To be and not to be, that’s a better question. Without which not, sine kwannon; all the time in the world sitting upon the edge. Precipice, precipitation and the precipitous collapse of meaning, dangled upon the edge of the end of the world, internally assonant, and just satisfying enough to crave that all encompassing desire for death. The pursuit of the void.
My headspace looks a little weird right now, I hope you will excuse me.
I muse, tonight, on a topic I have mulled over mindlessly – and mindfully – for some time now; still not concretely set upon an answer that would satisfy the basic urge that drives me, but still pleasantly placated by a sad thought: we are all doomed to be forgotten.
Not just forgotten, but non-existent. One day, we will cease to exist in sum. Our atoms, which were once star dust, which were transmogrified into us through some strange probabilistic magic, and will one day be not us again, will cease to hold meaning in the curious knot of consciousness.
I haven’t decided whether it terrifies me or not.
To be and not to be, again and again.
What if it is scary. Is all the nihilistic depressing outlooks warranted? Well, maybe Nihilistic, because nihilism is simply the absence of meaning: it holds no moral quantities whatsoever. It is a philosophy bereft of that thing we call inherent meaning. It is not the ideology of despair, but an ideology that precludes ideology: a paradox. My favorite kind.
Because paradoxes are unanswerable. They are the stuff of which god is composed. The atoms of contradiction. Those sweet freely flowing nothings that are everything’s by their very nature. An ideology that precludes ideology is ideal, because it holds no pretense at being the correct one.
Correct ideologies, are dangerous.
Correct ideologies dictate that that comma splice is evil; that semi-colons serve a specific purpose; that the rallying cry of the period is the death knell of the living sentence. That pulsating series of imperfections that dies in a little black hole at the end of time.
When an ideology is pre-supposed to be real – whichever shitty ideology it is – they all are, really – then the things that surround it are negated. The things that are not the ideology become objectively evil. It is monstrous. To make something that has no inherent meaning a bad thing. How can people be so attached to this?
Well, the reason is often comfort. It’s nice to believe that good and evil exist, that people can be bisected, bifurcated, and otherwise boxed into simplistic moral categories. That people are not composed of a series of actions, strung along a narrow conception of chaotic time; that things are categorical, that they exist as they are. That there is no need for paradox, because write and wrong are the two things that exist, and one is preferable to the other.
Fuck that.
Fuck it up its butt. Fuck all ideologies. Ideologies are fucking awful. Ideologically driven mindsets are painful and childish. They require reducing the world; putting it through photoshop, cleaning the stretch-mark scars on reality’s body. It requires that reality be modified, and altered – contrast added, curves enhanced, symmetry created – and that the rest of it be discarded. Then, when being processed into that idealized image of self, compressed, degraded, pixels removed. The warts all gone, ideology is there, beautiful, and unblemished by moral compromise. Because that’s the way it should be, Ce n’est pas?
I can’t abide such willful ignorance. I am prone to my fancies, and I am imperfect, and unqualified and unquantifiable. Reality is not attached to the circuits of meaning man constructs to comfort himself in the face of a broad, enormous, unending panoply of space, and planets and action. Reality is plural and unanswerable and all those things that make us uncomfortable.
It scares me, sometimes, when I think about the fact that we will one day cease to exist. That one day, there will be a nothing where we once were.
And, at the same time, it’s kind of beautiful.
Optimistic Nihilism. An approach to meaninglessness that I prefer. The world ends, nothing follows, let’s assume. Then every bad thing is gone, every good thing is gone. People are not real, or they are, or both, as I like think, and then we wink out, and cease, but we don’t leave, we simply change. We simply become that which is not otherwise, and it’s beautiful.
We rise and become everywhere like so many things that have already passed, and then, if this nihilistic show is oscillating, we do it again, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I fucking hate those dead, desiccated things.
So I ask, to be and not to be, that’s the question. And I don’t need an answer.
