Русское зазеркалье
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When seen from a broader perspective, a planetary disaster is still much worse than our own death. Why? Simple as this question may be, you are completely incapable of answering it as long as you fail to find this perspective. For a religious person, the answer is easy: our death, no matter from what reason, is nothing very special in itself, as our mind doesn’t cease to be after the death of our body. But then, no-one can guarantee that the realm in which you suddenly find yourself after your death will be a very nice place, not even if you are a believer—especially not if you are a believer who believes in hell and demons inhabiting it. Nowadays, many people think that what is needed is sort of a lite version of traditional religions that would contain nothing ‘medieval, ugly, or unpleasant,’ and this is how Christianity Lite, Buddhism Lite, and other such bizarre phenomena emerge. I do not think that all these versions work, as they obviously do not ‘do the job,’ do not perform the task that religious knowledge shall perform. They do not move us to be better human beings than we are—they also fail to give us reliable knowledge about spiritual reality as it exists. Imagine that there is a certain social media application through which you can socialise with your friends and with anyone you like. This application is for free—but then, it has an important disadvantage: each of your posts can be disliked by others, and there is a special thumb down button in there. You do not approve of the very idea of someone disliking you, you do not want to bear that much, so you simply refuse to install its full version—instead, you go on with its lite version, manufactured by some guys from Eastern Europe, that you have found somewhere on the Pirate Bay. This lite version doesn’t allow anyone to give you thumb down, in fact, it has no thumb down button at all, and you think yourself very clever man (or woman, or whoever you are). But no, the guys from Eastern Europe have cheated you. This lite version only gets you in touch with Internet bots and other such algorithms, so it practically is of no use. You cannot socialise with real human beings via this fake application, you cannot buy or sell anything via it, you cannot ask a nice girl for a real date, because this nice girl is just an algorithm or a product of artificial intelligence in the very best case. This girl doesn’t exist in flesh, and never will be. This is what I think of Christianity Lite and other such spiritual surrogates that pretend to completely eliminate suffering from our life and from our afterlife without any special efforts of ours.
You may reject the religious perspective altogether, but the question of how to peacefully accept your own death is still there. For a believer, death may be horrible because he or she doesn’t know whether he or she ‘qualifies for Heaven,’ so to speak. For an atheist, death is horrible because life is generally pleasant, and then this pleasant continuation suddenly comes to its end, and there is nothing there ever more. In the event live is not pleasant—suicide logically is the best possible option: that is, if you stick to your atheistic views as firmly as a believer sticks to Christ, or Allah, or the Buddha. But you probably don’t.
…To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
As it seems, Hamlet’s famous monologue doesn’t deal with either firm believers or firm atheists. It is spoken by someone who doubts, by someone whom you perhaps would eagerly identify yourself with. Dubitare humanum est, to doubt is human, isn’t it? I would go even further and say that Alexander Rosenbaum, too, has taken no side between firm believers and firm atheists—he, like Hamlet, does not initially recognise his, or maybe his father’s, own ghost. (Is the person that his protagonist sees actually a ghost? Another question to explore.) Some of you regard the very possibility to doubt in anything as your safe harbour. At the end of their lives, those persons may be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that doubt, while having made them more intelligent (arguably so), has failed to remove their anxiety and fear.
I hope you will now agree with me when I say that this song doesn’t score so very low even on the vertical. But there is still more in it. How much we can get from any work of art depends on how attentive we are to its details. Of course, there always remains the possibility of our misinterpreting those details or of our squeezing them so hard, figuratively speaking, that they give away more than the author actually put into them. And yet, I am not afraid to squeeze them hard, because I firmly believe that getting more from an artwork than its author wanted us to give is definitely better than getting less than that from it. So will you please follow me in my exploration of allegedly minor details of this story?
Here they are. Firstly, pay attention to the snowflakes that do not melt when landing on the old man’s body as well as to the fact that he is walking on water as if it were solid ground. Is he a living human being, or a ghost, or perhaps a zombie? An average body temperature of a living man would probably melt the snowflakes, so the alter ego of the author is probably not alive. On the other hand, the same snowflakes would not stick to a ghost, so he cannot be a ghost. A walking dead body? No, because he guffaws at the author and then instantly disappears, thus excluding all three possibilities. What makes us believe that this meaningful encounter has really happened? I guess it is the fact that the author recognises himself in a mirror as the old man he once saw, thereby confirming that this encounter was not just a product of his own imagination. But then, where could it possibly happen? Was it a real location, say, somewhere in the Leningrad region? But how could it be real, considering white fog and snowflakes, the two factors that cannot easily coexist? I believe the question makes no sense at all. Here comes another lengthy quotation.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more
—which seven lines, translated from Italian by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, open the ‘Inferno,’ the first book of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Do we really want to interrogate Dante Alighieri about the exact location of his dark forest? Do we really pretend to believe that that forest physically exists, or had ever existed, somewhere in Italy? I think it is safe to say that this forest exists in poet’s imagination only. But wait: haven’t we agreed before that anybody’s imagination has no value at all as it only produces pure phantasms?
Herein is the source of our mistake: we, meaning you and me, have never actually agreed to regard the nocturnal part of human consciousness, being our fantasies, dreams, and premonitions, as something that has no meaning at all. The idea was simply superimposed onto us by the logic-centered rational education we have received at school, so we gradually grew into belief that this idea is true under any conditions. It is not. Were it true, such works as the Divine Comedy or Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde would never be written.
How valid can be the information that we receive by mediation of the nocturnal part of our mind? To what extent does contemporary art still require this part? How is it possible to talk about artistic education when considering that education basically relies on the diurnal activity of our mind? Do art and education mutually exclude each other, and if they don’t, how can they possibly come together? I will be happy to receive some answers to these questions from you during the second part of our lesson.
Let us, secondly, give a thought to the guffaw the old man utters when he sees his younger self. What is he laughing at? Is it the futility of all human endeavors?
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
—to quote from William Butler Yeats’s Among School Children: a poetically shaped question to which I have no answer to provide. You have probably noticed that the song I have been talking about for already half an hour poses more questions than it gives us answers. Good questions are not less valuable than good answers. I will admire those of you who will attempt to provide a meaningful answer to this poetically shaped question.