Seeking deeper truths

INREACTION to Jeff Rudin’s absolutely thought-provoking article, I quote Martin Heidegger: “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.” And perhaps I should also quote another guru, Bob Dylan: “Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain. Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain.”

We humans, we that know the preciousness of life, the brevity of life, we need some identity to make us cope in this bewildering world that has no favourite sons and daughters.

And we project this “fundamental” identity all over the board of life. The Chinese do, those bloody Americans and the English too. And so too Indians with their complexity of gods and goddesses.

And we South Africans too. From fundamentalist Bible bashers to black intellectuals bemoaning the hollowness of men, but then joining their biased queue to erect another statue that they deem holy without consideration for the relativity of all human endeavours.

We humans cannot really cope with the fact that life keeps coming at us, spraying pain and confusion in its wake.

Dylan is also in despair. He, like us, reads the papers and sees it just as clearly as my neighbour’s neighbour – that subjectivity keeps running wild.

It is so deeply embedded that even after all the speeches, we keep quoting our home fire formulations of “truth” to redeem our existential angst. There is but one final choice. To accept our inborn, inbred longing to come home to something that will hold, or that we drop our sugar-coated dark glasses and perceive relativity, a base greed to survive, and become human without pre-ordained selfish harbours.

Perhaps we should start looking for the soul of those “others” so different to our own perceptions of truth. That may be the art of real existence. In fact, our survival may depend on just that.