If we isolate each word that has any significance for us and analyse it in so much detail, until there is nothing left of its power, we will be free of it. Lacan says that “the symbol manifests itself as the murder of the thing”. When we examine words, we often end up in a microscopic exploration of human misery. Kundera does it all the time. He even has a name for it: litost. “Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden insight into one’s own misery.” There is no better way to understand human misery than to look inside. But humanity keeps engaging in atrocities, ignoring completely individual misery. Our existence is determined by gain. The art of losing is no longer an art, although today it is more necessary than ever. (I read the news today. There was nothing new. What a waste of time, all for a handful of dollars…)
Even if music is emotion, our understanding of misery should be devoid of all emotion. Why would anyone be interested if one more obscure slave girl, in a small town no one has ever heard of, discovers inside her the howling of litost? One should engage only in a cold assessment of human history. An analyst of fact can read all of history in each one of us. We can read a man or a woman, as if we were reading all the poetry that has ever been written, all the battles that have ever been fought, all the blood that has ever been shed, all the causes that the bravest among us have sacrificed their lives for. This is not an issue of psychology. It is an issue of history.
Let’s take a word from the English dictionary: pity. There are so many reasons to pity ourselves. The first reason could be the realization that we are ridiculous, even in our most noble moments. There should logically follow the loss of all hope for redemption and transcendence. We are pigs without wings. We should merely acknowledge our pigness and go on snorting our sonatas of misery. But it is madness to pity pigs…
The second reason appears easily, like the patter of children’s feet. In the baroque living room of my heart, I see my children, playing half naked with a kitten. I see my father, long dead, struggling to uphold his own words: decency, honesty, integrity. Then I see all the men who ever held me in their arms, trying to tame the wild animal of my body. I see the years, fraying away like old clothes. I see a woman getting older, looking at her failing eyes in a gilded mirror. I see an inhuman hand playing with the sand of time, erasing, always erasing. In the end, the hand erases itself. The room for pity keeps getting smaller and smaller.
A worthy moment of pity may arise, when confronted with the intensity of a woman’s desire. Transforming her body into a monument of vulgarity at a man’s feet, she licks the dirt off his shoes. What type of mental construction could one stand on, in order to pity this woman for her desire? How high should the scaffold rise, for one to stand on and look at her from above? What heaven could be large enough to condemn her? Through the centuries comes the roaring of thousands of women, resonating fiercely in our book of pity, forcing us to close it with a hasty hand.
On this optimistic note, I end my writing jovially, in the expectation of a glorious day.
