Sinusitis
I ask myself, what does the truth of one’s thoughts have to do with subjective feelings? I promised myself to write my weekly notes on Fridays. Today I am sick with sinusitis. I have had this chronic sickness since my twenties and all the years I spent in prison. However, its ubiquitous presence has been drastically reduced for the last twenty years and now just periodically appears. I ask myself, what was my subjective feelings during the recurring symptoms of this sickness in different periods of my life?
In my twenties, I was overwhelmed by it, as I spent my twenties in prison and the sickness also was a shell into which I hid myself, like a turtle, into my hat. It was cozy and slow and I endured pain and weakness, in a welcoming tone. However, in terms of thoughts, I didn’t know what to do with the torrents of doubts and political-philosophical questions which were invading me during my imprisonment. I started studying philosophy in prison. But I couldn’t understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by myself, even if I read the whole book in Farsi and took notes of it couple of times. I wanted to make sense of my life and adamantly believed or was trained to believe that Western philosophy is the best way to understand myself and my whereabouts. So, all my focus was on Western philosophy.
The sinusitis felt like a gray warm decay of heart amidst my numerous existential questions: What is the meaning of this all? Why am I here? What is this stripped sense of self—this non-identity-that I experience due to being cut off of all the interactions of a normal life, even from communal and group life inside the prison? I used to sit for hours in a corner and read and write for myself. I didn’t interact or discuss my thoughts with other prisoners, as I didn’t belong to any gang or group, nor did I collaborate with guards and snitches. I was alone on my own and somehow enjoyed it like my sinusitis, staying in my corner, concentrated inside like a condensed hard boiled egg.
I was talking to my son last week and he said he would rather to stay in his corner and just take his courses and play his keyboard, as he doesn’t need to interact with anyone. This insistence of isolation, staying separate from others for him is different from mine in my twenties. There is no one “introversion” but introversions, in plural, though they overlap. I told him this was his war, his challenge, because he feared rejection, the unknown of the other, so it was easier, cozier to stay in one’s corner.
The feeling of sinusitis, like a constant indicator stretched along my existential quests, gives me a point of comparison. I have had sinusitis in my twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. In different times, I was entangled with different puzzles of life and survival, but the other constant along this stretch of sinusitis, was a feeling of despair and discontent. To give an example, I go back to some of my writings fifteen years ago and choose one of them which is more related to this reflection.
Now I feel released from the agony and a deep sense of being lost and estranged compared to when (2001) I wrote this:
“I have traveled far away from and to myself. I have lived in a cave too long to be outside the sphere in which you are living. I have gone beyond blessings of heaven and hell and I have experienced beyond both of these. I have come from Mars, from a vacuum in space, from a hole right in the center of big bang. I am a deadly event, radiating love and life. Are you ready for it? I am not the phantoms of some memories: The times that I have been tortured in the name of God, in the body, or a poignant smell of a racism, in the soul. I have waited enough not to expect the ‘fashion’ that you desire me to wear. I am just a nobody. A dead body. I died long time ago. And then I saw myself in a full ornamentation of ethereal sense of time and a lasting phenomenon that does not come close enough to open up. I am a poem which does not want to declare itself. I am you. A little bit happiness, a little bit pride, a little bit dwelling in the ‘unknown’ and the fingers that play piano on our soul after practicing her or his whole life. I am the music that comes out of every instrument and every throat. I am the overture, and the song. I am the tears that scientifically have no meaning but form all of our lives. Hear me. See me. Live me. Remember the days that you were looking for a real feeling. Remember the days that you were dying for a little bit of passion. Remember the days that you were bored and digging the bottom of a romantic love to experience life.
Question the key that you have at hand and the lock that has been set for you. Question the sense of boredom and happiness that you have been tainted with. Question your goal and the whole process. Question the possibility of knowing and not-knowing. Question the way you have been trained to see things. Believe in the nullity that just comes out of this disbelief. Let those people laugh at you. You are there, in front of your death-destiny, where there is no ‘judgment’ and ‘fashion’ and ‘functionality’. A deep breath and silence. And the rigidity and fluidity of the things that flow around you, before things had any names. Wish the ‘anonymous’. And keep on keeping your dream, because no evaluation has proven it to be wrong, no rationality has proven it be absurd. It is just the eyebrows and lips that move in turn and twist and what ‘they’ see and say even rationally does not make any sense.
Wait for love. It will come upon you. And you will make love with air and boredom and wind and wine. See the life that emerges from the nothing, the being that jumps out of concepts and simply surrender to its being, naked. And the dance that has no meaning and you and s/he are whirl-winding in a passion that does not have any name. A sense of lost-ness that is not written in any dictionary and lexicon. It is you there out of the sphere of definition and truth. A solidity to be formed and changed and forgotten. The Alzheimer of intentions and goals. An impulsion from within and from without. A sense of being that has no clue to the beyond, but what is the closest.
