Work in Progress

We don’t know what counts or doesn’t count out here.

 

We’re not pulled in any particular direction. We’re open to all of them. To anything that could happen.

 

It’s what doesn’t happen at the coast that matters. No – it’s what unhappens.

 

We’re not who we were. Live out here long enough and you’ll forget your name.

 

Nothing happens here, and nothing needs to happen. And that’s what’s happening, or rather unhappening …

 

Our leave-us-in-peace to the world. Our call to be left alone.

 

We want to be unnoticed by the world. To reflect. To contemplate. To turn things over in our heads.

 

This is a brink. A threshold. Where something might or might not happen. Where nothing has to happen, right?

We’re the antinomians. We’re the bearers of the alien fire.

Total antagonism towards the world: that’s our only option.

 

More life – that’s what we want. But by way of death. By intensifying death.

 

Crying up our de profundis, as usual. Hoping for a reversal of the entire course of the world, as usual.

 

The goodness that destroys. That knows that that’s its task: to destroy us.

 

A deliberate plunge into the Fall. We’re going to fall further …

 

Our destruction. That’s what would prove God’s existence to us: that we were instantaneously struck down – right now.

No one has any words for what’s coming next. No one will understand. This apocalypse. This coming horror … The shift that’s happening … there hasn’t been anything like it since the sixteenth century. Since the collapse of the Roman Empire. These are utterly exceptional times. These are times without precedent. That no one understands. Especially us.

 

The world is destroying itself. This world … is strangling itself. Is murdering itself. Is doing away with itself, willingly.

 

How come it’s happening now? How did we become witnesses to this? Why us? Who said it should be us? We’re idiots … morons … We’re the least deserving … The most foolish …

No one would have chosen us. No one would have picked us. We’re the most useless apostles. We can carry no message. My God, we’re wretched. But at least we know our wretchedness. Is that why?

 

To be living through such times. To witness the horror unfold around us.

What steeled us? Why didn’t we succumb? Why didn’t we believe the lies – not for a moment? Why didn’t we drink the kool-aid? What instincts did we have?

 

We weren’t duped. For the rest of our lives, we can say that: we weren’t fooled. We didn’t destroy ourselves, like everyone else. We were exceptional, when it came to it. We were unfooled. Unsusceptible, somehow. What was it in us? Who were we, after all? Despite everything?

 

We made it to the coast. The coast saved us. The coast rewarded us. For being who we were. The coast draws our kind towards it. The coast knew us in advance. Called us. And we came …

The coat wanted us. The coast exerted its gravity. The coast called, and we came … Is this our reward? Will we survive here?

 

We were tested and we did the right thing. We, we did the right thing?

We had the instincts. We felt it in our guts. We were good for nothing other than this – but we were good for this.

How many succumbed! How many crumbled! How many repeated their lines? But we came through. We survived. We were better than the others. Us – us.

 

We did something with our lives. By doing nothing. By refusing. By not going along with it all. By not acceding. We didn’t compromise, did we? We knew not to.

An angel must have whispered in our ears. We listened to our still inner voice. The call of conscience.

 

But what are we surviving for? What new world will be revealed to us? What are we going to be shown? What have we been saved for? What will we be witness to, and why?

Wretched witnesses … witnesses because of our wretchedness. Good for nothing, as we never were any good for anything. But we passed the test. How did we do that?

They threw out their nets, but they did not catch us. They sent out their drones, but they never found us. They sought to entrance us, but we couldn’t be hypnotised.

We were survivors after all. But survivors for what? What’s our purpose? To be witness on earth. To ready our testimonies. To bear our witness …

 

And the coast called. This is where we came for our victory lap. This is where we came to be with others of our kind. Because there are others like us here, we know that. Other resistors. Other refuseniks.

I don’t want to live in a dull world. I don’t want the same. I don’t want moderation. I don’t want things to remain as they are.

Extremes – that’s what I want. Openings. Destructions. Breaches.

No liberalism. No mildness. No meekness. Madness – a dash of madness.

A cry – a life-cry. A life-rise. A life-rising. A scream, upwards. Sent upwards. That would tear apart the sky. A scream in search of what? God? Transcendence. Upwards. Rending the clouds.

Do you like being a lover – my lover? You don’t mind either way, do you? Our afternoon fucks are a bonus. They’re a treat. Our affair is a distraction. And it’s easy, because it’s on a plate. Because here I am, right in front of you.

It’s easy for you, too. You just drive here. And drive off again.

But part of me gets caught here. Snagged. Do you think about me when I’m not here? I’ll bet you don’t. Well, I think about you.

 

The real drama of your life is elsewhere – I know that. It’s your magnum opus. Wrestling with its very possibility. Or impossibility. That’s your drama. That’s what’s keeping you occupied.

