There are all kinds of diseases: of body and soul, visible and invisible, curable and fatal. Ancient Greeks considered disease a disruption of order, for medieval man it was God’s scourge. The man of the 19th century believed that scientific progress would one day unravel all the body’s secrets, but, with the dawn of the new century, it became clear that knowing the body was not enough – we set out to weigh the soul. The thought arises that a healthy person is just an illusion, or, to paraphrase the classic, all healthy people are alike, and all sick people are ill in their own way.
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Not only a person can be sick, but also a generation – each has its own anatomy of ailments. The symptom of our time is radical cynicism, which has already become the uniform and main attribute of today’s intellectual. And now – on the white door of the doctor’s office hangs a poster from which a sterile, as if soulless, face stares out, pierced through by a peroxide-white smile (some kind of antithesis to baroque vanitas vanitatum). A head unburdened by thoughts rests on hands, and below the modern still life is the inscription: “A perfect smile – in your hands.” Another nauseating exhortation – believe, dream, don’t give up. Understand – you, human, can do anything. Indeed, from childhood we are taught to believe in ourselves, therefore, having reached just a quarter of a century, some of us having already managed to complete the list of books mandatory to read by the age of 40 (one lecturer’s invention), we cannot comprehend one line from the Holy Scripture: “A person can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven.” Although we understand individual words, some better, some worse, the meaning of this line is unknown to many of us. Best of all, of course, we know what a human is. Although we have ideologically moved away from Mieželaitis, the image of a giant with feet firmly planted on the globe, hands supporting the sun, one who is always against, above, and if he has to fit, it’s only between the earth and the sun, is close to today’s person. We understand even better what it means to take (avoiding gravitating into tasteless preaching, I will not elaborate on the thought). Launching a rocket a couple of times a year, we look up at the sky, so we approximately recognize this meaning as well. It is considerably more difficult to understand the concepts of cannot and not given, because today’s person does not need permission, he knows – go and take.
A reader of refined taste should already be nauseated by pseudo-intellectual indignation. I remember a social advertisement hanging near my home more than a decade ago: “I litter for you, you litter for me, and we all live in trash.” We have learned to sort waste, but the culture of cynicism is still prevalent. Is there a way to ask questions, to object in such a way that public discourse does not turn into a landfill? So, here it would be worth stopping the indignation and looking around. Everything around is white: whitewashed walls, doctors in white coats hurrying back and forth. Is white the color of cleanliness, light, or capitulation? For people sitting on artificial leather couches outside doctors’ offices, the 21st-century philosophical postulate go and take does not apply. Only one thing remains – to hope and expect that it is given. If capitulation is one of the alternatives, can hope be considered a struggle? From a biblical perspective, the antonym of fear is not courage, but faith – Christ asked the disciples caught in a storm: “Why are you so timid? Do you still lack faith?” So, in this case, hope does not necessarily mean to fight.
I look around again. No sign of struggle anywhere: we all sit silent, calm, meek. Does hope mean believing that this too shall pass? Tuto, pasą – a tattoo on a friend’s forearm comes to mind. I used to stare at it for a long time, trying to decode its meaning on my own. In the first weeks in philology, I wrote on my right forearm with a black pen: signifier – marker, signified – marked, and on my left, I drew two intersecting segments – a horizontal one, which I supplemented with the note syntagm, and a vertical one, next to which I wrote paradigm. Back then, it seemed to me that these concepts could be used to explain not only linguistic phenomena but also the most important existential questions. With the right vocabulary, I could finally articulate my experiences, for example, to wonder how often form exists without content or to argue that not only words but also people are connected by syntagmatic (mutual) and paradigmatic (human and God) relationships. Although back then, using these concepts, I felt capable of explaining anything (oh, holy naivety!), the signified and signifier of my friend’s tattoo raised questions.
“Tutto passa – Tuto, pasą, you understand?”, he replied when asked. – This too shall pass, and this too will pass.” It turns out that this is an ironic distortion (you can’t call it a paraphrase) of a phrase derived from the story of King Solomon’s ring, which was supposed to cheer him up when sad and sadden him when happy. Allegedly, it’s nonsense to claim that everything passes – there are things that will torment forever, so all that’s left is to mock them. The first Road Traffic Rule is mutual respect, the first article in the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania: “The State of Lithuania is an independent democratic republic,” and the first advice for those who want to avoid bitterness is not to write an autobiography before sixty and not to get tattoos instilling life truths for at least the first thirty years of life (later you understand that truth is a concept requiring a stereometric, not geometric, perspective, and the desire for tattoos passes naturally). That time I joked that folk wisdom would suit the other forearm: “It will heal before the wedding,” but now, thinking about the meaning of hope, I realize I cannot define it precisely, yet I know – irony, cynicism, so sweet, empowering, is the antithesis of hope. Hope requires giving up pride, being humble, grateful. To know how to suffer.
