It howled at night in the pitch-black jungle. It wanted to spring upon its prey, Upon hearing the prayer. Oh! It was a calling. It possessed the man to commit the act. The possession is real, oh, it's true! The urge is real, the thirst too. He's a conniving man now! He turned towards the moon and smiled. He pulled his claws and wings out, And flew towards the moon. Oh, the beast it was. He got hold of a branch and moved forward; Branch by branch and tree by tree; Moved till the end of the trees. At the sight of lotus pond. He stretched to grab the flower he loved. In the water, when he saw himself. Astonished, at his reflection. For the Demon he was. All along the way, was I always a demon? Is my bad myself as the good is me? Am I demon to act the thought? Is the good thought-not-act? He growled and cried for his own reflection. The guilt killed his mind, ah, the tears. The appearance too; unwatchable! Turn me back! He growled. But can he? Or will he change the act done? The devilish deed and demonish greed. The wantings of urge and pure need. Now he is all the demon's feed. The demon jumped out, sprung out from him. Left him crying at the pond, laughing hard. The man on his knees, crying out loud. But would he know it left? Would he ever again dare to see in the pond? Could he ever have a glance at himself? Will he realise that it was not him? That it was the demon. And the demon? Just part of his mind's jungle. The one that hides and attacks when called. The actions! It possesses them hard. The thoughts however, not! It is the thoughts that call it out to act open. The man could have controlled the call. But did he? He gave himself to it. He sold the soul to the demon. Now he gets what he asked for, the eternal guilt. The burden of the thought; that unasked act. That could have passed away; the thought. But it did turn into an act. The unforgettable. The un-passable. Quite natural. But still is, Not-allowed! Is never. No, No. No.
Tag: absurdism
Nausea of Jean-Paul Sartre
I have been reading this book, nausea, for quite a long time. No matter how short this book is, don’t fall for the less number of pages, it is a lot of content that exhausts an average mind. When I began this book, I read 85 pages in a single go. But then, I didn’t dare touch it for two months. It is not that I didn’t want to open the book; there was never a moment that I didn’t think about it.
Everything I look reminds of “nausea”. The way Jean-Paul Satre wrote the book, he takes time to explain everything around the character. The character hits an existential crisis and begins to observe everything around him keenly. He begins to explain everything to us in a detailed manner. We are reading his journal, the pages left from his diary. His name is Antoine Roquentin, and his dairy explains all his thoughts and feelings about everything.
There is a page where Antoine explains how he felt anxious when he thought about his existence. He keeps reminding himself that he exists. And he keeps repeating “I think therefore I exist” in his mind numerous times and at the end, says, “I think therefore I am moustache” and loses it! He begins to question everything since he picks up a rock to skip it in a river; begins to question the essence of stone, and since then, he asks the nature of everything.
He begins to contemplate people, their actions, lifestyles; doesn’t see meaning in doing whatever it is. And he questions everything in a rather radical manner by drowning in absurd imaginations. Jean-Paul Sartre has carefully written the thoughts of Antoin in a way that while reading the pages that consist of anxious thoughts, we feel nervous too. I found myself observing everything in a more detailed manner and started describing things around me after reading 85 pages in a single go. I’m like Antoin too, and this book acted like the rock for him in his story.
Ever since I have read those pages, I became sensitive to smell. I began keen on observing the smells of everything. I even had a vomiting sensation, literal Nausea after sniffing certain smells. All the world is smells, visuals, audio, touch and taste. And there is nothing more to it; I feared reading this book any more. I needed time to continue reading this gem. And I have overloaded myself with it. After this overdose, something continued its journey with me—the meaning of this particular book.
Even though I have more 80 pages to read, I somehow knew where he was leading with the rest of the book. The effect that the 85 pages have done to my mind, I had the thoughts of Antoin for next 80 pages. I understood Antoin, and I suffered from similar views. I knew where Jean-Paul would lead me next. And I had existential crisis myself at the age of 19, and it was four years ago on 21st September that I first this ‘nausea’ that Sartre calls.
This Nausea bothered me, and I had cried multiple nights because I didn’t know anything anymore. Everything seemed false because nothing had any meaning. I don’t know if this is how it feels for everyone, but the way Sartre had written it down, I could relate to it. I resumed reading the remaining pages to see if I was right and yes, I was. And I predicted right, and it went over like I thought it would. But it was more beautiful than the first half of the book. He did not just raise multiple existential questions; he tried to resolve it.
Even though the resolution is not correctly baked, even Sartre knows that. He didn’t claim to have answers for the problems. Instead, he ended with a note of temporary patches that Antoin would do to avoid Nausea. It is a significant literary work as its style is new, post-modern and unique. Not only for its academic brilliance, but it is also philosophically sound. Unlike other books which claim to be resolutions of your life and offer fake solutions through influence, Nausea is pretty much straight forward and asks you questions. It is up to you to resolve those questions, or you can choose to embrace them.
