Life is always a meeting point for other life. Death is a ruse. Money is a trick. Fear is what you must face and no matter how often you face it, it will not go away as long as you’re still alive, but not facing it is not an option. And the symbols we use to paint the world are only stand-ins for the emotions we use to paint our lives. While all the while, generally speaking, belief is the driving force behind our emotions, and how we see is who we are, and “if we are unable to see then no more you” sort of thing, and when there’s no you then you are easily manipulated by the money-lovers of the universe, and specifically through the use of the binary ruse system involving sex and death with obligation as the cohesion tying this entire faulty belief system together. Wow. I just said that.
Because the apocalypse is coming, dear friend, and no matter how hard you try to prepare yourself, you will not be prepared. There is no manual, and no obnoxious commander-in-chief will protect you from the coming s**tstorms of the already-erupted kaleidoscope of vomit we call our rapidly devolving environment, and so we need to reach out for each other as the winds swirl about our heads. Punching each other in the belly and back will only lead to the entire species flung off into the abyss, and nobody wants that—except perhaps for a few snarky bureaucrats hoping to make a few bucks off this erased future of ours.
Best case scenario? The cult literature and movies of yesteryear are the masterpieces we will pore over in the trash heaps of tomorrow. And we are currently writing each for our own individual cults, whether they be of an intersectional variety or the cult of capitalism, but we all increasingly just speak to our tribes in the hopes that our tribe is going to win the day, when no one wins at the end of this already evaporating day, and instead, in our efforts to speak primarily to our particular tribes, we are only becoming more tribe-like. But that having been said… I don’t want you to stop being tribe-like; I just want you to stop trying to win the day. Or rather, embrace the cult! Embrace your holy family! But understand that your cult will never save you, no matter how much you plead the future to leave your lawn untouched—as the world spirals into itself wildly, and our lives become as moot in the larger general firestorm of the geopolitical wondershow, and our children cease to have footing to take their next step in a history is not ended, but ending. It’s not that we are living at the end of history as our post-modern predecessors so gleefully pronounced, but in an ending of history as we know it, as our Mayan predecessors predicted with far less glee.
The ever-increasing annihilation of rival cultures—through effective deployment of the super-ideologies of the world—and our eyes become distracted by the glittering screen as our many internal voices are always hiding deeper within the growing shadows of this monoculture as it moves toward the abyss with the lethargic apathy of bureaucracies everywhere—while we also are stating the most outlandish of ponderables in the tones of the helpless while simultaneously snickering at ourselves with the most heartless of snickers, and the end is nigh become a fashion statement, because fashions are always ending—but there is one fashion that proves eternal, the fashion for the ending of things—and we are indeed witnessing an ending upon the earth—but what is ending and what will it’s ending lead to. This is the question that our apocalyptic literature asks. Where do you go after the end of the world.
To be nothing but a nothing that is.
The Apocalyptic Era is not derived from the work of a specific philosopher or scientist. It is not a nice time to be alive. It is not a time of freedom and innovation, but a time when we, the lost souls of the universe, go tumbling over the edge of the ideological system that’s been driving the world for some three hundred years, and as you soar off the edge of this conceptual precipice, and how will your arms flail at just that moment? Will they flail in a decorous manner, or will they burble melodramatically as you try to stuff your intestines back inside of you in the most comedic of ways. There is no clear happiness here, but only the desire and need to continue to be as a species and to avoid as much as possible the Dark Enlightenment that has befallen us.
Or more specifically been stuffed in our faces by a progression of ever-more insidious thinkers.
Begin with this. That what I think of as me is in actual fact a very flimsy construction between the infinite imagination I navigate within and the infinite universe I am navigating without, and that these two dichotomies are not quite as distinct, but connected at their furthest reaches and most personal. As our scientists catalog the ways and means that smells make their way through the neurons to affect the as-of-yet undisclosed mystery we call the mind, and artists pine away at projects that affect primarily them and their friends, and politicians also are mostly interested in them and their friends, the rest of us are left sitting in our rooms biting at our fingernails coquettishly in our frustration at having been left behind.
