The Spirituality of Terror: Random Notes
How to play the game of life? By pretending that it’s no game. Man must numb himself with emotions while drowning in the quagmire of life. Survival requires illusion, and so, no TV documentary, no detergent comes without emotional baggage. Man thrives on hormonal humbug, both victim and perpetrator of the fraud “emotion” — the coin inserted into the machine to make it perform absurd contortions, the carrot and the stick of Mother Nature, the bitch. Cut to a crying mother, cradling her dead kid. Cut to kittens playing in ruins. Cut to more commercials.
“But we don’t like pain! We won’t accept death!” the flock laments, thus sealing its doom. For this is why terror will win and “free society”, refusing to face the facts, will lose. For with each random dead, terror will consider itself victorious. It is the thorn in our flesh, the tumor in our brain, for it has learned to gloat over both others’ and it’s own misery. Terror knows that death has come to stay, and no amount of indignant righteousness will stop it. By embracing death, terror has gained life, while gratification-addicted Western society is left to stare into the mirror, at a grinning, Instagram-enhanced skull.
Note: Our existence is a lifelong quest for death. Whatever we create to validate our existence — religion, philosophy, love, family, fatherland, art — is nothing but noise to keep us from realizing that we are merely a bunch of degenerate vertebrates running around screaming for a while before we drop dead and rot. A sane species would have accepted this fact before inventing the mindbogglingly pointless concept of “eternal life”. (Even though one should bear in mind Tertullian’s disarming vision of a heaven where the saved get to watch the torments of the damned from their box seats.) It would have listened to the devil instead of painting him black.
Advocatus Diaboli
Let us listen to the devil, shall we? We do not need to trust him, after all, for sure he has his own agenda. But then, who hasn’t? This is what the devil, sitting in your best chair and sipping your tea, has to say:
“I will present you with two options. Option 1 is simple: Next week you will die in a terrorist bombing. You will protest, of course, that this is terribly unfair, that you never did anything to offend the terrorists or their value system. Also, you had so many plans with your life. You wanted to see the pyramids, you wanted, perhaps, to get kids and grandchildren, you wanted a piece of happiness. And now you are dead just because of some imbeciles venting their irrational hate. Well, fuck. Option 2 goes like this: You will contract, say, one of a myriad forms of cancer. You will receive chemotherapy, of course, and it will help intermittently, while you will loose your hair, perhaps your teeth and, eventually, most of your mind, ending up like an animal in pain, groaning in your bed, trying to escape the one certain thing in an uncertain universe, death. Which is, of course, terribly unfair as well. Think carefully about the factors determining your choice. I’ll wait.”
It’s All Rather Silly
Terrorism: Fighting against an enemy larger than oneself. Asymmetry knows no rules. Oddly enough, it also knows no humor. (If Bin Laden told jokes to his compadres, most likely they dealt with mother-in-laws.)
Still, the reversal of power, rendering the all-powerful state helpless and the powerless individual mighty, is a classic topos of meta-comedy — a Robin Hood pantomime enacted by peasants exploited both by the lieges and by the very hoods whose praise they sing. “To show our simple skill, that is the true beginning of our end.” Thus — manifestos.
Time is a child playing at draughts, a child with a somewhat sick sense of humor.
Abyss To Let
Oh, don’t play the innocent. The destruction of the world, the merry apocalypse, the ultimate utopia — an old dream of you, isn’t it? You were the ones listening with anxious desire to the pastor’s rants about many-headed beasts and mangled whores (Sunday morning, just a few hours earlier your throat had tasted of vomit and genital fluids, your brain had screamed with hormones), you are the ones who keep watching disaster movies and hysteric news reports. Why blame those being more efficient with it for doing what you’re dreaming of?
First there were the dreamers and poets, telling you about Ragnarök, about heaven, hell and ethics, accomplishing nothing but a comforting chill at the fireplace. You paid them well, if only with flattery. Then, the warlords came — for them, destruction was merely a side effect in their idiot quest for power, unless things got really bad and externalized suicide began to look more inviting. And yet, you worshiped them: Power is it’s own reward, after all, and the uniforms look neat. Lone gunners, school shooters and arsonists? Ah, disturbed teens, naïve idealists, fodder for memes and movies. But still, you wished you were like them.
And now, death has gotten too close for comfort?
The Healing Power of Fear
The world is a song, but we are deaf. The screams you hear is just mankind trying to sing along. (I wish I were, I wish I had, I wish I could. The noise of closing doors.)
What are we going to do? By insisting that we are important, we condemn ourselves to oblivion. By fighting, we’ll perish, and by refusing to fight, we’ll perish. What can we do but laugh?
An old Buddhist thought experiment goes like this: Imagine you are falling into an abyss, and all the stuff you’re clinging to is falling as well. Where is the top? Where is the bottom?
An old song (Riddle Me This) asked: “Where do we turn, where do we go? Who’s the mastermind of the puppet show? Whom do we pay? Who’s the croupier? Who’s the one that sweeps all the stakes away? What is the song? What is the rhyme? Are there any odds on the wheel of time?”
An old madman (Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster) exulted: “But I will show the world that I can be it’s master!”
And behold, the world murdered the madman by means of a plastic octopus. There’s a lesson in there for all of us.
