(Bloody Sunday by Pol Ledent)

I think people have become so afraid of making mistakes, they’re too paralyzed to even want to live anymore. As a fan of existentialist philosophy, it should come as no surprise I’m a big fan of Soren Kierkegaard (K’), who is generally considered one of the original points of origin for this stylization of thinking about the world. In one of his books, the Concept of Anxiety, he writes the following:

“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.”

(K’) and I don’t see eye to eye on the whole belief thing, but his citation of God doesn’t really fuck this whole thing up any for me. In fact, in my world, the whole “making room for divinity” never bothered me any, as one can always just slot any “infinite” right above any hierarchical structure of thought, and absolutely nothing changes about it, helping to forgo the big time waste that is the whole bullshit concern involving the idea of how we define the undefinable. Massive time saver, in my opinion.

(K’) also saw freedom as kind of a core part of the angst of life, the paralyzing factor that generates this dread within us. Who we are, what we can become, who cares about whether or not we are. Likely why so many crutch on the notion of something greater, as if the idea of terrestrial love and worldly belonging is some how more outlandishly absurd or impossibly ridiculous than accepting that which has no sense of detectability amongst all our senses, far more comfortable with the idea of the leap of faith that what’s beyond must be good, because what is here will never be “good enough”.

This helps frame the whole escapism mentality so many are known to predicate themselves upon; the escape hatch to heaven is behind the door labeled fiction, and whatever lies behind that door with that label you pass through lies your own personal nirvana. Some sense of leaving behind this reality, one beyond your own choosing, to escape into a fictionalization of what can be, motivated by your own anxiety to create your very own personalized brand of “the endless kingdom” within your own mind, the last bastion of safety that no one else has the key to, a paradise of fantasy without the dread of the other fucking up the dream within.

I think where this was once a book, a song, a play, a piece of art, poetry, film, TV, or games, it eventually became the internet for many, or some strange subset falling under the umbrella idea of this “series of tubes” that dictates whatever metafictional existence we choose to embody at the moment, normally in an outsourcing effort to unassume our own identity, becoming the potential other, in whatever infinite form it may take, even if only for 7 seconds at a time. An endless feedback loop of always being dispossessed of our own angst of existence, and some how getting off on the dispossession of others in the same moment, this strange desirous lack of jumping into the metafictional ether and claiming “I am many and I am none, we are legion divided”.

Have we become nothing but a bundle of vices? Driven by a complete lack of self, the one we say we don’t need, can’t exist with, and the idea of that which was generated by that infinite other, now somehow assuming an external perspective, one as distant as possible from the I we don’t even know anymore, with even the idea of speaking in third person almost feeling like a guilty moment of intimacy, not nearly enough worlds removed from our own reality to feel comfortable enough to even give a passing glance to, let alone a masturbatory moment of self-reflection that can grant the power of personal autonomy; a guilty enterprise of lustful consideration entombed in shameful desire coated in hypocrisy.

Perhaps the lack of concern or care, the apathy generated from the zeitgeist at large that we feed into, propagates from the notion we need not concern ourselves with solving our own problems anymore, decluttering any sense of personal agency that might muck up the pretense of the everyday, part of which is merely thinking or even acknowledging it exists. This elsewhere and otherness, the generation of lack in the here and now we create by stepping out of this unself into another unself, begins to ramp up the intensity of obfuscation of relieving a sense of personal identity to the point of such mass-confusion, we are now so successfully lost amongst the white noise, we just effortlessly blend into the background of our own lives, main character syndrome evaporating within the screenplay of algorithmic intent that already has the end of the show completely planned out for us. Maybe only in parts, but it has a good idea of who this “unyou” becomes when you pull the dopamine lever looking for one more quick fix to fill this lack that ain’t you, but could be, if you ever stopped long enough to think about why it isn’t.

With the powers beyond, no one even has to consider even a fractional portion of their own issues anymore…though, maybe we never did in the first place, we just had different ways to mask for our complete lack of self, our own failing sense of place in the world, and overall absence of humanity that is painfully felt long enough to then be dismissed in the name of that same heavenly escape hatch with “fictional” emblazoned on the front being opened up again, though one day, we look back at the other side of that same door, and it says the exact same god damn thing on the other side, too, which couldn’t be, cause the only thing that remains where you just came from is the fragility of whatever mortality that still has your name associated with the not you that you already weren’t, but that’s not your problem any more, it’s the infinite and beyond’s dictation that set all of this into motion, and questioning any of it is only going to get in the way of all the bad times you still have a chance to turn your back on.

The lack drives us, the lack becomes us, the lack lacks us. We lack nothing, because we assume the role as such, and all of the lack it entails.

~Pashford