“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”, as written by Karl Marx.
Karl Marx transformed the history and evolution of humankind with a unique primary insight, simple to tell though it has many layers; we humans are self created beings, whose souls are artifacts of our civilization as historical and social constructions, interdependent with those of others, and if we change how we relate to each other as systems, narratives of identity, informing, motivating, and shaping forces, if we change the nature of our relationships, we also change the nature of humankind.
Are we not made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to each other?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership.
“The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” So wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which remains the most impactful revisioning of human relations, being, meaning, and values in the history of civilization.
Celebrate with me today the birthday of Karl Marx, who shaped from the Humanist tradition of the Enlightenment a toolkit for the realization of our potential humanity, of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and of the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power, from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and from the tyranny and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
An enduring legacy of Karl Marx is his instrumentalization of Socratic method as a tool of understanding unequal power as dialectical process, which can be generally applied in human sciences. This he demonstrated at length in the example of economics because he wanted to place it on a footing as science, much as Freud insisted on defining his new talking cure for madness as medical science to confer authority on it.
Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, May 15 1969. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third a part of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital. In this interpretation I was influenced by my context of growing up in a Reformed Church community, where spoken English reflected that of the King James Bible whose rhythms shape my writing still, and the influence of Coleridge and other Romantic Idealists and religious symbolism in medieval art through my mother, who was a scholar of both.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Camus and Sartre, Beckett and Pinter, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe free of any meaning or value we ourselves do not create, and the madness of our historical attempts to control fate and nature including our own in a mad world, where security is an illusion, truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, and relational, and our fear has been weaponized globally by carceral states in service to power, the centralization of authority, and our enslavement and dehumanization. In this second unfolding of understanding I found guidance and allyship with fellow revolutionaries and scholars of Marxist thought and its praxis, as we waged liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, American imperialism in Central America, and other theatres of Resistance to tyranny and oppression.
The third time I read Marx was over a decade after my baptism by fire in Beirut, this time as a counselor seeking to better understand and help my clients. I remain as I was then, a scholar of the intersection of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, whose primary field is the origin of human evil and its consequences as violence, though of course I have been greatly changed by my life experience, and my understanding has changed with me.
My third reading of Marx coincides with my Defining Moment of understanding the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force from which evil, violence, and fascist tyranny arise, a Ring of Power which requires the renunciation of love to wield, and a pathology which can be healed by the redemptive power of love. Here Marx helps us to understand the dynamics of unequal power as a system of oppression, a model which can be applied generally to issues including those of gender, race, and class.
We often have difficulty envisioning a therapeutic model of finding balance and harmony in society rather than a coercive one; we may align ourselves on the side of freedom against tyranny and the force and control of the carceral state, but how can we abolish the police and throw open the gates of the prisons, abolish borders and the counterinsurgency model of policing which enforces white supremacist and patriarchal terror, renounce the social use of force and abandon violence and war, cast down law and order from their thrones and forge a civilization of liberty and chaos in its place?
Let me provide you with an example of what that might look like. On my return from adventures abroad, I took a job as a counselor in a program called Vision Quest run through a Native American tribe for court mandated youth, under the flags of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers with the Army’s permission, and with gorgeous Union Army blues parade uniforms.
As described to me, I would lead a group of fifteen boys through the program from a three month impact or boot camp in Arizona near the historic Fort, then ride horses to Denver and Philadelphia, sleeping in a tipi as one of several such teams while they learned riding and parade horse drill, and finish the program on a tall ship in the Florida Keys teaching them to sail. They would earn their GED high school equivalency certificate, and graduates would have served their sentences and be provided with jobs and transitional supervised community based housing. There was no lockdown; just men learning to live together without violence.
This sounded like a grand adventure, and for most of my life if you told me something was going to be an adventure, or as Obi-Wan says in the first Star Wars film “some damn fool idealistic crusade”, I’d likely do it. It’s the part they leave out of the pitch you need to worry about with this kind of quasi-official outfit; what no one told me was that the clients were mainly violent felons with four or five year sentences that would eventually land them in adult prisons if they washed out, with issues like psychotic rage and often highly trained and indoctrinated gang soldiers, cult zealots, and fanatics of political terror as well. It turned out to be both much tougher and much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and became my entry point into working as a counselor.
