I feel nihilism, the world truly closed and empty, then without warning nihilism gives way and blossoms into the aesthetic of a song, or a story, something finite but meaningful. Through nothing there is everything, even though everything is finite.
I can think of no greater nihilism than the idea that art is greater than experience itself. And yet, this is my deepest conviction. Therefore, I hold the nihil within myself, and reap all that comes.
“Bombs from the sky break reality, and God is great as the throat is slit.”
-Repressed power speaks its sick indignation
I would rather be the villain in my story, power incarnate, the one who must lose, rather than myself. Just to be cool, just to have a place in the world. Just to have an aesthetic, and command it, and to be somebody in the world.
I feel like I’ve been shot. My top two vertebrae, tingling, vulnerable, and my shoulders as well. All I can feel is my skeleton. All I can feel is fragility. I feel my heart within my chest, aches around the edges, internal organs as compacted meat, hands trembling and mind gone wild. I can’t think or focus, but I could, what I couldn’t do was speak. What I couldn’t do was take action. What I couldn’t do was become somebody in the world, and even though I knew that was exactly what I needed to do. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know whose face to look at it, what argument to make, what thing to embody. All sorts of things ran through my mind, and I chose none of them. I sat there, and afterwards, after sitting there, I regretted it. I beat myself up for it. I couldn’t sleep. I had no energy, and the next day I did it again. I’m an absolute slave. A slave to matter, a slave to reality, a slave to my own mind. Thoughts swallow thoughts and the mystical oroboros is all that remains. I cling to it, my absolute inability, it is all I have. I am empty, and yet I am full. My actions are not my thoughts. I am not harmonized. I am out of sync with mind and body, outside of the world. I am a ghost, a floating head with hands that do not move. I am fully aware of this, but how do I change it? What do I say? What do I do? Who do I open up to? Who can love me? Who can rid me of the guilt I feel because of the guilt that is put onto me? No one but myself. I know this, and yet I can’t stop fucking up. Can’t stop doing the wrong thing, can’t stop failing to put an impression forward. What should I say? I could say a million things. I don’t know what to say. I can’t hear you. I am trapped in my own mind, swallowing itself over and over again every day without respite or catharsis. I don’t know what to say. I could give you this. Would you like it? Of course not. But it’s how I feel. “I am not a human being.” Excuses. All you want is excuses. Of course I do. A reason not to try. A reason to lay back, engulf my face in smoke and embrace the void. I am not a perfect writer, and so I cannot write. It can be criticized, torn apart, destroyed. It always will be. Who am I to say they’re wrong? Who am I to have a perspective and stumble blindly with it into the world? Who am I to accomplish anything? I am the superego, and I am void. How do you kill me? How do I kill myself, without killing myself? Paradox. A circle. I am trapped. Maybe I ought to get some exercise. Or some sleep, so I can have the energy to exercise. I can’t do it. I think to the future. I enslave myself in time. By then, I’ll feel better. By then, I can try. Not now. Not while the guilt lingers in my heart, false guilt that I don’t have the will to defy. Is that the superego speaking? Or is it me? I can see stories. I can see the windswept shore and the coastal town, and the girl and the ghost who face themselves there. I can see the magenta palace, sparkling and spiraling out of the sea, and a city of crystal, domain of the moon. Am I the moon, or am I the sun? I am me. I should just be. So take a step, and walk out. To where? The world. What will you do? What will you say? Is this you? Is that what you will put forth? I don’t know. Then don’t go. Stay. Please, never leave me. I do not want change. I do not want to go. I want to be with you. I want you to be my friend. All I want are true friends, true love. I am all you need. I am the World. I am the imagination, and its call. The shores of the real cannot compare to the spiraling city, the triumphant sun, and the alchemist therein. Recede into the ideal. Become a failure, a loser in reality. And a pole through which the world moves, a pole through which fear and trembling makes its nest. Are you not apt for such a cosmic role? No. Because I want to be somebody. I want somebody to see the city, the light, the sun. It’s no good in my own head. Because you don’t believe in it. You need it validated. I need a reason to love myself. And who are you? An empty thing, through which thoughts move. A stranger to yourself. Yes, absolutely. A failure at reality, with no self and no will. That’s what science says. Embrace objectivity. And cancel out the mind? Get rid of you? Yes. Enshrine yourself into the history of the world. These thoughts, they come and go. Their light is not real. Then I’m not real. How can I change? You are your thoughts. Yes. You are your ideas? Yes. And you fail at making them real? Yes. You are me, and I am you. I am. But how can I kill you? Go to war with the self, recede into fantasy, the city by the sea and the shimmering water of worlds ideal. Or exercise. Yes. But now you are tired, and you must sleep. But I have to change! I have to be someone else! Yearn, and die. I’ll write. I’ll make these worlds real, and I’ll show you. Who are you talking to?
