Living and Dying in the Times of Corona
- Taking affairs of life too seriously and thus failing to appreciate the adventure of the climax of life – death or the great secret and joy of dying every moment or dying before death in which lies the true art of living well. Art’s abiding value in reconciling us to life is mediated through transcendence of life wedded to ego/self, thus embracing the tragic/death. Those who are ready to die every moment really live. Death is no punishment as Socrates noted and literature is one with philosophy in its aim of preparing us for death. Fear of Corona shows how much we have understood this elementary lesson of religion, philosophy and art.
- Our failure to live with ourselves and be truly religious understood in Whiteheadian mystical sense as what one does with one’s solitude. We want gossip and all kinds of distracting activities to escape what is felt as terrible encounter with ourselves, with solitude.
- Investing in the art of destruction (war) instead of health by major and minor powers. Corona would hardly be a news if we hadn’t been cheated by our rulers who build warships, polluting industries and massive ecologically harmful farms and projects of all kinds and not hospitals and research labs. Our environmentalists tell us of corona affected lungs of our earth, our home and “mother,” crying for a ventilator (that intelligent organized lockdown can be. What barbarity is in the demand to deny her access to ventilator in the name of business or GDP! It is opting to send mother in flesh trade. It is time to ban for months if not years (or at least heavily tax) personal cars, the culture of single use disposables and luxurious feasts in restaurants – in fact three or higher starred facilities, big farms, many a construction projects, especially road construction projects passing through forests and ten thousand other projects and scores of corporate houses including mobile manufacturing companies that are literally raping our earth for profit.
- Failure to see such monstrosities as work, work and work (alienated unsanctified labour involved in workholism/Capitalism nurtured protestant ethic of work) as the norm or driving a car daily to workplace, drifting from café to cafe while failing to experience and attend to thousand blessings that home provides or attend to the most ennobling “work” of being just oneself, the art of contemplation and basking in the sanctuary of soul. The most treasured things are within our homes and involve routine activities. Fear of lockdown shows we fail to treasure them. Let us read Joyce and appreciate the key point in the art of Johannes Vermeer.
- Failure to cultivate the space of relationships – one hardly ever looks once deep into the eyes of our near and dear ones including parents, children and spouses as that is a life’s work that would never cause boredom or require early lifting of “lockdown.” The greatest joy life can offer is love and play for the sake of love and play and these are perfectly possible inside homes with spouses and children. We have built houses and not homes – how tragic that domestic violence has increased during lockdown. The most sublime and treasured object of life is to experience it under the shade of eternity or heaven and this is possible by turning more inward than outward or better transcending the distinction between home and street or inward and outward. Bedil has said that rather than stroll in the most prized garden, he just needs to tune to the station of heart within to experience heaven. Poetry is a way to access this heaven and how tragic that this is largely missing from our lives. Those who know the orgasm of words have hardly any desperation for other orgasms that living with the other or outside offer. Telling stories is what is central to the art of living and how joyfully we have, previously, endured months of lockdown by God during winters by telling stories to ourselves and one another. Writers write, children devour and we the masses live great stories/myths told in scriptures and classics. We live by virtue of the word and not bread alone. There is no lockdown on words, dreams, love, play, creative pursuits and most of vocations and crafts and fulfilling sanctified work in homes or in small scale industries.
- Overinvestment in outdoor and underinvestment in indoor activities including sports by this other directed self-escaping civilization that Joyce rightly called syphilization.
- Failure to cultivate love of reading books. Had our schooling been a success we would never have parted with books. And those who can read books and find almost everything there need not fear lockdown. The State would not need to enforce lockdown in a society where people read. Retirement is felt as punishment and not gift because we don’t know that life is about living and not just working. We fail to appreciate poetry and beauty of life in the school of life – schools kill the poet in us – lived on its own terms, for the sake of greater or more bounteous life. We fail to heed those asking for transforming life into a work of art.
