We live in a world of marvellous objects – that glitter and shine and amuse us for moments; and our lives struggle to compete, to match the shiny sophisticated complexity of things and toys, but somehow it never does.
Thus people die from disappointment…
..not from disease or old age or war or the risks attendant on living, other than the risk of being totally and impossibly and unforgivably disappointed.
People die from disappointment and though it can’t be proved scientifically neither can it be disproved because the price of acknowledging even its possibility would be the unalterable recognition of the need for a new world.
What’s the cause of Death?..you might wonder: accident, disease, war, famine…but some people survive accidents, overcome disease, and endure war and famine, but no one survives disappointment, not the prolonged hopeless variety i am talking about. So are accident, disease, war and famine not causes but symptoms of something else, something else the grim cause pushing us inexorably towards death?
People die, sooner or later from the disappointment that the dreams they carried heroically within cannot be realised.
People die tragically (“he died so young, she left a family behind her, they’d everything to live for…”) because they have lived heroically and their heroism realised little and could not be sustained indefinitely.
In the modern age of Mass Democracy it is the ‘little’ people (the ‘common’ people) and not the celebrities that are the real heroes because they bear the burden of carrying the world’s dreams in their hearts and this burden is often too great a burden to carry indefinitely.
It’s a strong person can carry the burden of hope indefinitely without going insane or being drowned in silence; so people die tragically from the disappointment that their dreams that they carried preciously through thick and thin can no longer be sustained.
They lay down their dreams in the privacy of an overcrowded suburbia that’s cluttered with shiny new objects that mock them for the futility of hoping that life might mean more, have more value than an unending line of bright shiny gadgets.
But what do people dream of? What’s so important in a dream that as soon as it can no longer support the yearning for life in the living, that life itself gives up and invents complex diseases, miraculous accidents, tragic mistakes, horrifying wars, random murders, sad suicides to end the bloodless façade?
What does a species that has become the unquestioned ruler of a planet, that knows the power to fulfil its fantasies in reality, and does so on a regular basis, dream of?
Despite the countless millions who never get a chance to live but rather survive heroically and die without a human dream because of hunger or cruelty or ignorance…what’s in a dream?..what’s beneath all the symptoms, what carries on and what gives in eventually so people die tragically and at a loss for what never came to being despite their often grim heroism?
What’s in a dream for people who have produced so much wealth and transformed it industriously and transformed it magically into shiny gadgets that excite and amuse and eventually lie abandoned on the scrapheap of the human race’s great illusions?
What else can it be..?
If the sophistication of a world of sophisticated weapons, gadgets, bombs, rockets, and buildings offer little what can it be? If money, which is only paper and which used to be a medium of exchange but now has obviously become an end in itself even asks the question in its insolence: then what else is there?
It can only be a secret?
People’s dreams are a secret, often to themselves and certainly to the world of gadgets where moving parts, motors, mechanisms, switches and power, (limitless power) limit the language people can speak and even dream in. It would be like trying to get a fish to dream of flying in our shiny ‘new’ world, to ask people what dream they carry in the silence and hope of their hearts…what do they long for, ache for and yearn for…
A secret – like the fact that people die tragically from disappointment is a secret.
It’s a secret because the human heart and the human spirit has been banished from the language of men and women who were told to “grow up, cop on, get a life, chill out” and accept the ruthless language of a world and a life whose only value is in objects and which itself is only an object: a piece of meat on a butcher’s slab despite all our pretensions to be more, not less.
It’s a secret because all that is holy has been banished from our sophisticated world because it insults the machine, the credit transfer, the stock exchange and all authorities (including political and spiritual ones) who legislate for us lesser beings and because they tell us in no uncertain terms if it doesn’t have a price how can it have a value?
It’s a secret also then because no one can copyright it, own it, market it, or sell it. All you can do is take responsibility for it and carry it on your back or in your heart like a burden in this shiny new world where everything has a price and little has any real value. Especially money.
i’d take a guess, looking at the futility of so many lives lost tragically whose only diagnosis, after the doctors, the surgeons, the coroners have given their verdict and done their business – is disappointment.
In other words people die from disappointment because their dreams have finally and utterly and without any going back – broken their hearts.
