The Big Nothing

Life is much more horrifying than hope pretends. There is much more solitude in life than anything in the ideology of our education teaches us. The gratification and excitement of upward mobility sooner or later abandons us to the dizzying inner spaces of our rootlessness. To be sure, many Americans desire to cover their inner turmoil, to shrug it off as momentary weariness, to brighten and smile and look for something "constructive" to do. Many keep faith. But others grow. Slowly we learn that even warm, close bodies betray one another, and each discovers in himself countless self-betrayals. A complete phenomenology of the experience of nothingness in our generation is neither possible nor desirable. There are as many ways for the experience to break into one's consciousness as there are personal histories. Some feel its touch by way of sickness or disaster, some by external events or inner breakdown, some in the flush of power and others in irretrievable despair. The experience comes uninvited, though it may also be pursued. The strong nod at its voice with familiarity no less than the weak. The men and women from the lower-middle class lack fancy words for it, but behind the skin of their faces it sits with the same mask it wears under the faces of television commentators.

Perhaps it's an exhaustion of spirit that comes from seeking meaning too long and too ardently. Meanwhile, the dark impulses of destruction find only thin resistance, they beat upon the doors for instantaneous release. Many who wander into the experience never emerge again. Insanity, suicide, cynicism, egocentrism, hedonism, a wild drug-taking race toward an early death, an intense desire to be consumed like flame. Have we not seen in the last decades countless forms of self-destruction and orgies of blood and death in the name of inner emptiness? It's not by chance that so many cultural icons end up dead with needle-pointed arms in hotel rooms far from their homes. Yet even more vivid than the dark emotions are a desert-like emptiness, a malaise, an illness of spitit. One sees all too starkly the fraudulence and insignificance of human arrangements. The engagements seem so involved in half-truth, lie, and unimportance that the will to believe and the will to act collapse like ash.

The main impact of institutions upon us is to organize the chaos of personal experience into reality. Institutions are shapers of experience, perception, value, and action. What they decide is real is enforced as real. What they count as important is important. I say fuck the institutions. The enforcers of reality are not merely the policemen and armies, they are also the loving parents, the smiling teachers, the wonderful psychiatrists, and all the saboteurs of our humanity who instruct us how to master the signals and cues required for our "success." Life has already been prearranged, what is real has already been clearly labeled, but there is no real world out there. Within human beings and outside them, there is only a great darkness in which momentary beams of attention flash like fireflies. The experience of nothingness is an awareness of the multiplicity and polymorphousness of experience, and of the tide urging the conscious (and unconscious) self to shape its own confusion by projecting myths. What once seemed fixed and steady dissolves. What seemed certain, necessary, and stable suddenly seems arbitrary and unfounded.

We do not know who we are. We continue to throw up symbols against the dark reeling formlessness in which we seem to be adrift, like spaceships whose rockets no longer fire, whose direction can no longer be controlled. Fidelity to nothingness liberates and delights. In comparison, the pursuit of happiness that we used to share seems pallid, dehumanizing, and sickeningly destructive. Don't bother consulting the philosophers, philosophy is meaningless. It's just different means to the same end. So why bother to work? Why bother to do anything? One day I will be dead, along with my family, friends, and every person I've ever known and seen. Most people live their entire lives shrouded in delusion, giving everything they have to the lies, never realizing just how meaningless they are. However lamentable it may seem, we're all part of the nothing, this absurd, mysterious, beautiful nothing. And that's OK.