On the Folly and Foible of Men

In this world, there is sadness that is enough to turn the switch of life off at any given time — sadness that is capable of blocking the light from the sun that shines upon all living creatures in this planet. 

 

The joy of the glorious days of the past is gone and all that is left are ashes. Thank the modern villains and their victims who deserve to be recognized and praised.

 

Praise the ignorance of men and those who insist on their ignorance, for ignorance is bliss. The illuminating light of the truth is blinding. The vast darkness of the unknown is terrifying. The rich repository of knowledge is boring. After all, anything expository is trivial.

 

Praise those who spend sleepless nights thinking of their worries and doubts and contemplating on their mistakes and shortcomings, for they acknowledge what others fail to admit: the flaw of their existence. It is not the flaws of man but the flaws of the creator.

 

Praise those who drown their sorrows in alcohol and suffocate their hearts with smoke from tobacco, for it takes courage to forget and return to the bitter reality the next morning, often with a painful headache, regrets, and heavy lungs.

 

Praise those who are frustrated in life and choose to do nothing, for they acknowledge the adversities. They want the things they crave for so bad that their minds and their hearts cry out and their bodies suffer the consequences. But that is all there is to their frustrations, acknowledgment.

 

Praise those whose love is unrequited, for it is what it is. It is only a preparation for the love they ought to give and the love they expect to receive, but perhaps this love is never bound to happen. It is the failure of the other to acknowledge their efforts, it is never their fault.

 

Praise those who remain in their selfish state. It is incredible to sleep soundly while surrounded by the loud cries of suffering and wake up every morning as if nothing just happened. 

 

Praise those who are blind and choose to remain blind. The truth is a bitter medicine to swallow. It hurts the ego, the source of their power. After all, what they do not know does not hurt them.

 

Praise the romantics for they dwell on the ideal. It is hard to deal with the reality; logic is indeed harder to comprehend. The will of the heart is stronger than the wise advice of the mind.

 

Praise those who worship a higher being but show contempt to his brothers and sisters, for their actions shock even the divine. After all, the gates are open for those who believe. Nietzsche has a point when he said, “God is dead, God remains to be dead, and we killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”

 

Praise those who are consumed by too much self love, for the world revolves around them, but only in their minds. They want to eradicate all the flaws of their birth and attain absolute perfection. After all, the story of Narcissus is just a myth — a story we tell everyone for a reason.

 

Praise those who settle for mediocrity for they know to themselves that the competition is stiff. The world is filled with so many great minds already. There is no room for too many ballerinas.

 

Do not start. Do not even try. 

 

That million dollar idea you have? Someone has already thought about it. Someone had already conceived the idea even before it popped up in your mind. Your thoughts are not as original as you think they are.

 

You are not even grains of sand compared to the vastness of the universe. A speck of a speck of a speck. You are not special, you are not unique, the world does not need you. The world survived for billions of years without your specie. What makes you think that it needs you? The world does not need you; you need the world.  

 

What is the point of even trying? You are, and will remain stuck.

 

The richest place on earth is the graveyard. So many men died and were buried there with their hopes and dreams. You do not weep for them. You do not praise them. That is all that they are and that is all they will ever be.

On what lies beneath

What does adulthood spell for us? Is it a stage that we dread, or a phase that brings out the best in us? We usually enter this chapter of life with a promising hope for success and a fulfilling path to a meaningful existence. However, we are often confronted with an obscure idea of what this “success” means or even looks like. We are left confused and most of the time, empty.

 

The younger version of ourselves brought us wonders of what adulthood is like and what is in store for us. Looking back, during my formative years, I was surrounded by people whose mindset was fixed on gaining wealth as a measure of success. At an early age, many people made me believe that the path to happiness is success, not the other way around. 

 

For most parents, they instill in their children’s minds that they must study hard to get a job that pays well. Many children are encouraged to pursue a degree that would have them land a lucrative profession. On the other hand, they are discouraged to consider courses that cater to artistic expressions. Thus, there are times that children feel like they are deprived of choices that might lead them to their own concept of success.

