This morning I was rereading my favorite
stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his
work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his
surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values
which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is
rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich,
and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization
destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the
Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as
if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find
writ large the words, “I do not exist.”
One’s interpretation of a universe empty
of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean
cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one
of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who
are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump
and his presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist theatre and lunacy, rests with our
solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible
of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us
and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also
steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as
shaping forces. Hope directs us toward a conservative project of finding new
gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions
as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope, is vital to
Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and
no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell,
which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves
and to our own liberation.
True
freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of
the idols.
Freedom can be terrible as well as
wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how
she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop
lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband
wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our
nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative
rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization
destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same
awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and
must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country,
exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one
but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to
possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of
historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot,
Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary
force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and
Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces
just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of
conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand
stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing
morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the
history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed
in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution
and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to
transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process
of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow
up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled
by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a
third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections.
And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social
frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and
history.
This is the first revolution in which we all
must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a
term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others
make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
Torch of Liberty 
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