I HAVE A RENDEZVOUZ WITH DEATH
Ayad Gharbawi
To the many needing comfort, needing advice, needing passions sincere, to whom do they turn to?
To whom can they turn to?
The days unmask the increasing emptiness between all of us, and the need for revolt is always there. The urge to be solitary as a reflection of one’s disgust with the hollowness of human beings, is always an attraction for some.
The urge to speak one’s mind to all people, to shatter the idiotic niceties and protocol that separates all of us and represses our genuine needs and desires and ardent wishes in life, is always an attraction for some.
The need to transcend the humdrum of our lives daily is there, and yet we feel that somehow little can be truthfully done. That is such a prevalent feeling – that as an individual I can do very little to change my life, so one submits to apathy wearying.
The society of individuals increasingly down cast and alone while at the same time people may increase their social contacts – but, there are no positive results to be gained therefrom, for the ‘human’ is crumbling as a sovereign entity into frightened fragments, self-doubt and confusion.
Ask yourselves, what is the net emotional result of all your socialising? For when the certain hour arrives and you witness that accusatory feeling of ‘What have I done?’ your horrifying reply will be that you have done nothing to fulfil your needs and desires and passions.
The hour does ask you: ‘What do you feel at the end of it all?’ and your emotions search vainly for meaning and fulfilment, for in essence there never existed any meaning and fulfilment in your lives in the first place.
Your life style, your socialising has merely succeeded to varying degrees and extents in covering up your real needs and desires.
Thus, in essence, you are merely ignoring, avoiding and repressing your true feelings; the ‘successful’ day is when you do not feel the urge to express your needs; in other words you have successfully been able to distract yourself from your real self.
However, ones innate needs and desires return to haunt us because they are our essence existentially.
Repression of one’s needs and desires and hopes results in disastrous consequences of the self. We are not being true to our selves. We are masks, we are afraid of ourselves because if we were to face ourselves, then that would entail changing our lifestyles and our frame of mind.
The humans around you are not ‘real’.
They are not what they are pretending to be.
The humans around you are living in sorrow hidden by niceties and good manners and protocol and a million other worthless distraction. The humans around you are losing their humanity, their creativity, their needs and passions while they go about the routines of their various lives predictable.
Man is dying in himself, willingly wistfully to accept his/her resignation from life; echoes of Seeger’s poem, ‘Rendezvous’ can hardly be ignored:
‘But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town
When spring trips north again this year
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.’
Ayad Gharbawi -