Beckett Nihilism and Transcendence

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Abstract

Nihilism Against Transcendence: A Metaphysico-mystical Appraisal

of Samuel BeckettMohammad` Maroof [email protected]

9419546538

Kunan, Bandipore, Kashmir,193502

The present paper critically explores Samuel Becketts nihilistic absurdist metaphysical viewpoint that

depicts modern mans sorry state in a world without transcendence. He has echoed certain important

Nietzschean-Heideggerrian-Sartrean arguments against both the traditional humanistic and God-centred

worldviews. He has depicted a world of characters that show incredulity towards traditional theology and

philosophy. He has vividly depicted modern disillusionment with humanistic personalist scientific

rationalist progressivist worldview. In this paper it is proposed to situate Beckett in traditional metaphysical

(as understood by the traditionalist perennialist metaphysicians) and mystical thought currents. A

remarkable convergence at certain levels is discernible between Beckett and the Eastern thought but as will

be shown, his antiepistemolgy and skepticism is philosophically quite vulnerable to a number of criticisms.His absurdist pessimist conclusions are based on constricted empiricism. His case against man and God,

reason and metaphysics is not logically and empirically very well argued.

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mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Nihilism Against Transcendence: A Metaphysico-mystical Appraisal

of Samuel BeckettThe post-Nietzschean literature of the West is fundamentally a rebellion or a lamentation. It is more or

less pessimistic. In a world without transcendence modern literature indulges in a bleak parody of the good

news and the Kingdom of God or the Idea of Good that had traditionally been advocated by religion.

Atheistic existentialism is largely a working out of the key modern event of what Nietzsche called as the

death of God. The theater of the Absurd was born in the same environment. Samuel Beckett, amongst the

most influential French writers, is a spokesperson for this nihilistic absurdist metaphysical viewpoint that

depicts modern mans sorry state in a world without transcendence. He has made, or rather echoed, certain

important Nietzschean-Heideggerrian-Sartrean arguments against both the traditional humanistic and God-

centred worldviews. He has depicted a world of characters that show incredulity towards traditional

theology and philosophy. He has postmodern distrust of traditional logocentric philosophy. He has vividly

depicted modern disillusionment with humanistic personalist scientific rationalist progressivist worldview.

He has not provided an alternative philosophy but forcefully problematized the case for traditional picture of

it and exposed futility and impotence of all substitutes of God that modernity has been worshipping. He has

not argued for resurrecting the traditional God but has demonstrated why modern gods are also dead or are

fictions. He has primarily made a case against Western philosophical and theological tradition and has notdeeply engaged with the Eastern metaphysical and mystical thought. In this paper it is proposed to situate

Beckett in traditional metaphysical (as understood by the traditionalist perennialist metaphysicians) and

mystical thought currents. A remarkable convergence at certain levels is discernible between Beckett and

the Eastern thought but as will be shown, his antiepistemolgy and skepticism is philosophically quite

vulnerable to a number of criticisms. His absurdist pessimist conclusions are based on constricted

empiricism. His case against man and God, reason and metaphysics is not logically and empirically very

well argued.

Becketts is certainly complex and weird philosophy, if at all one could label it as philosophy.

From numerous threads of logic tightly and sometimes loosely woven, from fragmented argumentsfrom Proust and Descartes, from Guenlincx, Melbranche and Schopenhauer, from Dostoevsky,

Wittgenstein and Sartre, a complex metaphysical vision is woven by Beckett. all leading headlongtowards an inescapable impossibility; all adds up or gives way to Void, Nothingness which isonly described negatively. His conclusions show marked affinity to those reached by the East

although sometimes they seem to be parody of them and one thing is indisputable -- he despairs of

Man and his is a bleak and irredeemably pessimistic vision on the whole which is antithesis oftraditional religious mystical and metaphysical vision of the East.

Becketts whole endeavor can be summed up in one sentence, We are fallen beings without

any possibility of salvation. It is nihilism pure and simple although it may be our inability to benihilists despite the vanity and meaninglessness of life that he is emphasizing. His whole art is

geared towards bringing home the point made by the skeptical author of Eccliastiacs vanity of

vanitiesall is vanity and Upanishadic dictum there is no bliss in things finite (and infinite or

God doesnt exist for him). Our life is an absurd punishment. Time is a cutting sword, as Shafisfamous saying runs forms the refrain of his thought. Time disintegrates everything and nothing, not

even art (which for him is an inescapable imposition with no power to save) can defeat it. We are

conscious suffering beings. There is no exit. Our journey is from nothingness to nothingness. Thereis no immortality, no providence, no saving grace, and no cure for pain. History is junk. Life is a

poor joke. To be is to suffer and suffer for no cause at all, no sin of ours, for no worthy end. It has

no redeeming grace. Death is our destiny. Death consummates everything. Life is a lengthy exilefrom the self. Only bad eternity is achievable. Of the eternity of which mystics speak Beckett is

ignorant or chooses to disbelieve in it. Abul Ala Maaris dictum that to be born is the (wujuduka

zambuq) sin is illustrated in the works of Beckett. Both life and art are mysterious punishments for

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some unknown crime --(that of being born perhaps), each is the vain and unremitting search for an

impossible language of the self which would allow one at last to lapse into the silence of eternal

self-possession. Our only hope is the hope of the impossible and we are condemned to hope it, orhoping against hope. Having abandoned metaphysics and theology, he has noting to express, no

power to express, no desire to express. He is condemned to ignorance and impotence. He knows

nothing and the most important thing that he thinks he knows is that nothing is more importantthan nothing. His ideal is:

Feeling nothing, knowing nothing capable of nothing, want nothing.

feel nothing; hear nothing, know nothing, say nothing, are nothing, that

would be a blessed place to be, where you are

innocent of what, no one knows, of wanting to know, wanting to be able

What does Beckett know about the ultimate questions? As he rejects intellective intuition of

the mystic and revelation of the prophets and is committed to rationalism despite his avowed

disbelief in it and ultimately seeing its failure to make anything comprehensible he neverthelesstrusts its verdict even if he deploys it to destroy its own foundations. Like their creator, Beckettts

people, one and all are uncompromising rationalists as Richard Coe has remarked in hisinsightful reading of Beckett in his paper God and Samuel Beckett. 1 to which this paper owes

much. The questions which his people ask, however reasonably, are precisely those which reason,left to its own devices cant ask. Their reason (and they have no other resource at their disposal)

cant tell them with certainty a single thing they want to know (what really matters, which is not a

piece of information or which science could know); not so much as whether (perhaps) they arealready dead, or (maybe) still alive. Of the origin and end of things, of their whither and whence, of

purpose and meaning in their lives, of the reasons for which they have been punished, or of the

sin they have committed and most importantly of their (or possibility) of salvation they dont knowmuch. They are all strangers and sojourners in the current dimensions of existence; like the narrator

of ProustsA laRecherche du Temps Perdu-- in whom most of them have their remoter origins

they know themselves exiled from their true domain of being, alienated from their properselves, imprisoned against their will in space and more particularly in time. They dont knowhow to escape from these arbitrary absolutes, from the maya jal. Or net ofsamsara, the hell they

are in by virtue of being born. As their attempts of escape are futile they allow themselves to be

mutilated, becoming armless, legless, featureless, in an effort to approximate their quintessential

selves they stagger to stand still, now bedridden, now propped up against walls, now stuck in vaseslike sheaves of flowers, in order to escape from the tyranny of movement and its despotic corollaries,

or else they try to die, and dying, strive to detach their selves from the unhappy accident of incarnation,

hoping thereby to redeem at last the catastrophe of spatial and temporal identity- only to discover that

heir personality, against all odds, survives.2

They neither know how to live nor how to die or how to smile at the face of death and how to

die to take rebirth in the kingdom of eternal life and to be in a state beyond both life and death.