I Exist in a dog’s mouth
I was sitting in a cafe, sipping a cold drink. The drink passed in my throat, I can feel it going down my throat and falling into my belly. Right when it hit the bottom of my stomach, I couldn’t feel it anymore. This thought struck my mind, and it made e forget that I’m sitting in a cafe. I was lost in my thoughts. This drink, when mixed with all the half-digested junk in my tummy, becomes something else. It isn’t the soda that I drank anymore. It’s some dude’s half-digested stomach acid. So, the soda doesn’t exist now. It existed a while ago till it was in the throat. But now, it doesn’t, and you can’t turn me upside down and get it back. If you try that, you might get that semi-digested white puke that is not the soda anymore.
So, is this what happens to me? What A I? I’m a skeletal structure, and above that, a muscular one fit with all the organs in a way that I have consciousness. I’m me, till I am conscious. So, if I’m not conscious, aware and awake, am I non-existent? I lost in dreaming about ‘nothing’. I could see something black everywhere. But I know that ‘nothing’ would not be black, because black is something, for it to be nothing, I have to imagine a blank space. I realised that it is humanly impossible to imagine nothingness as we have something or the other to always think about. We can not really think nothing like those meditation fantasisers claim. The close one to nothing that I could think was everything!
I imagined everything instead of nothing but excluded me out of the picture; I imagined the world as it is, full of splendour and horror. And I imaged the dog sniffing in garbage and perverts sniffing thrown panties. The world is the same, the mixture of every opinion it contains. Just one difference; I don’t exist anymore. This thought struck me from the back like an ice pick with full of snow on it. I felt breathless like, Jean-Paul Sartre; nausea. Nothing mattered anymore. I can see my reflection in the empty bottle on the table in front of me. It exists, it is a plastic bottle designed to contain a liquid that people consume; It has a purpose that’s solved, and I trash it. And it goes into the dump and from there it recycles. It’s molten and becomes some other product, or ironically the same bottle again.
But this one, this new transformation is different from the older bottle. Even though it is the same bottle, it is different. It is not the old bottle now, it changed. As per our understanding, its existence has not ceased but transformed into something else or the same thing again. But it is not exact, it is different. Maybe there was an imperfection in the bottle somewhere, perhaps it had an extra plastic layer on it, but it has some new flaws now. It is not the same bottle even if it looks like it. This made me realised how objectified are religious people. Maybe they don’t voluntarily do that, but they compare themselves with objects. They think like this bottle even they are made by some external being, filled with some purpose, and after the fulfilment of that purpose they believe they are re-used.
I think I know how they came to this conclusion. The religious people are just like me, just like how I felt about this soda bottle, they thought about it too, looking at the mirror. They compare themselves with the things that they see because these things are what immediate to our sense and intellect. We can see them, think them. But we can’t think about what is not there. We can’t think about the things that happened before us that connect to us. We don’t know what our parents were thinking about before conceiving us. Or we don’t know what happens in the baby-making factory of God. We don’t even know if God is a dude or an animal. What we speak about or think about God or anything that we haven’t seen by comparing it with things that we have seen and try to make it sense.
But we haven’t seen them, we are not capable of thinking about something before or after our existence. But I have successfully done that. I have thought about the world where I don’t exist. I ceased to exist. I’m lying in the ground, six feet under. Years have passed, and my descendants don’t even know that it is me that brought them into existence. The graveyard has been destroyed, and now the land is a real-estate venture. The tractors moved the soil. My fragile bones broke because of the pressure, and now they got jumbled; My favourite face, the beautiful face that I apply moisturiser every day is now a skull with no features half-cracked inside the ground. And my flesh in the tummies of maggots long back now. My energy drained in the soil went into the roots of a plant. It sucked me with its rots from the humus. And my jaw, my beautiful jaw broken because of the soil-digging, has now surfaced. My jawless skeleton lay underground.
This spectacular jaw attracted the skinny stray dog. It found a play toy in this calcium deposit that I once wielded a majestic beard; It held the jaw in its mouth and ran all over the venture. And It played with my jaw, and the tooth that was stuck on it fell on the ground. My sharp-canine got into a car tyre, made it flat. This angry driver threw my tooth out of this tyre on the filth beside the road. I exist! I exist in the plant’s body, I exist in the maggots that have eaten me, I exist in the dog’s mouth and car’s tyre. But it is not me, it was me, but not me now. Now it is a mere veil that had held me like the empty bottle with no soda. My muscles, my organs, my brain and my functions and my user-interface, the mind, they don’t exist. I transform into a plant, my cells live.