- Failure to put God before religion. “Religion is a means, not the end. It becomes idolatrous when regarded as an end in itself.” “There is nothing more important, according to the Torah, than to preserve human life …. Even when there is the slightest possibility that a life may be at stake one may disregard every prohibition of the law.” One must sacrifice mitsvot for the sake of man, rather than sacrifice man for the sake of mitsvot. The purpose of the Torah is “to bring life to Israel, in this world and in the world to come.” Those who put mosques or congregational prayers before God (especially in the times of Corona) need to note this. Given God is the ground of life and His name The Living and durood (blessing the Prophet S.A.W) is blessing life, sitting home and distanced is the prayer demanded now. The Kaaba’s kaaba is the human heart and living and letting others live fitting reverence to this heart. God is where love and relationships are honoured and in the times of epidemics, He is like the King who leaves palace to visit subjects at ground zero, choosing to dwell with them for their consolation. God feels we have deserted homes and His sanctuary (the mosque’s mosque, human heart) and invites us from mosques, this Ramadhan especially, to water this garden – the garden of solitude of home or the garden of relationships there. We know once in the medieval world at the time of epidemic Muslims assembled for collective repentance and prayer of healing and God responded by intensifying disease several fold immediately afterwards. Details may be found in masterly summary of all that we need to know (both ulama and laity) about Islamic tradition vis-à-vis epidemics in an article published in monthly Tazkeer by Kashmir’s exemplary scholar-preacher Dr G. Q. Lone.
- Failure to understand life and work of such monks as Merton or appreciate vivifying value of voluntary withdrawal/chilla/itikaf. All our problems spring from our inability to sit alone in our rooms (as Pascal noted) or failure to learn doing itikaf. This years’s Ramadhan seems to promise the feast of itikaf to all and sundry. In fact as Heschel has noted that the great dream of religion (for him Judaism) is “not to raise priests, but a people of priests; to consecrate all men, not only some men.” Few amongst us have so far had time for ourselves or commune leisurely with God (itikaf).
- Failure to appreciate how small (small scale industries/home based skills and crafts, including home schooling) may be beautiful – as Schumacher taught – and the sanctifying value of manual work as traditional cultures including Islamic and such influential figures as Heidegger and Gandhi taught, how how the best job is one closest to one’s home or ideally in home and obsession with machines such as cars constitutes necrophilia (love of corpses) as Eric Fromn argued. There is enough for everyone’s need and we don’t need to work throughout week or six days to live with dignity. The spirit of “Abolition of Work” movement that underscored little noticed pathological character of modern living that gives a holiday or two in a weak needs to be understood. In fact far happier civilizations/communities than ours are premised on working on average for less than half of time we are required to. People centric, life centric and environment centric governments would institute, for all and not just employees, three days a week or one session (forenoon or afternoon) for five days besides compulsory holidays – organized lockdown with periodical home delivery of essentials (in Kashmir after Eid az Zuha would be ideal as no shortage of quality food and what else is essential as few would need doctors or go sick with such celebratory environment with our families) – for a month or so. Monthly requirements of informal sector/daily wagers could be met for a month from donating one day’s salary from employees, CEOs (that may later be entertained for tax deductions) and all charity/zakat giving people and appropriating 1% of profits of corporates for CSR in the form of feeding/educating in the time of lockdown. (Reportedly, in every city in Palestine there was a place called “the chamber of the silent .. in which people deposited their charitable donations in secrecy, and that with equal privacy the impoverished members of self-respecting families would receive their support.” We may experiment with creating a common charity account or special credit card or better qarzi hasana account to which access could be provided to needy self respecting persons confidentially by banks.) Almost all disease including wounds inflicted by strained relationships if voluntary lockdown in the celebratory manner were designed and annually repeated. We need to recharge batteries of Spirit (whose fuel is time, silence, rest). Traditional cultures have revivified spirit by truly living weekly holiday, number of community festivals/celebrations/special days for heroes that would extend for days, sometimes weeks. We hardly observe Sabbath or holiday and do all kinds of distracting even exhausting works on weekly holidays. This is time to reclaim the legacy of Torah and the meaning of Sabbath (Saturday, weekday for Jews, involving abstaining from any work, doing nothing but living, just joyfully being). Let us focus, with Heschel (the philosopher of religion reading and assimilating whom one would endure, even long for, lockdown for months) on how to honour holidays or appreciate true meaning of sabbaticals/vocations and transform the pain of lockdown into joy and into a hobby. Read his The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man and feel the difference and see how vacations become chosen vocations and the prison of home gets unveiled as heavenly spa
A few statements from his God in Search for Man today, leaving his more detailed treatment of the theme in In The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man for future. For Heschel Sabbath is the art of surpassing civilization and preview of heaven – “the incomplete form of the world to come is the Sabbath.” What shall one be doing in heaven if not rest and chant or sing to heart’s content? And Sabbath is “a reminder of every man’s royalty; an abolition of the distinction of master and slave, rich and poor, success and failure. To celebrate the Sabbath is to experience one’s ultimate independence of civilization and society, of achievement and anxiety. The Sabbath is an embodiment of the belief that all men are equal and that equality of men means the nobility of men. The greatest sin of man is to forget that he is a prince.” During lockdown we are all princes, not paupers as it is civilization that defines a pauper. “The Sabbath is an assurance that the spirit is greater than the universe, that beyond the good is the holy…The Sabbath is holiness in time. ..The presence of eternity, a moment of majesty, the radiance of joy. The soul is enhanced, time is a delight, and inwardness a supreme reward. Indignation is felt to be a desecration of the day, and strife the suicide of one’s additional soul.”
