"It is nothing but our life in this world; we die and live, and nothing but time destroys us" - the Arabs
After he was overwhelmed by the existential experience and absurdity became a solid doctrine for him, The Happy Melancholic decided to undertake the writing of meditations that would constitute the rooting of his being. He chose to write in a fragmentary/segmental manner in line with his claims and confiscations, without getting involved in logical division or systemic construction, as his existential map is splintering and tearing in anticipation of his final fall, as well as his text.
The Arabs have said that everyone who does a job that does not benefit him: You are only a player. God is based on this linguistic meaning of the root (P.L.A.Y.I.N.G) the first playing being, as the originator of existence that neither benefits nor harms him.
Epicurus became aware of this gentleness when he admitted that the gods are perfect, blissful beings, free from everything else and self-sufficient! And if they really are, they are gods playing with their creation of beings. But if we want to invert the equation, and put the creature in the place of the Creator, the mystery will not be unraveled and God will remove the defect of playing: Man has invented gods for a need in himself, and thus committed the first decisive folly in his history: the meaning/end foolishness.
If absurdity is a defect in relation to God, then it is the honor of the man and the highest manifestation of his awareness of himself/his size/status. It was clear conquest of those epistemological revelations that broke the axioms of the human race and destroyed its narcissism cosmologically, biologically, and psychologically...
From these revolutions, a narrative of suspicion emerged. And man proceeded to remove magic/illusion from himself and the world. But he reconstructed his illusions in scientific/positivist/modernist contexts that led him to the catastrophe. And what comes after the disaster? The harbingers of new dawn!...
Resentment, boredom, and hatred have prevailed, despair has spread, indifference has spread, and the earth has become a cesspool of hell in which the strangers of modern times are vomiting... The “unaffiliated” has officially been born!
The unaffiliated was born officially during the first half of the twentieth century, that is, during the legalized and signed cosmic catastrophes. With his birth, he inaugurated the era of unabashed/blatant absurdity, the era of all human illusions, the era of revealing ugliness without hypocrisy. The unaffiliated is the same as the last human, who, by his birth, inaugurated the beginning of the end.
It is a screaming voice in the human wilderness, where there is loneliness and chattering of teeth. The era of the unaffiliated is the era of the manifestation of the true universal spirit and its exposure - Hegel lost the bet -, there is no longer any covetousness in the myths of salvation and the faithful. There is no faith in the finality of history and the nobility of its purpose, and no belief in divine providence.
Human perception is based on fantasies or illusions, as it is represented in its essence. Returning to Schopenhauer’s work “The World as Will and Representation” – it is considered one of the classic tributaries of the Happy Melancholic – we find this idea clearly: Man “knows neither the sun nor the earth, but only knows an eye that sees the sun and a hand that feels the earth, and that the world which surrounds it is only standing there as representation.”
Man is necessarily a delusional being, who sees only what his deceptive senses allow him to see, and he only embodies what his mind dictates to him, which is governed by the compulsions of biology (schizophrenia, for example, which is an organic disease that affects the brain, may cause auditory hallucinations that do not exist in the real world). Acting becomes planted thickly in the game of individuality, a form of tampering with existence, shaping it and molding it like smooth clay.
The Happy Melancholic says in one of his disappointment diaries: “What should I do in this world?
I wake up every day to this confusing question. The Kantian bets about status, duty, hope, and knowledge return to me.
What can I know?
It suffices that I know disappointment is repeated in history and throughout the soul.
what should I do?
I am the scion of the wretched, defeated, heralds of the ruin and nullity of the world. From Suleiman al-Hakim through al-Maarri to Emil Cioran, I am that gentle owl, a harbinger of doom, a sign of wisdom.
What may I hope?
All the techniques of hope have exhausted their potential, I content myself with echoing that Buddhist wisdom engraved on the tombstone of Nikos Kazantzakis, “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.” What is a human? A human being is a monstrosity. He creates handcuffs when dawn breaks, then secretly tries to break free from them when dusk comes.
He exerts great effort during the harvest season, then burns the ears to start the war over the crumbs. A hyena feeds on the carcass of his species, a wolf to his brother, a digger of expensive graves, greedy for life beyond life, envious, hateful, inclined to evil, prone to harm...
This is my way of dealing with daily strife, and all I reveal is a variation on this glorious saying:
The vanity of vanities, all vanities... around and around goes the wind,
(Sulaiman Al-Hakim - Book of Ecclesiastes)