A Fundamental Unsatisfactoriness of Existence

Patricia Nistor

Patricia Nistor is a non-practicing Art Historian. She has a BA in History of Art from University of Birmingham and an MRES in Arts and Culture from Leiden University, with a specialism in socially engaged art. She has worked for institutions like Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Skissernas Museum in Lund, BOM in Birmingham, as well as film and music festivals in Romania and The Netherlands. She has largely renounced the traditional art world, yet she cannot (nor does she want to) fully escape its gravitational orbit.

A Fundamental Unsatisfactoriness of Existence

My condition is defined by unclear outcomes, complex symptom management and lack of comprehensive research. Below is a very real exchange I had with my Dutch General Practitioner who, after taking my pulse and conducting a brief auscultation, concluded that my symptoms were perhaps ~simply psychosomatic~. I had showed up as a patient, from the Latin patiens, a form of patior, meaning “to suffer” or “to endure”. I was a sufferer par excellence, an identity infused with a Christian (for me – specifically Eastern Orthodox) spirit of suffering as redemptive. My Very Dutch doctor denied me this role, diluting the “person-centered care” approach to only leave the personal responsibility and nothing else; to which I replied by wallowing in deepest pathos:

– I know you don’t want to help me, because life is fundamentally suffering and it is foolish of me to come here and expect any escape from the pain.

– Well…yes. I mean, you know, in Buddhism they say that pain is inevitable but suffering is not.

Photographer Jan Dirk van der Burg, in his taxonomical book Typisch Nederland captures the “Buddhafication” of the Dutch front garden. When probed, owners say that the Buddha heads evoke peace, are nice to be around, or that they simply have a certain “something.” The Dutch sense a certain unsatisfactoriness in their Western, Protestant, Liberal gardens and instinctively reach for a facsimile of imagined Eastern tranquility. My doctor was presumably sharing wisdom that was similarly hollow, an instrumentalised aesthetic embellishment unrooted in a true spiritual practice.

For the purposes of this text, though, let us believe he meant it in earnest. If he did, that would require us to revisit the 1981 World Medical Association Declaration of Lisbon, stating that the patient has the right to “a physician who is free to make clinical and ethical judgements without any outside interference” as well as to “… die in dignity.” Thus I propose, in my Healthcare Provider’s honour and upon his strict medical advice, to amend it and include the following: “The patient has a duty to understand, and not just endure Duḥkha, the first of the Four Noble Truths, which is most easily perceived as suffering but instead is best seen as a fundamental Unsatisfactoriness of Existence.”

I walked into that interaction wanting salvation. In a complete lapse of my politics, I craved a paternalistic dynamic to give me momentary respite from wretchedness. And what I found instead was a complete metaphysical shift; rather than dissolving my Self in the murky sea of institutionalised medicine, I was made to consider a more radical dissolution, beyond Being and Non-Being, one in which I could finally escape my endless cycle of rebirths altogether.