On Existential Exhaustion

Why pity poor Atlas? He had only the weight of the heavens, we must bear the cosmos.

Are there any greater optimists than nihilists? Those who raise truth to so impossible a standard? The paradox of the nihilist: a denial of truth, in that they have profoundest commitment to its ideal. This, then, is the ghost that haunts the nihilist’s soul, the stain that cannot be so easily scrubbed from their consciousness: that here there is hope. Yes, the nihilist is in a state of constant hope. For it is not so much that they do not wish to believe but believe that there is nothing in existence that can be proven true enough for their belief. Another paradox, this time of narcissism.

One more: of life: that every moment is based on nothing and yet continues—a petty worthless life and yet one cannot quite bring oneself to the noose... The sad man’s most bitter paradox.

What does it equate to, all these paradoxes haunting the soul...?

An emotional vulnerability, a hecticness in the blood, a lurching to the right, a spilling to the left, a turning over of flotsam on stormy nights? Here is nervous excitement. Here is the ecstatic soul braced with a tension of spirit as every moment turns into unwinnable argument—the devil seemingly on both sides. Living in such a fragile state of exhaustion, one is eventually weakened as though by a virus, by a desire for rest, to be cured by any and all means—nihilism as virus of the soul. Fragile, as such, equivocal and squirming… it is then that Leviathan swims up and devours such small fry.

So, then, the ideologies of the 20^th century: they with their crass certainties, their brutal dictums, their ironically unbelievable claims to certainty, were saviours. They understood more than any this desire to be saved, to be released from this equivocation of hopeful nihilism. They also understood how to turn this ecstasy of the spirit to best use. The demagogue’s main declaim: thy suffering is from thy enemies—it is they who have debased reality into this unbelievable matrix—their blood will water new buds—from out the carnage will spring new hope, new gods—such is the clarion of all those who pronounce certainty in the sacrifice of the other—the jew—the bourgeoisie—the Armenian—the Chinese—the socialist————

Thus hope breeds death, the optimist’s final paradox.

Though one wonders for those nihilists who have not fallen under ideology’s sway—for their life’s plan becomes to destroy those who have—America against The USSR. Whose nothing is founded on surer depths? I ask you.

But this is the nihilism of old, passé—the nihilism of the unawakened. Ours is now a more enlightened nihilism, a pessimistic nihilism. We who are now too desperate to even hope, too flagellated by history to even desire; holocaust and defeat have turned us against belief in any such idiocy as truth. Paradox has consumed itself, a critical mass, the formation of a black hole of apathy and lethargy. Who now cares for anything? Who now hopes? Who is that naïve, quite that foolish? For all the cries of extremism—from left and right, of demagoguery and political violence—we are but palings and pygmies compared to the Sturm und Drang of the past, though we seem to pray mightily from our enemies those monstrosities we have so tarred them with. (I can only imagine the amount of chicken feathers that would be spilled if our dreams came true!)

Our dictum is decay: the wish to neuter oneself is predominant now, and if we do not... the next best thing, we become political and squabble how best to destroy hope or any optimism, fearful where it might lead; an abiding commitment to nothingness is ours for the taking, if only we can try hard enough. Our journey has led to a desert where even despair has lost its meaning, we, the last ones, who long for nothing more than the sterility of all mankind.

In a phrase: the Nihilism of the ages past: an optimistic genocide; the Nihilism of the present: a pessimistic suicide.

And so now we come to it... where all nihilism leads, the portal swinging on creaky hinges, a yawning of the tamed infinite, we, as we have so many times been prompted, have only to turn the knob... Who is not tired of existentialism and its successes? Its ubiquity and everlasting torment? Can I not simply lie down and die, watch my innards dissolve, fly-blown and green, maggot-engendering, my petty and pathetic works thrown into the bin where they most certainly belong? Is not life torture enough without meaning, and that I must constantly be reminded of that fact, that I have none AND must search it out?

Why pity poor Atlas? He had only the weight of the heavens, we must bear the cosmos, we, again, with our much finer and busier shoulders. I wish I could shrug and smash the whole thing.

No, rather, there is a constant existential heckle from every obtuse angle—that every moment must suggest something, that I, Buddha, must crouch diligently to stool, that I, Jesus, must answer emphatically my emails, that I, Seneca, must drive myself productively to work, that I, Nietzsche, must argue obstreperously my petty cases, that I, Kierkegaard, must pay my bills, that I, Kafka, must go toe-to-toe with the universal facelessness of all existence, that time, all time, brief and fickle time must be a passing of one opus to the next—when most of life, really, is only a morbid and feculent outrage, best fit for pig-dogs: here a little honesty would go a long way!

University: The existential temple par excellence!

Certainly, as a weapon existentialism has become blunted by overuse. Its aggrandizing has diminished its power. We are utterly exhausted and demeaned by its demands. Rather than saviour, it has become conducive to nihilism, with every moment a meaning: then every moment equal in its meaninglessness! Its success has been its downfall. Its triumph has seen its collapse. Philosophy is now nothing but the refuge of the depraved, nothing but pornography—a little existential ejaculate, a homunculus mutilated by its momentary purpose—hooray for life—then back to nothing, back to the grind, we hypocrites of the hypostasis. This, if anything, is its greatest sign of exhaustion, perhaps only to be matched by that anti-existentialism where one hopes to bludgeon each moment with desire, to lose oneself in a sea of content, a dull carnage of things less than beast.

I weary, and run out of time, space, and patience... Let us say this, simply, if simplicity is possible in such a subject: a life can mean something... But does it necessarily need to?

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