I existed even before I was born, like the stardust. We all don’t cease to exist, we transform. And we change from a being sitting in a cafe sipping a cold drink to dog’s play-bone and a maggot’s midday meal. We are eternal. It is just our consciousness that is not. It is a limited offer which is a result of evolution by natural selection. The cell in evolution had thought it’s best if this ape gets consciousness. Thus, the mind, and existence of consciousness. And here I exist. As a memory in the mind of myself writing this in the future after my cafe episode. Then the regular diversion have started. I have crossed all these thoughts off my brain; I wanted to close my eyes for a while and when I open it, I don’t want to picture my death anymore. And I want to delude myself into believing that I have a purpose like that plastic bottle.
I have lot of things to do, it is time to work, I thought. I stood-up walked away and looked all these people in the cafe, not knowing what happens to them after dying. They think they will transport to heaven or some think they stop existing. No, they exist, in a different form. A form that we don’t want to imagine. We turn in to the half-digested juice of this world’s other beings. But no, why should we think about it, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just look at that toe massager, dream of buying it. Let’s chase a paper print called money. Because I think any diversion is better than thinking about this. Or maybe we can embrace it, by calling it a random event that we had no say.
Our purpose, or to be precise, the purpose for us to have consciousness is to make these cells replicate and live long. Thus our purpose ends as other beings in the world use our energy, cells and etc. Hence our purpose solves. We transform! We exist, not same, but different!
The ultimate truth of Life!
What is true? How can we conclude something to be true and something to be false? Isn’t it ironical, that confirming that something is false, becomes confirming truth about that ‘thing’ to be false! Even if we are not deliberately searching for truth, instinctively we seek the truth. There is always a curiosity in human nature to find facts about almost everything. Am I beautiful? Does she like me? Do I need to improve my skills? We are continually questioning something because of the desire to know. And in the daily life of an average human, we face a lot of questions, and we seek a lot of affirmations. But is there something that we have been asking for a long time and there still is no answer? Yes! The purpose of existence! Why do we exist? That is the ultimate truth of life!
Have you ever wondered, why do we exist the way we do? Did a god make us like this? Or is it all random? No matter if we accept it or reject it, we all are curious to know! And we found a stream for that, dedicated to studying reality, existence, death, life and almost everything; Philosophy! We have made arguments! We brought conclusions, and we also raised questions that were never there before, using Philosophical studies. Many findings from Philosophical studies have been misinterpreted and misused for a long time! Few have accidentally misread the conclusions, and few have taken advantage of them for their benefits.
Philosophical conclusions or the arguments that Philosophers made throughout history, have proved useful to the con men who tell you that they have an ‘ultimate truth’. You can see many people using that term! They say to you that they found it, know it, and they are going to enlighten you by showering it to you. One of the most common ‘ultimate truths’ they pour upon us is about our existence and reality. These con men take advantage of our curiosity to know the meaning of our lives and preach pseudo-philosophical utterances that only put a patch over your void of existential crisis but does not fill the void. This patch is fake, it is like putting a plaster to a broken wall, it did fix it, but not the solution you are seeking.
The ultimate truths they speak are words of comfort that make you sleep at nights. Their sugar-coated words are indeed a bunch of lies. Even they don’t have answers for their very own existence. But they have found their purpose, that is to fool you and encash your belief in their utterances. But regardless of these conmen and confused men, is there a purpose to live, let alone human life, but the entire existence, does it? Well, it depends on what you choose to believe! It has enough space for anything you want to think. If you wish to place a purpose that your existence was meant to save lives and become a super-hero, it is! Because that is what you are telling yourselves!
The conmen are successful in making people believe whatever they tell about the purpose of existence. That is because it is a blank white paper; tabula rasa! The article having an answer about existence is blank! That is, the ultimate truth about the ultimate truth of existence is that it is false and does not exist! To clear the confusion and put it in simple terms, the ultimate truth about existence does not exist. And the fact that there is no ultimate truth becomes the ultimate truth indeed! Because that is what we all want to know ultimately! And that is what we all have to know! That there is no purpose for existence!
It might sound sad or discouraging to put it like this. So, let us perceive differently. Let us say “The paper that has answer to our existence is blank.” Now, this looks positive than the sentence “Life has neither a purpose nor a meaning to it.” This positive depiction of the absurdity of life, gives space to the one that reads it. The space that it creates is the space that one can use to fill that blank paper. This analogy of a paper encourages one to write their papers and fill it with meaning that they want to give to their lives. And again, it doesn’t necessitate one to write something. The paper is just blank, and you are free to choose to fill out or leave the paper blank! Every individual has this blank paper with them; filling it with some meaning every time they are doing something.
Every person is also free to do whatever they want to do with that sheet. You may create your Ultimate truth, or you can embrace the ultimate truth that there is none!
Penfluky 