They dont know theology even if they are always involved in some sort of theologizing (knowingonly its exoteric version that holds fast to dualism of creator and created positing a personal

interested God as the Absolute) and metaphysics and that is why they ask what unspeakable Being

has conjured up a creature who cant know himself, imprisoned for no conceivable reason in a

duration which is hard to endure. He rejects materialistic as well as the traditional Christian theisticthesis. Becketts people know from the evidence of their experience and their irrefutable logic that

temporal and spatial reality is an illusion, and that their real selves exist in another, non-material

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dimension. From their standpoint man is an absurdity and God too, in the logical sense is an

impossibility, and it is just as impossible that He should not exist as that He should. And in either

case, the fault is His. As Fanninza puts Becketts contradictory position:

Hamm puts the case more strikingly,. Let us pray to God, he orders. There is silence, at the end of

which he concludes, The bastard! He doesnt exist!- an affirmation which is immediately qualified by

Clovs Not yet . But even Hamm, who comes closer to despair than any other Beckettian character,

is anything rather than an atheist in the accepted meaning of the word. Hamms black fury is directed

atGod; Godsnon-existence is the last and dirtiest trick which the sadistic Creator has played on his

victimised and miserable creation. 3

The evidence of evil is there to prove that the thesis of creator personal God does not stand. A God

who could create a world of suffering, absurdity and death, and yet still give man an inherentnotion of beauty, happiness and significance (The Unnameable) can only be a being so cruel and so

utterly cynical as to pass all human understanding. For Beckettts people, God may well be a

monstrous and inconceivable evil. He cant be lightly dismissedLife for Beckett is a continuous flowing in which he appears and disappears in a

punctualized, continuing, flowing, fragmentary, and hopeless fight against this flow.

Or , as he seems to say , in a chaotic and caustic symbolism, human existence is an enforced habitation

in a jar(Fanizza, 1960). Nature uses or abuses him for obscure ends. The being of this prisoner is

lacerated by confusion, humiliation, and pain . He no longer hopes to change his condition. In this

strange analysis by Beckett there is a sense of uneasiness, of nausea, of depression and decay that

mingles flesh and spirit, and from it all emanates a stink of monstrous, horripant, disgusting and rotten

carnality. 4

He aspires to be let loose, alone, in the unthinkable unspeakable, where I have not ceased tobe, where they will not let him be( The Unnameable). This is a discovery of a state of annihilation

and isolation and of complete alienation recognizing itself as such. As Fanniza quotes Boisdeffre

How many ages of accusation against the world reach an end: mans humiliation, which from

Rousseau to Kafka, paralyzes so many writers, culminates here in a world of abjection and ignonimity.Beings judge themselves in the tranquility of decomposition, reviewing their life as if they were

already dammed, and mingling forever with their solitude, their humiliation, and their unhappiness

before disappearing in an ocean of ordure.5

For Unnameable The essential is never to arrive anywhere , never to be any where the essentialis to go on squirming forever at the end of line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening

in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits (The Unnameable). He

finds no nirvana insamsara and in the void of his own self he finds not the Bliss of which mystics

speak but something which he doesnt and cant describe and it looks that if it is a peaceful state itis not the peace of Beatific vision or the nirvanic peace but peace of annihilation, peace of death,

peace of grave. He cant see the world as the Selfs manifestation or exteriorization. He rightlyrecognizes that in order to find oneself, one has to situate oneself outside the game, outside the

world orsamsara. It is not easy to say however where this leads according to him, whether to the

new world or to the destruction of the old and nothing more. One feels as if Beckett does only thefirst part of the job of the mystic which includes turning away from the illusory world of ego and

desire. He sees maya as maya and abandons all hope of finding salvation in the world of time and

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space. He recognizes the necessity of non attachment, offana, so to say.But he does not reach the

other shore of nirvana or heaven and the Bliss Unspeakable that is only in the Infinite.

Beckett is haunted by the problem of death and in the majority of his writings he is concernedto find from a non-religious perspective a meaning for that which obliterates all meaning, including

its own, and an explanation for that inexplicable. The central theme of the futile and purposeless

death of the individual in his earlier works is subsumed in an apocalyptic terrifying vision, not ofone man, but of Man, the senseless extinction, not of the individual life, but of all life, leaving a

frozen or a burning planet to wander for all eternity in the absurd infinity of space. This echoes

Russells oft quoted version of modern sciences view of the probable end of the universe. This, ofcourse, is the main theme of Luckys vision in Waiting of Godotof the earth in the great cold the

great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas. This vision of

senseless final extinction and annihilation reaches its climax in Endgame where Hamm and Clov

represent the last of living things in a burnt-out landscape of stones and dust.One thing is painfully brought to the light in Becketts works. Goal is hardly ever reached by

his people, though they continue to hover around the threshold. Though reason may in fact know

that the goal exists, that there is the light at the other shore but what constitutes human predicament

is that the other shore is not reached. Molly, like Hamm, hopes to die but cant (the death is themeans of dealienation). Malone, by a complex process of multiplying his various verbal

personalities, contrives to detach his I from the pseudo-self he knows as Macmannn, and thenwatches Macmann diebut this extraordinary feet still leaves the problem basically unresolved, for

the death of Macmann is as powerless as the death of Malone to obliterate the apparently

immortal Pour-Soi or negative principle. On the other hand the ultimate self needs an ending inorder to know itself and escape from the dimension of time, space and language in order to know

itself. But time isnt dissolved in Moment or Eternity in Beckett. Man lives in time and dies in

time. If time were noty all would be fine but we are condemned to live in time. But there is o

salvation in time. But alas! There is no possibility for his heroes to find salvation outside time. Thepole of eternity is before them but the question is could it be appropriated. Malone vainly struggles

in search of that ending of time. Like Valadimir and Estragon, like Hamm and Winnie, the

dimension of eternity into which he attempts to plunge proves a mirage. As they are movinginstants slow down towards timelessness, their progressive deceleration means that they take

longer and longer to reach the goaland the nearer they reach to that goal, the slower they

approach it, so that in a universe controlled by rational logic, it is strictly impossible that theyshould ever achieve it.5It becomes as impossible as it is for material particle to attain velocity of

light. The closer it approaches it greater its weight and thus more and more difficult to accelerate.

Coe demonstrates this point in his essay and here is the relevant quote.

Two symbols dominate both the Trilogy and the plays: Zenos parable of the little heap of millet, progressively

augmented by halfthe quantity remaining to be added from the total ( this becomes the little heap of days in

Endgame and Winnies mound in Happy Days); and secondly, the recurring decimal or irrational

number( Morans sons dentist bears the characteristic name of Mr Pi), which proceeds by ever-decreasingdegrees towards a logically definable objective, which objective, how ever can only reach them when zero

becomes a positive number. A positive zero can be a solution to the Becketttian riddle. We know that, of

necessity, it must exist; we know equally well that we can never reach it(you must go on, I cant go on,you

must go on, I will go on, says The Unnameable, you must go on, I cant go on, Ill go on(414); and

meanwhile, we can but wait, caught up in the anguish of impossibilitieswait for the end of the decimel, or the

completion of the heap, for the materialization of the dynamic Void, or whatever we like to call it. For of course,whatever we call it, it remains by definition that which cant be defined, except in terms irrelevant to itself. So

why not call it provisionally Mr Knot or Godot?6

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He cant say anything but he cant be silent either. Silence has however no beauty for him. No God is

revealed in silence. No revelation is communicated. It is nullity and negativity, pure and simple. Language

fails him. Past or tradition is valueless. He parodies academics and ologies. He condemns all abstract

generalizations. He doubts everything all knowledge claims, scriptures, wisdom traditions. He doesnt

know himself either, neither his God. Nothing has any meaning, any purpose. Life is absurd. He iscommitted to an ideology that rejects all ideology. Only thing that he cant doubt is his consciousness of

suffering. He can say no to everything except to lifes summon. He cant be and that is his problem. Hecant revolt either but he cant submit in humble submission also. He rejects all supernatural consolations.

He has no faith in reason or science either. He has no illusions, even not the illusion of being able to lighten

ones anguish by sharing it with others. He depicts man as a lone figure, without hope of comfort, facing

the great emptiness of space and time without the possibility of miraculous rescue or salvation, in dignity,

resolves to fulfill its obligation to express, weighing absence in a scale, attempting to enclose nothingness is

words. He is a builder of ruins who undermines his edifice at the very same time as he raises it. He makes

the trajectory of disaster. Every novel is in a way the story of disintegrationeither of the hero, or of time,

or of life. He has ventured very far in search of an absolute that is a minus quantity. Everything is

ambiguous in the world of Beckett. Nothing is clear cut. Nothing can be known absolutely. He doesnt know

there is anything to know. He isnt even interested to know. Gnosis of which mystics speak is something

quite unknown to him or a fairy tale. He is obsessed with guilt, the ever present feeling of guilt, of life as a

condition of guilt; and the very protestant idea of destination which joins with guilt, judgment, anddamnation itself to make them even more intolerable. For him, as we see in Molly, metaphysical cruelty is

only a fable invented by man in his state of abandonment, a projection of himself, a reflection of all the

things that seem on the human plane to reflect it, all the manifestations of the father figure in human affairs

towards the figure of the son in all its various forms. He asks us to admit our absolute solitude and total andabsurd responsibility. All this business of a labour to accomplish I invented it all, in the hope it would

console me, help me to go on, allow myself to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving between a

beginning and an end

So man is alone, and bereft not only of God, but also of the world. Implacable grandeur of life moved

Camus but not Beckettt. Becketts work is a ruthless critique of experience. Ours is a windowless monad.

