighty civil servant
Black suit, noose tied tight, and hair gelled back: he is ready for life. He feeds his body only so that it may attend his civil duties, and he shuts his eyes so that he may never see the shining sun. The towers nod to him and he nods back, and the heat from this labour retrieves him from one sadness and places him into another. But he remains blind to this new sadness, his shut-eyes make sure of that; so he works and works and works, no longer questioning his fate; and once his wealth has filled all his pockets, he will buy more pockets to fill. Then, once a year, he will put on an exquisite holiday attire so that he may visit the natural world ‒ but through the comfort of man’s safe constructions, of course ‒ so that he may smell the perfume of the rare rose and swim in the lake which meets the horizon. And when nature’s medicine has filled his soul, when it has restored his spirit and provided him with a happy tone, he will once again return to the city to wash his sun-tanned skin with the purified city water. And like this he goes on: into his forties, fifties, sixties; then, having made himself into a walking contortion of death, having retired his lungs and livers, and filled his veins with acid, his body shrinks into a drop and withers away.
But at some point before all that happens, his hair will grow wild and savage, his tie will loosen, and his shades will fall off his cracked and crooked nose. And it is then, with his eyes, the best of all artists, that he will see how far he has come, how hard the shell on his back has grown in order to protect him, and he will finally crawl out of his shell and enjoy the last of his days with the real beauty of the earth. And for the first time since his infancy, he will understand the delight of the falling rain, the simple beauty of the glaring sun, and the wonders of the waves and winds; he will take up the whole world into himself and smile a faded smile like no faded memory of his has ever smiled.
That is life.
And it’s spelled out on his old and withered body: on its stretches and contortions, its marks, scars, cuts and spots, on its inked skin and worn out hands, perhaps on a balding head or even a broken knee. The body is the canvas of man’s history; and from it, one who pays careful heed can discover a lifetime’s worth of mistakes and adventures, joys and tribulations. But we don’t; because where we live, too much attention is paid to words and their notions, to the verbal intelligence, instead of honouring the non-verbal humanities, instead of reading the smiles and grimaces that betray one’s inner truth when the words of the mouth expel their untruthful properties. The body seeks truth and reality as much as the mouth seeks to speak or the ear seeks to hear.
It’s all there: a lifetime of tears and smiles. But the body will only sell these stories to us at the high cost of heed and silence; something we can no longer afford.
There’s no need to write about it or dictate it; it’s all there. One only has to see, for the eye is the best artist of them all; only, one has to listen, to hear the faint beating of the heart, for the ear is the greatest composer of them all.
It is all there, on every man and on every man’s body. It is even there on the young man’s face: that face which expresses profound concentration, occasional smears of blood, and states of muddled sullenness. It is there in the beat of his slackening heart: a heart which proudly adorns a wealth of anxiety, passion, and pain; a delirious feeling teetering on the brink of unearthly order and splendor. It is there inside his head: inside the young man’s head with lapses and losses common only to dream sequences; and in those eyes which dare not stare at a near-death life for too long, because it’s too terrifying to do so. For you see, no young man dares to stare death in the face for he has not yet lived. But if one looks at the aged then one will hear them say: “Even the corpse has its own beauty.” But we will not do it, for we have lost the courage of the child, that courage which is only regained, once more, before the end.
To do so, however, to look at death and think, would bring about a wisdom undiscovered by the books; and to gain such wisdom, one can only react by becoming a gruesome reduction of death itself, a reduction that turns one into incoherent fluxes of fluttering thoughts and ideas. And thus, the world seen through the eyes becomes one of momentary, disconnected fragments. But this never lasts, because eventually the eyes open up, the skin crawl back over the spine, and the back hardens like before; and once again, man will be thrown back into the rack of joy where he experiences his youth in full throttle until he grows quickly used to it ‒ like all things in life. And in this return to adult lucidity, the absurdity of the universe makes itself present in everything: in war and poverty, in music and cinema, in the food we eat and the ways we dress, the jokes we laugh at and the memories we cry for.
But this wild longing for clarity, just like the former state of delirium, will also subside.
“To question one’s universe,” he will say, “is to not live, and to live is to channel this great absurdity into one’s life. And man, falling in between the midst of these two extremes of joy and terror, of comprehension and confusion, will strain his head to discover the truth. “My beat is irregular, my skin isn’t mine, my eyes do not see; where am I?” he will ask, never understanding that the cat’s universe is not the ant’s universe. And the understanding of the world which at one point he thought he had, will once again be reduced to a human level.
In nature at last!
So he lies on his back, on that very same back that grew so hard and course over the years, as though he were once more a child crawled up in an awfully large chalice. So he lies on his back: lips apart, teeth apart, and his head swaying ever so slightly to the left, then to the right, staring at fragments of the cast-iron sky through the dead space between the trees. He lies on his back in that dreamlike state, absorbing the music and straining his ears to hear the end quavers of his long-faded youth.
Under the shade of a great aged oak, he experiences the magnanimity of a warm Sunday afternoon. And as it passes by the shaken trees where fruits and flowers have fallen, a cool breeze comes and goes, bringing with it an intoxicating aroma; and on its way out, it twirls the leaves, carrying them like torn paper through the Elysian Fields. But once it’s gone, all that follows is a small gap of silence where not even a whisper of the wind can be heard. And in that silence, the city man returns to his inner thoughts, not daring to open his eyes for fear of seeing the world again through the same weary eyes.
