On Our Will to Control
“But we would be as gods,” so uttered the slave.
The Enlightenment has failed. It has blinded only. In our quest for total control, we have only made slaves of ourselves.
Through reason we believed we would shackle the world; through science we would know all, predict all, determine all—nature’s administrators. We would free ourselves from the chaos of our lives. Instead, we have been left to grow weary under our chains. Our paradise has become the desert of our souls—each day a grey-fired hell, a desolation of the inane.
What are the terrors of the universe compared to those glib terrors of the diary?
The day-to-day has become a mortuary of misspent time. Everything done, nothing accomplished.
To my own mind, the meeting room is a proxy for the battleground of old, but instead of a trial of strength, one is challenged by how little you will let your mask slip, how long the façade can be maintained, with those successful being granted the role of puppet master.
Nothing is more exemplary of the modern spirit of reason than the deification of the manager. An existence endowed with all the attributes of a slug. Their elevation has meant the worst of all worlds. Under their tutelage we have learned a morality cattle would bridle at: pettiness, image over substance, the virtue of mediocrity, the wasted hour, the ever-watchful eye, the corporate abortion of language, the detail abstracted to the inane, the snide backbiting of the viper, form 152B…
Mystery? Adventure? Danger? There they lie in the sarcophagus of the past, red taped to oblivion, mummies to us all.
With these weapons of mass despair, they bleach the spirit of the rebellious. Like plants, we are left to die in dark rooms. And if, by miracle—what’s this? A fragile bloom of fruit? Of flower? It is reaped to no reward. It is merely offered as sacrifice to the aborted will that maintains the system of our exhaustion.
I am tired. I am tired… Each moment now a devastating lassitude.1 Each second, a transcendence only of the mundane. How many shades of grey were thought possible?
In each of us there is an inclination to frenzy, the restlessness of a beast that doesn’t know where to lie; this, by force of mandate and pedestrian routine, is sublimated into the trivial….
Can we really not see how lost we are?
A man stares at a blank wall for forty years, his body bloating in an orgy of decay, a diet of manufactured filth… and yet it is for the deaths of those he did not know he cries, in lands he will never visit, in realms of the ideal so confused that right and wrong are but the dreams of chance.
Who talks of ------? Who cries for ------? Who wrings their soul on the broken plinth of politics? Of war? Sectarianism? Celebrity?
But who can say they even exist when we ourselves are but barely here, we images of men?
Who am I?
I don’t know.
They have not told me yet.
Soon they will.
Then I will be whole.
Then I will be nothing.
A dangerous and demonic power this is: that in our hearts we may live by the devastation of our dreams and pride ourselves, worship ourselves for their sacrifice.
Our tyranny to routine is now paramount. Even history does not escape our grasp, not even the simple peasant, whom we believe lived a life of frank boredom. Yet the fickle heart of nature was theirs. We will never know the joy of rain, the silvery suspense of the heavens, that we might by it thrive or die, that each year might be a devastation of the heart and hearth. Ours is only the groan of a forgotten umbrella and the crucifixion of the dry-cleaner’s bill—a grey sky: the tedious impact on already wilted souls.
And all this for the power to say, I know. To be It, that caged thing: fed, clothed, medicated, indoctrinated, sedated, titillated.
No wonder we flee to the virtual when reality has only inanity to offer us as well as the decay of our spirit.
I am not religious, but I now understand the impulse to it.
In religion there is mystery, chaos, something profoundly unknowable. In the boundless iridescence of God there is wiggle room for the soul. There is that ever challenging of faith, a refreshing in the fact you will never know. That is, you can doubt. Is doubt then our soul? Is it that ever consuming ability to question all, to distrust all… For that equivocation of the moment is life, that breathless parcel of time, that hectic instant when we ask: do I dare? Or do I daren’t?
Against this, we place modernity.
It is one of the great ironies that the questioning spirit of humanity has led only to its desuetude. Every query is now turned over to the expert, to the quango, to a banality so in love with itself that its self-justification has become onanistic.2 These grey men, in their quest for a societal bondage, are Sadomasochists at heart. One can only imagine that dark, pallid little room where, with reams of vapid mumbo-jumbo, they attempt the castigation of humanity, tantalizing their own rotting corpses in fits of papery necrophilia. This is not about power but rather the instinct to rationalize taken to its highest degree, and all men debase themselves in whatever reality they engender.
Do we then lose ourselves in certainties?
Is nihilism the sickness of certainty?
These are questions that will have to be saved for a later time. I promised myself to keep this short though there is almost an infinite unsaid.3
Instead, I will return to that matrix of ennui. That place where we fantasize on the apocalypse and dream our dystopian dreams, where we wait for that knocking of the gate, where we are left only with the palliatives of poetry and philosophy…
My own philosophy has only ever been a will to break, a will to awake from this soporific grandeur we call the modern. I use my words as I use my dreams: loosely, luxuriously, grandly, a disdain for the prosaic, the easy, the insurable. I am contra mundum. I write not for money (my curse). I write for the few, those whose hearts candesce at these words. I come, I’m certain, from that place where the Bacchic gods dance their gorgeous orgy, where the potency of blood yet hammers on. I’m sure it existed, somewhere, and may yet again. Perhaps.
And so, I looked on my life and wondered only at its mundanity. I sought to change. I sought, by a dull tyranny over the senses, to become greater than myself, and by this, I only ever sunk into greater despair, my chains somehow heavier.
Exhaustion
Mastabatory
On Brutalist Architecture and the Castigation of Our Spirit.
Those unwilling or unable to dwell within this grey paradise of ours termed mad or diseased and hounded to the margins, condemned with penury, etc.
Modernity has always been a double-edged sword, and it was only a matter of time before we cut ourselves on it. Nietzsche, Spengler—they all knew it. We have lost so much in the belief that things would always get better. Today, we live in a hollowed-out world. Nothing has substance anymore; everything is lost in the fog. There is nothing left to believe in. No more grand narratives, just a vague, indefinable present and promises of a better tomorrow that never arrives.
Yet more and more people are searching for a way out. They seek refuge in spirituality, in the simple things in life. They are reflecting on old values that, until recently, were dismissed as superfluous relics of an outdated time. They know they must do this to avoid going mad.
Oh wow - can you ever write! Inference, allusion, oblique referencing, all pulling together into a strong critique of…a lost world, a lost humanity.