America at this time was caught up in a highly politicized racist hysteria over gangs and rising crime, whose emergence was to me clearly a consequence of the failures of capitalism as our civilization began to collapse from the inherent contradictions of our systems of unequal power. One reply to these conditions was to use greater force; the solution of stop and frisk policies, the school to prison pipeline whose design is to create prison bond labor and the re-enslavement of Black citizens, militarization of police, and the universalization of state terror as the counterinsurgency model of policing. This has two problems; it fails to address underlying causes of crime in wealth disparity, and it asks us to throw our children away.
They were some of the toughest and most unreachable boys in our nation, mainly Black and from the ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, with issues of abuse, abandonment, and addiction as consequences of structural and systemic inequalities and injustices, internalized oppression, and the legacy of slavery. And they were boys and future citizens our nation had thrown away.
We had a three percent recidivism rate from that program; 97% of our clients had no further contact with the law after completion. This amazing success with teenagers our society had pronounced violent and unreformable criminals began with an awareness that perpetrators are also victims, both and neither good nor evil, and was won by providing a constructive way for them to earn honor and membership; so far like many other programs based on military models of identity construction.
But it was the horses, wild mustangs given to each new client as their own personal mount who had to break and learn to ride them, that allowed them to forge the ability to bond with others, because you can trust a horse and it will never betray you. Teambuilding exercises did the rest, as in the military but without the purpose of violence.
So it was, with The Communist Manifesto in my saddlebag and dreaming with serenity between a former gang enforcer and extremist of Louis Farrakhan’s racial separatist Nation of Islam who had been shot six times in six different gunfights with other Black teenagers and whose joy was to recite poetry from my copy of Rumi, and on the other side a former Jamaican Posse drug lord who had two million dollars in cash in his pockets when his reign of terror in Philly ended in betrayal and arrest and who had discovered a genius for choreography in adapting reggae to parade drill, that I had a primary insight and realization of the nature of violence as a disease of power, of addiction to power and of unequal power, which operates multigenerationally as epigenetic trauma and historical legacies of slavery and racism, and often a result of secret power.
Dehumanization is the end result of commodification; Jean Genet famously called the quest for wealth and power necrophilia for this reason. William S. Burroughs coined the term the Algebra of Need as a metaphor of Capitalism. And with his invention of the philosophy of Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre explored the implications of Marx’s primary insights as a psychology of the consequences of unequal power relations and the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions as alienation, falsification, commodification, internalized oppression, and the disfigurement and theft of the soul by hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and the hegemonic forces of those who would enslave us.
As a systemic and pervasive means of transforming persons into things, capitalism is an enabler which acts as a force multiplier for a host of evils, inequalities of racism and patriarchy, and divisions of exclusionary otherness, touching every aspect of our lives including our identity and social relations and confronting individuals with enormous and weaponized forces with which we must wrestle.
And our best response to these threats is solidarity in refusal to submit or be isolated by our modern pathology of disconnectedness, divided by otherness and identitarian categories of exclusion and privilege and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and subjugated by authorized identities and the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power; to unite as a band of brothers, sisters, and others and to shelter and protect our humanity and viability through and with others as a United Humankind.
In our revolutionary struggle for our souls, for autonomy and self ownership, for liberty and our uniqueness as self created beings, and for the liberation of humankind, we are each other’s best resource of action.
We are not designed to survive alone, and it can be difficult to get people in crisis to reach out for help, and for our institutions of caregiving to find where help is needed before things spiral downwards into violence, nor can violence be cured with violence or state repression. But this is the great mission of our humanity; to unite across the boundaries of our differences in revolutionary struggle to become better.
Let us defy the malign forces that would divide and enslave us and consume our souls. So I say with Karl Marx, the great visionary of liberty and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; People of the world, unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.