The unreality of reality is constantly present; there is nothing, one exists in nothing, The fact is I was never

anywhere says the hero ofThe End, like Ham in Endgame. And what do I mean by see and see again.

Logic is utterly impotent in capturing reality. Language also is such a poor filter. The Aristotelian laws ofidentity non-contradiction doesnt apply in the Beckettian world.

Time, the dimension of the absurd is an unceasing hemorrhage of existence. All that remains, all

there ever is, is a vague present lost in a double mist of non being: a present in which everything (or rather

nothing) takes place, noted in a language as close to it as possible: inchoate, groping, with all the inflections,

hesitations, and repetitions of speech.7 That silence which is so full of music, so blissful, so holy and the

language of the divine for religion and mysticism is unknown to Beckett. For him silence is only dumbness.

There is no echo of the timeless, of the eternal in this moment of silence. This silence is silence of death. It

is that kind of silence of which Horatio speaks at the end of Hamlet. Life is an absurd show, full of sound

and fury, fret and fever signifying nothing and death is absence of all this and not their transcendence in

some nirvana although at some moments he comes close to positive mystical conception of silence.

Beckett has experienced the hell the modern man is in and puts all its torments back where they

belong, inside mans head. Becketts devils are the imaginary They whom everyone can find in himself.One is sometimes reminded of Dostoveskys and Kafkas terrible and terrifying imagination. He leads us

straight into the lowest ditch of hell. His heroes cant face the self. They are all schizophrenic, in a way. No

one has discovered the essence of self and thus his identity which alone allows one to achieve silence.

Modern man is de-individuated. He is in search of a soul, a self, an integrated self, an authentic existence.

But in the Beckettian world An ego changes into a terrible nest of vipers, with an obscure They and an Iwho is perpetually discovering himself to be someone else, who can never coincide with himself, never be

recognized, or completely identified, or wholly absorbed. Becketts Texts for Nothingpresents the inner

drama in its most inchoate form. In them the inner monologue seems to be the work of hypostatized states

of consciousness transformed into strange knots of fragmentary personalities who wrangle with and

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that demand for truth is the very raison deterof man. Man is willy nilly a metaphysical animal. He is made

for the Absolute and to know the Absolute as Schuon would assert. He lives by it. But for Beckett the

demand for truth becomes the more urgent the more clearly it appears incapable of fulfillment. It grows with

the effort that wants to disprove it. Thus Beckett, with illusion of an arrival, at the same time destroys that

other illusion that the vain quest can end. He lacked that faith, that vision and that light of which mystisspeak.

And it is the vision of God or what Buddhism calls nirvana and Hinduism knowledge of Brahman thatsatiates the unnameable metaphysical hunger; all else prove mere idols made by man himself. And Beckett

cant believe that this bliss is there, this cessation of suffering is there, apocatastasis is there, this Light of

the World is there, this peace which passeth all understanding is there, and that it is attainable here and now,

at this very moment. The condition for it which is doing away with the separative principle of ego, and all

attachments, all clinging, all dreams, all hope, all comfortswhat Sufis call fana and Buddhism non-

attachment and no clinging is also recognized by Beckett but he doesnt believe that what awaits such a

salikorfaqeer, is Bliss Eternal, the Kingdom of God, but the peace of grave, of utter nullity , nescience and

death though he does concede possibility of some sort of nirvana but none of his people could be said to

have attained that nirvana or deliverance or beatific vision in the sense in which mystics have attained.

Truth is ever deferred, and thus unreachable. Dieter Wellerchoff thus sums up Becketts failure in his attempt to

demythologize In all the strivings of his imagined creatures have the triple ridiculousness of a fool who islooking, with inadequate strength on a wrong road, for a goal that perhaps does not exist at all. But the laughter

ceases in the presence of the intensity of the effort. We are watching the compulsive action beyond the reach of

irony, a furious mono-mania from which no laughter can liberate us. This is happening in earnest. Beckett

himself, who wants to unmark madness, is deeply enmeshed in it.8

Not recognizing or knowing the intellect (which is to be distinguished from reason) and intellective

intuition and knowing nothing of metaphysics, of universal principles, typical Beckettian characters such as

Vladimir and Estragon are incapable of anything more than mere beginnings of impulses, desires, thoughts,

moods, memories and impression. They are in a twilight state, half conscious and they dont qualify to be

human as they arent rational metaphysical beings. They are living on the most primitive levelnay animal

level. They have nothing worthwhile to do, to know, to celebrate but indulge in sado-masochistic and absurd

games to pass the time. They live the most inauthentic life (authentic life can come only by being oneself.And not alienated and estranged and exiled. Modern man is a stranger or an outsider and indulges in vain

rebellion but all this intensifies his fallen and exiled status and makes him incapable of reckoning with the

plague of life, not to speak of enduring and contemplating death.) Because everything that makes life

meaningful and purposeful is vetoed on a priori terms. The Beckettian world is peopled by not a single Man

but by tramps, vagrants, hoboes, and other vagabonds. He disbelieves in all heroism and perfectionism and

progressivism. As in his Waiting for Godot, nothing happens, nothing is done, no development is discernible

and there in no arrival or end. Time is circular rather than linear. It isnt creativebut sterile. Everything is

sterile as there is no life, no carrying forward, no evolution of any sort. But suicide too isnt an option.

Heaven is unattainable. So Beckett condemns us to hell on whose door is written, Abandon ye all hope

who enter in. There is nostalgia for lost God, lost values and this too is killing. Beauty, grace, truth of the

first water, I knew they were all beyond me. And they are beyond modern man as Beckett sees him. LikePozzo modern man is small bundle of subjective feeling and responses but sometimes indulges in self-pity

although represses its fear with narcissistic pomposity: Do I look like a man who can be made to suffer?

The universe far from being joyous Leila or play of God, creative exuberance and radiation of goodness of a

Being who is all-good as Augustine would characterize the creation, is, a nightmare for Beckett. There is no

answer to Pozzos cries for help and Vladimir makes them of universal significance. Man isnt a

theomorphic being, a being made in the image of God, or would be God, a potential God, or perfect man of

Sufism who appropriates all the divine attributes and houses Gods sirrbut bloody ignorant ape for Beckett

and he deplores the fact that he isnt prepared for evolution, for psychological and spiritual maturation.

Between two nothingnesses, between two nights of the womb and the tomb flickers for an instant the light

of life. The panorama of immense futility that life is presented through Pozzos vision of time, which is

usually a symbol of life, of growth, of fertility and perfection. Time for Plato is it is the moving image of

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Eternity but is cursed in Becketts works. Estragon furiously replies to Vladimirs questionwhy lucky

became dumb. Have you not been tormenting me with your accursed time? It is abominable. one day,

isnt that enough for you? One day like any other he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we will go

deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day., the same second, isnt that good enough

for you. But it is one day when one gets enlightened, delivered from dukkhafrom death itself. Here nowone could be reborn in the kingdom of God, in heaven. However, that day and that instant never comes for

Beckett. God as Godot, on sum, appears more in the role of Shiva (Destroyer) than in the role of Vishnu(Preserver). Modern man is schizophrenic because like a schizophrenic patient he treats reality as if it were

strange to him or estranges himself from reality as Beckett is depicting him and it is precisely the acceptance

or vital appropriation of reality that constitutes iman and Islam. Iqbal well characterized this modern mans

plight.Bachasmai haiwan hain yeh zulmat(that darkness has no elixir). In this wasteland and desert there is

no water of eternal life. Modern mans great tragedy is that he is indifferent to the air that is full of cries, as

habit is a great deadner; he is reconciled to his hell in a way as flies are to dirt, to use an image of Ibn Arabi,

a great Muslim mystic. He is dead to April shower, to rain from heaven as Eliot said. He is complacently

wallowing in the dirty waters of hell. Pozzo who despises his slave and victim, is as Metman notes,

prototype of modern inflated consciousness rejecting and neglecting the flow of inner processes which

happen and constitute the source of spiritual inspiration: But for him [the now crushed lucky] all my

thoughts, all my feelings would have been of common things.9 The inner witness could emerge only by

appropriating God but our critics see Godot as old conventional God who is preventing the emergence of it,or maturation of consciousness. This transvaluation of values is at the heart of modern mans misery.