 

Many of us spend our years of existence with the complicated and vague view about what life should be and what success should mean in the modern world. Take social media for example. A social media platform is designed to help others better connect with friends, family, relatives, loved ones. It widens our connection, but feeds us with just a glimpse of what is on the surface of another person’s life. As we scroll up and down, swipe left and right, we can see the glamour that the person wants us to see — a new house, a new car, a cute pet, a loving partner, a job promotion, a newly opened business, a published work, a memorable dinner with a celebrity, a fancy vacation outside the country. The list can go on.

 

Our logic and commons sense tells us that these are but a part of the person’s existence. However, we readily believe that it is the totality of their lives. We believe that perhaps they are having the time of their lives, and there is nothing that could go wrong with their lives. Social media as a tool for better connection has left us with false illusion as to the reality of everyone’s daily life. That is why it shocks us if one celebrity decides to kick the bucket at an early age. How tragic it is that a man who was smiling while eating dinner with his family in the photo or a video he posted two days ago would take his own life, or a child star who started off with a promising career and was loved by many audience suddenly falls victim to drugs or bankruptcy. We are horrified with what happened, and we baffle with the idea that a person whom we thought has it all would fall into despair and tragedy.

 

With the vague idea of success, we feel that it necessary for us compete with others. We are compelled to show other people that we are winning in life, that we have to manifest in our life the example of what success looks like. For most of us, a successful individual is someone who should be admired or envied. 

 

Sadly, we have created a society where showing our vulnerability is a mortal sin. Showing our human flaws will certainly break the ideal picture that we are painting for the eyes of others. We are born to this world flawed, and no matter how hard we try to make ourselves better, there is a high likelihood that we will be committing many mistakes in our lifetime. We are born with conflicting emotions such as admiration and anger, joy and sadness, hope and disappointment. Oftentimes, we feel disgust and self-pity, when we cannot attain a successful life. When things do not fall into place, we seek for validation, the need to be loved, the need for understanding and patience, and the need for warmth.  In a progressive and a competitive world, however, there is no room to show these emotions. 

 

We must always smile in our pictures, we should show others the lovely meal we are having, we must tell others how many books we have read or written, we must share our new songs, we have to share to the world that we excel in our field, that the world must know that we have the best partners and we are lucky to have them. 

 

There is no room for us to vent our frustration about dissatisfaction in our current jobs, the tragedy for the path we did not pursue, the failing relationship we are trying to hide, the sickness or death of a close relative, the financial problems we deal with everyday, the sleepless nights we have spent worrying, or the melancholy brought about by the modern standards. There is simple no room for us to show any of these. We are too tough and too clever for misfortune. After all, why would we share our woes and misery to others when we cannot do anything about it?

 

There is a fear in our heart that opening up our misfortune to others will also reveal our vulnerability, and this would allow people to judge our failures in one aspect of our lives as our failure to be an exemplary person. Charles Darwin introduced the concept of “survival of the fittest” — that those who are weak will perish and those who are strong will survive. We fear that our flaws as a person equate to the weakness of our existence, and by opening up to the world, we permit the society to judge us, to take advantage of us, to pity us, or simply kill us slowly with humiliation. In the end, we either keep it in, or we die slowly and quietly into obscurity.

 

As Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of the software company called Luca, once said in an interview with Quartz, “Most of the social networks, they are promoting you to be a star, to be this cool person with a lot of amazing photos that show how many miles you ran this year, how many books you’ve read, and how many amazing connections you made, and nobody is allowed to be vulnerable anymore. No one is actually saying what is going on with themselves very openly.”

 

Keeping this vulnerability locked inside our hearts, we continue to walk our own path. Along the way, we develop vices and addiction in order to distract ourselves from the haunting calls of our dark clouds. We smile, even if our hearts are heavy. We act as if everything is merry and fine, even if we our drowning in the sea of our own sorrows. We share happy memories instead of showing what is really going on with our life.

 

Just like the bluebird in Charles Bukowski’s poem entitled “Bluebird”, in the comforts of our home, in the middle of a long and lonely nights, we are restless, we take our masks off and let the haunting songs in our heart sing with nobody to hear, sympathize with, or even appreciate. A song nice enough to make other people weep. 

