The Beauty of Disorder

ibn-firnas

Mundane life is the source of all evil, and the roots of sadness and fear. In madness, pursuing peculiar goals, and hunting the mirage on the horizon, lies the precious secrets of life. It’s where the renaissance of art, and the salvation from the boundaries of mortality and sin begin. This bizarre philosophy however, means locking up the soul in an endless loop of torment, and being vulnerable to disappointment and insecurity.

When Abbas bin Firnas climbed a tower in Andalusia (Southernmost region of Spain), driven by his utter madness and passion to fly like birds, he veered away from the normality that dictates that humans should move about on two legs, or hub on those that walked on four legs equipped with a saddle or connected to a carriage. He was climbing the tower amid a large crowd of people murmuring, giggling and pointing at him. He was ascending burdened by two large wooden wings stitched up with feather, and a heavy inner voice that was shouting: “Stop! go back to your house, Now!””You’re making yourself look like a fool!”. “Do you feel this beautiful morning breeze? look at this splendid view of the city! Do you really want to sacrifice all this comfort for this insane idea!”.

Abbas never listened and never stopped. Abbas fell down, and we flew up after him, just like birds, in the way he envisaged thousands of years back.

We live in an era of mass-production, recycled ideas, and manufactured emotions. We herd after the “real” things all our life. Then at some point, we get struck by a totally unexpected event that leaves us in a crisis of faith, melancholy and anger. These events could be too small, like not waking up to our dream-job interview in the morning (because we were too exhausted visualising scenarios of that interview all night), or too big like the loss of a close friend. We then realise that we’d been sleepwalking all our life to catch the precious carrot, while failing miserably to see the stick. We realise alas too late, that we were unable to see beyond our tunnel vision, and to venture beyond our fears.

A cancerous and fatal social disease called “consumerism” is what keeps the wheel of “reality” spinning. We consume visual materials day and night, on Youtube, Netflix, or Tv stations, to learn how perfect and “normal” people lead their lives. How they dress-up and show-up, how they get paid and get laid. We’re being subconsciously programmed to conform to these illusory “rules” that constitute “reality”. The consequences of breaking away are dear. These consequences are words! but poisonous words that could cause a lot of damage to our self-image and self-esteem. These words will sound like: ” loser”, “unworthy” , “Stupid” , “Ugly”, “Not good enough”,”Not smart enough”. The source of these words is not our haters, it rather lives deep within our minds; it’s our inner bullies. These inner bullies go with us everywhere on a daily basis, they are ready to be triggered anytime we take the courage to break these rules, to free our minds. There’ll still be a probability however, of disturbing comments coming from those who are the best at conforming to the rules of “reality”, who perfectly follow what they were programmed to do. These comments will just come to add fuel to our raging inner fire of insecurity and fear.

I conclude with this quote by Philip Dick: “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality, to go insane.”