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All things beautiful and fearful, ugly and kind, powerful and small, come into existence, do their thing, and disappear within
the context of this great ocean. At the same time, they are made of the very love in which they swim and can never be
separated. We are made of this love and live our whole lives at one with it, whether we know it or not.”
(http://ow.ly/1aTxfW)
BY CHOKRI OMRI
It was not long ago that this was cropping up in my mind. But in truth,
I did not want it to be or at best to end this way. It is not the kind of thing, I
wish to make clear, I would accept in this life that is mine. I tried many a time
to take it at once for an indecent idea because it is, indeed, one and by no
means a decent one: To wait for others to offer you that which, had you
worked upon it yourself, you would have made it come into being without their
help. This is not so difficult a task to move through towards the light instead of
remaining in the dark waiting and nobody around appears to care. It is just, I
must say, within the limits of the possible to have your mind made up to it
without any impalpability. But then, let me say it no more. I take
responsibility for all of this and you take none. I have something to say to you
while you have none. It has never before come to my notice that I know so
little of you. I have wanted to come closer to you, to be with you, to see you,
and then to stop listening to what others say about me and you. Take all the
time you need but never ask me what difference there can be between wanting
and obtaining. It is my conviction that of all those upon whom the sun shines,
only those who help themselves will yearn for being helped. In the meantime,
were anyone to take the liberty of asking me who would come to their help, I
would perhaps say it is not any concern of mine. They are helping themselves.
Do you not at all understand? They are helping themselves. God help them,
please, and they are really helping themselves. They are not to be left wanting.
They are looking for a way out of this extremely painful universe where things
come and go and people never know. Have I said it to you? No. Then, have I
wanted to say it to you? No. But then, have I gleaned it out of nothing just to
say it to you? No.
I think I will let you know. There came few tears to my eyes when I saw that
the reason behind this all is past finding out. It’s my dignity that prevents me
from knowing why. But at the same time, it is that which guides me into
saying this to you: Never come back to me. I am not waiting for the unknown
to be known. I am not waiting anymore. My way is still long; I think I will be
the man who never trifles with time. I will say after Friederich Hölderlin:
They got the better of fate. It is not so beyond human understanding. They
have never found themselves in a way in which they take advantage of others.
There is this presence in their lives of what one calls faith. Faith in everything
that bodes and portends with life, faith in human nature as far as it can really
go, faith in all that is holy and divine the paucity of which generates as much
pain and contrition as such that might be grasped in those who lost
accordingly faith in themselves. There is no possible reason for them to do
otherwise because they have succeeded in making radical distinctions between
what is essential and what is trivial. Of course, to say la moindre des choses,
there is yet another significant aspect that must be attributed to their lives. By
this, I mean hard work. Faith and hard work when compacted will
undoubtedly have their effect and meaning. Hard work, arduousness but also
industry; these are things we should not cast out into oblivion if ever real life is
to us a worthy endeavour. We all need to struggle for better times. Let us help
our selves for the sake of our selves and hence for the sake of God. Courage still
resides in our hearts. Courage and temperance are fundamental human
attributes that must be at any cost foisted upon us. Agathy is never absent. It is
never lost for fear. We are agathious from creation to the general doom. We
only do not seem to be aware of that because of the film of familiarity which
obscures from us the wonder of our being as Shelley would put it. There are
many rips in our lives. What do we do vis- à- vis them? It is really up to us to
decide whether or not they are going to be mended. Or are they to be left
unmended? It is up to us to mend these rips and walk through them to the light
or remain forever in the dark. There is more enterprise in striving to repair
some of the erroneous things in the world rather than to clench our hands over
our foreheads and then foolishly shed tears over them. Let us make a
terrestrial galaxy as the stars do in the sky. To put it, in short, and in as a few
words as possible, let us create our secret world because the outside world is not
doing very well. Why cannot we stop caring for the material and the sensual?
Why cannot we stop caring for the things that will die? Let us feel for the
spiritual. There is still much hope since, as I like to think and would like to put
it, we have not learned enough despair so as not to hope. Despair and hope do
not cause us to be ridiculous. To work arduously and then yearn for a better
future is not to be found cloistered within the boundaries of idealism. It is
altogether apparent the fact that our minds and hearts, for the time being, are
not unfortunately set on the same arena of expectation. Our lives, to say
perhaps the least, are shrouded in obscurity and by way of consequence not a
good number of things are made clear.
We are persistently catering for indeterminacy and eclecticism while being
morceled and devoured by doubt or precisely nous sommes pris par voie de
conséquence dans les supputations du doute as they say in french. Under the
spell and delusion of amorality which contains a heavy dose of immorality we
are celebrating the spirit of the age. Many are those who are coming in but few
are those who feel like going out.
Should we thus draw up our breath at these sad signs, and sigh again and
exclaim on death?