And it’ll keep you busy for a number of years yet. Until … your late thirties, maybe. Or early forties. When you decide you’re bored of it all.

 

Only in philosophy are you allowed to think you still might develop into something, age thirty-two. That you could still have unlimited promise in your early thirties. That if you work in your room for long enough. If you read the wright books for long enough, you’ll turn the right corner. There you’ll be …

And I like it in you, that hope. It’s attractive. Your idealism … Like you’re about to change the thought world.

 

One day, I’ll just leave you to it, your ambitions, your great project. I’ll tiptoe away, and you won’t really notice. It won’t really disturb you.

And it won’t disturb you, either. You’ll have our husband to go back to.

Go back to? I never left him.

 

So it’ll be an episode, for both of us. An episode. A what-was-that? A what-happened-there? A what-was-that-all-about? A just-think-of-it. An imagine- that. Something to occupy our thoughts in dull hours. Something to wonder at. To get wistful about. Nostalgic.

 

One day you’ll tell your husband all about it. One day, when you’re feeling particularly close. On an anniversary, or something. On his birthday, or yours. You’ll tell him about your love affair – that’s what you’ll call it. It’ll all come out. To show him not to take you for granted. Not to assume you couldn’t lead an entirely life if you chose to. Not to think you weren’t ever so interesting to someone. That would add an unexpected twist to the evening, wouldn’t it? That would make him sit up and listen …

And you won’t tell anyone. Not even your future wife. Your future girlfriend …

The destruction of the present course of the world. The wiping out of the Satanic powers. The termination of all pain and sorrow. The coming of the fucking kingdom of the God …

 

The turn from the old aeon to the new one. The shift from the time of sin to the time of salvation.

When the Now alone has meaning – nothing else. When we have to decide what do Now – and what to leave undone. When no standard from the past can help us.

 

A militancy. A totally passionate way of living. A total praxis. Where you embody the revolution. The apocalypse …

 

The new aeon breaking in. The imminent abolition of the world, of all the kings and nobles, all the priests, the moneylenders, the rentiers, all the laws and the henchmen. The annihilation of everything that is not perfect in God.

 

A new epiphany of the Godhead. In its urgency, its Kairos. The wedge of the Moment in the present.

 

All present things are inconsequential, because the end is coming. That’s what apocalypse teaches you.

 

Nihilism has already claimed transcendence. It’s swallowed it up. Transcendence is fucking empty.

 

Ecstatic nihilism. Creative nihilism. The death of God that we have to live.

 

A new thought of the void, of the emptiness of nihilism. Of chaos – chaos itself, in its groundless ground.

 

We have to face the full horror of history. No escapism. No wishful illusions. The full reality of this despicable world.

Theology has to descend to Hell and stay there.

 

Faith can’t be positive anymore. It’s destructive. It means destructive action. The destruction of the political law. Of moral law. Of metaphysical law.

 

God is the nothing of the world. The void of the world. And that’s the religious meaning of the death of God.

 

God has nothing to do with the world – this world. God has left this world. Nothing remains of God but the void.

A religion of the void of God – that’s what we seek. Except it wouldn’t be a religion, or just another religion. It’d be anti-religion. The end of all religions …

 

This is our theology: divine absence. Divine non being. Divine impotence. Divine indifference.

 

Do you know how we’re unified with God? Not through some beatitude, but through crucifixion. We become one with God in slavery. In the Cross. That’s how we know the absent God, the divine void.

 

A theology of divine absence, divine impotence. The godlessness of the world is what we know of God.

 

The first experience – our experience – has always been of the silence and nothingness of God.

 

God is the whirlwind. And all there is is whirlwind.

Which means that God cannot be called to account by his creatures. That God is unrecognisable, unsayable, unnameable. Utterly transcendent. 

 

Our uprootedness. Our nakedness. Our hopelessness.

 

Transcendence is not – it doesn’t exist. 

Which is a way of saying that God is without form, without bounds, unameable, incomprehensible, non-existent.

 

A revelation of the void – everywhere. The very sky. The earth itself. The waves of the sea. We can’t escape.

 

The meaninglessness of the world is itself significant. It means something.

 

The grace of destruction. Grace as destruction, running rampant. Like spreading flames.

 

The Fall’s just deepening and deepening. The law of the earth is too strong.

It’s much too late for this world – but we always knew that.

 

Lower and lower stages of amorphy. Of formlessness. Of senseless violence.

 

We’re waiting for the blazing break. For an apocalyptic fire to purge the land.

 

We’re the antinomians. We’re the bearers of the alien fire.

Total antagonism towards the world: that’s our only option.

