The end times remember everything that’s happened, throughout all of history. Everything flashes before the end times’ eyes. Just like what’s supposed to happen in the last moment before death.
Except the end times aren’t a last moment. They go on forever.
Our approach. Our methodology. We just pick and mix from all the old stuff. From philosophical history. We hold up old ideas, old debates to the light.
We snatch things from history – out of history. We pick over scraps like children. Peer into history’s rockpool. These philosophers, their lives, their worlds, their problems …
Which is our way of mocking it all. Oh, not intentionally. We don’t mean to mock all the old ideas, the old debates by lifting them out of history, but we do. For what remains of their context? Their historical life?
And we mock ourselves, too. The very act, the very operation – pick and mixing from philosophical history. Out of what? Misplaced identifications. Spurious connections between those times and our present. The pretence that the ancient can be timely.
Self-mockery. Self-disgust. Peering into history’s rockpool, to see what we can catch. Philosophers and their lives and their worlds and their problems …
History laughs back at us. Those old things, those moments laugh and say, you’ll never have us. Don’t even try, fucker. You’ll never understand a word …
At the darkest moment, when the trap’s about to close, we turn to the past. We look for help. Surely there can be some connection between that old stuff and the present? Surely someone can help?
Gunter Anders with his nuclear bomb. Hannah Arendt, and her totalitarianism.
Philosophers with their own problems. In their own worlds. And here we are in our time, with our own problems, with all this stuff, happening all around us. And the past laughs at us. Because it has nothing to do with us. Because their problems aren’t our problems.
Will history stop laughing at us, do you think? Will we stop laughing at ourselves? I’m tired of laughing at myself.
It's the end times laughing at us, through us. Through our laughter. It’s the end times, amused, desperately amused, and by way of us, by way of our laughter at ourselves.
We’re the sense of humour of our age. But it’s the blackest sense of humour. It’s darkness as humour.
And don’t for a minute think that this is our laughter. That this is our sense of humour. We were raised by the end to laugh at itself. Trained to provide a little light relief. Comic relief.
The end was bored being the end. And so we were born. The end wanted amusement. Jesters. So there we were. It wanted a funfair mirror. And there we were.
The end wanted to shout and laugh. It wanted life – a little life of death. It wanted to do its death dance. Pull its death moves. Do its dying boogie. And there we were, its caperers. Its acrobats.
The end got bored of its endlessness. It wanted puppets to dangle. To sing its end times’ songs. So there was our end times’ show. Our end times’ cabaret. The void’s own philosophical song-and-dance troupe …
Singing our end times’ songs. Doing our end time dances. Making our end time moves. The ends’ pet proles. The ends’ own Punch and Judy show.
This is the time when the void reveals itself. The black sun, blazing. This is the time when we see it at last. Like the anti-dragon in Games of Thrones. Breathing green fire, or whatever.
This is void time. The shadows are longest. All the alibis have failed. All the attempts to construct positive philosophies. Everything’s just falling into the abyss.
A black hole is turning, at the heart of things. Drawing all things towards it. The void voids, and we’re part of that voiding.
A general … ruination. A tearing apart. Nothing else convinces. Nothing has any … force. We can’t believe in anything. Can’t muster the belief. Can’t call it up.
We’re the type who appear at the end of a civilization. Stunted – intellectually. Deformed – in spirit.
Mental dysgenics been at work. A kind of de-evolution. We’re mutated, psychologically. Ill-made, in the head. Inclined to neurosis and suicidal fantasy. Borderline-personalitied. Burrowers. Moles. Full of resentment of mental strength and certainty.
No use for our kind.
At least the collapse will wipe us out. At least we’d be the first to go. We’re not exactly alpha males. Or alpha females. We’re not the surviving type.
We’ve got all the weak traits – the worst traits. We’re inbred, or something. Something went wrong at our births. We’re all left handed – did you notice that? Our faces are asymmetrical … We’re spiritually lopsided. That’s not a good sign, is it?
We’re the last kind. The degenerate kind. Our kind would have been selected out by evolution, long ago. Left to die … What kind of society should tolerate us? Would let us live?
You take impostor syndrome to the next level.
I condemn this world for not murdering us – in our sleep or otherwise. For not strangling us at birth. Then we wouldn’t have been allowed to grow up and pollute the world with these morbid thoughts. To have turned philosophy into … whatever we’ve done.
Mad Gnosticism! Hysteria about the void! Don’t you get tired of what we are?
All this twisted talk. All these things we should not say. The dead ends of our talk. The futility of it. Our futile words. Despite, despite everything.
It proves we’re not dead. It proves we are dead and talk with dead words. Words that do nothing. Create nothing. In the beginning was the word, right? And at the end – the anti-Word? The mockery of the Word.
Let there be light – I’d like to say that. I’d like for there to be light. I’d like to be able to separate light from darkness. And instead?
Work in Progress 