Goodness and rejuvenation can only come from the original source, from which men have always received

it. Onus lies on modern man to be a fit receptacle, a fit subject or vehicle for grace, for divine benediction. If

old God appears as Devil, as evil, it is only because modern man is himself possessed by the latter and hisvision clouded. His perspective is that of a fallen man. He conceives God in devils image. Caricatures of

God and Christ in modern art and literature (as in the figure of Godot) show only the perverted modern

sensibility. Man constructs God in his own (devilish) image and that constitutes the supreme idolatry against

which all the prophets have warned. And idolatry translates itself as self-alienation. And one hardly needs to

prove that all the modern fads for dealienation have failed and Beckett is pessimistic like ONiel primarily

for this reason. Modern man isnt able to create new God to fill his spiritual void as Will Durant testifies in

hisInterpretations of Lives. He has killed only himself by killing old God. He could be revived only if he

makes himself child again, unlearns huge mass of modern ignorance (so called modern knowledge). Thiscouldnt be done by reviving exoteric theology of the church but by traditional metaphysics, the perennial

philosophy and it is the eclipse of metaphysics ( understood not in Aristotelian sense but as the science of

the Invisible, the Supraphenomenal, the Infinite by means of intellection or noetic vision) reflected in the

eclipse of spirituality or mysticism in modern age that is behind the eclipse of the sun of the Spirit. This will

be discussed later in detail. Man must be a light unto himself and not project his problems and guilt to some

metaphysical entity. Salvation cant descend from above. It is man who has to win it. Waiting for the God ofexoteric dualist theology is inauthentic approach not only for Beckett but also all traditional religions. If

modern man has gloriously misunderstood anything it is his God or religion and its intellectual content, its

metaphysical basis. If he is ignorant of anything that is one thing most needful, his ultimate concern, his

ground of being i.e., GodGod who is only the other pole, the ideal pole of his own self, his hearing andseeing, to use the Quranic phrase. Modern mans cardinal sin in his spiritual and metaphysical blindness and

nothing could dispel this darkness except the coming of light. Beckettian ethic includes such things as thefantasy of Ham of the Endgame in which he refuses to give a man food to save his child because, as he

passionately argues, life on earth is beyond remedy. Macmann, like Molly before him, is satisfied with

having eluded charity all his days, and is stunned when it is forced upon him. Becketts people have no

interest in the ethical aspects of Christianity.

The only certainty that Becketts characters know is that of everlasting ignorance of self. In spite of

their insistence on impotence and ignorance, Becketts narrator heroes are unable to relinquish the old Greek

quest for the metaphysical meanings of the self, the world, and God. But

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it is a hopeless quest, to be sure, since there may be neither mind nor body to undertake it, and

language may mistake it. The unnamable begins, unbelieving in his I, unbelieving in his beginnings,

knowing only that the discourse must go on. Towards the end he asks himself whether I am words

among words, or silence in the midst of silence. Implicit in his long monologue is Heideggers

haunting question: Why is there any Being at all and not rather Nothing.10

However, Beckett, for all his deep sadness at the sorry and sordid state of affairs that fallen mans lifeis, doesnt give up the search for life, for beauty, for salvation, for eternity, for essence of self, the timeless

self. He isnt an incurable obdurate pessimist. He doesnt take sides; only mercilessly exposes, dissects.

Metmans conclusion that in Becketts plays, the carriers of life, future and wholeness prevail over those of

negation, despair and defeat, does contain a grain of truth. Pessimism, as William James remarked in his

famous essay Is Life Worth Living, is essentially a religious disease. Only a man who is unable to commit

himself to absolute despair mourns over mans inability to transcend his miserable state. Beckett makes us

aware of the dukkha, of the misery and the vanity of our egocentric endeavor. He demonstrates the truth of

the vision of the author of Ecclesiastics vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Life of ego is life of alienation and

misery. Our ordinary existence, desiring selfs existence necessarily is fallen, tragic, inhuman. It is the life

of suffering. There is no good nor bliss in things finite. In that sense Becketts pessimism is warranted. We

need not argue. It is religion that makes us acutely aware of our misery, our fallen state. Although Beckett

doesnt share religious mans ultimate optimism regarding mans destiny and its faith in salvation of allhumans and end of suffering and eternity but there is a yearning for it. He occasionally approaches very

close to religious ideal of nirvana, but on the whole he sees only bad eternity, bad infinity. He achieves

only a semblance of salvation. Refusing to look heavenwards, towards the sky of transcendence, towards the

Infinite, (key to which is contained in those doctrines or traditional metaphysical wisdom of Christianitywhich he dubbed as childish myths in true demythologizing rationalist humanist spirit) and pinning his

vision on the realm of the finite, he could not obviously be granted the vision of God. We now discuss

Becketts vague and confused attempt to achieve what he considered his ideal of questionless existence, or

choiceless awareness in Krishnamurts phrase. Gunther Anders in his perceptive study on Waiting for Godot

rightly remarks that he attempts to answer how such a life, despite its aimlessness, can actually go on. He

answers that

life doesnt go on, rather it becomes a life without time. Since time springs from mans needs and hisattempts to satisfy them, that life is temporal only because needs are either not yet satisfied, or goals have already

been reached, or objectives reached are still at ones disposal. But in case of Estragon and Vladimirs lives,

objectives no longer exist. Events and conversation are thus going in circles.11

Metman emphasizes the final endurance of the man in the short mime Act without Words. After his totaldefeat he sits motionless and erect until the curtain falls and this expresses a dignity and concentration

which stand in vivid contrast to the meandering semi hopelessness of the figures in Waiting for Godot. Such

an enduring Heidegger calls an out-braving the utmost and he says that together with a standing in the

openness of Being it constitutes the full essence of existence.12 But Buddha like enduring and Nirvanic

outbraving the utmost is a far cry from this enduring stoic calm and resignation that Beckett may be

suggesting sometimes is not comparable to mystics joy and the bliss of Buddhas nirvana. Beckett doesnt

abandon himself to meaningfulness and Anders calls tramps of the Waiting for Godotas metaphysicistsbecause they are incapable of doing without the concept of meaning. They conclude from the fact of their

existence that there must be something for which they are waiting; they are champions of the doctrine that

life must have meaning even in a manifestly meaningless situation. They arent nihilist, rather the

incorrigible optimists. Man cant be nihilist, even in a situation of utter hopelessness. However, Beckett

cant celebrate lifes essential absurdity and meaninglessness like Osho. Lifes beauty consists of its

mystery, its spontaneity, its meaninglessness and purposelessness. This point will be elaborated latter.

Anders sees in tramps waiting a demonstration of Gods existence ex absentia.A rationalist would only

scoff at such a proof. But God signifies the Mystery, the absence of discoverable meaning, the void, the

emptiness also. What cant be grasped, caught, tracked, what always eludes, what is infinitely deferred is

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God. Religion is refusal to demystify existence, refusal to logicize reality. It is faith in the unseen, the

suprarational, the meaningless, the absurd. What meaning can be imputed to bliss, to heaven, to vision of

God. A rose is a rose is rose as Osho has famously remarked. For what purpose does rose blossom and

birds chirp. Existence is as it is. It is its own meaning. God is RealityAl-Haqq. He is totality of Existence,

both phenomenal and transcendental. To ask what is the meaning of existence is meaningless. Religion callsuniverse and life Gods ayat or symbol. God, manifestation and thus life is essentially meaningless if

meaning is sought outside them. The universe is the play or Leila of God, as Hinduism puts it. Life is amystery to be lived rather than a problem to be solved as Osho has beautifully put it. This is the essence of

Zen approach. From the perspective of Reality or Absolute the question of meaning or purpose doesnt arise

in such a disturbing fashion. It arises from the human all-too-human and by virtue of that fragmentary

perspective which is the perspective of modernist humanist anti tradition. The question of meaning and

purpose cant be asked of God or his doings. It is very anthropomorphic and anthropocentric notion to ask

of meaning and purpose. Mystic celebrates life, the innocence of becoming (Nietzsche comes closest to the

sublime peak of mystical vision in this regard). He sees existence flowing for no other reason than pure joy

of creator. There is no objective for life. It is its own celebration, its own legitimation, its own warrant. Time

doesnt exist for a mystic. He is out of time. He is beyond mind, beyond time. It is only the mind caught in

finitude and net of thought, and thus essentially a conditioned organ that asks the question of purpose. He

has no goals, as all goals are in time and necessitate becoming. The mystic is beyond both. Time cant bleed

him. He is immortal. He lives in eternity. He isnt of this world. Neither of the other world. He is not insearch of anything. He has seen vanity of all seeking. He has killed the seeking self, the desiring self. In fact

he has reached the other shore, merged in the universal self. He has renounced his self thereby having

reached his essence, his identity. And that is why he can be silent, not just negatively silent but sing silence.

