Never have things become as much clear and apprehensible to us as they are today. Everything is blatant today. What belongs to the individual does neither necessarily belong to society and nor should it be. Never should it have been an obligation for us, lovers of Truth, Beauty and Freedom, to buy everything society is selling. For society, be it the family, the community or the people appropriated, seems, I believe, to have taken everything from us including our dreams and ambitions and left nothing to us except the words we are writing. Society has confiscated our dreams. Society has confiscated our ambitions. Everything is clear today. It is certainly clear because even those whom we have thought are sharing our dreams and ambitions have lost them and then painfully said that he who thinks differently is wrong and good for nothing.
True, we are wrong and good for nothing. For if we are not, what meaning is there or will be out of protesting against something called society while, at the same time, we are waiting for it to hold us by the arms and then, as time goes on, we, ourselves, forget about our dreams and our ambitions? For, again, if we are not, what meaning is there or will be of thinking about home, innocence and place? I am afraid that if I go on this way, I will be plunged into an endless desert of questions and nothing will quench our thirst for true answers except the One who is above (greatest and exalted be He). But so long as questioning is a key to knowledge, I will go on asking questions and hence, in so doing, I will be thinking for myself. No human being will ever think for me and pretend to offer me answers to my questions.
And if it will happen, as it does now, that my questions are bad ones, it will also happen, at least, that my answers, however futile or successful they can be, will serve the quest for a meaningful way out and offer me, in this respect, the platform I need to go on thinking for myself and asking more questions. And we have the courage and agathy to think for ourselves and follow our ambitions and dreams to their quixotic and, maybe, tragic endings. For to make an end, T. S. Eliot rightly said, is to make a beginning. Here is Plato in his Allegory of the Cave without critical intervention afterwards:
"And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,
And to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?"
Let me close up this space of thought only to open it up again with this poem I entitle Ode to Love and Beauty. For life is a mystery. It goes on despite the enemies of it: the enemies of Truth. And if nobody holds the truth, they do not seem to understand. I will therefore continue to write for life and say that:
Having said what I said,
Having done what I did,
I will never keep my head
short of spirit or down with regret.
Alone in my agony, alone in
my dynasty, I will stand still
and dig and have things to hammer out.
Shall I stop? Shall I thus wait and weep?
I weep but not at this time
in this place when my words
have turned without sense
without platform to feel pride
and swing aimlessly like birds.
O brothers and sisters of shared
Love and Beauty, keep working
keep living keep soaring in silence.
Chokri Omri
Tunis, le 23-05-2011
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