 

We acknowledge the pains and frustrations, but never allow the baggage to get out of our caged heart. We sleep with the sorrows and despair and move on to the next day, until the cage becomes so heavy that we cannot carry it any longer. Like a ticking time bomb, we break down, we get angry at the world for not treating us right and for confusing us with all the false hopes and promises of the illusion given us when we were young. Others succumb to deep depression and choose to end it all, while others ruin their lives and suffer the prejudice of society. We are but children in the body of an adult trying to act as if we know what we are doing. 

 

Everyone is susceptible to this vulnerability the madness that comes with it. And when I say everyone, that includes you and me. We have to acknowledge as Michel de Montaigne once put it, “Kings and philosophers shit - and so do ladies.”

Charles Bukowski’s “Bluebird”

https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/charles-bukowski-bluebird-f4e80e5000ef

 

Quartz’s The story of Replika, the AI app that becomes you

The story of Replika, the AI app that becomes you

On the silent consolation from Art

There are times in our life, perhaps over a cup of coffee or during a sleepless night, when we feel alone. What could have led to this feeling? Perhaps we had an exhausting day at work or we just lost our job, we are tired waiting for the right one or we just broke up with our partner, we had a hard decision to make ahead of us or an option we considered suddenly failed. Perhaps we are just in need of someone to talk to, or we are simply feeling blue.

 

Normally we would run to someone closest to us for comfort and assurance that everything will be all right, with a conviction that we deserve love and comfort from another kind soul. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes, the people we run to for comfort are not always readily  available. There may be instances that they are too concerned with their own troubles, or we may think that our concern might be an additional burden to them that we decide to keep it to ourselves. In this case, we tend to sulk and we become stuck with the dreadful idea that we are left on our own dealing with our melancholy. This can be a disaster for some.

 

We can only wish to go back to a simpler time when love is about having someone who understands how we feel without even asking. If only we could be cradled once again in our mother’s bosoms with an assurance that everything will be fine, that we have a bright future ahead of us, and that we are one in a million. But those are the bygone days that are merely left to the solitary confinement of our memory. We can only wish that there is someone who can hear our cries and understand our sorrows, someone who can give counsel and console us in the desperate moments of our lives. In times of longing, the silent consolation and wisdom from the unexpected source called “Art” comes into place. 

 

Art, in its general sense, is not merely confined to the four corners of a painting. Art can be conveyed through music, literature, and other forms of artistic expression. Most of the time, art  can somehow give us the assurance, comfort, and wise advice, or even the bitter truth that may see us through our darkest times.

 

Let us take for example the Renaissance painting of Pieter Brueghel the Elder entitled, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”. The title itself describes the totality of what is going on inside the painting. For those who are not familiar with the story, Icarus is a character from Greek mythology who succeeded in flying using the wings that his father Daedalus made by using feathers secured with beeswax. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax will melt and he’d fall to his death. Icarus ignored this warning. He flew too close to the sun, thus, melting the wax off his wings. His boldness caused his untimely demise of drowning in the sea.

 (Landscape with the fall of Icarus, c. 1555,  Pieter Brughel the Elder)

In a glance we may notice that the title has nothing to do with the painting itself. It is just a vibrant landscape depicting people going about their daily lives. There is a farmer tending to his farm, ships sailing to their destination, and life happening spontaneously. Upon closer look, however, we can see Icarus’s legs in the water just below a ship. This scene shows the unfortunate fate the protagonist of the story met. The painting inspired poems such as W.H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, William Carlos Williams’ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and Michael Hamburger’s Lines in Brueghel’s ‘Icarus’.

 

In all these poems, the theme has always been the same and the painting has been viewed the same. That people may ignore another person’s plight and life goes on. It must have been quite a sight to the farmer, but it may be just imagination. After all, a man with wings falling in the water must have been a product of his ridiculous imagination. There are fields waiting to be ploughed and cattle seeking for attention. The ship’s crew may or may not have seen the horrifying sight, as there are cargoes that need to be delivered, or they simply dismissed the scene as a product of their imagination as well. Life goes on with or without Icarus, his death may cause his father’s sorrow, but for others it makes no difference. Life for the people around Icarus goes on.