He sees God is silence. Unknown descends only when the realm of the known ceases. All metaphysicalquestions are answered in silence as the questioning self is no more, it is dissolved. The mystic is a light

unto himself. He is in no need of any consolation. It is the absent God that he adores as he denies his self-

will as Simon Weil has pointed out. All supernatural consolations would dilute the misery, the utter

loneliness of man and reassert the self that mysticism denies. A mystic is utterly naked being stripped of all

outside anchors. He has no anchor. His only anchor is Nothingness.

Beckett attempts to reach the timeless. Murphy makes a downward journey into subconscious and

reaches a point where he is not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. Beckett is unable to reachthe timeless because his concept of self is tainted with dualism. It is a pebble in the steppe, a tiny plenum in

the immensity of the void, and thus something autonomous and separate from the void. Beckett fears the

unknown; he cant trust it like a mystic. He cant surrender to the unknown, to existence. He cant accept

total dissolution of self. He cant achieve a state of objectless consciousness. He cant be at ease with the

void within. He cant assimilate the experience offana. He fears it. The mystic celebrates his freedom, the

absolute freedom because he is one with God, with existence. He appropriates Gods attribute of freedom.Becketts characters have a notion of I which cant conceive of itself except falsely, and so the vain and

wearisome business of self-pursuit goes on beyond death, with the old dualism of a non-temporal, non

spatial subject in Beckettian perspective, as Ross Chambers notes.13 To approach the self is to embark on an

infinite process comparable to attempting to express, the value of a surd to the last decimal point. Life as the

pursuit of self thus becomes the endless, hopeless task of pursuing an infinitely recedingsomething. Beckett

points out the inescapable absurdity of the ineradicable human belief in a principle of inner lifecall itessence, self, or personality. Ours is an endless exile from the pursuit of an infinitely unattainable self. 14

Beckett is unable to see how duality and exile could be transcended. Living for him is the experience of

endless duality and exile, where one knows the timelessness of the self but is yet condemned to life in time,

where one senses the essence but is yet condemned to existence. Lifeour real life, is a birth on a tomb, just

a small disturbance in the void of death or inexistence, it lies outside of time; but it is a difficult birth, one in

which time has a say, and we grow old and suffer; and the whole problem lies there. At the most Beckett

captures threshold experience, the region of being where existence and essence, non-self and self, time and

timelessness endlessly co-exist, in the strange, ambiguous, inescapable half-world of semi exile that is his

image of our human condition. In this ambiguity is the fate of dualism; the more he attempts to convey the

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sense of timeless essence, the better he describes an existence endlessly excluded from while endlessly

tending towards that essence. Time never stops absolutely for human or any other character.

Burden of this paper is to argue that Becketts absurdism and pessimism is unwarranted, especially if

coupled to his critique of Christianity or religion. Religion is more consistent in its absurdist philosophy.

It carries the thesis to its logical conclusion. Religion conceives no salvation in the world of time andbecoming. It posits a kingdom of God which is achieved only by total renunciation of self. Its first principle

is that in his present state man is in violent disequilibrium or fall or exile, in a state of dukkha and the causeof this is that our consciousness isnt objectless, it is caught up in the maya of space and time. Its Unitarian

perspective demands transcendence of all dualisms and dichotomies (such as subject-object, man-God, self-

other, self-world dualities). Religion starts and ends at the knowledge of the self, of identity, of essence, of

truth Religious man would reject the whole edifice of Beckettian thought and sees his problem as pseudo-

problem and his absurdism and pessimism (carried to its logical end) as unwarranted. Beckett affirms

diagnostic part of religious thesis but not its treatment. He too sees our life bedevilled with ignorance, sin,

guilt and suffering, as tainted with fall. The Easts absolute isnt personal God. It posits no supernatural

consolation. It too doesnt value individual. Buddhism rejects the very idea of permanent separate self. It too

sees no grace, no heaven in the world of becoming or in the domain of time. It too sees nothing but suffering

in store for man (identified with ego, or desiring self). It paints the evil facet of life in its most gruesome and

extreme form. It too squarely encounter limit situations in which Beckett was interested. It too has no faith

in action or deed. Jinana yoga orirfan or via contemplative do away with action. Its theory of time is alsocircular. Nobody comes, nobody goesin the mystics desert when he encounters the Divine Darkness,, the

Abyss, as he delves deep into the nothingness within. But it isnt awful for him. Nothing happens in eastern

mystical world, not once or twice but thousand times. He delights in no-action, in choiceless awareness. He

celebrates it. He strips himself of all illusions, even the illusion of ego or permanent separate self. He has nobeliefs, no securities, objects to cling to. He stands alone, naked. He waits for none. He is resigned to his

meaningless existence. He doesnt even dream of a better life or heaven. He is quite contented with and

even grateful for what is. He bears all sufferings that flesh is hier to smilingly. He makes no complaints

against anyone or against heavens. He has surrendered to the cosmic will, to the will of Totality or Tao. He

has submitted or surrendered i.e., he is Muslim. He has no self to claim anything. He has no demands,

because he isnt, because he has realized the vanity of all things, all objects, all achievements. He has seen

the nothingness at the heart of everything. He has found emptiness or voidness of everything and God, in the

eastern mystical tradition of negative divine symbolizes precisely this emptiness, this nothingness orShunyata. He is utterly hopeless but that does not mean he suffers from despair. He has no hopes as he has

no ambitions and nothing to achieve. He isnt after pleasures even. He doesnt avoid pain. He accepts

everything. He is as mirror to existence, just choicelessly aware, pure consciousness. He has passed out of

time and of everything that pertains to the realm of time. He is ascetic i.e., he has renounced the world with

all its joys. It could even be said that he welcomes or invites misery like Job. More precisely he has attained

a state which is beyond pleasure and pain. He has no objectives. He has renounced the past as well as thefuture. He has renounced both the worlds for the sake of Goda God who is none other than his essence,

his inmost self, which is pure objectless consciousness. He sees no other to complain to, to possess, to

dominate or to conquer and then to suffer or make others suffer. He is as silent, as resigned as a tree, as a

stream. He doesnt desire to be. And that means he cant suffer nausea or angst. He is relieved or deliveredof all pain. Absurdity isnt an issue for him. He has already committed a suicide by killing the ego thus

having solved the problem that perplexed Camus. Beckett has no metaphysics and thus he has noexplanation, no reason for the problem of being. He knows nothing of the origin and the End. He finds no

reason, no meaning for existence, for life. Why should he be created and given birth astride of a grave. What

is he doing here, on the planet? What for and why should he be and not be. Since the world isnt the

creation/manifestation/sign of God (on that ab initio or principle alone would it have meaning)because

God incorporates triple values of truth beauty and goodness) it stands as brute fact, fact devoid of any

transcendental reference or meaning or value. The universe as Sartre said is gratuitous. Beckett perfectly

agrees. Beckett is sure of only one thing, knows only one truththat he suffers and suffers for no reason at

all. Like universe, his existence too is gratuitous. It is accident and not substance. It could well not have

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been. It doesnt matter. Grave consumes everything and is there to prove our nothingness, our accidentality,

our purposelessness.

Like mystics Becketts people cant reply to the question does God exist? This is because ifthat which exists is positive, or finite, or definable, or in any way verbally to be differentiated

from other existent or non-existent phenomena, then God, void, infinite, undifferentiated and

abstracted from the dimensions of time and space, is precisely that which doesnt exist; it is theliberation of the finite by the infinite . God cant be named, he cant be characterized. Supraformal

Essence has no attributes. No words have defiled the Absolute as Ramakrishna used to say.