People die tragically from the disappointment of carrying their dreams endlessly beyond endurance. How strong is a human heart at the best of times?
And the dream? If there’s no language yet for the human heart and the human soul then words won’t name it but not naming it only makes it more impossible which is part of the burden of carrying it…
…and because the words themselves can only light up the darkness for a moment and show us the darkness for what it is (otherwise what we long for would not be a dream nor seem so impossible but would be with us right now)…
Words and naming it, reaching towards it, escaping the darkness and the weight that silences our own hearts and keeps them dull only helps us to yearn more to ache and dream towards that which we long for instead of struggling silently ‘til we die of our unrealisable dreams.
So what lights up the darkness even for a moment?
For want of words that could give voice to the human heart and the human spirit…i’d say…
…human kindness…
…an elusive spirit that flits between the gadgets and the cruelty and the darkness of our lives so we don’t even notice it most of the time…
…unless we are gifted with both the pain of the impossibility of this world we have inherited in such a bad state as well as the miracle of something ‘better’ lighting up our lives even for a moment…
…not changing the world (though the world certainly needs to be changed) not saving souls, but showing us the darkness within which we labour, within which we tread a weary path towards the fulfilment of what our hearts somehow promised us, somewhere in history, sometime, someplace…
…human kindness…
…a world waiting to be born…a world we are promised in myths and dreams, a world not yet realised, a world to be struggled for, a world where darkness and cruelty, and poverty and ignorance are the abnormality and not the norm as they are in our shiny glittering fake world of gadgets…
“…human kindness, overflowing …”
So when we are woken for an instant in the act of letting go (“grieving”) for someone we yearned to live with, share the act of life with, when our illusions are finally (if we are lucky) put into a deep hole where they belong, unless we are forever to be children living in a world of stories…
…when the gadgets refuse to comfort us anymore…
…maybe the disease can provide its own cure…
…if people die tragically from the fact that their hearts are broken continuously from the disappointment of their unrealised dreams maybe there is a cure?
Maybe the only cure is to reinvert the balance, put the gadgets back in their place (as objects not subjects) and wake up to the fact that with all our ‘achievements’ its what we long for that not alone gives our life meaning but is the meaning of our
Life…
…And what we long for is not contained within the fake shiny gadgets that amuse us…that they have no heart and no soul and without a heart and a soul there may be no pain and dissatisfaction but there can be no ache of longing, no yearning…
and…instead of dying from our dreams or living as if we were already dead we need to wake up and realise them…
No matter how dark…
No matter how loud the noise…
No matter the pain of our loneliness as we wake…
No matter the fear of our vulnerability if we are to live…
No matter the cruelty and ignorance that prefers we stay asleep…
This is the world to come.
A world where the secret of the human heart and the secret of the human soul is no longer silenced and no longer a secret…
A World not of objects but of subjects…
A World not of things but of human people…
There is no other world to come unless endless darkness.
No other world offers hope and promise already in this one…even as it flits among the gadgets and the cruelty, the darkness and the ignorance…
..no other……human…world…
And so César writes:
“Mi gozo viene de lo inédito de mi emoción. Mi exultación viene de que antes no sentí la presencia de la vida. No la he sentido nunca. Miente quíen diga que la he sentído. Miente y su mentira me heire a tal punto que me haría desgraciado. Me gozo viene de mi fe en este hallazgo personal de la vida, y nadie puede ir contra ese fe. Ai que fuera, se le caería la lengua, se la caerían los huesos y correría el peligro de recoger otros, ajenos, para mantenerse de pei ante mis ojos.”
Hallazgo de la Vida
“My joy comes from what is unpublished of my emotion. My exultation comes from not feeling before the presence life. I’ve never felt it. He lies who says I’ve felt it. He lies, and his lie probes me so deep that it would make me miserable. My joy comes from my faith in this personal; discovery of life, and no one can oppose this faith. No matter who he was, his tongue would fall out, his bones would fall out, and he’d risk picking up others, not his own, to keep himself up before my eyes.”
Discovery of life
César Vallejo
(Poemas Humanos – 1923-1937)
Séamas Carraher
For TB & SR, Christmas 2003
(Written, Christmas Time, in the year, 2003)