 

There is no way we can really tell whether Brueghel the Elder wants his work to be interpreted as the indifference of people towards the suffering of another. Perhaps he was honest with his endeavour as to portray the simple landscape when that unfortunate event in Greek mythology happened. After he finished creating the painting though, his intention is then separate from the eyes, interpretation, and perspective of the viewers. Through this, art as a medium is doing its work. It consoles us, the viewers, that life goes on whether we like it or not, whether we are victorious or defeated. The farmer will continue to tend his field, the fisherman will continue his search for fish, the merchant will proceed with his business, and the viewers will proceed with the next art.

 

Let us take another form of art, this time, literature. Ezra Pound’s poem entitled “In a Station of the Metro”, originally published in 1913, invites readers to visualize the reality of the crowd in a congested train station in Paris and the image inside the mind of the writer.

 

“In a Station of the Metro” is a short poem consisting of 20 words including the title, but it gives us the wisdom that just like fragile petals on a wet bough, our existence in this world is fragile and may be cut short, as a gust of wind may blow away the petals on a wet bough causing it to wither. The poem perhaps invites us to perceive things in a different perspective and see the deeper and realistic nature of impermanence. Pieces of literature such as this, console us with wisdom and in a way slaps us with the bitter truth in our lonely moments.

 

Music, another form of art, may be different from other forms of expression, as it more vividly illustrates the message and feeling it evokes. Take for example R. Murolo’s “Malafemmena” (Bad Woman) — a song about a man who is confused with how he feels towards his unfaithful partner. He wants to hate her, but his love for her prevents him from doing so. The singer invites the listeners to feel his pain and sympathize with those who are experiencing the same circumstance as he has. He put into words what a cheated partner might feel; he spoke for those who cannot speak their hate and confusion on the unfortunate fate of love. The song makes the listeners feel that we are not alone, that other people also experience our suffering, that others have the same thoughts as we have, and that we are not crazy to be confused with how we truly feel. 

 

Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune, which falls into the category of classical music, invites the listeners to look at the moon and admire its beauty. That during our lonely and sleepless nights, when no one is there to listen, when nobody is there to understand, the moon is there and the moon is a witness to all hopes, joys, and sorrows. The soft tune of the piano invites us to think of the simpler times, to the joyous bygone days that we may not be able to return to, but we can recreate or look forward to.

 

Art, if it has to make sense, should make sense to the broken, bitter, angry, and lonely. While the creator of the art may have been long gone or impossible for us to meet, the art he produced is his gift to this world and to us, the viewers. Art is the silent confidant that understands our sorrows, our worries, our loneliness, our flaws, and our circumstances without any prejudice or bias. It gives us pieces of advice to assure and reassure us that we are not terrible people to feel this way, that we are not crazy to think this way, that we, just like the creator, are normal people, too. That the creators too once felt what we are feeling now. That loneliness, frustrations, despair, and melancholy, though negative feelings, can produce a work of art that consoles and sympathizes with those who have no one to share their woes with. We simply need to listen to the wisdom that art wants to share with us.

 

W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940)

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/musee-des-beaux-arts/

 

Michael Burger’s “Lines on Brueghel’s ‘Icarus’”

https://timesflowstemmed.com/2014/06/22/lines-on-brueghels-icarus/

 

 William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the fall of Icarus” (1883 - 1963)

 https://poets.org/poem/landscape-fall-icarus

 

Ezra Pound’s “In a station of the Metro” (1913)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro

 

R Murolo’s “Malafemmena”

Malafemmena - english translation

Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”

Suite bergamasque, CD 82, L. 75: III. Clair de Lune

On the Topic : An Introduction

We live in a modern society where technological advancements have opened many doors for faster access to information, vast learning opportunities, wider social connections, and life-changing innovations. The digital era has brought the world together and has made communication and daily life (at least in theory) more convenient.

 

We can now call our friends and families from the other parts of the world at any time, watch movies on our mobile devices anywhere we are, shop for items or search new restaurants in one click, and even look for a date and find the “right one” in just one swipe. Indeed, these innovations have brought people closer and made life somewhat easier. However, in the process, we are constantly bombarded with so many trends that divert our attention from life’s  realities — within ourselves and the society.

 

On the Topic opens different discussions ranging from self, love, relationship, society, politics, philosophy, art, and life in general. Our intention is to present to you, our dear readers, thoughts and ideas that intend to tickle your imagination, challenge your way of thinking, and direct your attention back to what really matters.

 

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