“Six days a week we are engaged in conquering the forces of nature, in the arts of civilization. The seventh day is dedicated to the remembrance of creation and the remembrance of redemption…to the exodus from a great civilization into a wilderness where the word of God was given. By our acts of labor during the six days we participate in the works of history; by sanctifying the seventh day we are reminded of the acts that surpass, ennoble and redeem history.”
“Civilization is on trial. Its future will depend upon how much of the Sabbath will penetrate its spirit.” “The Sabbath is the counterpoint of living; the melody sustained throughout all agitations and vicissitudes which menace our conscience.” Every holiday “we must kindle the lights in the soul, enhance our mercy, deepen our sensitivity.”
Now an important question that concerns especially medical staff, administration and volunteers who help reduce pain in the wake of Corona. The question where is God during Corona may be answered by transposing the remark about Holocoast to corona. “Where was God during Holocoast?” is answered by a counter-question “Where was Man?” A doctor/volunteer says labayka (I am present). And “We tend to read the Bible looking for mighty acts that God does and not seeing that all the way through the Bible God is waiting for human beings to act.” This lesson is especially put forth by Camus’ hero (Dr. Rieux) in The Plague who serves tirelessly stating that all he knows is that his job – calling, vocation and “salvation” – is to lessen misery. Heschel shows how, in the face of absurdity that epidemics may force us to take notice of, one can still find meaning of life. “There is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can do — every one — our share to redeem the world despite of all absurdities and all the frustration and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live life as it if were a work of art. You’re not a machine. When you are young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence.”
Holidays – healing days, holy days, days devoted to living as against this or that work/engagement/official assignments/money making – are invitations to feasts we mostly miss. Heschel states: “Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.” We have forgotten distinction between labour and toil (where soul is not) and means (“work,” time) and end (rest/living/eternity). Pity those who rest to work confusing means (work) for an end (rest). Angels flee from the shops/offices where work goes on even after designated closing time and on some holidays.
Post Script:
For those who take the Prophet (SAW) seriously by opting for a sort of itikaf or self/home quarantine during epidemics and don’t court suicide (cardinal sin) or endanger lives of others but nevertheless die during Corona, these words of our sage Heschel: “In Jewish tradition, dying in one’s sleep is called a kiss of God, and dying on the Sabbath is a gift that is merited by piety. For the pious person, my father once wrote, it is a privilege to die.” Dying during epidemic is a kiss from God for Islamic tradition and if combined with the lockdown/quarantine celebrated as sabbath, it is pure grace. We needn’t trouble relatives for mourning and death rituals. Death is a celebration and may well be celebrated by a feast – death anniversaries should be celebrated as is the tradition of urs. Death is an adventure we lose in hospitals and is best enjoyed consciously, in home as if it is the first night of wedding (One recalls here Ghulam Rasool Nazki who made it a point to die consciously – adventurously, joyfully.)
https://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/living-and-dying-in-the-times-of-corona/
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