The mysterious rivers of tears under the streets
"Holy the hideous human angels. Holy the Fifth International"
We’re falling out of love, John observed a couple of days back.
I think that’s true. There’s a flattening of affect. A hollowing-out of experience. Despair, sure, but what’s perhaps more prominent in our culture is rather this gray state of non-life that lacks the focused intensity of actual anguish. A confused numbness, a sort of frozen grief.
A state of alienated subjectivity that cannot breathe deeply, that has forgotten so much of what life should be like that it doesn’t really care about anything anymore, save for distracting itself through the spectacular commodities on offer.
“This flight. All the long flights. All the hours. Deeper than boredom.”
“Activate your tablet. Watch a movie.”
“I feel like talking. No headphone. We both feel like talking.”
“No earbuds,” she said. “Talk and write.”
(DeLillo, The Silence)
The absence of deep thought, the childish superficiality and incoherence of discourse (and all of its many preconditions), is key to this sense of profound unreality.
An intellectual integration into the world, a thinking engagement with reality, whether on abstract or more hands-on, corporeal terms, is a primary facet of the nature of humans as rational beings.
Yet in the midst of this stultifying and distracting spectacle, and the sequence of emergencies that call forth our lower, emotional faculties at the expense of critical reflection, this rational integration becomes impaired. And since this particular connection is so important to the kind of creatures that we are - since it’s our primary avenue of attachment to being itself - the result is a broad, profound disconnect from reality, and not least from one another.
A couple of days ago, I gave a flower to this girl who in her professional practice has helped us out a bit over and above the norm. Also, I’ve always thought she’s had this haunted, this harried look about her, so I wanted to cheer her up, if I could. To say thanks for going that extra mile.
And in her genuinely grateful response, I saw this flash of utter vulnerability and longing for genuine human connection. Just for an instance. It seemed such that, even though the gift was very much appreciated, the interaction was tinged with a painful remembrance of how cold and empty the world outside really is. Like the gesture sort of broke through a numbness which unfortunately also called forth that terrible windchill the anaesthetic was in place to help you forget.
We’re falling out of love, in seeming spite of the preponderance of that “ethics of desire” I wrote about at length a while back. For this worldview, this set of bearings is really a morality of baser and self-indulgent desires, rather than anything like a refined eudaimonist quest for complete human flourishing.
The emphasis is always on immediate individual self-gratification; the intense yet superficial experience of the passions, of the lower appetites rather than the intellect or the will (or of the whole, complex human being).
The value of this ethics isn’t found in principles that transcend the self. There’s nothing of the romance of the solemn vow here, nothing of the sublime joy of self-sacrifice or of the sacred union of a band, coterie or society.
It reproduces only isolated individuals which sometimes may function as a target of another’s desire or gratification. As commodities.
Finally, as per transhumanism et al., commodities even for their own consumption, in a sort of spectacular self-cannibalization.
The tendency of the current institutions of the ruling class is to enforce rules against unity. Of any kind. In that sense the lockdown protocols were almost a symbolic distillation of the values and fears of the ruling class. The culture of the selfie, the obsessive reproduction of self advertisements, in essence, are band-aids for the lacerating loneliness most people feel today.
And it further reinforces this idea of hyper individuality, as well as reinforcing a deeper deformation of what constitutes reality. At the same time the government assiduously works to undermine all collectivity and group formation. It’s also apparent that the spectator sports domain is there to mimic collectivity and provide just the most basic ephemeral experience of belonging. This segues into the current war cult being inflamed by the US government.
(John Steppling, ibid.)
The roots are deep, of course. The decay of thought, the retreat from truth, as G. R. G. Mure put it, begins in the high middle ages. And it gains traction in the reductionist ontologies of the auxiliary ideologies to early capitalism, in the ascendancy of that tethered and stultified idol which usurped the name of science.
The ontology of scopes is a case in point.
This master discourse, predicated on avarice and control through the substitution of actual reality for interchangable numbers and figures, for hollow and disjointed abstractions, reproduces in us this notion of a penetrading, “objective” gaze of domination.
The ultimate foundation of reality is the data on a shipping manifest or a bill of sales.
When we internalize this twisted focus, we lose something, both of ourselves and of the reality around us. We deafen the perception of external intentionalities through this conceptual and cognitive domination of the mode of objective possession; we become blind to the actual willings in the world apart from our own.