 

We don’t need God any longer to solve the human paradox. We’ll solve it ourselves. We don’t need to find a justification for all the unbearable terrors. There is no justification.

 

Either God or the world, right?

 

The flash of the transcendent in the immanent: that’s what we want to see. The apocalyptic fire of divine love. The momentary burning up of the world …

 

The world’s old – terribly so. And it needs renewal.

 

The incessant death agony of the world …

 

Our religion of the Fall of God.

 

We can understand meaning only negatively. Only through the profound experience of meaninglessness.

 

The world is a purely functional mechanism. The conditions of meaning come from outside.

 

Being is just self-repetition, self-perpetuation, self-enclosure. The old tautology.

 

The use of nihilism: not to denigrate ourselves, but to embolden us so that we can look beyond the world. So that we no longer regard it as a holy gift. So it loosens its magical grip upon us.

Nihilism: disenchantment carried to its limit.

 

The void of God: that’s what we have to see. That nothing remains of God but the void.

 

God is with us in his absence: don’t you see? Even though that absence is painful.

 

Kierkegaard: It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion.

 

Scholem: 'the redemption […] cannot be realized without dread and ruin.

 

The world was created by mistake: that’s what I believe.

 

I renounce the creation and reject the creator. That’s where I stand.

 

He lives in his own private Dostoevsky novel. A St Petersburg of his mind.

 

When prophecy fails, there comes apocalypticism. When apocalypticism fails … Gnosticism.

This is not our world: remember that.

All we have: our despair, which is to say, our freedom not to be caught up in this world. Which means despair isn’t just passive. It isn’t just something we just endure. Which means despair is a incitement. An awakening. A condition of further action …

 

Despair is an invitation. A calling. Even the highest calling. It says: turn your eyes to this. Turn your attention to this. Awaken yourself to this. You are not part of the demonic realm.

 

This demonic world. This unacceptable world. This refusable world. Because that’s what we learn: this world is refusable. It doesn’t have to be our world. We don’t have to succumb. We can climb into the light.

 

Our apocalypse. This world has to collapse – and it will collapse.

That’s what hope is, for us: destruction. The end of all things. For the end of the world.

 

This isn’t our world. This isn’t our filth.

 

Horror at the world. At ourselves. At having to live. At having to go on.

Sin, deepening. Sin, always. And lies. And corruption. And ugliness.

 

The hideousness of it all. The twistedness.

Will we ever be untwisted? Will we ever be made beautiful? Will we ever become uncorrupted?

 

This world is too disgusting to last. It’s too deeply fucked to last.

Which is why we’ll have to accept the coming horror. The tyranny.

Which is why we’ll even have to work for the destruction. For the great down-going.

 

The air is poisoned. The very air. Our food. Everything we eat. The sky is poisoned. The clouds aren’t real clouds. The soil is poisoned. The water. The rain that falls. All poison. They’d poison the sun, if they could.

 

We’re driving ourselves mad: do you ever think that: that we’ve driven ourselves mad? That we’ve gone too mad. That we’ve spent too much time in mad company. Too much time reading mad books. Studying wild philosophy.

 

Is this what madness is like? Is this what it feels like – tastes like? Are we unwell – that’s what they call it nowadays, don’t they: being unwell. Are we suffering from mental health problems – because that’s how madness is known today, as a mental health problem?

 

Because madness shows what lies beyond this world. Madness is part of a greater sanity. A coming sanity. It’s the face of that sanity. Just like stupidity – our stupidity – is the present face of brilliance.

 

What if we’re the madness? What if we’re the ones who should be eliminated? What if our destruction is the solution?

Mad people like us. Mad philosophers like us. Mad theologians like us. Mad thinkers. We’ve taken things too far. We’ve taken thought too far. Until it’s merged with madness.

 

It can’t go on like this, and yet it goes on. It can’t get any worse, and yet it gets worse. It’s even accelerating.

They’re intensifying the pressure. The enemy’s desperate. They’re forcing their agenda. They’ll stop at nothing. They’re the real apocalypticists, not us. They’re the ones who want to drive the world to ruin, not us.

 

A mad philosophy, for mad times. A mad theology. In service of God gone mad. Who will help us? Are we just driving ourselves madder? More mad? Infinitely mad?

 

Everything burning up into nothing … An offering … The offering of everything there is. To what? We call it God. But it’s just … The sky? The night? The fucking Open?

As if our whole lives were sacrifices. In some religion. Our religion …

 

We should slit our throats now. We should hang ourselves now. It would makes sense. It makes more sense than anything.

At the height of our lives. At the height of our fucking beauty. (Laughter)

 

I want the wave to break. I want the flood. I want to go under.