I too once bore the icon of Saint Beatrice of the Absurd as did he, following the tracks of Dante through a blighted and ravaged series of otherworlds, bereft of dictums, of referents, a journey in which all the signs had been switched so that self-referential language led outward to realms unknown and the places marked Here Be Dragons had settled into my skin like living tattoos and could only be found by surrendering to the currents of time and dancing untethered like a leaf on the wind, or glimpsed in a mirror of endless reflections.
But unlike Samuel Beckett, grim prophet that he was, I danced in rapture and in joy. Because he who has no hope nor fear, no boundaries to one’s self, is totally free. And in freedom there is as Rudolf Otto teaches us “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”, both terror and rapture as before the monstrosity of the Infinite and the Unknown, all that which is utterly alien and defines the limits of the human.
Who cannot be compelled is free, and becomes Unconquered. For Samuel Beckett, this embrace of Sartre’s total freedom lies at the heart of his luminous questioning of human being, meaning, and value. Take away everything a man has or is, possession and mastery of his own body, his memories, histories, identity, and what remains is his Voice, protean and relative though it may be.
Here begins his use of language as an instrument of revolutionary struggle interdependent with many of his great themes, which he deployed as Resistance to fascist tyranny during the Occupation, against a brutal conqueror who used terror to subjugate victims through learned helplessness by means of shock and awe; yet in the face of unanswerable force and overwhelming horror Samuel Beckett discovered a way to claw back some of our humanity from the darkness.
Sometimes it’s the best we can do. Yet it remains a power which cannot be taken from us, our refusal to submit, and that is the only power a human being needs.
I think of this tonight as I contemplate the abandonment of our humanity and our principles of universal human rights in the genocidal Gaza War which Biden has made America complicit in, as Israel has with her criminal violations of international law provoked Iran into direct retaliation for the bombing of the consulate, and Biden has granted authorization for this by shielding Israel from the consequences of her actions by shooting down Iran’s drones.
We are now directly involved in the broad regional war against the Dominion of Iran, which controls Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, and is Russia’s key ally in Putin’s mad quest to re-found the Russian Empire.
World War Three has now been ongoing for several years in ten theatres of war, including America as Putin captured the Stolen Election of 2016 with his agent Traitor Trump for the purpose of a free hand in the invasion of Ukraine without American intervention, which he got and still gets from the subverted Republican congressmen.
Israel and Palestine, one people divided by history, are now the tenth theatre of the Third World War, which Israel is doing everything in their power to generalize as imperial conquest and dominion of the whole Middle East. And Netanyahu’s regime has implicated America in unforgiveable crimes against humanity as a strategy of our subjugation and now maneuvers to bring us fully into conflict with Iran, which will bring us into a direct and total war of survival with Russia.
As one may surmise from my frequent use of the phrase Never Again!, I will gladly guarantee the lives of Jewish peoples, be they Israeli citizens or that of any other nation, with my own, and this is unconditional; but applies equally to all human beings. Protecting Israel from the random civilian slaughter of aerial bombardment, yes; but also protecting everyone else from Israeli bombs.
If America bombs Iran or enables Israel to do so instead of sanctioning Israel for the consulate bombing that provoked this escalation and cycle of retaliation and mutual destruction, everything changes, and the Age of Tyrants begins.
Humankind now faces six to eight centuries of global wars of dominion fought with unimaginable weapons against whole populations by tyrannies of brutal force and control, and in less than two possible futures out of every hundred something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and wonder how and why we destroyed ourselves.
To be clear; nothing human survives the next millennium; the only question now is whether or not we take all life on earth with us. Unless we choose a United Humankind over an Age of Tyrants.
If Biden had used Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to stop the Israeli genocide as it began in October, we would not now be on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Instead he, like Netanyahu, and now like Iran, chose to answer death and terror with greater death and terror, and failed to silence the bombs.
Force cannot answer force, but only gathers more as it dehumanizes us. If Biden now sanctions Israel he can still stop a war of survival between Russia and America, and between our allies Iran and Israel. I fear instead he will choose the path of evil as we so often have when the lives of others can become fuel for the power of elites and of imperial conquest and dominion. If we cannot find mercy within us, we will exterminate humankind. Today I fear the Age of Tyrants has begun.
