Daily Times

When you have nothing to do, the first afterthought is to reset. World’s newspapers get flooded with the word. Reset capitalism, reset democracy, reset the relationship with nature, and so on. True, all greatness comes from the school of adversity: an optimistic approach in devastating times, nevertheless, the question remains, who are the agents of change? Do they agree with the notion?

Well, the human mind is a complex machine. It becomes more complex in manifestation when it turns into systems, states, and governance. The frustration dulled human faculty worldwide as it did during every horrific pandemic in human history. The uncertainty frantically dominates the culture, economy, and politics over horizontal and vertical tangents of the globe. So, what next?

Weaving dream of a more rational and cooperative world afterwards demands some hard work, or the frustration would have some predictable outcomes naturally? The history validates that well-thought pain management transforms adversity into opportunity, which if taken for granted, the outcome is likely to be nothing but more adversity.

Plato (370BC, The Republic) excluded the people of aesthetics from the state affairs. Compounded in abstractness, moved by imitation, the artists stand far away from the real discourse of social architecture, he argued. But what next if the architecture gets collapsed? Who will rebuild the emotions, hopes, and intellect back to the normal? The assertion is beautifully tackled by Aristotle, his own mentee, that aesthetics heal because it is interesting to see the life how it is, but it is even more interesting to see the life how it can be.

Weaving dream of a more rational and cooperative world afterwards demands some hard work

Overwhelmed by economic interests, a larger part of the political structure remains indifferent-unable to stay considerate in the atrocity, but only if it serves the larger pursuits of power, fame, and capital. The personal aesthetic preference, spiritual growth, and a quest to re-envision the key determinants for fulfilment in life are the tools to re-engineer the societal process after a painful spell of emotional instability.

In the 13th century, a Persian-Muslim poet, mystic, a polymath Sa’adi wrote a simple but amazingly penetrating poem “Bani Adam” (The Human Being), decorating the walls of the United Nations building in New York today. He signalled belongingness to be the secret of foreverness.

“Human beings are members of a whole,

in the creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,

other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,

the name of human you cannot retain.”

Writers, artists, historians, and painters add on to the wisdom, memory, and introspection to the dead depository of human history.

“These breathed death in every place, and upon everybody who came near them; nay, their very clothes retained the infection, their hands would infect the things they touched.”

These lines are taken from “A Journal of the Plague Year,” written by Daniel Defoe in 1772, a vivid chronicle tracing the plight of the citizens in London and environs during the Great Bubonic Plague in 1664. There is an astounding resemblance between the events and responses. The governments tempered the death records and tried escapism at that time also.

Published in 1827, “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni is a remarkable aesthetic expression; a love story enduring the tyranny, war, famine, and plague. Manzoni’s artistic masterpiece stimulates the human enterprise to face the terrible expansion of disease and occupation simultaneously. The novel interknits the torment, belief, justice, power, and society into a sweeping epic wrapped in the ribbons of romance. It has long been considered one of Italy’s literary classics and also elaborates on the remonstrations against the government’s sluggish response to the 1630 plague in Milan.

During the hard times, 1605-06, Shakespeare penned three remarkable tragedies. “God knows How many ages shall those lofty scenes be acted in states unborn and accents yet unknown.” How true! He transformed atrocity into aesthetics. He conceived “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” as London bled from the foiled Gunpowder Plot and an outbreak of the bubonic plague the next year. He navigated the calamity as, “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.”

Inspired by Defoe’s ” A Journal of the Plague Year,” Colombian Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “The Love in the Time of Cholera (1985),” an amalgam of struggle, disease, longing, love, lust, hopes, frustration, and enterprise.

GGM weaves a tale that is carried along upon some of the most sublime and vivid sentences ever penned. This alone would elevate the work to the pinnacle of aesthetics.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” (1349-1353); Albert Camus’s “The Plague” (1947); Stephen King’s “The Stand” (1978); Jose Saramago’s “Blindness” (1995) and Philip Roth’s “Nemesis” (2010) are the few works dissecting human behaviour, delight, misery, strength, hope and resolve to live and cherish during the times of a collective catastrophe. Humans always dreamed of a utopian island having no pain, epidemic, as was comprehended by Thomas More in his famous “Utopia” (1516). Instead of escaping it is pragmatically beautiful to blend the pain with ecstasy and master not only the inner self but also the world around. Only the artists can do it, not the power-parasites.

The writer is an academic and public policy researcher