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In cases of acute pain, doctors often ask to rate it on a scale from one to ten. Various types of measurements, as befits a linguist, ignite my imagination. We, humans, cannot agree on the most basic concepts, yet a second, a kilogram, a watt, a mole, an ampere mean the same thing in every corner of the world. Mikalojus Daukša, contemplating the importance of his native language, fantasmagorically imagined what would happen “if a crow wanted to sing like a nightingale, and a nightingale – to croak like a crow, a goat – to roar like a lion, and a lion – to bleat like a goat,” and it still worries me how the world would change if we suddenly stopped agreeing on when one second has passed or how many watts are needed to fulfill the will let there be light. For this, there is the concept of a standard – not just an idea, but an artifact. For example, until 2019, the standard for the kilogram was the International Prototype Kilogram, a cylinder of platinum and iridium, kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. The kilogram has a prototype, so it is a reliable measure. But how to measure pain? Each of us carries its standard within ourselves.
Lately, I’ve noticed another phenomenon – with a war happening in the nearby neighborhood, people tell other people’s war stories: doctors tell of refugee patients, teachers of students hiding from the war. Most often, they are full of grotesque details, long and vivid. It gives the impression that they are their own. Previously, as soon as a conversationalist started telling such a story, I would interrupt them, annoyed – it seemed indecent to talk about someone else’s pain as if it were one’s own. Now I listen more often, because, unlike a kilogram, pain is difficult to measure. How should a patient’s pain be rated on a scale, compared to a soldier’s wound, an orphan’s loneliness? How to measure, weigh – calculate depth, width, volume, weight? Listening to recounted war stories, I understand that every ache, corresponding to a person’s personal pain standard, is acceptable, and recounted foreign stories often become a way to experience one’s own fear, which under a peaceful sky seems illegitimate, to express one’s own sorrows, which in current circumstances are often dismissed as unimportant, and to receive compassion, hoping that the kilogram, the second, and pain will return to their former standard limits.
I grew up hearing from those around me that I didn’t know what the Soviet era was, and therefore hadn’t experienced real hardships. I hoped I wouldn’t experience anything similar. Even the most prominent historical minds predicted the end of history. According to Francis Fukuyama, we reached the end of history – we stopped searching for a better alternative to the system, because liberal democracy remained the only idea without a serious competitor. It is precisely here that a dangerous sense of stability arises – the conviction that the peak is the final state. However, it is worth considering the paradox – having reached the peak, the only way to move forward is to go down. Sisyphus is condemned to roll a stone up a mountain for eternity, and a person who has reached the peak is constantly rolling down from it. Just as Albert Camus suggested imagining Sisyphus happy, so too is it worth imagining the 21st-century person as having hope – understanding that personal or civilizational achievement is inevitably followed by decline, but finding the strength to rise again. Thus, hope is not a promise of stability, but the ability, while recognizing the limitations of human nature, to nurture expectations, to create and recreate. This algorithm has been seen many times in history – each epoch is born from the ruins of the previous one, simultaneously carrying the seed of its own end. The last time this formula was evidenced by the rise of postmodern art: after the Second World War, traditional forms seemed incapable of articulating the scale of the catastrophe. Although the German philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that writing a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric, Paul Celan’s German-written “Death Fugue” made it clear that aesthetic form is not cynicism in the face of catastrophe – it is a space where trauma takes shape, and shape gains meaning. Signified and signifier, marking humanity’s indestructible desire to find meaning.
Glancing at the clock – it’s almost my turn to enter the office – I turn once more to my companions in fate. A young woman sits nearby, clutching a baby in her arms. It moves, writhes, squirms – poking out a tiny foot or miniature fingers, which the mother soon carefully hides in a diaper. The wrapped child whimpers, sighs, cries. As if trying to apologize for disturbing the silence and peace, the mother looks up: “Teething. Has a fever.” I observe for a moment. After all, this is a conscious choice, the greatest act of hope. In the face of war and adversity, not only to live, but also to condemn or bless (sacer in Latin means both cursed and blessed) offspring to life. “The world is ending, therefore / one must write poems,” – wrote Aidas Marčėnas and he was right. In a world that ends daily, hope, unfortunately, is not the opposite of fear, death, or disease. Hope is the reason to write a poem, to check the mailbox, to buy children’s shoes for a feverish child, hoping that one day they will be outgrown.
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“Teething (hope)”, – I think to myself and open the office door. My time.