Our world has far too many rulers whose fingers rest on the button of nuclear Armageddon, and like an evil jinn in its bottle it whispers to them with its siren call; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
We are all become Death, destroyer of worlds, and we must resist the seduction of power.
Two years ago on this day I wrote to you from a place similar to Gaza today, a field hospital in Mariupol where the wounded were triaged and those who may live chosen from those who will die, surrounded by men burned beyond recognition by the mobile crematoriums called thermobaric weapons, identities stolen by brain damage from shrapnel and concussive force and disconnected from themselves with memories possibly forever lost, missing limbs from the violence of others and parts of their humanity from the violence they themselves have committed for war generalizes moral harm and degradation, many with families annihilated in the cauldron of war, who sing a litany of pain and fear and loss; and I believe I understand the place from which Samuel Beckett speaks to us.
All the works of Samuel Becket are masterpieces, are unparalleled, revelatory and stunning. I would first read Waiting for Godot, as everyone else has, and after that my favorite, The Unnamable.
The Unnamable, final and most ferocious novel of his magnificent and terrifying trilogy, is a monologue summarizing the great themes of his works without characters, plot, or setting in the usual sense of literary devices.
There are many things it is not, as Samuel Beckett’s critique of language as a mechanism of social control and theft of identity recalls that of Gertrude Stein and travels in the direction opposite the joyful myriad experiments of his long collaborator James Joyce; yet it remains a brilliant and stunning set of arguments for the meaninglessness and emptiness of values and of being in a universe empty of imposed meaning in which we are free to create ourselves by our own poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
What else may one expect of an author whose references include Lautréamont’s Maldoror, de Sade, Bataille?
An extension of Sartre’s Existentialism which develops Absurdist Nihilism as a radical notation of its parent philosophy, and reflective aesthetically of the theatre of Eugene Ionesco and Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett’s idea of Negation rests on premises of authenticity and alienation, and is intended as an act of liberation and an answer to human suffering as a condition of being. Beckett’s Principle of Negation finds its form in the art of silences and blank spaces; here we become the disembodied voices of Molloy or the trapped and dehumanized figures of David Rabe’s Recital of the Dog or Kobo Abe’s The Box Man.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
I have often wondered if Samuel Beckett was influenced by Nagarjuna, who denies both the existence of the soul and possibly of existence itself, or other Buddhist philosophers, with which he aligns. Certainly the influence of Nietzsche was formative to his ideas.
Samuel Beckett influenced Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze; among the essays of The Infinite Conversation there are dialogues between himself and his friends Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Blanchot wrote of him in the essay Where now? Who now?; Alain Badiou’s essay on Worstward Ho, Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept, among the collected essays published as On Beckett, remains unexcelled.
His influence on modern theatre begins with his protege and collaborator Harold Pinter, and includes Sam Shepard and Edward Albee.
Both a direct refutation of the Biblical concepts of sin, soul, cosmological design, historical purpose and teleology, and divine authority, and an original and visionary reimagination of the human condition, the works of Samuel Beckett are integral to our civilization and among its finest achievements.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2023, This Midwinter Solstice, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom; As we enter the Christmas season on this Midwinter Solstice, the day of most profound and deepest darkness, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
As written by Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist: : How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, in Aeon; “Exhausted by the modern pressure to squeeze meaning out of every moment? Here’s a radical way to reset your priorities.
In theory, the pursuit of a meaningful life is noble. Foundational concepts of community, ethics, logic, morality, consciousness and equality were born from the investigation of meaning. From Aristotle and Plato to the entire oeuvre of John Hughes, the urge to wrestle with the point of it all has inspired great works of art, literature and film. But today something’s gone awry and the pursuit of meaning inspires more angst than awe. The search has moved from a private pursuit to a marketable product.
The rise of meaningless meaning
Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.
Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout.
The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters. Daily newsletters flood our inboxes, prescribing never-ending tasks and goals to meditate over and mark as complete. In the shower, we listen to podcasts about making this day count, then towel off and cram in a few minutes of mindful journalling about what we managed to meaningfully achieve the day before.
