Okay. sometimes it’s fun..
We’re living in the age of “nothing matters.” Theoretically, this is a liberating thought. If nothing matters, then nothing is lost by failure. Fucked up your career? Broken heart? Shrug. We’ll all be dead soon anyway.
I have a strong nihilistic leaning, I’ll admit it. I love walking through cemeteries, looking for my name on the stones. Something about it makes me feel better. All the looming dramas of my local space-time self fade to the background in front of the proof of imminent mortality. Who cares? Who cares? Who cares? Raise a glass of champagne, drink a toast to forever, do whatever the fuck you want before it all goes to dust.
My favorite brand of nihilism -- the most fun of all! -- is the absurdist British variety, as showcased wonderfully in Monty Python’s “Meaning of Life.” It starts strong with the “Meaning of Birth” (spoiler alert: there ain’t one) and the bombastically sarcastic tune “Every Sperm is Sacred,” and later evolves into the cheerful “Galaxy Song” in which the listener is regaled with facts illustrating the infinitesimal size of their existence.
The jewel of the genre is Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Earth is discovered to have been built as a supercomputer to determine the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Unfortunately, the Earth is exploded to make way for a galactic bypass just minutes before it was able to fulfill its purpose. Earth’s predecessor, the supercomputer Deep Thought, had attempted to calculate the answer for 7 ½ million years, only to come up with the rather disappointing answer of 42.
But ultimately it’s not (fun)…
There will always be a place in my heart for the joyful imploration: “WHY BOTHER!”
But in my experience, the jester’s delight in meaninglessness is hard to maintain in the face of our often bleak external reality. And, anyway, this is an article about how nihilism is boring, not funny.
Nihilism is a common malady that can lead you or people you know to suicide and that’s very hard to find humor in. Humor is a burst of colorful confetti, a contraction of ribald laughter that sends rainbow waves into the electric atmosphere. Nihilism is a yawning black hole that sucks all light and all color into its maws. Pretty lame, if you think about it. How could such a thing be growing in popularity?
Nietzsche declared god was dead in his book The Gay Science, back in 1882. Writing from Europe, he of course meant one big man-god in particular, and I’ll drink to that. But all we had waiting in the wings to replace him with was science, and science makes for a poor religion.
Don’t get me wrong -- I’m a science geek. If you’ve got an interesting book about the animal kingdom, evolution, space, or technology, I’ll eat it like candy. But in the end, science is about cold, hard, measurable facts and how can we measure the Spirit? Meaning is found by constellating facts, but the discipline of science stops short of constellating facts into a meaning for your life -- as it should. You find the meaning. That’s your job.
You’re not a nihilist if you’ve failed to find meaning in the apparently endless vacuum of space that science has presented us with -- it does look quite bleak. You’re a nihilist if you insist that all that the eye can see = All That There Is. But meaning isn’t out there -- it’s in here. So our universe appears accidental and random, so what? You’ve been warned not to judge books by their covers!
Once, I was reading about Pluto when I came upon a bit of genius. Voyager I was just about to be the first manmade object to exit the solar system, and everyone was speculating on what it would find. One scientist said, “It will find what it was programmed to find -- nothing more.”
I’ve thought about this statement ever since. We built Voyager I with only the technology we had at the time. It will detect what we programmed it to detect. It will fail to detect anything else. But that doesn’t mean nothing else will be there.
Past experiences → Create expectations → Create reality.
The call is coming from inside the house…
Being presented with the void “out there” only increases our need to find a companion to our solitude “in here.” A companion who doesn’t balk at a glimpse of infinite space, who feels quite at home in it. Call it your soul, your daemon, your anima or animus, your higher self. Whatever it is -- and does it really matter what it is? -- it is the part of you that remains connected to the Source, or as Jung called it, the collective unconscious. This is the level at which we are all energetically connected. It is a soup of archetypal possibility. At this level, everything exists simultaneously, unaffected by time. The past and the future swirl together, with no such thing as cause-and-effect. (Which is exactly why Earth science cannot be admitted here.)
But the most wonderful thing of all? This infinity is full of friends.
