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The fact that the grand system of life — of nature and
seasons, of flowering and shedding leaves, and the whole rhythm
of existence — goes on despite horrendous catastrophes, wars,
personal tragedies and mass burials etc only shows that there’s
surely a message and a meaning hidden like "word within the
word", and remains unavailing except to a visionary man in
labour, in thought, and in prayer. To decode that message, as I
have said earlier, often puts us in a Catch-22 situation where
ambiguity abides. Scores and scores of the greatest minds and
intellects have, in their quest, run into the rock-face of an
impenetrable reality, and thrown back to muse long and hard.
However, the search and the spiritual angst would not let such
souls rest in peace. In silence, they grieve, they cry like
children on "a darkling plane", and wait and wait and
wait....
This dilemma of
suffering has always and continually engaged the imaginations of
great writers, poets, painters and men of thought. From the
Greek tragedians to the Shakespearian and beyond, they all have
remained embroiled in a ceaseless battle with the conundrum of
suffering. Even in the Story of Job in the Bible,
and in similar symbolic fables in other faiths, the question
remains a profound mystery. Even in the midst of earnest prayers
and meditations, the dark night of pain remains to touch and
move "the imagination of disaster", to use a Henry
James phrase.
Wordsworth, who as
a poet of nature took a transcendent view of existence and in
his Ode to Immortality sang of "the
intimations" of divinity, too was driven to despair when
his vision began to darken in the end, and wrote thus in The
Borderers, a poem of deep sound and suffering. "The
world", he sang, "was poisoned at the heart". In
his view then human suffering was something permanent,
"dark and obscure", and the creature man could do
little about it. Similarly, in King Lear, even in that
pagan world there is, towards the close, a scene in which the
broken, bruised king has, as the critic, A.C. Bradley, observed,
a vision of his crucified daughter Cordelia "in
paradise", as it were. A little earlier when his suffering
had touched sublime heights after the hanging of his dearest
child, he saw life as a crown of thorns: ‘....
"....but I am
bound upon a wheel of fire that
mine own tears
Do scald like
molten lead...."
Thus, the total
helplessness of man before the awesome tragedy of unmerited
suffering seems to be balanced in the last scene, and
Shakespeare describes the chastened king and his innocent
daughter as "God’s spies" in whom the mystery of
things remains inviolate.
Does suffering
effect catharsis in the Aristotelian sense as all tragedy does?
Or, to put it differently, does suffering of a certain order act
as a detergent of the human soul, leaving it cleansed of all
human impurities, leaving you light in a bud-like way, tied,
wounded, but still free, light, perched as though on a tree with
the music of airs and waters in your ears. A victory had come
with surrender and understanding. Why, then, suffering may even
ennoble a man.
Protracted
suffering can either destroy one’s spirit and cripple him in
his very self and being, or enable one to develop new muscles to
live in a settled, serene state of mind which brings me to my
readings in Sikh scriptures where in scores of sublime hymns,
suffering is seen as ordained, but still a redeeming agent of nirvana.
Seen thus, such martyrdoms as those of Guru Arjan Dev and of
Guru Tegh Bahadur, amongst others, become a mark of divinity.
Doubts in regard
to the mystery of suffering are natural, and not even the great
prophets and saints have been left untouched by uncertainty in
the end. Even Jesus Christ, seemingly in anguish cries out: ‘Why
hast thou deserted me, O Lord?’ However, the ineffable smile
later seen in the paintings of the Renaissance masters,
particularly in those of Raphael and El Greco, once again, makes
suffering on the scaffold something divine, something that
passes understanding.
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