By Ananya S Guha
There is a lot in human nature to complain. In school we read a poem, ” The Plaint Of The Camel”, But that was an imaginary ” complaint.” It was facetious as well. In some way I think the alter ego of humans are animals. Humans write stories about them, compose poetry right from Enid Blyton’s mythic rabbits and animals, to the Orwellian myth of animals viewing men and women not only warily but with insouciance and a kind of contemptuous nonchalance. Then there are the rollicking ‘ animal ‘ stories of Gerald Durrell. Again we have in the novels of William Golding a mythic vision of man, the thralldom he has created for himself, the warring in him between flesh and body – in fact the shearing away of ‘ innocence ‘. And, what is its polarity, experience of course in the terms of William Blake. Aldous Huxley once said caustically that if William Wordsworth lived in the Tropics, he would not have established his credo of Pantheism in a scale of euphoria. But cynics will always say something, the need to create a world which is fabulous as opposed to the ‘ real ‘ is an upsurge of creativity and radical thinking. The dream world and the real world become as tenuous as can be, the blurring insignificance of what is and what can be! Who cares? The creative impulse is motivated by a kind of subversion and even iconoclasm.
Carl Jung’s ” Memories, Dreams and Reflections” is a brilliant exposition on the myth of dreams, but to him it was real, so real that he began to interpret every single dream of his- from dark nebulous to that of light, a fugitive resplendence. Is the lit darkness which William Golding spoke of with coherence, the kind of coherence which made to see life not in wholes, but in complex shades of light and darkness.
Yet what is creativity? Jung was not writing fiction or poetry, but in trying to grapple with his undying dreams, he was trying to make the fleeting and the evanescent permanent. Temporally and spatially creative artists transcend a blurring world of black and white. Freud’s interpretation of the child as artist with an inherent wish fulfillment gave to psychology a new dawn of truth. Where does the line end and begin- for example when a child becomes an adult what happens to the child-likeness and when the superannuated faces death is there a regressive childhood?
Against this creative writing, painting, performing, the thespian’s world, philosophy we still dream of a superman. Nietzche did it, but I am not sure he was very confident as he was enslaved into abject decrepitude.
So the moral is: give free fictive imagination to your dreams. They will sustain you one day, and the day after, and the day after…Human civilization draws all its sustenance from them. And the Hegelian forces of antithesis will find themselves in the eternity of conflagration. Remember Hitler?
Civilizations flourish not in chaos, but out of chaotic conditions there may be moral or spiritual awakenings. The Buddha’s renunciation was due to misery and poverty, not his but what he saw around him. This led to a flowering of truth, a vision and beatification which was all pervading. The pacifism of Buddha influenced not only men like Asoka who cart-wheeled after witnessing widespread violence , but also men like Akbar and Tagore in modified contexts. The efflorescence of any cultural growth is not only arts and literature but quality living, where ignoble thoughts are vanquished. Such leaders lead mediated living, they were pacifists and dispassionate in their overall world views, or also in their religiosity.
Decadent phases of civilization are sometimes preceded by prosperity- material, spiritual or cultural. Bu in the midst of such decadence there can be heretics like Joan Of Arc who lived for a cause, and died unflinchingly for it.
So that brings us to the present. The past and the present are cohorts and can be seen only in relation to one another. They are causalities, a cause- effect relationship draws them, and one cannot be comprehended without understanding the other, a rare complexity, what we call history.
There is very little to be happy about in today’s world- military aggrandiz-ement in the garb of ‘ protection ‘ is the worst kind of media hype. The middle east and the Arab countries are bullet ridden, where the lives of innocents are being lost every day. In India we have lost whatever little sensitivity we have had.
It’s time now for history to turn round…And then we can only dream.