exhaling nothingness

05 Dec, 2023

I finished Yukio Mishima's Beautiful Star recently; while the whole book is exceptional, one of the contexts resonated with me so deeply that I almost immediately felt the urge to write about it. Closer to the end of the book, while discussing the fate of humanity, extraterrestrial beings describe said humanity's virtues in the following way:

Here sleeps the human species, inhabitants of planet Earth. They were highly artistic, they represented joy and grief in equal measure, they revoked other forms of freedom and, by doing so, only just managed to recognize the relativity of their own freedom. Unable to conquer time, at least they endeavored to remain disloyal to time, and sometimes, for a few moments, they knew how to exhale nothingness. May they rest forever in eternal peace. Which, in human language, equaled to: Here sleeps the human species. They ended up lying all the time, they offered up flowers for both good and bad fortune, they often kept small birds, they were frequently late for appointments and they often laughed. May they rest forever in eternal peace. Mishima's characters perceived this philosophy in a specific way (and I won't spoil anyone the joy of reading the whole dialogue), but the metaphor still resonated with me strongly; I perceive it in my own way.

I always felt there is a part of nothingness inside me. It's definitely not a bad thing: it's not a hole that must be filled, it's not a perforating wound. It's more like a hidden part of my mind, perpetually occupied by complex life questions with no obvious answers. When I re-think these questions, nothingness is what I uncover: I still don't know much and I can't reach a specific answer. The process is much like being asked what do you want to become when you grow up. I'm in my thirties, and I don't really know what I want to become; I probably only know something about what I want or don't want to do, and this is a totally different thing. These revelations, they sure can be kind of scary.

By laughing out loud, I exhale the nothingness and let it go free in the world. I exhale my fears. I accept that I don't know much, and this is funny on the scale of universe, if you get what I mean. In some sense, it's laughable how short and unpredictable life is, and and how diligently humanity is trying to do something about it, all together and each of us individually, and how much fuss I make about things that have absolutely no meaning, trying to persuade myself and others that I'm occupied by something important.

This is not an evil laugh. I laugh, ergo I love all this fuss, and I will keep it on no matter how hard it is, no matter how pointless all my actions seem. Mostly, I'm laughing at myself, and, by doing that, I confirm that I have free will to perceive the universe in any way I see fit.

In Eco's The Name of the Rose¹, a blind old prophesizing monk called Jorge of Burgos² argues with Brother William of Baskerville on the topic of laughter. He says that laughter deforms the contours of the face and makes people look like animals. Brother William parries that no animals laugh, and laughter is a purely humane. Jorge than proceeds with explaining that so is sin, and, moreover, there is no evidence that Christ ever laughed³ (which, by the way, is not exactly true, because there is no evidence that Christ did not laugh either, as the Bible does not describe all that Jesus has said and done in detail). For Jorge, the laughter he despises so much paradoxically does what it really does for me: it clears fear, making it fade and disappear.

Without fear, Jorge says at the end, faith would no longer be possible.

For me, any faith is only possible when you recognize yourself as a human - more importantly, as a human whose existence and philosophical research and attempts to impress other humans can appear feeble, pointless and ultimately funny.

So, let's have this laugh and exhale some nothingness maybe?

#libero arbitrio #reading