“Andoumboulou Vorfreude”

We are all an andoumboulou, a rough draft of humanity, a work in progress until our guaranteed demise. What we leave behind could be some of the joy that we had felt in our lives, even before we understood it to be joy, before we anticipated it to occur, our vorfreude.

Freud (and Nietzsche) was instrumental in helping me through my path to understanding the world, even before science made its indelible dent in my psyche and heart. Freud was a guide through my desires and slip-ups. I always defended him when he was ignorantly attacked during my years studying psychology at a Canadian university, regretting some of what I learned in that wannabe field of knowledge. One of my late teachers, Dimitrios Papageorgis, PhD, and I used to laugh about all the denial so obviously apparent in many Freud haters. It was denial of the first kind and order.

To me, vorfreude also means before Freud, and before him, life was even more meaningless, though it seems to have caught up to its past shame nowadays. Love remains the only antidote, but knowledge is beneficial for love, giving it both legs and wings to walk through it and sometimes fly even if it is only in a dream.

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“It is not suffering that makes one unhappy but its banality”: Life Versus Death

Ce n’est pas la souffrance qui rend malheureux, mais sa banalité.

(It is not suffering that makes one unhappy, but its banality.)

Yann Moix, from Jubilations vers le ciel (Jubilations Towards the Sky)

What is the most horrible thing ever?

“Ever?”

Yes!

“Death!”

No!

“What, then?”

Life!

“Life?”

Yes! I cannot even imagine anything crueler than life. Remember that life is not meant in the abstract. It is life as we know it, and also as we do not know it. Just the fact that it includes Slavery and that it included the Shoah (Holocaust), just to name two barbarities, are sufficient to render it the most horrible mechanism ever. And yet, a universe, a world, that can generate life, which can evolve to someone like you cannot be the most horrible mechanism ever and may be worthwhile. But what happens when you are no more? Can one conclude and accept that there are others out there; each one like you or almost like you; each individual stimulating significance in another life? And thus, life cannot be the most horrible mechanism ever, being probably the best, since it can evolve to someone like you.

And yet, life remains excrement-embodied, feces-personified, caca-squared, full of death droppings.

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The Little Lilac: A Brief Union

Her blue lilacs rustle in the kind wind, inviting me to participate in their timely disposition. I approach them with my nose, to breathe in their astral scent. I would even like to savour their colourful appearance, but I only touch their intricate texture instead. Their beauty, surpassing any painter’s picture of it, makes me yearn to be one of them: blue, carefree, riveting.

A bee buzzes by and barely contains its surprise at the celestial display, almost crashing into one of them. It hovers for a while, unable to make a choice as to the first one to lay its sweet figure upon. Somehow, it chooses the shortest, not to show its consideration or lack of bias, but because it is the most enticing with its modest demeanour.

I begin to wish that I was a bee, so I, too, could bathe in the heavenly pool of pollen. I gaze at them, embracing each other’s gift of life, enjoying each other’s prompt present, imagining each other’s sense of pleasure — voyeur.

The bee, grandeur-drunk, withdraws almost falling. It has stripped the little lilac of its life-giving elixir. But as it flies towards its home sweet home, the little lilac’s bluish hue begins to fade away, proclaiming to the world its successful union. It has done its share of procreation and now is ready to fall asleep and dream about the departed lover lost to the wind. As it begins to slumber to the sound of its wishful friends, I realize, again, that loneliness is worse than death, and that love, only love, is the answer.