This pessimism entails a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the disorientation of deep space and deep time, all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s happenstance existence – all that remains is the desiderata of impersonal affects – agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art (though what usually results is slapstick).

The Last Messiah

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

The Indoor Swamp by Jon Padgett

"On later visits to the Indoor Swamp you might find yourself staring through the greenhouse windows with longing. Those buildings and those slivers of sky around you look so bright. The busy, outside world seems so engaging. What a relief it would be, you might think, to be anywhere else beyond these glass walls. But you’re filing back onto the long, flat boat. Making your way down the artificial lagoon. Skimming through the crummy flea market. Creeping along the trailer-hallway, viewing one disturbing mise en scène after another on your heavy way to that final abyss."

This Party's Dead: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals by Erica Buist

What if we responded to death... by throwing a party?

By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.

While her husband maintained a semblance of grace and poise, Erica found herself consumed by her grief, descending into a bout of pyjama-clad agoraphobia, stalking friends online to ascertain whether any of them had also dropped dead without warning, unable to extract herself from the spiral of death anxiety… until one day she decided to reclaim control.

With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.

This Party’s Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.

We did not make ourselves

We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along—a world where all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves.

—Thomas Ligotti

To Understand

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.

—Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676

Infinite Resignation

Futility is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists… When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or what doesn’t exist; sense and non-sense eclipse each other, and whatever you do ultimately leads to an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game.

—Eugene Thacker

Lines Written During a Period of Insanity by William Cowper

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,

Scarce can endure delay of execution:--

Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my

Soul in a moment.

Damn'd below Judas; more abhorr'd than he was,

Who, for a few pence, sold his holy master.

Twice betray'd, Jesus me, the last delinquent,

Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, the Deity disowns me.

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;

Therefore hell keeps her everhungry mouths all

Bolted against me.

Hard lot! Encompass'd with a thousand dangers,

Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,

Fall'n, and if vanquish'd, to receive a sentence

Worse than Abiram's:

Him, the vindictive rod of angry justice

Sent, quick and howling, to the centre headlong;

I, fed with judgements, in a fleshy tomb, am

Buried above ground.