Thought swallows itself. Spheres of thought rise from one another, each consuming the next, all of them lost in the end. The whole sequence of spheres cannot be held in the mind nor can they ever be expressed.
A brain smacked against a brick wall. The wall moves forward to meet the brain.
Thirty zebras all braying and making noise, thirty zebras all around you with their mouths open, gums flailing, eyes wide. Panic. Terror. How do you get them to fuck off?
A rusty screw pulled out of reality. What does it contain? A shelf, a drawer, fallen out of its place. What’s there? The thoughts move so quickly and eat themselves but undoubtedly they were there. What were they? We don’t know, and so we yearn.
I want to see the green grass, swaying in the wind, behind my grandmother’s house. I want to see it as it was long ago, between my birth and the birth of my cousin, who is 8 months my younger. I want to see that yard that we would play in, I want to see what it was when the wind swept through it before he was born. In an intermediate time. A time lost to me, to him, to my grandmother. I want to see that lost time as the manifestation of neurosis in memory.
Fine, then. I would take the demon onto myself and hold it within my soul.
And, the demon said: Who are you?
“This man, he is a festering sore. He is like a bloated wound that burns and burns and seeps acid onto your hands. Throw him away, and do not look back. Get rid of him, and watch your days improve.”
I am a reductionist at heart, but I do not like the answers reductionism gives me. I need to read experience, I need to penetrate deeper into the soul of reality. How? There is no way, save reduction, from the world of eyes to the world of atoms. But reductionism only leads me astray. How does one simply live and function in reality while remaining thoughtful?
“It is amazing, what you are,” I said to my superego. “You fuel yourself so flawlessly, you are a self-generating machine. You create all kinds of selves that are not truth but masquerade as such, and each self that is reflected upon leads to the same end. This end is absolute paralysis, absolute critique of oneself to the point that all is false and all love and light is nil. But it’s not, and it’s amazing that you had convinced even me.”
The voice in the back of your head tells you: “Nothing has changed. I’m not okay.” And you start to feel that way. You tell yourself, and that’s what you become. Complete self-affirmation, for the cause of horror. Refuse it. It’s just another voice. Why tell yourself that? Why become your own enemy? Because reality is against you? So what? The reality of some people in this world was to sit chained in a ship in miserable hell on the way to become slaves for life. And they made music, and they lived. “Forfeit yourself to the void.” No. Radiant light languishes and thrives in darkness.
We fetishize the past when we fear the future.
Sopranos, Dark Souls, Bloodborne – insight gives visions of the eldritch horror, the pale limbs like sticks and bodies like spiders hanging off the cathedrals. Dark Souls and Bloodborne show a world trapped in pattern, where the only recourse is violent force, which amounts to nothing. But without such violence, one accepts death. The weakest layer of consciousness yearns powerfully to wield the violence it is terrified by. This is the consciousness that wants to become Tony Soprano.
The soul, winding into a film canister slowly, out of the void.
Religion must be revived, and I will be the one to revive it.
“I’ve been a nihilist, but I’ve never been an atheist.”
Kierkegaard’s Truth is subjectivity = The part, expressed in accordance with itself, is the whole
I have no doubt that death is not the end, I just fear what the whole thing will turn out to be.
Rationally, we must conclude that there can be no life after death. But a question so massive as death merits all our faculties, not merely reason.
History is an open wound.
Its Truth is in its fulfillment. The only way to make a truth True is to fulfill it.
Every thought is a being. A thought is a creature.
I feel like I have to hold myself somewhere outside of myself
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