Nothing answers the question what is It as great Muslim mystic Jili has said. It is utter darkness orthe light that never was. It is the impossibility of all signification. Beyond Being neither creates

nor reveals nor saves. It doesnt exist or it transcends the category of existence . To name God as

does the Preacher inAll That Fall, to define his attributes, to circumscribe his essential Non-Being

or Beyond Being as though it were a positive phenomenon which could be imprisoned in wordsand in the logic of time and space, is to defile( in Ramakrishnas phrase) or distort the Absolute

into a false absolute, or pseudo-God. Beckett is unable to see any meaning in the concept of the

God of conventional theology. For him that which is a lie (and all words are lies) is unendurable.The essential self is timeless and deathless; but they I, the self I know, is condemned to death

and suffering It is hier to all the ills that constitute the fact of world-pain. This gratuitous futility

and misery can only have been ordained by the cruel caprices of a God who is himself of thesame element-words. The true God can only be a macrocosmic equivalent of the microcosmic

Void of the true self; the Preachers God- a God who is conceivable- can be nothing but a

malevolent and monstrous projection of the pseudo-self, or, in Sartrian terms, either of the In-

Itself or of the Other . If there is a total reality( as all Beckettts people realize there must be), itis the eternal Pour-Soi, the Absolute Unnameable; as soon as the Preacher calls on God, and

says what he will or will not do, all he does is to create a corresponding En Soi(the Voids own

pseudo-self or vice-exister), concocted out of human words and reflecting human evil 15 Beckettis desperate to decondition his people from words, from everything borrowed so that they

encounter reality or self in all its nakedness and horror. Krishnamurti does the same job but he

discovers at the end of the journey into the self not horror but what Budddha discovered- peacethat passeth all understanding and bliss infinite. Treasures of the Self are unimaginable. He too,

like Beckett, refuses all consolations, all bad faith,. He strips all the veils, all the layers that hide

our own essential nothingness. Since all thought is in words, the only self that I can know is

compounded of words, and out of other peoples words into the bargain, since all words are learntfrom others The enforced alienation of the self into the hands of a hostile and elusive congregation

of others who, by their very existence, render impossible any real existence for the self, is

perennial source of despair forThe Unnameable . But Krishnamurti (to whom I refer because he isclosest to Beckett in his sensibility and methodology and in his transtheism). He celebrates the

unknown that he comes across ( if the formulation be allowed as there is no separate subject when

the infinite, the unknown dawns , when God alone is rather only pure experience of bliss is and

neither the experiencer nor the experienced. Beckett is also unable to see beauty of languageopening into the infinite. The world is not a symbol of God; It is not sacred. Things finite dont

reveal or manifest the Principle of Beauty that is its Origin and End. He doesnt see any order inthe universe All is chaos for him Thus there is hardly any scope for building a positive theology

that alone makes life in all its details worth living, He is unaware of The Sacred that permeates

whole of the phenomenal order , that sanctifies it, that makes it a channel of grace. He seems to

deny Gods immanence in the world of things. The universe or cosmos (for that matter he has nonotion of any entity called cosmos which means order, harmony) isnt a theophany for him. It

doesnt glorify or sing the praises of God. He cant bless Existence as Muslims routinely do by

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blessing the Prophet who symbolizes the Pole of Existence. God is the totality of Existence in the

Eastern framework. Only God exists in the strict sense of the term. Eternal order permeates the

temporal order through and through and in fact can be tasted here and now, in time. This worldthough Maya from a certain perspective, reflects or mirrors God also. Otherwise it would not exist.

So there is no real turning away, no real asceticism in the traditional religious worldviews. World

doesnt fail to reflect the perfection and goodness of the Source. The harmony, order and beauty ofthe cosmos are the imprint of the absoluteness of the Principle in manifestation. Beckett is unable

to celebrate the mystery of existence, and he encounters its mysteriousness as something absurd, as

irrational, as the Other. While as religion is belief in or celebration of the mystery of existence andthe concept of the negative divine is only a reflection of this sacred mystery. Religion refuses to

demystify existence. The Sacred is by definition the Other the mysterious, the mysterium

tremendum and for that very reason to be adored. Religion binds this world to the other world, the

relative to the Absolute and by virtue of that it delivers us from the finitude. Rationalist in Beckettas in Camus for instance would like to appropriate this mystery, this absurdity in rational terms

although he is painfully made aware by encountering the limit situations that the irrational, the

impossible is there standing as a brute fact about which nothing could be done. This also helps to

approach the question of meaning and purpose of the life and the universe which has bedevilledexistentialist philosophers and which is at the centre of absurdist vision of Beckett, Ionesco and

Camus, to name only a few of the most important champions. Following few lines will attempt toclarify the point.

The question is why isnt Eastreligion in general absurdist and pessimist when it shares

Beckettian diagnosis of the things. Is it because religion is wish fulfillment or it is based on hopeand what Camus calls tragic hope: if religion a metanarrative, an ideology, a theory about Reality

one could well dispute it, or at least be agnostic towards it. Modern mans fundamental error lies in

this assumption about metaphysics and religion. Religion talks existence or God and not about

existence oraboutGod. God is Reality itself ,Al-Haqq as the Quran calls it and as Sufis interpret it.Mysticism is experience -pure experience of Reality (without the gulf, the distance between subject

and object, man and God ) where no thought is to construct a system, an ideology, a theory. It isnt

belief or faith in the ordinary sense of the terms. It is experience, it is seeing, it is discovery.Religion (God) is synonymous with truth and this truth necessarily transcends all categorizing, all

philosophizing, all theorizing endeavors. God is what is as Krishnamurti puts it. Whatever is or

whatever truth known and unknown is, is God. God is Love and God is Beauty. Timeless iswhispering in every leaf, in every flower. Everything declares the glory of God. All creation

praises Him as the Quran frequently says. Our very choice to be is our declaration of faith.

Religion is gratitude; gratitude to God, for existence. Religion is surrender to God and that means

acceptance of Reality or Truth. There is no other attitude possible because they are all against thevery nature of things, against our normative endowment; against our very being, our very ground

of Being or our ultimate concern. Faustus is damned as are all rebels, not because some malicious

power from without wishes so but because the very nature of things or what Hinduism andBuddhism call law of Karma and Islam fate demands it. It is absurd gesture to rebel, to rebel

against the Truth, the state of things. Rebellion will accomplish nothing except the destruction of

the rebel. It isnt the question of returning the ticket to God because God cant take it back. That isall bad faith, or a gesture of inauthentic life. Here comes the vital point of distinction between

religion and Beckttian approach. Religion doesnt merely show how life can be worth living but

makes it so. It creates meaning even if it isnt objectively there. What existentialists vainly and

futilely attempt (i.e., create meaning or values in a meaningless situation or valueless universe) hasbeen so successfully done by religion. It has given meaning to our otherwise meaningless life. It

has made life worth living for countless millions throughout history. Even the supposedly life

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denying pessimistic religions have made life worth living. Only God, also, like Heaven, Nirvana

can make life worth living and a fruitful pursuit. Faith in God signifies faith in meaning, not by

virtue of some future life or heaven but by a changed attitude or perspective by virtue of which onesees eternity in this moment and consents to fate, to even eternal recurrence if that were the case,

and kingdom of God within oneself. It makes life a celebration, a feast, a joy everlasting. It doesnt

merely promise or postpone these things. They are realized here and now. Mystic is pure joy, ratherBliss orAnnanda as Hinduism describes it. Ours is originally a state of Bliss. And religion is

nothing but remembrance or zikr in the words of the Quran. It shows us our original face, our

divine face, our original home in Eden, our original state of Bliss. Mystic identifies God with selfor life and thus life becomes a celebration, the supreme value. Religion sanctifies life. That is why

it is against suicide, against despair. The Quran identifies despair with kufr(disbelief). Religion by

characterizing our life as blessing (as God could be realized or perfection attained anytime) as

benediction, as gift of love, an expression of pure joy, the joy of creation or creativity leaves noroom for despair. We werent and now we are and that is moment of celebration. Existence as such

is good and nothingness is deprivation. The principle of Existence, Reality or God is good by

definition and evil comes by distortion of good, by absence of good, by absence of some qualities

or attributes of God in that thing. Only God is wholly good because all the Divine Names(attributes) are actualized in Him. All creation displays only some of them and certain others are

absent for the simple metaphysical reason that it isnt God. The world isnt God and that is why itis tainted by evil. It cant be otherwise. But everything comes from God and returns to God and

thus evil is naughted. Nirvana is the destiny of all creation. Heaven awaits all of us. In the universal

apocatastasis (that is metaphysical necessity) evil is no more. Evil is there and it is real at its ownlevel. But in the total or cosmic perspective it is extremely limited in time and space.

What is the beauty of the creation is that it has no determined meaning and thus it has infinite

signification. Each moment God is in new glory. He never repeats. Each moment is original in the

life of God (and the life of universe). Because the universe has no given determinate meaning wecan give it one. God isnt the name of an object, an entity, a being, a person. He is Infinite and All-

Possibility. One can never exhaust contexts and thus meanings as God signifies precisely this

impossibility of exhaustion and determination.One can well ask what meaning Christianity gives to the world and what makes it

unacceptable to Beckett (Beckett calls it a mythology, a story that only children could be coerced to

believe in). For Christianity (as for Islam) world isnt created as a joke, as it isnt gratuitous. Godhas created it and history is directional. Man isnt accidental to the scheme of things. He counts. He

is divine. He must attempt to realize the kingdom of God. God is the Origin and the End. Now if

we explore these notion in depth we will discover something very different than what Beckett and

many a critics of religion would believe. God is another name for life. He is described as Eternalliving principle by all religious scripture. He is the hearing, the seeing, in the Quranic phrase.

