A Sad Life Chronicle

Portuguese nau, by Alfredo Roque Gameiro

Disclaimer to non-Brazilians: the following essay contains references to a traditional football/soccer team from Rio de Janeiro, the city I live. The team in question is named Vasco da Gama, after the famous Portuguese explorer from the late 1400s, but we normally just call it "Vasco." In the last two and a half decades, the team has become synonymous with loss, despair, and even death, that's how bad their situation has become. Still, it is beloved by many, having the one of the largest fan bases in Brazil. The essay also references some of Rio's affluent neighborhoods in the Barra da Tijuca region of the city. The title in Portuguese is "Crônica vascaína da vida", and it would be more directly translated to "Vascaína Life Chronicle", "Vascaína" here is an adjective written in feminine form, because "vida" (life in Portuguese) is a feminine noun. Vascaína or vascaíno means "something pertaining to Vasco da Gama."  

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Here in Rio de Janeiro, in Barra da Tijuca by all indications, by the Barra Olímpica area, near the Península and Rio2 high rise condominiums, a man ended his own life by jumping from the roof of one of those 12-14 story residential buildings. A terrible, hellish, terrifying scene. He was wearing a Vasco jersey, the beloved and troubled football team. His glassy eyes were fixed on the sky, motionless, as was his entire body. His mouth was slightly open. His face was slightly deformed, as the bones of his face were fractured inside the skin, which luckily didn't break in the front, although his skull was completely sunken in the back. Around him were pieces of bone, brains, and viscera that had leaked from his ruptured abdomen. He appeared to be between his early 30s and early 40s, maybe a little more, or maybe even less. A man. Decades ago, this guy was born. Perhaps his parents were emotional, tears of happiness on their faces seeing that baby. Then came the fights, of course, and the reconciliations. A life of struggles, challenges, problems, loves, that culminated in that ending with him crashing onto the concrete floor after jumping from the 14th floor of a building in Barra da Tijuca wearing a Vasco da Gama jersey.

His life goes from that beautiful moment of love and tenderness that must have been his birth, a moment filled with dreams and plans, filled with the idea of ​​an open future, a future full of possibilities, to that burst sack of meat with brains and guts and blood and feces lying there on the hard, dirty floor of the condominium, being scrutinized by curious eyes and cameras. What a pity. How sad! Life is a joke. And we are the ones being mocked. Life laughs at us, it's not laughing with us. We are the victims of the malicious joke, and the best we can do is dance so this insane tyrant can laugh for a few decades. Then, we begin to rot from the inside and become useless to the tyrant. Some go sooner, others later, most don't go willingly, some go willingly, but in the end, life keeps laughing, it just laughs, since it's a maniac. It's hard to imagine that in the beginning of the Homo sapiens births were charged with as much emotion as births are today. Even in classical antiquity, people basically had multiple children just to see which ones survived early childhood. Cute stories, like those of Jesus' birth, complete with tens of thousands of religious icons and Renaissance paintings, are the exception.

In classical antiquity, child abandonment was very common. It was considered a less barbaric way to get rid of them. This leads me to believe that the murder of one's own children was common and acceptable in various ancient societies and human groups. Things tend to be forbidden because their practice was widespread, as seen in the various prohibitions against human sacrifices in the Old Testament. These types of sacrifices were made not only to other gods, but also to Yahweh. Consider Jephthah, one of the judges of Israel, who lived around 1100 BC. He vowed to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his door to God if the Israelites won the battle against the Ammonites. The battle was won, and the first thing that came out of his door was his daughter, whom he sacrificed, and God gladly accepted. If there is a prohibition, it is because the practice existed. Before Jephthah, the book of Leviticus already forbade the Jews from sacrificing children to Molech. But the practice of sacrificing people to Yahweh continued here and there. It was only more vehemently ended with the reforms of King Josiah, who ruled the kingdom of Judah between 640 and 610 BC.

If we consider the Neolithic and Paleolithic periods, things get even stranger and more bizarre. Detachment was certainly the norm. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 200,000 years, with more recent discoveries placing that date closer to 300,000 years. But let's say it's 200,000 years. This means that if we took a time machine and transported a member of the H. sapiens species to the present day, however different they might appear in some traits, they would easily pass for one of us. They would be one of us, in fact. They could even procreate with one of us without a doubt. They are genetically closer to us than to Neanderthals, with whom they coexisted and even procreated on several occasions. So, my question is: did these humans from 200,000 years ago cry with emotion when they defecated their offspring into the world? Did they see an open future with new possibilities, new directions? Or were they "on autopilot," as were the other animals that preceded them on the evolutionary scale? Furthermore, isn't the current emotional outburst that occurs when we bring someone new into the world something we do "on autopilot"?

While we go through life thinking that our emotions and complaints related to the "business of life" are cultural aspects that exist beyond our biological machinery, while we imagine that humanity has transcended the rest of our foetid forest brethren, it might just be that our emotional complaints are, in themselves, pure biology, pure adaptation. It may be that all these emotions are part of the machinery, which makes life even more insidious when we stop to think about it. Even our myths and religious and philosophical beliefs could be a way for our biology to keep us in line, to continue with the programming, a programming that has no purpose whatsoever and that, in fact, is killing the very biosphere that generated it, given that we humans have been releasing an absurd amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short time, about a century and a half, and gases of this type persist for a long time, causing the heat that the Earth receives from the Sun to be trapped inside it without being able to return to space.

