Morning Song of the Wild Cock

or On the Grand Scheme of Things

At the first morning lights, a wild cock comes scurrying into the market of a village, screaming, shouting and generally looking out of his mind.

No one in the village seems to pay too much attention to the cock, nor the peculiar aspect of his nature; besides possessing the use of reason, it had been taught, no one knew by whom, to express itself in human fashion.

“Waaaake uuuuup! Wake uuuuuuuup you foooooooools!”

“Shut up you rooster! Stop being so annoying or we’ll pull your neck and roast you for supper tonight,” shouted an artisan who was sweeping the entrance of his shop.

The cock rushes through the middle of the square, dodging the attempts of those who try to catch him. He runs towards the church as if he were late for something, erratically flapping his wings to perch on the top of the stairs, from where he could speak to the crowds in the market from a vantage point.

“Mortals, awake! The day breaks; truth returns to the earth and vain fancies flee away. Arise; take up again the burden of life; forsake the false world for the true…”

An old man had rushed to scold him, in the same fashion a father would scold his son for eating too much chocolate or staining his pants with mud.

“Friend, I advise you not to talk in this fashion with everyone, because if you do you will gain many enemies! Don’t you have anything better to do with your time? If you go down that alley there is a sculptor who might use you for some errands, you might earn a few florins, and even find yourself an occupation. For God’s sake, find some meaning in your life you wild animal!”

“Of this I couldn’t care less, old man, for in the grand scheme of things, only two things matter: know yourself, and learn how to die. All the rest is just passing the time. And so is what you suggest I do, a stratagem to allow me to pass my time.

Most of you in the village get an occupation or continue the one of your fathers in order to pass the time. If you are lucky you do something that tickles your intellect, so that you can pass the time better. Money is just a tool to buy things and experiences when you are not working, to pass the time.

Some people call it ‘meaning’, to me it is just passing the time in the way that most reduces the pain of living in a meaningless world..

You conduct yourselves as if you were to live forever, as if there were an award for all your efforts at the end of your journey. Look at the most noteworthy fellows that once inhabited this town, all the money and accolades didn’t save them from the inevitable. Take Vivaldi the banker for example, he collected lands and more gold than he could store in his vaults, but this didn’t save him from death. And who remembers him today? No one, not even his widow who didn’t waste a single minute to squander his fortune with her mistress!

In the grand scheme of things, money seems such a trivial pursuit, and only useful as much as it provides the freedom to simply contemplate life if one decides to do so. But then what sane man in the history of humankind has ever been content simply by cherishing his or her freedom?

A noble man called Fillippo Ottonieri, by account of the illustrious Leopardi, made no distinction between business and pleasure. However serious his occupation, he called it pastime. He said that our truest pleasures are due to the imagination. Thus, children construct a world out of nothing, whereas men find nothing in the world.

It is not sufficient for men, as for other animals, merely to live in a state of freedom from sorrow and physical discomfort. As he narrates, the gods knew that whatever their condition of life, humans would seek the impossible, and if unpossessed of genuine evils, would torment themselves with imaginary ones. The gods resolved therefore to employ new means for the preservation of the miserable race. For this purpose they used two especial artifices, such as instituting a thousand kinds of business and labour, to distract men as much as possible from self-contemplation, and their desires for an unknown and imaginary happiness…”

The old man had given up on the cock and waved his hand at him while turning back and walking down the church, muttering to himself.

“Here comes the nihilist, the cosmic pessimist, the new Zarathustra coming down the mountain to preach to us..”

In the meantime, the cock had continued his harangue, in a state that resembled that of a trance; his thoughts had become more disconnected, his eyes were lost in the distance, its voice flared in a whisper.

“..do we get lost more when we are young, when we think that life is a chaos, a vortex of unattainable things, or when we are old and see so clearly in front of our eyes the simplicity of everything? How everything is in fact easily discernible, decomposable, describable? How in the grand scheme of things, only this awareness matters? To this I have no answer.”