The Flesh of Stories

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'The Wedding Dance' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1566)


I am a pessimist in the sense that I don’t believe in a grand, totalising theory. My favourite philosophers tend to be pessimists who write in fragments and aphorisms; Schopenhauer, Cioran, John Gray. Somewhere along the way it blurs into poetry or even story; Nietzsche, Borges, the Tao Te Ching...
“To live signifies to believe and to hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.”
-       From E.M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay
There isn’t a border between story, poetry and philosophy rather, they are all part of the same expression. Humans are made for survival, not for truth, and stories are, in a sense, all that we have. Reality must pass through the lens of human sensibility, filtered into something tangible, rational. Our sensory impressions are like words, reducing the truth into a sign. This is a basic philosophical idea, but it forms the foundation of my understanding. Stories matter a great deal because of this fact; they are alive and material inasmuch as they exist through and between lives. 
I don’t believe in some gnostic release from the flesh, as I think some optimistic philosophies do. Rather, the flesh is all we have. The life we have is our own to shape and mould, but we are also situated in a broader time and place, a community. This is not to say we should stay in that one place, but rather if one wants to find meaning, they should start with what matters to them; what is material and enriches one’s own life. As life progresses, as it moves and changes, different stories matter, different fragments of information, pictures and feelings.
As such, there cannot be a single, totalising story. And yet, the stories are all we have. The mind games of philosophy are just like food in the sense that they nourish and are delicious. Making meaning in life is about learning to conjure this nourishing deliciousness. It is an excess in life, excess energy like a death drive; dancing, singing and sending spent minutes up to the sun. In this joyous excess we find meaning. The excess required to do philosophy, to play games, to cook good food. 

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