The Cynic and the Monk

They are the opposite poles of the continuum that stretches from cheerful despair to sad optimism.  The cynic is a sad man who laughs away his blues with the soothing belief that life won’t be any better than this. The monk is a happy man who wearies himself with the longing to make life holier by staying away from its inevitable pollutions and then preaching cleanliness to the miserable wretches who are condemned to wallow in the filth.

However, there is something common to both the cynic and the monk. Both reject the world. The cynic is afraid of the world and hence says No to it with masqueraded cheerfulness. His No is his shield held against the pains and dregs that life will inevitably bring if he dares to say Yes to it. The monk appears to say Yes to life but is in fact saying No to a lot of things. While dark humour is the natural tool of the cynic, rubrics are the monk’s knights in shining armours. While George Orwell’s donkey Benjamin is the cynic, the Biblical Moses on Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments is the typical monk.

Hitting a balanced equilibrium is the real art of living. Life pollutes necessarily. The rain is good; the soil is good; but when they unite slush is the offspring, as Kazantzakis’s Saint Francis says. Life is that slush. There’s no escape from that slush unless you stay in the cynic’s niche of cheerful contempt or the monk’s holier-than-thou Mount Sinai.

Both the cynic and the monk say No to life because of its inevitable slush. It is those who are miring themselves while grappling with that slush who are the real potential heroes. That is why the sleazy stories about priests and bishops and other religious people who creep into the frocks of nuns and housewives don’t interest me though the Malayalam TV channels discuss little else these days.

What I find disgusting, however, is the blatant refusal on the part of the priests and other ‘holy’ men to acknowledge their falls with the humility that well behoves them. Instead they are eager to project themselves as the incorruptible custodians of morality and heap slush on their hapless victims. The system is so male-dominated and male-friendly that even women support the priests with arguments such as why the girl/woman/nun didn’t stay away from the seductions of the holy men! Again and again, I hear such arguments from many of my female acquaintances and relatives. I’m both amused and disgusted.

The monk wouldn’t claim such moral high ground if he actually lived life like other men. He wouldn’t be so eager to bring down the tablets of commandment from the Mount Sinai.  More importantly, he wouldn’t be so unwilling to acknowledge his own frailties and falls. The real saint is the one who has the courage and humility to stand at the crossroads and beat his chest crying, “My sin, my sin, my most grievous sin.”

Instead, when they ascend their respective Mount Sinai and bring down more oppressive tablets on us, the irrepressible cynic in me bursts out with Orwell's Benjamin, “Donkeys live a long time.”