There’s here, in a very profound sense, a reification of the artificial distinction between self and non-self. An arbitrary distinction made possible through the merely logical, merely virtual separation between the self and the world, neither of which can properly be said to exist outside of their immediate relation. A relation which really is intrinsic to the very intellection upon which the virtual separation is predicated.
And when that relation is severed or forgotten, the door is opened to the sort of fiat metaphysics inherent to both 13th century nominalism as well as contemporary transhumanist discourse. Of the predominance of representation before immutable realities.
Before nature, within and without.
Postmodernism is apparently what we are left with when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.
Not only does pm echo Beckett’s comment in Endgame, “there’s no more nature,” but it also denies that there ever was any recognizable space outside of language and culture. ‘Nature’, declared Derrida in discussing Rousseau, “has never existed.”
Again, alienation is ruled out; that concept necessarily implies an idea of authenticity which postmodernism finds unintelligible.
…The real danger consists in not challenging, at the most basic level, the alienation and domination threatening to completely overcome nature, what is left of the natural in the world and within ourselves. … Similar is the brief pronouncement by Novalis, “Philosophy is homesickness.” By comparison, Kroker and Cook are undeniably correct in concluding that “the postmodern culture is a forgetting, a forgetting of origins and destinations.”
(Zerzan, “The Catastrophe of Postmodernism”)
There’s a connection here between capitalism’s core practice of conjuring money out of thin air, and that “Humian vomit” (G. R. G. Mure again) of something possibly emerging from nothing, towards infinite growth. From fiat currency to fiat metaphysics. A widespread, insane approach to reality, will reproduce itself in our worldview.
And indisputably, there’s a sort of nominalism inherent to the dominant mode of contemporary discourse. It’s evident in the irate Facebook commenters aggressively defending patent absurdities, and their almost proudly irrational zealotry. It’s also present in the political doublespeak where common assertions of mutually contradictionary positions is the everyday norm. Where scientific racism abroad is lauded, and open nationalism at home anathema.
Of course, this is not a problem if representation trumps reality.
In the expression of these habits of thought, the tension between appearance and reality, fact and factor, substance and attribute tend to disappear. The elements of autonomy, discovery, demonstration, and critique recede before designation, assertion, and imitation.
Magical, authoritarian and ritual elements permeate speech and language.
Discourse is deprived of the mediations which are the stages of the process of cognition and cognitive evaluation.
The concepts which comprehend the facts and thereby transcend the facts are losing their authentic linguistic representation.
Without these mediations, language tends to express and promote the immediate identification of reason and fact, truth and established truth, essence and existence, the thing and its function.
(Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man)
And alienation, in its many forms and manifestations, is at heart nothing less than this disconnect from reality. A sort of permanent cognitive dissonance.
These are quite some numbers. Going outside of the chart, Canada has put to death 31,664 of its citizens between 2016-2021. A full quarter of all of these, irrespective of the underlying condition, stated that they wanted to die because they were lonely.
And the significant part of all those purported covid deaths were of course equally iatrogenic.
Back in early 2020, a few of us who actually had first-hand experience of the palliative and care home sectors’ liberal use of opioids and other pharmaceuticals which may… Expediate the passing of the elderly, let’s say, were quick to ask a few uncomfortable questions. A prominent Swedish investigative journalist even managed to publish an article which directly implicated practices of de facto euthanasia in the rampant care home deaths around March or April of 2020. And the widespread practice of placing frail patients on ventilators? The enormous monetary incentives to diagnose people with covid? And I’ve almost forgotten the PCR scam.
Any and all such uncomfortable questions were drowned out in a deluge of fear porn and propaganda, of course. Everyone saw the images of people dropping dead in the streets of China, like Hollywood has taught us to expect from the magical incantation of pandemic. Everyone saw the ads and the headlines, and we collectively masked up and obeyed.
This is to say nothing of the lockdowns, the economic fallout and its consequences for the third world, or of the mRNA products.
The disaster was attractive, of course. Not only since it felt real, since it felt like something was finally happening, but also because we long for the catastrophe.
Because we want all of this to end. All the long flights. Deeper than boredom.
Are the oceans rising rapidly? Is the air getting warmer, hour by hour, minute by minute?