It is here: the blood that will stop circulating. The rhythm of spiral in its motley ways of appearance. A self which is ashamed in its being imprisoned in one interpretation. A sense of freedom. A little bit fresh air. I wish you forget all these verses and just dance around the pointless beat of ecstasy, and I wish you feel extreme love for every body and ready to die and jumping out of the prison of ‘security’, ‘well-being’, and ‘insurance’. And we are with each other whenever you just sing your heart in your transparency and dance your soul in its ultimate nakedness, and be ready to pay the ‘price’ for it all. An overcoming that always remains a wish and will keep us on our feet to move forward.”
Now, in 2016, I am again with my old friend sinusitis, but I look into my heart, into my “subjective” feelings. I have lost most of my fears of the other, I am at home now with myself. I prayed to God, during years of being lost and the agony of estrangement, to teach me love. Sincerely, deeply, I prayed to God, even if I didn’t seemingly believe in deity, to teach me love, how to love people. Because if you are discontent and not satisfied with the principle of pleasure, and also don’t want to put your head beneath the sands and ignore the dilemmas of existence and insist on asking, “what is this all about?” then you may also ask: What is “love”? And when we ask this question it is mostly because we don’t experience it enough, but for me coextensive with my sinusitis, it was a quest to find an exit from the maze of existence, to find an answer to “why are we here?”. People don’t ask this question because they usually don’t think they may find an answer to it. But I couldn’t help but asking it, and asking it philosophically and with all my spirit: “What is the meaning of existence?”
There are and have been so many barriers between individuals to connect: their age, gender, class, race, sexual orientation, education, spirituality, religion, interests, language, culture, and moral compass, etc. I have been feeling all these diversities and barriers inside my body, I have been experiencing all these obstacles inside my soul, and I begged to God, sincerely and repeatedly, teach me love. And I feel now free, I feel no barrier between me and anyone else, all faces, all animals, and all insect. Something did fundamentally change in me and unravelled. I don’t feel that restlessness, that resentment, or Nietzschean despise. Within the cocoon of my little sinusitis now, within my subjective feelings, I bless the Nameless and feel a deep gratitude, different from my twenties, thirties, or when I wrote the above piece.
I have
never been happier than this time in my life, even if I have nothing. I am
ready to die, but I love life and want to live; I want to live and to give and deliver. I feel tired for this chronic sickness, kind of breathless, wrapping
and warming up to go, but I have to come back and deliver that life is
wonderful, eternal, and worth living in thousand folds. I tell myself, in all
my twenties and years of life, I have been waiting for someone to come to me
and say it, what is this all about? And I struggled, fell, and made mistakes,
inside and outside the Gnosticism of East and West, wasted and stretched into
sin, losing myself in pleasure and cries of soul, asking God to teach me love,
and then was startled to see the heaven’s door opened to my wide open shocked
eyes and said: “I am here, life is not the subclass of dead, but yet we are not
compatible.” I couldn’t stop the tears of joy and despair at the same time
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)
And how wonderful life is, and death is not meaningless, nor is a nihilistic end to life, or a sorrow to come and an absurdity to endure. I have gone through multifarious gestalt switches to come to this understanding.
In retrospection, I remember I loved Albert Camus’s The Fall when I was 16 years old and could recite some parts of this long monologue by heart. I have to admit it happened that I experienced the same feeling of shame and dissatisfaction with myself as Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the protagonist and the only narrator of the book. He was a lawyer with a perfect self-image, who quit his job and became a “judge-penitent” after he realized he was a pretentious mask, because of this event:
“That particular night in November, two or three years before the evening when I thought I heard laughter behind me, I was returning to the Left Bank and my home by way of the Pont Royal. It was an hour past midnight, a fine rain was falling, a drizzle rather, that scattered the few people on the streets. I had just left a mistress, who was surely already asleep. I was enjoying that walk, a little numbed, my body calmed and irrigated by a flow of blood gentle as the falling rain. On the bridge I passed behind a figure leaning over the railing and seeming to stare at the river. On closer view, I made out a slim young woman dressed in black. The back of her neck, cool and damp between her dark hair and coat collar, stirred me. But I went on after a moment’s hesitation. At the end of the bridge I followed the guys toward Saint-Michel, where I lived. I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound—which, despite the distance, seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence—of a body striking the water. I stopped short, but without turning around. Almost at once I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it suddenly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t stir. I was trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too far ...” or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no one.”
And in the final pages of the book, the penitent-judge says:
“My
idea is both simple and fertile. How to get everyone involved in order to have
the right to sit calmly on the outside myself? Should I climb up to the pulpit,
like many of my illustrious contemporaries, and curse humanity? Very dangerous,
that is! One day, or one night, laughter bursts out without a warning. The
judgment you are passing on others eventually snaps back in your face, causing
some damage. And so what? you ask. Well, here’s the stroke of genius. I
discovered that while waiting for the masters with their rods, we should, like
Copernicus, reverse the reasoning to win out. Inasmuch as one couldn’t condemn
others without immediately judging oneself, one had to overwhelm oneself to
have the right to judge others. Inasmuch as every judge some day ends up as a
penitent, one had to travel the road in the opposite direction and practice the
profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge. You follow me? Good.