For, your everyday average citizen is not just being shafted economically but also aesthetically, spiritually, and conceptually. All of the various specialized areas are so internally-focused that they have lost touch with the holistic picture. How can a politician, when faced with the imminent destruction of the planet, be concerned with anything else but working to avoid this? You could ask that question. You could ask yourself, “How is it that artists could be interested in anything other than conveying meaning to the greatest number of people possible?” For there are certainly artists who could give a s**t. Or, how could scientists be interested in anything other than saving this planet as well? Or writers? Or you?
I live in a universe of my own imagining, and you live in a universe of your own imagining, and I like to imagine our imaginations as having become intertwined within a literal dimension in the larger dimensionality of the universe is actually made up of our many imaginations messily—not unlike how subatomic particles seem to be on the messier side of the universe.
So that’s pretty out there.
Altruism seems like a new trend among the young, but personally, I have never been very good at being good. I mean, I just am a total mess of a human being myself, and I say, Welcome to my hot mess. This is my MO. This is how I am. Others have different life strategies. This is mine.
But what this means in reality is that there is a time and a place for everything and everything’s coming undone currently, in this time and place, and you have got to get up off your ass girlfriend, and start talking back to the man if you’re ever going to get out of this brokedown laugh track of a decompressed life. Wake up to the shit, my brothers, because the shit has become as woken up to you, and if you don’t start singing your sweet song on back, then you are as a parakeet in the juicer and a paramecium singing of the afterlife in the blandest of tones. Be awake, there, my pretties, as the universe collides with itself in an effervescent cloud of known particularities. That having been said, we do not shy away from politics, but are also not stringently political. You can understand us by what we are not.
We are not you. We are not going to get anywhere. We are not laughing right now. We are not being read or followed by anyone anywhere. We have no place in this world. This world does not belong to us. This world is ended, and despite being occasionally a little bit political, we act as single people, and never as part of a herd, and despite acting as single people and never the herd, we are also building communities. We are building communities of individuals that are our holy families through outlandish ideologies that are the more durable ideologies of the end times, and not the flimsy rationalizations of the enders of our times. Like this.
But most of the time, here in the apocalypse, we can only ask questions, because we’re very often not sure of ourselves, which is all part of being out on your own and shouting pronouncements while also terrified about what the herd’s going to do with these pronouncements, and most terrifying being that the herd doesn’t care what this solitary thing shouts at them and there’s nothing you could ever have done, that you were always going to be stampeded anyway, which in a sense is true, but, even so, I need to know, Who am I when I’m not myself? How do you know something is true? What would the world be like if everyone really got whatever they wanted all the time? What makes me human? Am I human? Like this.
The answers always vary but the questions remain the same. As we veer luxuriously towards the apocalypse, as we’ve already become enshrouded in the blood walls of the apocalypse, as we look back nostalgically to the days when the apocalypse was just beginning, it is the duty of the artist, writer, thinker, and activist to ask these questions. We are in full on blaring-emergency-light mode and we have got to pull ourselves out of this mess. By making shit up and making connections with others over this shit.
So, to recap. These days, the quaint cynicism inherent in post-modernism seems trite and pointless. And specifically, the whole project of irony and artifice. Only the dark spirituality of the apocalypse can give the appropriate answer to this endgame we have been presented with. And this dark spirituality is at the heart of a new literature that fits with the new Apocalyptic Age.
These are lines being projected out into the meat of the abyss. These are gods being redrawn in the contours of any number of beasts simultaneously. These are homes that have been invaded by the forests of the world. These are screams I cannot hear for I am too busy gauging eyes into my shoulders. These are the ends I have used to justify my many means, and now they all look like toys being tortured into the configurations of monsters for the viewing pleasure of the many cavern-dwellers I keep under my bed to spy on my dreams.
I have nightmares in which the elaborate hopelessness I feel daily is countered by something like a howling in the forest, or a sudden vision of another land, or places that are anywhere but here, and every day I wake knowing we need to save a world we also already wholeheartedly believe has gone past the point of no return.
To undo the damage that is already irreparable.
