Born.Live.Die.Signify.

“I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it.” - Thomas Ligotti, The Bungalow House

“But I didn’t despise the Christian girls. No, for some strange reason it was precisely them I fell for. How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgment of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain – in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least make out with. How could I explain that to Hilde? I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. ‘Booze and hopes of fornication’ it was called, and it was right next to ‘insight and sincerity,’ separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.”

― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 4

In the short horror story, The Bungalow House by nihilist writer Thomas Ligotti, a narrator becomes obsessed with tape recordings of dream monologues he encounters in a dusty, disordered art gallery near his place of work. During one of his daily lunch breaks in the gallery, he comes across a new performance art exhibit – an audio cassette recording by an unnamed artist recounting his experience in an old, vermin-infested bungalow. The monologue is impactful as much for its silence as its words, and the narrator-listener becomes entranced by the recording, so much so that he implores the shop owner for the right to purchase it. After listening to the mysterious artist's second recording about an abandoned factory, the narrator desires a meeting with the artist. From there, the horror, almost wholly psychological, unfolds for the reader in a Borgesian style, leaving you with little to hold on to as “truth” by the end.

Psychological horror as a genre has intrigued me since I first read Kafka in high school. What untold damage we do to ourselves through tortuous, endless thoughts! And while I would love to get into the state of mental states at some later date, what struck me while reading this story was the beautifully nihilistic view of the material world – that icy bleakness of things. We imbue such life into our possessions by projecting a meaning onto them that is not inherently there. To that point, I think about the tub of stuffed animals sitting in my shed and get unnerved when I consider throwing them out. I am sure I could find a place to donate them, but some are likely too ratty and outdated to be relevant to any child today. And as to the bleakness of things, I think about how I foisted such emotional meaning into something so lifeless as a stuffed piece of fabric that even now, 30 plus years later, I can’t bear to think about them mouldering in a landfill somewhere, despite their once great significance being cut off to my adult self.

The bleakness of things comes from the ultimate realization that the hopes you have for said things will never be fulfilled - they are, in the end, just things. Beautiful things, expensive things, cuddly things - all just things. Once you realize their limitations, you have to accept that acquiring more, or different, things will never fulfill you. Ever.  Imagine the ennui of a spoiled child opening a 40th present at their over-the-top birthday party -  everyone blames the kid for being ungrateful, but the entire scene should be readily viewed as absurd. Yet somehow, it’s not. It’s like blaming the victim in a sense. “Oh, you don’t get happiness from things? Well, what does that say about the rest of us; are we all LYING to ourselves?” Yes, Brenda, you are all lying to yourselves. Now go have sex with the pool boy and calm down. Things don’t bring happiness -  a tautological thought for sure, but hell, Americans needed a show to teach them this!

Despite their inherent meaninglessness, the “things” that surround us do have an innate beauty. Even, or maybe especially, the discarded and forgotten things. There’s a morbid curiosity I have about the amount of stuff that’s created for human material consumption that goes unused - I am talking about the literal millions of tons of unsold products that end up...in landfills? In stores in developing nations? At the bottom of the ocean? The decay of things. Sensitivity to the death of things. It’s beautiful, in a twisted way.

For the past year or so, I have been reading the six volume novel, Min Kamp by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. When I tell “people who read” what I am reading, they laugh or roll their eyes, ask me how I can be reading such a series, because essentially it is about nothing. And in that nothing, it is about the everything of life. He spends passages, even pages describing his surroundings, from the natural to the material to the corporeal. And for what? In the end, he’s living his life as a normal person suffering through the mundanities of housework and childcare, the tedium of monogamy and the frustrations of being a (generally) domesticated animal that doesn’t rape and pillage its neighborhood. Same as most of us do on a daily basis. But there’s an elegance to the nothingness. An allure of the void. You’re reading about the life of a man who’s dissecting art history for three pages and then follows up that intellectual goodness with him checking out the cashier in a grocery store and anguishing over the guilt he feels because he’s married and his wife would kill him if she knew any of his innermost thoughts. For someone who spends a lot of time in their own head with their innermost thoughts (very much so by nature and at this point, by choice), this sort of juxtaposition makes complete sense. In moments of metacognition, I will catch myself listening to what someone is telling me about history curricula or whatever seemingly important stuff, but I will be more actively thinking about how old they look today or some other awful bullshit. My thoughts in those moments are unfiltered and wholly without judgment; if I can tune into that frequency though it’s amazing to realize just how aware we really are of the world around us. But, I guess due to “living our lives” we tune out a lot of the excess observational shit we do almost nonstop.