But to make myself even clearer, I’ll tell you how I operate. First I closed my
law office, left Paris, traveled. I aimed to set up under another name in some
place where I shouldn’t lack for a practice. There are many in the world, but
chance, convenience, irony, and also the necessity for a certain mortification made
me choose a capital of waters and fogs, girdled by canals, particularly
crowded, and visited by men from all corners of the earth. I set up my office
in a bar in the sailors’ quarter. The clientele of a port-town is varied. The
poor don’t go into the luxury districts, whereas eventually the gentlefolk
always wind up at least once, as you have seen, in the disreputable places. I
lie in wait particularly for the bourgeois, and the straying bourgeois at that;
it’s with him that I get my best results. Like a virtuoso with a rare violin, I
draw my subtlest sounds from him. So I have been practicing my useful
profession at Mexico City for some time.
It consists to begin with, as you know from experience, in indulging in public confession as often as possible. I accuse myself up and down. It’s not hard, for I now have acquired a memory. But let me point out that I don’t accuse myself crudely, beating my breast. No, I navigate skillfully, multiplying distinctions and digressions, too—in short, I adapt my words to my listener and lead him to go me one better. I mingle what concerns me and what concerns others. I choose the features we have in common, the experiences we have endured together, the failings we share—good form, in other words, the man of the hour as he is rife in me and in others. With all that I construct a portrait which is the image of all and of no one. A mask, in short, rather like those carnival masks which are both lifelike and stylized, so that they make people say: “Why, surely I’ve met him!” When the portrait is finished, as it is this evening, I show it with great sorrow: “This, alas, is what I am!” The prosecutor’s charge is finished. But at the same time the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror. Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the “we.” When I get to “This is what we are,” the trick has been played and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves. Just try. I shall listen, you may be sure, to your own confession with a great feeling of fraternity.
Don’t laugh! Yes, you are a difficult client; I saw that at once. But you’ll come to it inevitably. Most of the others are more sentimental than intelligent; they are disconcerted at once. With the intelligent ones it takes time. It is enough to explain the method fully to them. They don’t forget it; they reflect. Sooner or later, half as a game and half out of emotional upset, they give up and tell all. You are not only intelligent, you look polished by use. Admit, however, that today you feel less pleased with yourself than you felt five days ago? Now I shall wait for you to write me or come back. For you will come back, I am sure! You’ll find me unchanged. And why should I change, since I have found the happiness that suits me? I have accepted duplicity instead of being upset about it. On the contrary, I have settled into it and found there the comfort I was looking for throughout life. I was wrong, after all, to tell you that the essential was to avoid judgment. The essential is being able to permit oneself everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess vociferously one’s own infamy. I permit myself everything again, and without the laughter this time. I haven’t changed my way of life; I continue to love myself and to make use of others. Only, the confession of my crimes allows me to begin again lighter in heart and to taste a double enjoyment, first of my nature and secondly of a charming repentance. Since finding my solution, I yield to everything, to women, to pride, to boredom, to resentment, and even to the fever that I feel delightfully rising at this moment. I dominate at last, but forever. Once more I have found a height to which I am the only one to climb and from which I can judge everybody. At long intervals, on a really beautiful night I occasionally hear a distant laugh and again I doubt. But quickly I crush everything, people and things, under the weight of my own infirmity, and at once I perk up.”
I am released now from being Albert Camus’ penitent-judge, of performing duplicity[1], as well I am released from despair and laugh at Albert Camus absurdity theory, and sad for his Sisyphean perception of life, though admiring his capacity to express so much existential agony in plays and words. And thus I said farewell to all despair and the fuzzy feeling of disinterest and the nihilistic and hedonistic “let’s just enjoy this one life in pleasure”. I said farewell even to a crude desire for immortality without God. I cherish this one life, though I know now we are immortal, and feel my old friend, sinusitis, differently (with constant tickling joy-pain in my face), ready to die, ready to live, give, and deliver, until I become compatible with the divine.
[1] “That this
insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not
confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human
being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as
Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often wiser, not merely than the
vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up
truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases, it
holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the
genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.' For
example, how significant it is that in the Indo- European languages, as
Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning ' two ' should connote badness.
The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable)
are both derived from 'duo.' The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such
modern French words as bevue ('blunder/ literally 'two-sights’). Traces of that
'second which leads you astray' can be found in 'dubious,' 'doubt' and Zweifel
for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facingboth- ways, and
modern American slang its ' two-timers.' Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our
language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential
badness of division a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy 'two* makes
another decisive appearance.” (Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley)
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