Wait and Hope... Wait and Hope...

The Count of Monte Cristo signs off with this message. But I guess we are all living aided by this cane of life (or shall I say cain?). Are we not living a purposeless life making purpose out of things which we know will not bear fruit. Is it cyclical behaviour or is it habit? Our purpose in life is to create it for ourselves, follow it knowing it is a creation of our imagination and hence fictitious. We constantly strive to define, to give meaning to our work, our life, presicely because we know there isn't any meaning to it, for if it had one we wouldn't be defining it. What is the ultimate aim, the outcome, the end of it all? Nothing. It was nothing all the way long. We just pretended to see a path. We were told to see it, told it exists, made to believe we walk it, and we did just that feeling helpless carrying this burden of creating a world out of nothingness, as apart from this we could do nothing! We have been here from centuries, waiting, waiting for someone to give us direction, show the right path, the divine way of living, waiting under this tree to see it bear fruit, internalising the unfruitfullness of our wait, waiting for someone.... he will come... we know he will come, the one we are waiting for... what do we do now?... I don't know... lets leave... we can't... why not?... bcause we are waiting... Waiting for Godot.

Ok enough of me trying to be philosophical, absurdist, existensialist, blah blah whatever you may want to call it. Lets snap back to reality. I was reading a play by Samuel Beckett titled Waiting for Godot which has tiggered this blog. Samuel Beckett was a great playwright of the existentialist era. He was from the absurdist theatre group. Absurdism, existentialism were philosophies which suddenly sprouted post the WW-I/II scene in Europe. Seeing the abyss in which mankind had fallen some people questioned the necessity of it all, while others answered them by demonstrating the futility of it all as also that of life.

Waiting for Godot, is one of the major plays by Beckett. It is just a few absurd lines being spoken on stage. Imagine an extempore speech where you are thrown on stage with no time to prepare, not given any topic or asked to speak on something like "life". What will happen to you? You will speak some incoherent stuff as it pops in your mind. Imagine that four such people have been sent on stage and asked to make a dialogue. Well talking just gets tougher. That's just how this play seems st the most superficial level. The most incoherent part is the speech given by Lucky. It sets you wondering as to what was the author thinking when he wrote this play? Then as you start pealing the layers one by one, you discover new intriguing faces of the play. Yes the play is a bunch of absurd lines, but it is a portrayal of life at the same time. The play has repeated dialogues under similar settings which give you a feeling of deja vu. But isnt life so too? Does man ever learn from mistakes and learn to live in peace. Progress in life is inevitable but with progress corruption is inevitable. So there is nothing like true progress in reality. These plays attack the chronology of things and their rationality. They believe comprehending existence is beyond the rational self of man. To understand the nothingness in all that surrounds us is dangerous, as such knowledge will cause everything to implode. Especially man's inflated ego. So to make things meaningful we create beliefs and central to them is the belief in God. If we remove the centre, a singularity most situations loose meaning. The centre is the focus of every action and all our life revolves around it. So where is this centre? We do not know. How can we detach ourselves from it? Do we risk losing everything, everymeaning from our life? We shall never know. All our life we will search that focus towards which we spiral, the quest never ending, how much ever close we come we find ourselves equally far away.

The question then is - do we search this meaning, this centre which defines us? Or do we live in this mirage created by us clutching this meaning to our hearts? That is left to us. Afterall we are all caught in a whorl - one taking us out into nothingness freeing us of meaning, another drawing us in, giving meaning which means nothing.

Interested people can check out this link of Beckett which has his texts on-line. You will find the above mentioned play there.
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/