Pessimism

Thoughts on Schopenhauer and darkness

What we call ‘religion’ is simply the belief in the power of belief itself. Rarely is the paradigm of belief actually applied to what is truly ‘unbelievable’, but in fact gets applied before all else to what is most believable—certainty, the sense of what is stable beneath our feet, the ground, the earth, our planet, and everything which orbits around it, what it in fact orbits around. A constellation of certainties that the day will end and the sun will rise, that seasons will pass and with it time in the form of years, decades, centuries. All of this must be believed, all of it must be known, yet when this foundation begins to shift, when the ground begins to break revealing a blinding luminous abyss, we must then re-affirm belief in religion, grand order, Jesus and God and so on. They are the pure ideals of belief believing itself, life’s faith in itself to overcome itself, the great pulse of the universe.

The DNA helix is a symbolic representation of what is supposed to be the core form of biological ‘life’. Contained in its strands are the essential atoms of life; genes, self-replicating identities through which organic form endures. The Helix as a symbol presents a dual image, on the one hand it is a container, a kind of symbolic prison which we can never escape, yet is is not neatly geometric, it is playful, whimsical, as if through science there is the possibility of occasional escape; gene mutation, gene therapy, adaptions through which we might eschew fate and enter into the realm of the Gods. In mapping the entirety of the human genome we collectively indulged in the fantasy of a world without disease, of a life beyond life, yet such a fantasy could not persist forever, and the dogma of the DNA helix symbol has begun to collapse

Now, the supremacy of gene theory as the framework of biological life is at its end. Denis Noble, poetically a scientist of the heart (a cardiologist) discovered that the heart beats, on its own, as a response to its environment. A clump of cells in the womb that is larger than one-third of a centimeter in diameter must process oxygen and CO2 or else it is poisoned and dies. Thus, there is a pulse, primordial in its simplicity, a response to a vast miasma of nature; liquid and gases, air and light, all without a system of nerves to send proper electrical signals and all without a genetic program organizing it. A pulse, a beat, rhythm, fading in sound into many other pulses and rhythms and music—a pulse spanning the entirety of our species and beyond, to human and animal alike, to perhaps even beyond life, an original stimulus between both inside and outside ringing in a kind of harmony. One thinks of Schopenhauer, and his belief that the intellect’s only true contact with the Divine was through sound, music.

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Precious few encounters one has with this thing we call the self. Mostly they are partial, if at all. Now, typing this, I can give particular visual indicators of my self; I am seated, for example on a futon with a mess of sheets and clothes on both sides of me. In front of me is some kind of large exercise equipment, lit at the tip of its metal end by a warm light from the crack of the room’s door. Otherwise a macbook is on my lap and I am typing away and imagining I am striking the image of a pianist rather than a writer. I could go on, explain up to infinity all the myriad things of my perception but they would never add up to one, nor would they ever add up to the ‘I’.

Schopenhauer wrote that the intellect begins with the eyes and this is why ‘eye’ is indistinguishable phonetically from the first person pronoun. The eye through its movement binds space and time in a perceptually coherent way, yet, in doing so straddles a periphery of the intellect itself at the very boundary of the finite and infinite. The eye traces along a perhaps infinite sequence of events in nature, and thus further bounds nature through conceptions of quantity, cause, substance, the impulse to package it all, designate it, name it, verbalize and conceptualize

This is at once a prison, and at once the condition for the purest flight life has to offer. One can be whisked away by the grandiosity of sight, perhaps, to madness, perhaps somewhere else. For me, I seek that secret place just at the boundary of sight, just at the boundary of the visible and the invisible, behind a leaf, a portal to a vast green terrain in which only imagination’s freedom reigns.

Schopenhauer stated in his writing that the universe is fundamentally dark, and that life is therefore blind. Light, accordingly, is an illusion of the intellect which is itself the manifestation of illusory processes. I do not believe he truly meant this. I believe Schopenhauer stumbled upon a light so rare that it historically it was reserved for holy men, Saints, Caesars and Napoleons, but Schopenhauer, not wishing to squander its brilliance on the misshapen masses, locked it away in an elaborate puzzle for Nietzsche, Gaugin, and his many adherents to discover a piece of it for themselves.

For as intelligent a man Schopenhauer was, it is difficult to imagine that he did not understand that there is no darkness without light, no shadow without the sun, no universe without stars. The other day, walking in circles beside a stream dazzling under the fractured tree light, I happened to stumble upon something. What, or where or how I cannot quite say. Perhaps it was this thing this no-thing, the ‘I’—it was my own silhouette, flattened before me, a pitch dark shadow.

I could see it as clearly as I could see anything. It was my height–-perhaps a little taller. I investigated it, it was still, silent, until from an exact yet indeterminable angle it was revealed to contain its own dimensions. It was a universe unto itself which I then, somehow, entered into—leapt into myself and across vast years and lightyears it was entirely dark, black, endless, but then there was a solitary star suspended in the endless abyss. The star was spinning, pulsing, and revealing what I had already known—revealing life, and light, and that I could see the darkness and therefore could already see the star which allowed the darkness. Before the invisible, there is a pure visibility. Life before death.

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I think now more about the question of evil, of darkness. I don’t really know what to do about it. I don’t see much in the way of evil in my daily life, but I seem to see it clearly when I come across black and white photographed literary ‘parties’. Fat, cancerous old men of distinction (though neither I, nor anyone I know has heard of them) surrounded by demon eyed, evil mouthed dark haired lifeless skinned young women ready to feast on their corpses or else feast upon the corpse of a dying culture. Crows, worms, evil.

It is a kind of revelry brought on by the euphoria of impending death. Like the peasantry who could not stop dancing as the plague encroached. It is the perverse joy of the tension of life finally being relieved in totality, but first they must feast, fill their mouths with names and awards and journals, and every tendon and fiber and bone of the old regime. They are peasants, they only know how to eat and toil, how to spread the negative principle upon which their life hinges. They are mutated peasants, inflicted with the ‘existential’ regret of ‘modern’ ‘life. Or else like the mushrooms which have sprouted around Chernobyl adapted to the nuclear radiation of its melted cores. Only, our Chernobyl is New York City. And if you let me speak a bit freely I will say this—that I have never been to New York City, but have seen in my own city every year new New York City refugees here to find new bodies to feast on. In their Subarus in their Audis, they buy up every building which housed artists or studios and turn them into noxiously bright, white walled ‘galleries’ where on the wall hangs a massive gaudily colored acrylic painting of a fucking….street car…fucking streetcars and sometimes black people. Forgive me for this, these people need to go. Have your death revelry in your dying city, let my city be consumed by the waves. As it is meant to be