The Kingdom of God is nothing but life in all its splendour and glory, life of intensity and depth,

life everlasting. It is life with a capital L. One who realizes the kingdom of God within realizesinfinitude and goodness of Self. He sees God within as God is only the other pole of man. He

discovers transcendence. He appropriates God in his immanence, in the depths of his self. He

attains Bliss, as he has renounced the principle of separation and thus sorrow-the ego. When not hisbut Gods will, the cosmic will, the wholes will or the will of Existence is done then one says that

he has attained God. There is no separate experiencer or subject to will otherwise than what God or

nature of things or Karma or fate demands. There is no subject to feel absurdity. There is no

desiring self and thus any desire for meaning, for purpose, for this or that things. Religion is an actof trust in existence. The mystic simply watches and lets God or Holy Ghost does everything. He

becomes a hollow bamboo, a flute as Existence (God is Absolute, totality of existence and not a

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person in metaphysical mystical perspective) plays the notes and the song is the fragrance of love

as ego consciousness, limiting self directed principle of alienation is transcended. When Beckett

reaches the limit of consciousness, when Malone is stripped of everything, even body, whenEstrogen and Vladimir have no will to do anything, to become this and that, when they are tuned

by time as such, then there is no agonizing sense of absurdity. One is beyond absurdists

predicament. One has transcended nihilism. One lives despite absolute meaninglessness ofsituation. However, this way of fighting absurdity is ironically portrayed by Beckett. He sees mans

inability to be nihilist and laughs at it. He sees no way out of meaningless situation man is caught

in. He is unable to see beyond nihilism. He is through and through a pessimist. The East strips manof everything including ego, but then it shows the way to Godhood also.Atman isBrahman. Pure

objectless consciousness is Sat Chit Ananada, the supreme bliss, truth and reality. What drew

Beckett to despair and pessimism are mans nothingness, ignorance and misery. But the East shows

how consciousness is Atman and Atman is Brahman or man is potentially GodBlissfull,Omniscient and Existence. Neither ignorance nor misery is mans lot. Modern West is obsessed

with the idea of nothingness and wretchedness of man. So the idea of superman has been

advocated. God has to be killed to let man live or let him usurp His kingdom. Beckett disbelieves

in heroism, in all supermanism. He shows us; quite rightly that man apart from God is indeednothing and wretched. No Sartre or Nietzsche could console us. But where Beckett stops there East

(premodern traditional West or Christianity also as the perennialist authors have argued) begins.The East does see reasons impotence and mans (egos) vanity. Man is nothing apart from God.

God is rich and man is poor as the Quran says. But man can be transcended, negated, killed. So

that only God lives and by virtue of that man also partakes of Godhood. Through fana (dissolutionof self) one attains baqa (subsistence, Eternity in God). A drop isnt lost in the ocean but becomes

ocean. Beckett however, doesnt believe in universal self or Brahman or God. All there is desiring

self and once it is thrown off we get liberated from misery but not nirvana or one doesnt dissolve

in infinity but negates ones finitude and that is all. Rest is silence, the calm and peace of death.Becketts journey ends in grave. Consciousness isnt a something worth possessing. It is just

awareness of our misery and our suffering. It isnt the principle of omniscience and immortality. It

is unwarranted materialist psychology that Beckett believes in ( though he consciously rejects italso at other places) that leads to pessimism and nihilism. If nothing survives death and if suffering

is there to stay Becketts conclusions are impeccable. He identifies Atman with Jiva (empirical

ego) and that is why he cant see grandeur of man but only his misery. If ego were all there is thenBeckett is perfectly justified in his despair. Mystic experiences God. He most surely comes in

contact with the well-spring of eternity. He most surely is blissful because he doesnt identify his

deepest self with the ego, with Iness. He as a subject isnt there to suffer; it is the ego that

suffers. And he lets it to suffer through ascetic exercises. He considers it essential to cross the darknight of the soul. Beckett is enmeshed in the dark night of the soul but he cant see the other shore,

the dawn that awaits the seeker.

Becketts greatness lies in insisting on the perpetual presence of existence, to make experienceexistence rather than theorize about it and label it or avoid it. He isnt, like Joyce, writing about

something but letting that something itself speak. He distrusts all attempts that try to shape

experience or subsume it in any narrative framework, philosophical or theological. He faithfullyrepresents the chaos that experience is. He is neither didactic nor escapist. For him only honest

literature is what imposes no pattern on experience, and eschews all external meaning or

transcendental signified. Nothing answers our metaphysical quest for centers, for anchors, for order

and significance. We cant evade the utter dissolution that awaits everything. There is nopermanence in any experiencable thing, in any existent. Emptiness and nothingness at the heart of

everything is there to stay and cant be evaded, do what we may, as all the evasions come to

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nought. We can invent numerous ways to kill time, to distract ourselves from time with theological

or mathematical speculations but nothing can be done to avoid being ditched into the hole of death,

the Inferno,. As OHara would put it A lifetime becomes a perpetually incomplete process,diversified at first by learning, travel, sex, and the desire for love, but dwindling at length into the

mere sex, and the desire for love, but dwindling at length into the mere existence of a mind sick

with thought and fastened to a dying animal16

Here we remember the Buddhas unremittingemphasis on the voidness of everything, the universal fact of suffering. To quote the Buddha on the

omnipotence of death (and Russell seems to echo him in his often quoted lines on pessimistic end

of universe): Not in the sky nor in the depths of ocean, nor having entered the caverns of themountain, nay such a place isnt to be found in the world where a man might dwell without being

overpowered by death. Radhakrishnan comments The most moral hero and the greatest work

of art must one day be cast down and consumed in death. All things pass away. Our dreams and

hopes. Our fears and desires all of them will be forgotten as though they had never been.17

Vanity of vanities all is vanity, cried the author ofEcclesiastics. Everything reduces to dust and

ashes. It is existence that victimizes Beckets characters and thus nothing can be done against its

absurdity and injustice. Beckett leads to no resolution of lifes problems, its absurdities and pains

but merely seeks to cultivate sardonic detachment or detached hopelessness. His art is simply anironic contemplation of the bleak tragedy, the inchoate and absurd drama, which life presents.

Not only is life too painful for contemplation but also too opaque for intelligence. Intelligenceis not cut to the measure of absurd mystery that universe and life present. Nothing can justify the

ways of God to a finite rational consciousness. Existence cant be analyzed, labeled or understood;

it resists all our naming and pigeonholing into some meaningful form. Nothing answers thequestion what is it. So it is better to believe that there is no problem. There is no key, there is no

problem he asserted in an interview when asked whether the preoccupation with the problem of

Being posed by the existentialists might not be a key to his works. He isnt seeking any answer to

any metaphysical question; for him we need not be metaphysical animals. He declines to be anintellectual and is content to be only a sensibility. To quote fromMalone Dies: But what matter

whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have

always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor why I am, nor where I am, nor if I am 18 And if Iever stop talking it will be because there is nothing more to be said, even though all has not been

said, even though nothing has been said 19 God does not seem to need reasons for doing what he

does, and for omitting to do what he omits to do, to the same degree as his creatures 20 He is notdesperate to solve the riddle of existence; it is reasons vain endeavor to try to scan existence. We

are here to endure experience and lament that it is hard and painful; we are not to comprehend it.

We need not the lies of philosophy or theology but strength to honourably face the trial that life is,

to patiently suffer the punishment for an unknown crime. Why we are born he doesnt know and isnot interested in knowing it either. Why we suffer he doesnt know and disinclined to know. He is

also not interested in pursuing the inquiry Can there be an end to suffering. He is only aware,

painfully aware, that we suffer and are condemned to suffer. He makes a metaphysical assertion,despite his attempt to avoid metaphysics, that we cant be saved, that there is no eternity, that there

is no enlightenment. The universe, according to Moran is made of silence, the terrifying silence

which seems to be the inhuman reality of stasis. Becketts definition of man is that he is asuffering animal. He is different from other animals only by virtue of his consciousness of

suffering; he suffers more intensely and consciously. There is no release from the purgatory of life.