Do people experience memories of earlier conflicts, the spread of terrorism, the shaky video of someone approaching an embassy, a bomb vest strapped to his chest? Pray and die. War that we can see and feel.Is there a shred of nostalgia in these recollections? People begin to appear in the streets, warily at first and then in a spirit of release, walking, looking, wondering, women and men, an incidental cluster of adolescents, all escorting each other through the mass insomnia of this inconceivable time.
And isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout? Is this something that they’ve always longed for, subliminally, subatomically?
(DeLillo, ibid.)
I still remember, reading Stephen King’s The Stand when I was twelve years old, how incredibly attractive were its post-apocalyptic vistas and dead, empty cities. There was such a wonderfully relieving sensation in imagining oneself to be a remnant individual among the ruins of industrial civilization, untouched by meaningless, bureaucratic rituals and the future prospects of subjugation under a machine of hollow responsibilities and strange sacrifice. School’s out forever.
To walk about in the park, dew glistening in the early morning sun of some dog-day in the middle of August, and realize that the machine wouldn’t start up again after the holidays. That it would never start again. That you were finally free.
The novel also approaches the reader with this sense of immediate, hands-on participation in not only a great and significant struggle, but also this low-key notion of nourishing meaning inherent in being at the forefront of a radical social renewal, a re-founding of society that touches some deeply human need of roaming freely into pristine lands, and building something of your own together with people that you love and trust.
I guess one could say that this is very close to the opposite of alienation. These are the origins and destinations Zerzan desires, beneath the boardwalk of civilization. The authenticity of multi-dimensional human life.
The deep, holistic integration of eudaimonic fulfillment.
It’s not our final goal, the Catholic in me must add. That unfathomable glory. But it’s something rather near to our contingent, worldly end, and which I think we have a clear duty to both realize the possibility of, and to strive towards with all the resources we can muster. Not least since Grace always builds on mere worldly virtue.
+++
Nothing is true, the spectacle now seems to insist. Incessantly, everywhere.
Well, “if nothing is true, everything is possible”, replies Skinny Puppy as the callsign of their farewell tour.
This is a much more profound statement than one might think.
If nothing is true, then there’s absolutely nothing to prevent the actual presence of a transcendent and immutable ground of being that by itself vindicates absolute truth.
Yeah. As soon as you actually concede that literally NOTHING is true - that there’s no ontology, no logic, and no fundamental principles of being to which everything must conform - then it immediately follows that the actual, immediate presence of absolute and immutable truth is not only possible, but actually given.
There’s namely now nothing to prevent its immediate givenness, that it was nonetheless present in the deep background beyond absence all along. No law of contradiction, no principle of identity to violate - nothing.
And when this is granted, the whole edifice of being, of truth, beauty, goodness, and their rational appreciation, which simply are aspects of this immutable foundation and our relation to it, are equally real.
Equally incontrovertible.
So go ahead. Deny truth altogether. Really follow this thought down to its ruddy end. And you’ll find yourself right back at the foundation.
That same firmament to keep building on.
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.(“The Darkling Thrush”, Thomas Hardy. About December 1900)
You've articulated the feelings I, and I'm sure many many others, have been experiencing over the last three years. The despair, demoralization, alienation, inertia, the frozen grief as you so wisely put, all begin to make sense in this philosophical context. Truth has lost its value in the postmodern mind. It's a plaything, a toy to mean whatever one wants it to mean, changeable at any moment. To see this in action is disturbing on many levels. I have certainly felt myself a stranger in the human tribe, exiled by not participating in its blood ritual.
The desire for catastrophe is tangible. I'm glad you pointed this out. I think it gives a sense of meaning, of togetherness that's been missing so deeply. It's intensely primal. I recall my mother telling me how close everyone felt during wartime, that sense of everyone coming together for a common cause, to defend it, to fight. It gave the tribe something to live for, a reason to exist. I believe the pandemic with its virus, the new enemy, achieved the same thing - but in appearances only. We weren't collectively fighting this enemy for our freedom, although it was sold to us as that with its 'Freedom Pass' and other such deceptions. The tribal connections were exploited in its design.
I long for the carolings of the little thrush, those fleeting moments of unbridled joy, of hope, the call of the ecstatic wild, our true selves. I spend as much time as I can in nature for this very reason.
A very fine piece indeed. Many thanks .