And I want to think there’s an ark somewhere. That will save all the good things – not me. Not the likes of us. But there’s an ark that carries all the beautiful things, all the good things. That saves the goodness. I like that thought.

 

There’s nothing more beautiful than death. I’m starting an absolute cult of death –now! Tonight!

They want to fuck up our hippocampuses. The ability to learn. Our emotional stability. That’s what they want to target. To create a new neural network in the brain. Rewiring the human nervous system. To trap us in Hell.

 

It’s neurodegeneration everywhere. All around us. It’s all conformity, obedience. People are turning into zombies. Their frontal lobes are fucked. The high centres of the brain.

All the fine turning’s gone. All the subtlety. Humane thinking. Empathy. All going. Love – the capacity to love. Civilization’s the central cortex. That’s what they’re demolishing.

They’re creating the kind of masses that they want.

 

This is Armageddon. This is the apocalyptic battle. Taking evil to a level never before seen.

Satan is behind this. Someone who hates the world as it is. Who hates creation as it is. Where it’s not enough to own everything living, but to take possession and control living things in their essence.

 

It’s out in the open. They’re not trying to sneak up on the herd anymore.

 

There’s aluminium, barium, strontium up in rain. The rain, like foams.

 

They don’t need us to make money, they don’t need our taxes, they print money for whatever they want.

 

The mercantile era is coming to an end. This is the neo-feudal era

 

They’re breaking in the new system. Everything’s lined up – every major logistical element.

 

The population is a liability. They want to thin out the herd.

 

It’s cognitive infiltration. They’re letting the IQ points fall.

 

We’re being prepped. They’re programming us – remote controlling us.

 

It was a slow kill programme. Now it’s a fast kill programme. Things are speeding up.

 

They’re going to modify every species on the planet.

 

We’re in tune. We sense things. The shifting narratives.

There are so many battle fronts. So many battle lines.

 

The ownership of humans: that’s what they’re aiming at. He ownership of the entire world. The digitization of everything that can be traded or used as a medium of exchange.

Mourning the death of the old world.

But we didn’t even like the old world. The old world sucked.

What will the new world be like?

Worse.

 

It’s growing dark. The philosophers of the end, of the very end, are starting to appear. Who are they? Where are they hiding? What do they look like? How will we tell them from the rest of the tossers?

We will know them by their deeds. Their books? Their substacks. Their podcasts. Their vlogs.

 

Why do we sense these things, and no one else does – not all the clever philosophers? How come it’s falling to us?

Our very mediocrity. Our very lowness. The fact that we’ve little stake in the world as it is. The fact that we half hope for apocalypse. That we want it all to end.

Perhaps we’re not to be trusted. Perhaps we’re too in love with apocalypse. Perhaps we want the end of the world. Perhaps that’s all we want – all we’ve wanted.

 

A new kind of thought, that’s all our own … As vast and stupid as things are vast and stupid. Pathos-driven thought. Deep moods. Which we will access through drinking.

Of course! Drinking! What else! It’s preparatory. A method of attunement. Not a method … that’s not the word. There’s a Way.

 

The stupid hope that a world may come in which we’d want to live. When the end of this world is the last chance we have.

 

The shift’s occurring. We’re supposed to go along with it all. We’re supposed to accede. We’re supposed to work on it ourselves: the production of the new reality. We’re supposed to join in, the so-called educated middle class. The indoctrinated. The deceived. The stupefied. Shoulder to the wheel, and so on. We’ve got our role to play.

The great dimunition. People are more lethargic now. They’ve lost their pep. They’ve lost their joie de vivre. They’ve sunk down a level – everyone. They’re lost their desires.

We’re sinking, all of us. The level of the world is falling. The spiritual level. It’s all planned. They know what they’re doing.

 

They’re decommissioning the old reality, and implementing a new one. And everyone’s going along with it. A thousand years of darkness: that’s what’s coming. Slavery. A slavery system. The new Hell. They’re building Hell. A false reality. A fake reality.

And they’re rolling out the new narrative.

 

The spiritual trial is over. We know who we are now. It’s been revealed to us. It’s all clear.

 

No one’s coming to save us. There’s no second coming. We have to save ourselves.

 

They’ve launched it. The new reality. It’s here – it’s all around us.

 

Most people just want to believe. They’re pretending to believe. They’re pretending as hard as they can. It’s difficult – it’s an effort. Look at them, straining.

 

The trap is closing. No – it’s closed.

 

You’re going to refuse their implants? The implants are already in you, idiot.

They put it in the air, put it in the water. Everything you eat.

 

Love … there’s no more love. Just mutual suspicion.

 

All that’s left to us are more or less spectacular suicides. Which no one will understand.