The end result of his philosophy is best captured in Pryrhhos words in Lucians Philosophies for

Sale as ignorance, deafness, blindness. He reduces man made in Gods image, (God isIntelligence) to the worm. It is the imagery of dogs and worms that figures so prominently in the

Beckettian world. Men are apes, not theological and philosophical apes but the apes that suffer and

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find themselves condemned to hell for reasons unknown. Man is not potentially a god or destined

to be some worthy thing in future. No paradise awaits him though he seems to have lost one. For

him as an ego only failure is possible it fails to possess and it fails to communicate.I quote certain statements of his characters from his works that are more or less representative

of him and express something of his disjointed and inchoate philosophical vision. What is wrong

with me, what is wrong with me, never tranquil, seething out of my skull, out of my skull, oh to bein atoms, in atoms(Mrs. Ronney inAll That Fall). Are you listening to me? Is anyone listening to

me? Is anyone looking at me? Is any one bothering about me at all (W1 in Play) Silence and

darkness were all I craved. Well., I get a certain amount of both. They being one. Perhaps it is morewickedness to pray for more (W1 in Play). story if you could finish it you could rest

sleep not before oh I know the one Ive finished thousands and one all I ever did in

my life with my life saying to myself finish this one it is the right one then rest

sleep no more stories no more words and finished it and not the right one couldntrest straightaway another to begin to finish saying to myself finish this one then rest

this time it is the right one. This time you have it and finished it and not the right

one couldnt rest (Voice in Cascendo) I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life

and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name

21

You are on earth, and there is no cure for that(Endgame) We see abundant images of cursing, of

abuses, of disease, of alienation and madness in Becketts works. Nothing human and nothingsuperhuman are worth celebrating for Beckett. Only transcendence is unalloyed perfection and

could be glorified without qualification. But there is no transcendence in his view.. All the beauty

and goodness that we see around hardly means much. Beckett doesnt bother to inquire where fromhas goodness and beauty come despite his rejection of materialism. Trapped in immanence he feels

the stink in everything. Beckett doesnt arrive anywhere and isnt interested in arriving either. He

has nowhere to go and no worry to go anywhere. Just to endure like Sisyphus. Not a heroic

endurance. Not with a stoic spirit of resignation either. He tells stories that say nothing and fornothing. He never finishes telling them because there is no end envisioned, no final resting point,

no consummation, no resolution, no point in his stories. Like Heidegger who reported that the

world is that in the face of which one experiences anxiety and like Camus who refers to the worldas one to which he is opposed by all his consciousness. Beckett puts us in a difficult situation. He

wouldnt much approve of suicide but he has not even a single cheer for the will to love either. He

sees us in a hell from which there is no exit. He is pained to see himself hurled into life and lamentsthat there is no cure for that. All the great works of human spirit and reason, philosophies,

theologies, works of art and countless monuments of human civilization amount to nothing in his

scheme. Man, in this bleak vision, is indeed the scum of the earth, the puny little vermin, the

sticking dirt. What he aspires to do is not some great artistic or philosophical or scientific work butsome trivial amusement. The following description we find in Malone Dies is representative of

Becketts vision of the meaning and destiny of man.

But it was not long before I found myself alone, in the dark. That is why I gave up trying to play and

took to myself for ever shapelessness and speechlessness, incurious wondering, darkness, long

stumbling with outstretched arms, hiding. Such is the earnestness from which, for nearly a century

now, I have never been able to depart. From now on it will be different.But perhaps I shall not

succeed any better than hitherto. Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark, without

anything to play with. Then I shall play with myself. To have been able to conceive such a plan is

encouraging.22

While mysticism has envisaged an ascetic ideal as a means to an end that is a discovery of life, largerlife, life glorious and blissful, Beckett seems to envisage asceticism as an end and there is no discovery of

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the splendour of the life of Sprit as a result of that. It is asceticism of the one who is frustrated and repelled

by the ups and downs of life. It is a cynics asceticism, a kind of Maarian-Scopenharuian asceticism. While

the mystic achieves disinterested witnessing consciousness that is utterly at peace with the phenomenal

world and even sees it quite transformed and soul ravishing, Beckett achieves at best a lifeless neutrality that

just endures without much resentment the succession of phenomena. The mystics doors of perception areopened wide as the Mind at Large becomes activated as Aldus Huxley saw, and perceive the world as if in

a dream, more colorful, more refreshing, more lovely, more beatiuful. However Beckett is led to a myopicconstricted vision. To quote fromMalone Dies again:

My sight and hearing are very bad, on the vast main no light but reflected gleams. All my senses are

trained full on me., me. Dark and silent and stale, I am no prey for them. I am far from the sounds of

blood and breath, immured. I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel

nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and

wreathes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide off the

mark. It too seeks me., as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cant be quiet 23

While the mystic loves nature as he perceives the essences, the vision of ideal forms being granted to

him and he identifies his Beloved with the greenness of the leaves, and redness of roses Becketts

characters, rarely find joy in nature and never have loved it or worshipped it. Their view of nature is hardlya match for mystical and Romanic view of the same. To quote Beckett again inMalone Dies:

Sapo loved nature, took an interest in animals and plants and willingly raised his eyes to the sky, day

and night. But he did not know how to look at all these things, the looks he rained upon them taught

him nothing about them. He confused the birds with one another, and the trees, and could not tell onbe

crop from another crop The sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars didnt fill him with wonder 24

Sapo is a strange ascetic. In the midst of tumult, at school and at home, he remained motionless in hi

place, often standing, and gazed straight before him with eyes as pale and unwavering as the gulls.25 Becket

says that man is expiating for an unknown crime or sin. As he writes in Malone Dies The idea of

punishment came to his mind, addicted it is true to that chimera and probably impressed by the posture of

the body and the fingers clenched as though in torment. And without knowing exactly what his sin was hefelt full well that living was not a sufficient atonement for it or that this atonement, and so on, as if there

could be anything but life for the living. And no doubt he would have wondered if it was really necessary to

be guilty in order to be punished but for the memory, more and more galling, of his having consented to live

in his mother, then to leave her. And this gain he could not see as his true sin, but as another atonement

which had miscarried and, far from cleansing him of his sin, plunged him in it deeper than before. 26

Similarly Kafka believed that we are summoned to life and are under trial for unknown crime. The East ortraditional religion believes in the doctrine of fall, i.e., that man has committed a crime (even if it is just an

act of forgetfulness) that has necessitated his fall, led to mans being outside the Divine center and thus

made him fragmentary and thus in a state of disequilibrium. To be born is to expiate for the sins committed

in former life. We have forgotten that we are the children of immortal Bliss, that our ego isnt atman or

self that our home is Eden, that we are, by the very fact of being born in times severed from our timeless

essence, that existence and thus becoming has condemned us to a state where essence is hard to be found,that we have usurped the divine privileges and tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge, separative inductive

knowledge and thus direct access of truth, pure intellection or the faculty of intuitive intellection has been

lost (though not irretrievably according to mystics). Only in ignorance, in objectless consciousness is their

bliss. Beckett too recognizes this fallen state but doesnt believe that we originally were innocent, immortal,

pure enjoying our abode in heaven, in company of God. He has no metaphysics to tell him from where he

has come; similarly he doesnt believe that we are ever going to regain the paradise as he doesnt know

anything of the End either. He is resigned to the hell he is in. He didnt belong to paradise and will not

return to one. He has come from nowhere for no reason and has been condemned to hell by devils (they of

Unnameable). Because of his ignorance of metaphysics or the knowledge of universal principles, of first

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and last things or of the Origin and the End, of the principle of Existence, it is no wonder that he cant

explain mans guilt consciousness, the unknown crime that he has committed and which has necessitated his

suffering and why he is obliged to express nothingness of his life, why he is here to mourn his state of exile

and expiate for the sins he hasnt committed. Needless to say that life cant be but purposeless, absurd a

burden, and expiation for sin. Needless to say that he can find no reason for all the beauty, and love in theworld. He cant be true to himself because he isnt true to his God and that is why he wants an escape from

facing the self in death, in bad eternity. Camus is a different case. He feels at least at home in this worldand he paganistically affirms it and loves it so dearly that he finds his salvation here. He finds it so beautiful.

He finds ample love here. But in the Beckettian world there is neither beauty nor love. None of his

characters is at home in the world. Curse of time is on everything, every existent. Nothing escapes its wrath

and it is the principle of disintegration. It brings no hope, no joy and heals no wounds. It only inflicts

wounds and until the cup is full when one is no more to complain of its ravages.

Beckett abhors generalizations and abstractions and for him metaphysics is exactly these things. He is

apparently committed to a sort of phenomenological analysis of experience. He wants to have no distorting

spectacles of beliefs, ideologies while perceiving the truth of life. He wants to look at life naked stripped of

all illusions. His thorough going empiricism leads him to despairing conclusions. But the East (religion) too

is committed to empiricism. Its data too is pure experience. Buddhas is the most thorough going empiricism

in the history of human thoug

Beckett Nihilism and Transcendence

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