Endless compassion first step in dealing with an intricate life

WE HAVE art lest we perish from the truth – Friedrich Nietzsche.

Without getting into the philosophy of Nietzsche, clear thinking when analysing and then also falling into the trap of presenting us, we the feeble wanderers of this wobbly earth with “gospel” to lead us astray, he did write this one sentence in his diary and this can never quite leave one’s mind when the decades of life come marching by.

We are surrounded, bedded, programmed, mind fused to follow the wise ones of all the different tribes of the earth. As they prophesied and presented localised “truths” over droves of way off continents, somehow “authentic” and “universal” without considering all the others that came about in the past, the present and all still begging their superiority in the coming and going days of our lives.

From continent to continent. From religion to religion. From my culture to the inferiority of yours. From capitalism to socialism. From morals to ethics.

From paradigm to paradigm. From discourse to discourse. From uptown to downtown. From hetero to homosexuality.

From family to other folks and further on those that leave our compassion cold. From health to sickness, from life to death, from the cradle to the grave.

“We have it from Aristotle that life is hard” – is the first sentence in one of John Caputo’s books. We just cannot know the full spread of life storming on us, the others in its way, leave us all in disarray and sorrow with overwhelming numbness to verbalise the unfathomable.

Truth is nobody’s learned ABC. Truth is an expression of art that states and then always rephrases as the next wave of the un-understandable sips, or explodes, into existence.

But we must do it. We must find ways to calm our souls and to portray hope that all that happened, happens, will happen, are somehow all a knock on the door of absolute certainty and ultimate healing.

The integrity of our consciousnesses though cannot lay it aside that all the millions, billions of people that walked and walk their ways so different to the rest, even killing others that don’t acknowledge their “truth” cannot all be right.

And in the end the others will not come in masses over to your side, your persuasion, your belief system. They will remain soaked in own ways over continent, even on different sides of rivers both opposing groups call their very own.

In an expanding world more and more people just cannot find “soul’s reprieve” in simplified answers.

They have to stand the pain of walking tall in the hailstorms of uncertainty in the twin longing that chaos and certainty may somehow, someday, be reconciled.

No, said Nietzsche. We need art to handle life.

Not art in a simplified way of presenting a bouquet of flowers on a homely table. No easy, cheap, presentations of the complexity of life.

Serious art on canvases searching the belly of life, art in the forming and reforming of politics, art in dealing with psychosis, life-taking illnesses, tragedies and art in bringing the explosion of humans on a overstretched earth in some kind of synthesis with numbed economies, art in the dialogues of differing parties as not any of them carry the final and full truth in their briefcases, their statues, or gilded in their holy shrines.

Let us bring it home. I do not have the full proof of truth in my repertoire. You neither. We need to be incredibly honest, struggle with our own psyches, rely on integrity to give and to take in the flow of honest arguments.

To test everything and all “sand castles” whether the core of our rationalising is honouring the difficulty of life, searching for the restoring ways of empathy and kindness, dissecting all the trappings of discourse and in the multiplicities of life’s structures as it comes in with every new tide and then again as it starts to wave us goodbye.

Without this serious regard for the art of life we will forever be barbarians hooting for steamed-up ideologies, theologies, closed up in own narcissist belief systems that can only be universal if we disregard the ongoing art of dealing with life’s immense complexity. It starts with the art of borderless compassion.