Towards an Inclusive Vision

Dr. V. V.B. RAMA RAO
M. R. College, Vizianagaram

This is not a matter relating to the optometrist, still less is it one of tilting your spectacles with the tip of your middle finger on to the bridge of your nose for greater comfort of visibility. It is one of developing a sane, cheerful and healthy outlook on life and things in general. It is said that the mind in its own place can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. More pragmatically, it is your own attitude to things which can make your life pleasurable or otherwise. The comic and the tragic perspectives are two different ways of looking at life. The comic is said to be more pleasing and in the long run life-giving. The tragic perspective contributes to creating a salutary effect by sobering down the effervescent ripples of risibility. Horace Walpole is said to have epigramati­cally remarked: “The world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.” Human beings are both thinking and feeling beings and both thought and feeling are natural and necessary. By Walpole’s implication our perception should subsume both the attitudes. What is important is a balance, a quality of comprehension that saints have acquired over the years by cultivating and perfecting thought and by subduing feeling. This occurs in moments of realization in great poets as when a character in Shakespeare said, “Ripeness is all.” The tragic view of life stresses man’s involvement in evil and the resultant pain and suffering and it has its value in the faith at least in the hope that man’s confrontation with evil will be followed by an illuminating insight or the poetic quality. But the drawis that it leaves the impression of waste and a final taste of bitterness to those who wear these gloomy spectacles. The Spanish thinker Miguel Unamuno found that the root of the tragic vision of life is in the hunger of man’s heart for personal immortality. However, man’s nobler faculty, reason, tells him it is a dream. Contradiction, may be inner or outer, is the basis for the tragic perspective. If Unamuno’s is one of “knowing contradictions” the Existentialist Kierkegaard’s is the “suffering contradiction.” Schopenhauer finds that it is the finality of tragedy that satisfies us –that the end brings peace because all is over, the story is complete, the rest is silence.

But real life is not merely reading a book and enjoying a tragedy in the armchair or in the auditorium. It is different being a protagonist in the drama that is life. A drama is unreal –at least imaginary–while life is real. The tragic lens makes one gloomy and renders life only a period of pain. But the same suffering and pain, irradiated in perception through a comic lens makes life livable if not entirely pleasurable. We want to live, notwithstanding the pain that attends on it and is subsumed in it. We will do well to equip ourselves to face all contingencies with adjustable comic lenses. A study of the processes of the comic effect (not merely the risible) enables us to have a firmer grip on ourselves and a cheerful grasp of the reality. Looked through this magic lens ofour own making the painful comes nearer to being absurd. This in its turn brings us nearer to the comic interpretation and a deeper perception of life.

A comprehensive attitude must explain and account for the “human condition.” Hazlitt once wrote: “To explain the nature of laughter and tears is to account for the condition of human life, for it is in a manner compounded of the two.” Palmer; a recent writer on comedy, elucidated, Walpole’s aphorism: “To the man of intellect who stands aside looking critically at life as at a procession of amusing figures, life is a comedy. It intrigues the intellect. It is stuff of paradoxes. It is compact of irony and absurd mischance, a festival of fools. To the man of quick feeling, easily vibrating with sympathy with his kind life, on the other hand, is a tragedy.” The advantage ofhaving a comic perspective is that the insight of comedy is directed upon the meaningless aspects of life’s contradictions and upon the absurdity inherent in human acts, roles and projects. This perspective implies an acceptance of man with all his weaknesses and failures. This makes us realize what could really be expected of frail mortals. Acceptance paves the way to forgiveness. This makes the comic lens more realistic, practical and sane in that it enables the wearer to be compassionate and comprehending.

Writers on the comic mode in literature have enunciated the beneficial properties of the comic perspective. Feibleman wrote: “Comedy is an antidote to error.” The lens of comedy sharpens our perception of the comic spirit and thereby improves our perspective. The comic perspective is as inclusive as it is heterogeneous and it sharpens our understanding of laughter and tears. It arms us with a rich sense of humour and a sort of philosophical amusement at all the superiorities and inferiori­ties. According to Susanne Langer, life is compounded of the tragic rhythm and the comic rhythm. The two combine and in effect they never remain in isolation. The maturation of vision implies a progress towards the comic perspective. This kind of maturation is evident in the greatest writers of the world like Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare. In them as in the great writers of all times and climes the tragic is absorbed by and assimilated into the comprehensive, all-embracing comic.

Life being a strangely disparate mixture of the tragic and the comic, you will have to acquire a perspective that can react healthily to all situations. Susanne Langer wrote: “The fact that the two great rhythms, comic and tragic, are radically distinct does not mean that they are each other’s opposites or even incompatible forms. Tragedy can rest squarely on a comic substructure and yet be pure tragedy. This is natural enough, for life from which all felt rhythms spring contains both in every mortal organism.”

The implication for all enthusiastic livers is to cultivate serenity and equanimity, cheerfulness and compassion. Only adjusting your lenses makes the cultivation easy. Nothing is either entirely tragic or entirely comic. More often than not, there is a trace of the one in the other. Generally speaking, life is more comic than tragic. Reviewing a film nearly five decades ago, Graham Greene wrote in what then was only a flash of insight: “The truth is seldom tragic for human beings are not made in that grand way. The truth may be sad but truth is nearly always funny.” In a recent novel one of his characters avers: “Contrary to common belief, truth is nearly always funny. It’s only tragedy which people bother to invent or imagine.” The French playwright Anouilh declared: “The only virile attitude to take in the face of the human condition is to laugh at it.”

If the greatest works in literature have reflected, inclusive vision, the greatest of the scriptures, the Bhagavadgita, has identified this attitude much earlier as the quality of the learned ones. The Lord enjoins us to practise and to propagate the saint’s eye-view, Sama Drishti. The spiritually evolved have this faculty:

            Vidya vinajyasampanne brahmane gavi hastini
            Sunicaiva swapake ca panditah samadarsinah

Pandits, Jnanis look upon the learned Brahmin who has a wealth of humility, the cow, the elephant, the dog and the cooker and eater of dog’s meat with Sama Drishti, equal temper of mind.
Bhagavadgita, 5. 18.

The equanimity of the saint is the power he derives from this attitude. Catholic saint, St. Juliana, said:

Sin is behovely
All shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well.

Sin or man’s incapacity to escape from error and suffering, can become behovely without disconcerting one if there is a proper inward discipline and an ability to look at things in their perspective. He is the Nityasantushta, the one above all dualities, and nearest to the Almighty of the Gita.

To laugh at life needs maturation, not flippancy or insensibility. While trying to get a larger and more valid perspective on life, adjust your lenses and see for yourself how you have gone a step forward in the process of maturation.