The Big Party…
During dark nights of the soul, many people feel their anxiety peak as the sun sets and the moon rises -- but not I. I am anxious by day. There is something so harsh about the sun, so glaring and exposing. People move around busy, busy. Building, achieving. They seem to know just what they are doing -- and I never have. For me, night comes like a balm. The moon says, “There is nothing to do but just be.”
Being is my favorite form of doing. Like right now. Even though I’m writing, I’m just being. I’m not writing because I have to write. No one said I had to, not even me. I’m just being one with the moment. Night is falling. It’s past sunset, but that last bit of light still remains, briefly trapped. It’s a soothing blue light and the wind is blowing through the white curtains, dancing ghoulishly. I hear an accelerating train and a siren in the distance -- but it doesn’t alarm me. The world is full of sirens. Some day that siren may come for me, but that time is not now.
Now the friends are coming, now the party’s starting. Now my companion is here.
Who are these beings who always rise up to meet me at night?
They are those who swim like fish in the ocean of the collective unconscious.
Carl Jung can tell you about this realm better than I can. (Try Memories, Dreams, Reflections.) One companion he met here, Philemon, was so viscerally present that Jung was able to walk and talk with him, and ask him questions. Lest ye think Jung was simply insane, consider this: in the talks he had with Philemon, he received answers to questions that later became part of his groundbreaking work in psychoanalysis. Thinking that changed the way we all think, forever.
Unlike Jung, I do not “see” any of my friends, and never have. I just feel them, gathered around me -- and I can tell that they’re partying. As a (mostly) reformed party girl, I know what a good party is. Been to a lot of them. And the dimension I feel close around me at night is quite curiously similar to an Earth party. Not (necessarily) peopled with jocks, goths, geeks, and squares, but with silver screen starlets, dead poets, historical figures -- the ghosts of the past. There are gorgons and mermaids and all forms of fairy people. Phoenixes, dragons, and three headed dogs.
Instead of dancing awkwardly -- or egotistically -- to whatever’s playing on the bluetooth speaker at the Earth party, at this other party, the mythical beings are dancing like feral animals, stamping their feet. Their eyes are rolling back in their heads, arms waving, mouths gasping. These are not disaffected millennial humans afraid to surrender fully to a primal beat, they are Dancing the Ultimate Dance. They are dancing the-things-they-are-the-shape-of into being. They cannot AFFORD to be disaffected. They have work. to. fucking. do.
[These new parties have replaced the old parties. These are my people now. I can feel them as I write this, gathered around my chair.
The silver screen starlet holds a glass of champagne as she peers over my shoulder, almost spilling it on me. No matter -- it’s made of air. I meet her at this party all the time, it’s almost as if she belongs to me. She always says the same thing: “Write me something sexy. Write me something slinky.”
Then the slender fellow I always seem to have at my right hand -- the one I quite fancy -- laughs with twinkling eyes. He says, “I agree.”
Then there is a third man who always butts into the conversation. We never see him at first, he stands so deep in the shadows. I can only see his fierce black eyes. This man is so primal, we can’t even talk -- he only stares -- but I hear what he wants me to hear. He always wants me to write about Death. What a subject. But I do what he says because I can tell he’s a man who is not to be trifled with.
There are more than these three at the party -- in fact, the guest list seems to be infinite. The line is so long it spirals around the galaxy.]
Circling back…
If you have waited this long for me to bring this back around to nihilism, here’s what I’m getting at: space is teeming with life.
There are thoughtforms just below the surface of what we call existence that are queueing to build your reality. We can send some of these thoughtforms away, we can draw some of the thoughtforms in.
Draw this one in: Life has meaning.
Try it again: Life has meaning.
And again and again -- a thousand times -- until your arms are full of meaning and everything in your life has been built with the substance of meaning.
Now I’m going to twist this a little. Full disclosure: I’m not necessarily convinced that life ultimately, ultimately matters, or at least not in the way that we think, but I choose to ignore that. I choose to drink colorful antidote juice for the ill effects of nihilism (mainly for me: Listless Noodle Syndrome) and believe there is some kind of meaning, even if my confused brain doesn’t discover it until the moment I die.
“WHY? Why would you consciously choose a placebo?” My gray-and-black-clad friends ask me.
BECAUSE NIHILISM IS BORING. There, I said it.
And that is all I am trying to say.
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