Sometimes I revel in that aspect of being human - how, as animals, we do have to be aware of our surroundings at all times. We’re lulled into this sense of complacency about it, or consider it “beneath us,” because we’ve built our societies one upon the other for so long, we seemingly are removed from that animalistic part of ourselves. If you’re an American and you’ve ever been to Rome or some other ancient city, it’s jarring to see the ruins of past civilizations just sticking out of the ground. It’s a constant reminder of the death of all civilizations, even great ones (ones whose legacy will extend beyond the cultural landscape of a hut that sells pizza). Partially decayed, totally void of usefulness to current humans...oh wait, what? Were our societies just things like my stuffed animals of yore? What a humbling realization. An understanding that you’re part of a never-ending cycle of consciousness. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So why read such stories? Their appeal lies in that bleakness - someone has made art out of just a life- a life like any other; a life like my own. Life as art. Life is art. Mortality as holding a beauty all its own - something that all those trope blasé vampires yearn for. We should enjoy to live life, or at least endure living it to see what sort of product is wrought by its end. Although we can argue about the actuality of “free will,” the perception most of us have about the lives we live is that we do have a degree of control over our choices. Perhaps there’s a guiding hand of a god or some genetic programming that pushes us in certain directions, but evolutionarily, our experience of consciousness is one of freedom.

As Camus supposedly opined, “Should I kill myself, or have another cup of coffee,” coffee always wins out because the death part can come without you ever guiding it toward truth.

Where Has the American Spirit Gone?

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” - HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

          This is what "American" is- non-entrenchment. It's what I see in truly American artwork - as in the product of a wholly AMERICAN upbringing. There's some danger, some mystery, a sense of wonder that can only appear in a place where the boundaries, both materially and culturally are nebulous. The American point of view stands apart from the Eurocentric perspective that has dominated most of the modern world. Perhaps as a former colony, the US benefits from the post-colonial freedom of ideology and thought (bracketing out American colonial attitudes, obviously).

The American perspective is an attempt to encapsulate the "wild frontier"; to somehow relay the hopes that only looking over new horizons can bring through artistic expression. Of course these lofty feelings are tethered to the crushing pain of remembering that even with such hopes of the undiscovered within, all of us will one day die.

The Japanese concept of mono no aware is the most similar, non-American aesthetic I can relate this feeling to. The beauty in that "hope" of new life that is soured slightly by knowing the ending to all our stories. That bittersweet feeling of burgeoning possibilities and impending doom wrapped into one experience. How can such sorrow be the truth? And yet, who has come back to tell us otherwise? Jesus is a parable - his return is only to confirm the obvious - that the pain and suffering is worth it in the end. You are consciously experiencing reality for a brief moment in the span of this universe's life. Even the Judaic concept of waiting on the messiah is a metaphor for how to live our own lives. We can pray on the coming of a savior - to settle back and look for someone to guide us through, bu tin the meantime, why not do it ourselves?

American culture has lost the sacred cord back to mortality. The obsessions with youth, the now, "winning" are all part of the veil we willingly draw over our own eyes. Compliance, complacence, convenience and conformity has taken over our landscapes - again, both materially and culturally. When everything is easily answerable and "at hand," the mind tends to wonder, "Is this all?" We're ALL the 'kept' housewives of the post-war era. Some of us have started to chafe a little, but no
one is willing to risk the big push toward change. In this case, what would be a desirable outcome of 'revolution'? How can we successfully integrate technological advancements into our lives in more productive ways? Will a profit motive always incentivize playing to/preying on basic human weaknesses? 

Crushing artistic expression under the weight of commercial success has had a deleterious effect not only on expression, but on the collective consciousness. Art for consumption has supplanted art for art's sake. So what is lost when we take individual expression out of the equation? Hasn't there always been pulp/pop art? Sure. There's no question that art for consumption isn't a new development. The difference is that in its current iteration, everything is stylized, from 99 cent mascara tubes to high-end Teslas. Eye fatigue sets in. The brain becomes accustomed to the beautiful, forever pushing our standards for acceptability higher. But we need a break. We need something weird, ugly, frustrating to reset our minds.

Consider how we learn, from day one. Children are little explorers - they need challenges, stumbling blocks, to learn how to think and act independently from their caregivers. And yet, many adults go through life minimizing any and all frustrations - searching for something online? no way! lines at the bank? ew. Going to the supermarket? ugh. Crow's feet around the eyes? blech. Ultimately, this isn't a snowflake problem - it's an everyone problem. No one can wait - and god forbid we feel not-convenienced, let alone inconvenienced! A Bad Yelp! review to follow....For all of our time-saving and age-defying innovations, are we spending our "freed up" time engaged in amazingly humanitarian acts? To be honest, its our time and we can whatever the fuck we want with it, but let's not lie to ourselves that scrolling through social media feeds and liking/sharing memes is saving the world. And to boot, most of us seem to be bored by what's presented as the norm.

How do we recapture the American spirit? Of course, there are those on the fringes of or entirely outside of popular culture that have never lost it. If you're not looking hard enough, they may be tough to spot. And if you are yourself living there, it's a lonely road sometimes. But without struggle, we don't learn, grow and evolve. At this point, we need to. Our country is at a crossroads - our entire species is, really - we either adapt or we destroy the planet for the sake of out own convenience.