“To lie under the shade of an oak,” he thinks, “on the uncomfortable patch of drying grass which is thus transformed into a natural pleasure by the glaring sun shining above the eyes: that is life! To put the books away so that I may watch the setting sun instead: that is life!” And then he thinks: “What is life if not a series of misfortunes and missteps. And what are all those despairing mistakes if not reasons for joy and splendour? If not reasons for fortune to spring out of misfortune?”
And thus, he sits up and continues his thoughts out loud with the trees and the grass: “What is life?” he asks, disturbing their natural meditation. “What is life if not boleros, blues, and the bliss of oblivion?” And to himself he says: Man adorns the infinite shades of the earth to resemble the transforming states of his mind, wrapping his body with the hidden spirit of the self ‒ all for pleasure and protection. Then again to the trees and grass: “The greatest good a man can do himself is to live out his life by his own values, through his own actions, is it not so?”
“It is so,” the trees thus agree. And amused by Man’s sudden transformation, they go on to say: “Tell me then, if that is Man’s greatest good, what then is Man’s greatest evil?”
“The greatest evil?” he ponders. “The greatest evil is to forfeit life in search of what comes next. The greatest evil is man’s undying loyalty to death. That is the greatest evil.”
“And what are all these goods and evils if not the shared human experiences which define life? Shared and yet unique to each, isn’t it so, Man?”
“It is so,” the city man replies.
“But Man,” the grass and the flowers sing in unison, “eventually you will fret no more, won’t you? Your worries will depart and the angst in your soul will deplete like the evaporating morning dew. ‘All in the past,’ you will thus say. ‘In the past, in the past!’ And just like that, all your frets of the future will remain fragments of the past. Life will welcome you instead to a new morning! To a morning where you will venture to walk down sunny Cuban roads, blasting bolero tunes and dancing in pink dresses.”
“Boleros, of course, followed by post-death blues and life’s oblivion,” the city man interrupts, sighing in his mortal despair.
“But what is life if not to come like water and to go like the wind, stringing together Man’s birth and death with the joys and divisions which he experiences on the mortal earth? I believe that’s what all life is about, Man: boleros, blues, and the bliss of oblivion.”
“How right you are!” the city man will thus say.
And that too is life, man’s life: to humanize and anthropomorphize anything and everything under the label Man. To give our eyes to the trees, our ears to the winds, and our mouths to the creatures of the night. But that is needed in order to live with ‒ nay! ‒ to cope with these great wonders. By only providing us with a selection of the practically useful, the body and the brain work together to reduce our awareness of life’s absurdities. By shutting the doors of our perception, we are left with only that which is required to survive, only that which is human. And instead we are given shoulders that let us carry the heavy boulder of reality, fingers which let us write out our joys and pains, and little toes which strut us to and fro the great wonders of the earth.
And back to the city
But some choose to escape, to open that closed door and leave it open eternally. And this implicit denial of man’s true self ‒ that is, to reject the unification of the body and the mind ‒ is to cultivate a nihilistic attitude to one’s own being. For the body is that which carries oneself through a series of events, exiting not with feelings of grief or fatigue but of rapture and intoxication. And just like this, we know that the body is capable not only of a physical metamorphosis but of a spiritual one too, capable of carrying us through our own faults and turmoils. One, when possible, should never step over the body for the sole development of the mind, for the body is at the mind’s mercy and likewise the mind at the body’s.
As Nietzsche writes: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.” But we ignore his wisdom and the body’s too, and we instead follow this new idea that healing the body is possible through the mind and the heart alone as opposed to through the body itself.
But to rise from the pit of life’s eternal pity, one must join material and spiritual, abandoning neither in searching for the other, for the spirit of man flows through the plurality of one’s being, and to neglect a part of oneself is to neglect oneself entirely. It is from activity that self-suffering recedes, and from passivity that man comes to destroy himself: his mind, his body, and his entire spirit. To join the two, however, is to drink from the cup of life and rejoice; it is as powerful as integrating the innocence of the child with the maturity of man, and the lost soul of the city with the innate desire to return to the real world; to join the two is to experience life for what it is, for all its ups and downs and its final terminus. For what is life if not: boleros, blues, and the bliss of oblivion?
The quickly forgotten wisdom
“But alas,” we must say, for these are lessons that we learn either too early to be of use or too late to even be used. Alas! For that is the tragedy of man, the farce of life, and the comedy of death. And yet, the moments that intercede the tragedies, farces, and comedies are moments of bliss and beauty and bolero. They are moments where one, once again, starts seeing through his childlike eyes and starts thinking with his innocent mind, finally re-establishing the natural world within his despairing soul.
Because among the people, among nudists and the suited men, among the drunks, the ghouls, and the dope smokers, all anyone is really looking for is: to escape the city, to return to one’s natural infancy, and to join the mind and the body.
And on the road to unite each pair of extremes, we will experience it all: the good, the bad; the ups, the downs; the boleros, the blues, and the final bliss of oblivion.