When the spirit starts mattering again, few, indeed, are those who will
understand. After all, we have no one to blame and reprimand for this except
ourselves. There are things of importance left behind which must operate again
as they had done in the remote passing days. It is Eros, we believe, and not
Priapos, we still believe, who wanted to move no further after the objective he
gave his life to. It is his “restless expansive tendency” towards love as Sigmund
Freud had put it which comes into sharp contrast and opposition with the
“generally conservative nature of the drives” causing it hence to be threatened
all the time. But then, Eros is inaccessible to those who lack love as well as
spiritual insight. He is inaccessible to the profanum vulgus. “ Only he who
himself turns to the other human being and opens himself to him receives the
world in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted by my being, lives and
faces me in the whole compression of existence, brings the radiance of eternity
to me”. Martin Buber is ultimately clear enough to be understood. When
Adonis lived, it is not the sun and the sharp air which lurked like two thieves to
rob him of his fair as Shakespeare maintained. Adonis does not blame it for the
destiny. He must be held responsible for the loss of Cytherea. She was all in
love forlorn. Had he loved her with a love so over-powering as she did, no sun,
no sharp air, no whatever would have deprived him of her. It is love, say
mutual love or any other , which alone brings things together. It is that which,
I must say again, brings people together and makes an extraordinary galaxy
out of them. We must struggle for the sake of it and stand in no comformity
with their vulgarism and disparaging gestures. Most of all, we must put under
question and not merely cleave to the values established by tradition. Patterned
thinking will lead almost nowhere. Only by straying afield of our selves and of
tradition innovation and accuracy as regards our lives will become possible.
This is to be evidenced not only in our selves but equally in the kind of
knowledge we unfailingly continue to receive and accept without checking or
verification. Michel Foucault’s prolific work in sociology but then in
philosophy would not find the means and ploys to open up new avenues of
research and enquiry in history and the social sciences if it remained
imprisoned by tradition and atavism. Foucault’s sociological and philosophical
output, Steven Connor makes clear, refused to stay within the established and
precomprehended territories of theory and thereby succeeded remarkeably in
adding and contributing to the over all human knowledge. ‘After all, what
would be the value of the passion of knowledge if it resulted in a certain
amount of knowledgeableness, and not, in one way or another and to the
extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?’ Foucault would
remind us in his essay on ‘ The use of pleasure’.
‘The passion of knowledge’; It is interesting to see in it this astounding
interaction and intermingling of both heart and mind. Passion with regard to
knowledge. What offspring will there be if this passion of knowledge revamps
into a love of knowledge?
Let us think about love and feel it henceforth. To love means to act and not to
just say empty words that would add more horror to life. Call it as you like but
love is more than what people think. There is, this is it, more to love than what
many people think. It is the most important thing in life. To love, J.
Krishnamurti wrote, means to be sensitive. To be sensitive is to feel for people,
for birds, for flowers, for trees_ not because they are ours, but just because we
are awake to the extraordinary beauty of things. We are awake through
knowledge and not through ignorance and fear. Love is capable of making
wonderful things. It is capable of changing evrything by the way. Love of
knowledge with which we will be in a position to love better and not and no
longer say empty words and do empty deeds. It is, to make a long story short,
that which whose power energizes our minds and hearts and establishes a
perfect way of interaction and excahange between them.
Without love, I shall not be able to write this paper in the first place. But in
order to better comprehend this without any impalpability as I said above, I
will adopt a very special approach to this theme bearing in mind that any
limitation I am likely to be entrapped in is due, on the one hand, to my timid
but never hesitant nature and then, on the other, to the absence of this
energizing power of love in the face of this conservative nature of the drives as
Freud maintained. I will then attempt to disprove Friedrish Shiller’s
proposition that the mechanism of the world is held together by hunger and
love.
I shall first start out with reading Shakespeare’s sonnet number 116:
It is not here any business of ours to maintain that the form a Shakesperian
sonnet will take is one of three quatrins and a closing couplet. We are rather
and more importantly of the very insatiable desire to concern our selves with
the part of it that keeps the content of the sonnet brighter than therest do. Au
lieu de faire une vague allusion à la forme, il faut se demander quelle est sa
fonction comme sédimentation du contenu. Here, I assume, the substance is
found in these six lines and a half. I would not care so much if the remaining
parts of the sonnet were to get wiped off and disappear. Shakespeare himself,
were he to be told this, would pull himself together and help me in doing this.
Love is not love which changes with the time. If ever it changes, then let us be
in the apodectic certainty that it is anything but love. Love does not encourage
the remover of love to remove the object of love. It may encourage him to
remove obstacles like people for example but not to remove the very object of
love because otherwise it is lost and then we go back to the point we started
from which holds the view of Shakespeare that love should not change with the
time. Love is an ever-fixed mark. Love is the star to every wandering bark.
It is worth pointing out at this stage of our reading the distinction Shakespeare
wanted to make and did in fact about a fixed mark and the star which, to our
minds, they represent the two most important elements of the metaphoric
bearing they must have on love. Love is first a fixed mark.
Shakespeare wanted it to be indefinite when using the indefinite article ‘a’ in
order perhaps to mock people on earth who are changing all the time and then
keep on claiming that they are definite.
Shakespeare could have said for example that love is the fixed mark. The
reason behind his avoidance of that is perhaps this one: He does not want love
to be associated with anything because when using the definite article ‘the’ he
would necessarily find himself under the obligation of associating love with an
earthly claim. Then, by the same token, he held that love is the star feeling
thereby some sort of relief in escaping earthly objects and rising so high to the
skies which he does not know and yet insisted on using the definite article ‘the’
in order to mock people time and again by showing how he places his faith in
what is transcendental and how he assigns the definite to the indefinite and the
indefinite to the definite. This sonnet is not great yet. Let us put patiently aside
our impatience.