People joke that human beings are like a virus, since a virus enters an organism and makes it sick and kills it. But all life behaves this way, not just humans, it just hasn't had the opportunity we've had. To believe that only we are evil while the rest of our brothers in the animal kingdom don't possess the same potential for destruction is rather laughable to me. I'm not saying this to absolve humanity, not at all. I'm saying this simply because I dislike idealism. There's a hint of begging the question fallacy when someone defends a radical dichotomy between human beings and the rest of the natural world, because we ourselves are sons and daughters of nature just as much as all other organisms. Cioran writes the following in The Trouble with Being Born:

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

I'll go beyond Cioran. I find him too humble in his statement. In my view, if you gave fruit flies sufficient intelligence and self-awareness, they would not only face the same existential and philosophical difficulties as humans, but they would also likely accumulate knowledge and develop to the point of threatening the biosphere, just as our species has done and continues to do to planet Earth. Life is a mechanism for accelerating entropy disguised as a mechanism that negates entropy. While, locally, in time and space, it seems that living beings organize themselves, accumulate energy to perform work and therefore negate entropy, in general, given sufficient time, we are like termites that destroy the wooden beams of the house where they live. Or not. It may very well be that life is indeed this miracle of chance. Or even, what would be much worse, a true miracle, something almost supernatural or panpsychist, which amounts to the same thing. None of this would change the horror to which life subjects her countless children. Only theologians and philosophers who proposed theodicies believe that any "higher purpose" would justify all that we go through to the point of making everything alright.

This is where I think Schopenhauer made a serious mistake in his philosophy. He placed too much of his pessimism on the idea that the world might not have existed. This isn't the only justification for his pessimism, he also alludes to the asymmetries between positive and negative states. But one of his central points is precisely that the cosmic will might not have engendered this terrible world, that it could have simply "kept wanting," to use a very crude expression from our common language. Schopenhauer makes the notion that the world did not need to exist central, which means that if it were demonstrated that the world is indeed necessary, then his rejection of the world would fall apart. He was foolish in doing so. Misfortune and pain alone are enough to condemn the world, regardless of whether there is some greater force, some rational cosmic force that demands them. I return here to the character of Ivan Karamazov, from the book The Brothers Karamazov, which I have mentioned before (and will keep doing so). Ivan tells his younger brother, the novice Alyosha, that the horrible sufferings of the world could never be justified by a wonderful afterlife in Paradise, and that he respectfully returns the ticket of existence to God. I agree. And I'll go further: the wretched condition faced by sentient beings in the world is even less justified by the world itself. In a way, it's even more foolish to think that the world itself justifies this wretched condition than it is to believe in a Paradise after death that will justify the world after we leave it.

Only in a rather complex and unstable way could we experience some kind of "Dionysian pessimism" or "nihilism of force" proposed by figures like Nietzsche, I think. Interesting notions, but difficult. So much so that, at the end of his sanity, before being completely overcome by the illness that left him bedridden until his death, upon seeing a horse being mercilessly whipped by a stage coach driver in Turin, he had a fit of compassion for the weak and harmless animal and ran to protect it with his arms. Numerous attempts have been and are still being made to justify this act. Some with more, others with less merit. I prefer the simple explanation that he recognized the same in-itself that resided in him in the horse, which made him compassionate and caused him to try to save the poor animal, something that went against much of what he formulated in his works. This, however, is often relegated to the background by his defenders, for whom the matter is always more complex: no, they say, he wasn't against all compassion, only that which is linked to the idea of making the morality of the weak universal, among other things. I respect the experts and the fans, but I disagree. And, again, his defense of the horse makes Nietzsche a much more interesting character to me. The true life affirmer in that situation was the stage coach driver. All the rhetoric of strength and the affirmation of one's own will dissolved in a final act of compassion.

The same compassion I feel for the poor wretch in that gruesome scene that occurred in Barra da Tijuca, here in Rio de Janeiro. A compassion that exists in me even though the poor guy has been dead for quite some time, even though his problems, at least from his point of view, have dissipated forever. A compassion that made me reflect on how that poor man must have been so loved, so embraced by his parents when he was born, on how they must have had so many fleeting moments of happiness, only to end that way, because of despair, while he was wearing his favorite football team's shirt. An endless sadness among so many others, a sadness so small compared to the deep ocean of sorrows that it becomes less than a drop. It's smaller than plankton, comparatively speaking. Or not. Perhaps he was defecated onto the world by his parents like humans of the ancient world and from the stone age did, and then was mistreated his entire life, and that final moment was his answer to a world that only spat in his face from a very young age. Or perhaps he was a complex person, like all of us, an angel to some, a demon to others. In any case, whether he was loved or not, I hope he has managed to find true peace now, ceasing to exist as that individual and having his consciousness evaporate with the death and decomposition of his nervous system. Cursed life!

To conclude, I think it's interesting to share an unusual piece of information. In the Portuguese written Wikipedia article on figures of speech, in the section on "dysphemism," a type of euphemism that consists of using a vulgar expression to humorously soften a terrible event, the example they use is literally the following: "He went to play for Vasco" (he died). Well, folks. In the long run, all species that have ever existed and become extinct have played for Vasco, just as we, who exist today and will one day cease to exist, have signed contracts to play for Vasco. Vasco has ceased to be a Portuguese explorer and has ceased to be a football team, it has become a metaphysical-existential symbol not only of the human condition, but of all life in the universe. We are all in line to play for Vasco, and there is no possibility of escaping it. But, honestly, arriving at Vasco, I mean, at death, is not the worst thing in that can happen. It is the undoing of the knot that was tied when we were conceived, it is the total liberation of the self, the eternal end of the greatest of burdens, which is the imposition of life. Eternal life, that would be hell. The nothingness that will come after, Vasco, is true nirvana, true paradise.

by Fernando Olszewski