Mun Sum Mo Quai? Or, Denial of the Tragic

Between moments of the estatic and despair, our memory pushes for the experience of a lifetime in one full body thrust.

Mun Sum Mo Quai? It depends. Who is asking? When is it being asked? We're always telling ourselves that we have done nothing wrong. I have done nothing wrong.

Belivers of fate, the Greek thought that bad things don't just happen. We might not always get our just deserts, but they happen anyways because we did something to make it happen or our natures and our inheritance bring about our misfortunes. Our vices and our virtues both can be our path towards the tragic.

In fact many other sees liffe the same way. For Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Cassius is destroyed by his jealousy, Brutus by his trusting nature. We see this in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Guan Yuan by his pride and Drunkeness. Zhou Kwailang by fulfilling the call of heaven and his loyalty to the Liu's. There is always amoment of catharsis. The character realizes their ends are inescapable because it comes from themselves.

Almost ten years ago, I thought about killing myself. I was at the park behind my high school. I laid on the baseball diamond, near home plate, over an inch of fresh snow. It was still snowing. Cold I was drowsy from the cold. I thought about sleeping and not getting up. Never getting up al all.

I knew now that I probably wouldn't die from sleeping in the snow with my warm parka on. It wasn't cold enough. I didn't know that then. It felt comfortable. The snow felt war in the winter air.

My seventeen year-old mind came to a conclusion about life that made me want to get up: refuse cartharsis and there cannot be a tragic. If some shit happen to you and you come to some great, profound moment of self-knowledge, ignore it. Fuck. Forget that moment. You can remember all the bad shit, just don't remember that moment when you feel whole and complete and in-tuned with the self and the universe. Cuz when you do, you have just become a tragic hero. And nothing good ever happens to the tragic hero.

Forget it and the tragic cannot touch you. All that bad shit is melodrama. After that, the ironic. Ask yourself, mun sum mo quai? And say yes. Always say yes.Tragic heroes always die or suffer some fate worse than death. When bad shit happen to you (assuming you're a good person,) just laugh. Savour irony and life is just a bunch of random shit. Good or bad. Nothing is a tragedy if you don't allow it to be. If you just ignore all the profound stuff.