In the classical tragedy, the hero fights against fate. The ending is already clear, and nothing the hero does, will change the outcome. Tragedy arises from this positionality. Caught between the now and the inevitable then, resistance is necessary but futile. Resistance is the resistance against death, the fight to stay alive against all odds, to stay moral in a world of immorality. All choices that have to be made only pertain to the interim between one’s own life and one’s own death. Nothing that is left behind either punishes or rewards us ourselves – even though we know deep down that we don’t know, and that is even more tragic – or we can just give up. This is our freedom. We know that it ends, that it all ends, our lives, the lives of our friends and family, our country, our civilizations, our planet, our sun, our universe. Everything dies.
This tragic truth however is not bad news. It just is. It is up to us to fill our lives with what we want. Is that a license to do evil? Maybe religion was invented for a reason, maybe we need the notion of an immortal soul that could be damaged by our choices in life. I don’t know. none of us knows. But whether or soul is mortal or immortal, whether we call it our soul or our psyche, whether we call it eschatology or psychology, suffering is suffering, and joy is joy. We either cause happiness or pain, and if we cause it in others, we know, deep down, we will cause it in ourselves. It is not difficult, and we all know that.
Do I choose to cause happiness or pain today? Certainly, sometimes we do have to make difficult choices. Sometimes temporary pain is necessary to gain greater joy. Different perspectives need to be navigated, compromises need to be made, negotiations need to happen, and we surely don’t benefit from simplistic certainty about what is right and what is wrong. This is the other tragedy of life: We all make mistakes, there are no absolutes except the certainties of our fallibility and eventual death.
But again, this too needs to be embraced as liberating. Realizing the inevitable is the only way to psychologically manage our tragic situation, and to see the dark, maybe even divine comedy behind it all. Either this cosmic joke is on us, or we realize that we can laugh about ourselves, so that in the end we can say that we have understood our suffering and turned it into something worth living with, and even worth living for.
Erratic Attempts 