There have been cataclysmic events in history that took both the people and the institutions off guard. These turned out to be the levellers (as in Scheidel’s ‘Four Horsemen of Apocalypse’). This pandemic is no different, leaving an egalitarian imprint by not discriminating on the basis of belief, and class. In this pandemic our minds too have been caught in a ‘viral’ psychosis as Stoic philosopher once said; ‘we suffer more in our imaginations than in reality’.
Detouring through the philosophical, literary and artistic renderings of ‘uncertainty’ and dark realities of life, we just have to peep through and ask this fundamental question of why we wake up when everything brims through our senses. As we are in the middle of this viral shake up, this nagging thought reminds of having the pragmatic outlook to life and the means to explore our lives. If we can just reminisce of a day before the ‘pandemic’ struck the world, we would see a ‘sea change’ when it comes to living (coping as people call it in these times) in these times. Anxiety, lifelessness, depressing thoughts, existential angst, and many more multiplier lifestyle effects can be drawn from this ‘contagion’ phase of our life. Apart from these individual, life-driven realities, we can have sense of how our social realities are panning out in these distressing times. On the one side ‘privileged’ people were caught into this unusual trap of ‘lockdown’, for they are caught in this unusual dilemma for the first time. On the other hand, in the same society, people are dying on roads because they have nothing to eat. The stark contrast in these ‘systemic binaries’ deepens further with the plight and predicament of ‘workers’.
The age of post-enlightenment has seen the wave of ‘reductionism’ in every sphere of our lives, particularly in the themes like ‘certainty’ ‘reason’ and ‘order’. Justin Smith, one of the prominent faces in the contemporary philosophy delves deep into this mirth of ‘Enlightenment’ led ‘reason’ and ‘certainty’ in his book Irrationality. These get embedded and normalised into ‘extreme’ forms of existence, both in political and individual modes of it. This pandemic represented perfectly the ‘uncertainty’ by spreading the waves of a phenomenon which people had never thought of prevailing in this age, given the advancement in technology and supposedly health too. But uncertainty never strikes in the manner we have been experiencing and are taught the ‘fundamentals’ of life. They usually take meandering course and surprise us with the aftermath of it. We have been hardwired to the artifices of modern impressions of concepts like ‘success’ and the culture of ‘shortcuts/hacks’ in everything related to our lives. In a way we have been programmed to the ‘certain’ ways of looking at a life in the current times, which is marked by the ‘tragedy of meaning’.
Why does this happen that we reason seriously and sometimes ‘responsibly’ when tragedy befalls us. The psycho-political signifiers of the grand ‘nationalistic’ structures have always (mis)used the uncertain events to their favour, from the usual bellicose slogan of ‘expansionism’ to the Agambenian ‘state of exception’ and ‘bio-politics’. Pankaj Mishra, leading public intellectual, laconically remarked that ‘It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens’ (Bloomberg, 17th March 2020) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his celebrated 1973 novel Gulag Archipelago pointed out that ‘political genius lies in extracting success even from the peoples ruins’.
If certainty is a reality, uncertainty has a categorical significance in defining our life and shaping our ‘normal’ as no one knows what would happen the next minute. Uncertainty is a ‘fate’ as certainty is truth. If going for an outing was ‘truth’ confining ourselves to the homes because of this uncertain event (pandemic) is a ‘fate’. These intrinsic dualistic truths of darkness/light, suffering/happiness, logic/superstition have been here and will continue to be here as long as world (universe) is. If we leaf through the historical and philosophical thought of human suffering and happiness, these are our universal existential truths just like the one ‘sun rises in east’; this continuous cyclical reality of our life keeps on reminding us the positioning of our being vis-à-vis ‘cosmos’. Rumi gives us the mystical symphony and quintessence of embracing ‘uncertainty’ in our lives as “On what is fear: non-acceptance of uncertainty. If we accept that uncertainty, it becomes an adventure”.
Uncertainty clothes itself into ‘tragedies’ and ‘moments of happiness’ alike. When we seek through the cause of ‘uncertain’ events we usually find a microscopic ‘microbe’ shaking the citadels of our existence. There is a ‘spatial’ aspect of uncertainty getting more widespread as the ‘forms’ of uncertainty usually varies within a region. The incidence and angst of facing these ‘indeterminate’ realties can never be the same for the persons from Moscow to Paris and from South Sudan to Somalia. These ‘cartographic’ underbellies of uncertainty in both the individual/public dichotomies have made visible the ‘praxis’ of conflict/threats around the world.
When one considers deeply the ‘uncertain’ dimension of our lives there is a unique sense of ‘delight’ and ‘contentment’, no matter how adverse the situations become. When one contemplates the religious significance of ‘uncertainty’ one locates the value of it in our ‘eternal quest’ for ‘meaningful’ life. Islam has highly stressed on the holistic concept of Imaan, and uncertainty as a phenomenon is at the centre in that frame of reference. Imaan in this context refers submitting oneself to the cause/effect dialectics of ‘events’ that come our way and uncertainty being the essential one of that.
Tailpiece
Perennial truths and existential realities when seen together comfort us if any event or happening crosses our way, as this virus has. This is the everyday reflection on life, but sometimes we just brush it under the rug by turning to a realm of ephemeral where there is only prioritising of ‘temporary’ ideals rather than the beauty of permanence; it is this beauty of permanence which leads us to seeing light the end of the tunnel.
In this time of ‘pandemic onslaught’ just navigate yourself in the stream of your everyday existential realities that you experience, and soar high in hope, happiness, flow and meaningful stretches. Don’t just give into the scare and ‘plague’ of over-information/mis-information this time, sometimes just a reflective gaze into our ‘lives’ takes us to the stream of ‘bliss’. Times would just sail as the ‘time’ itself and memories would remain, as Coronavirus would be.
Mir Sajad is a Research Scholar, Department of Geography and Regional Development University of Kashmir