But as meaning moves from a long-term exploration to a daily metric, it’s creating new problems. When we’re not immediately able to locate meaning in our actions, jobs, relationships and consumer products, we’re left feeling like anxious, empty failures. The once-noble pursuit that built culture and helped us carve out rewarding existences becomes just another task on the endless checklist of a ‘good life’ that we’re never quite able to tick off.
Nihilism as a solution
So what’s the alternative? Is the answer to embrace a state of pointless, nihilistic chaos? Yeah, pretty much. At least that’s what’s worked for me.
For the past few years, I’ve been consumed by nihilism. Reading that, it would be fair to assume things haven’t been peachy. But my descent into the controversial philosophy hasn’t been a grim road of despair and hopelessness. Quite the opposite. It’s become one of the most illuminating and fortifying parts of my life.
Rejecting the urge to seek and denote meaning to all things has changed the way I assign value and spend time. It has challenged what I focus on and, most importantly, what I disregard. I’ve found that a kind of optimistic or ‘sunny’ nihilism highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the power of sunny nihilism, it’s necessary to begin with the philosophy itself.
The broadest explanation of nihilism argues that life is meaningless and the systems to which we subscribe to give us a sense of purpose – such as religion, politics, traditional family structures or even the notion of absolute truth itself – are fantastical human constructs; inventions to make the randomness of existence feel a little more orderly. Or, as nihilism’s poster boy Friedrich Nietzsche put it: ‘Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.’
Breaking it down further, the American philosopher Donald Crosby divides nihilism into four main forms: moral, epistemological, cosmic and, perhaps the best-known, existential. Moral nihilism rejects fundamental ideas of right and wrong; epistemological nihilism takes issue with absolute truth; cosmic nihilism considers nature to be inherently indifferent and hostile; and finally we reach existential nihilism, in many ways the culmination of all these considerations, which probably keeps most people up at night – the basic idea being that there is no meaning to life, everything is pointless.
Reading all that, it’s fair to argue that nihilism is kind of a bummer. These ideas do pose the risk of curdling into a kind of toxic nihilism that leaves the individual feeling despondent and overwhelmed. What’s the point of doing anything if nothing matters? If there is no inherent understanding of good and bad, why try to lead a moral life? If everything is pointless, why even get out of bed?
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism
While I’ll admit that the message that nothing matters – not your job, god, universe, certainly not what type of canned goods you buy – is an overwhelming thought, it doesn’t have to be. Set against this never-ending obsession with locating (or, too often, purchasing) meaning, it can be liberating.
When I contemplate life’s pointlessness, I begin by remembering that, in the scope of all human history, I really matter very little (a rather cosmic approach). My issues and concerns are mute. My successes and failures will all be forgotten. As will the achievements and stumbles of everyone around me (existential nihilism at its finest).
While I may feel dwarfed by the scope of endless and apathetic time, the smallest elements of my life begin to expand. If nothing matters long-term, my focus shifts to this moment. I understand that the present, however mundane, is as fleeting, temporal, fragile and forgettable as the greatest events in human history.
Nihilism makes me wonder about what I do and don’t pay attention to. Is what another person thinks of me imbued with greater meaning (or meaninglessness) as compared with a brush of jasmine tumbling over a neighbour’s fence? Not really. So why am I consumed by one while ignoring the other?
By his own description, Nietzsche ‘philosophise[d] with a hammer’, breaking open large ideas and challenging his readers to see what could be reformed with the pieces. In this way nihilism, like all philosophies, is a tool to explore parts of our lives. As with any tool, it can be picked up and put down, used to create or destroy; outcomes and executions are dependent on the user’s intent. It is up to you to decide if you will fall into the destructive grooves of toxic nihilism, or opt for something a little lighter. You may not have a purpose, but you do have agency. It’s this reading of nihilism that I think about when considering a life without meaning.
But how does one go about picking up such a tool and using it in a positive way? This Guide will help you embrace sunny nihilism and avoid its toxic alternative.
Think it through
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism
The challenges posed by nihilism weren’t lost on Nietzsche, who had an elegant way of explaining how the philosophy can serve as a destructive or constructive force. According to him, passive nihilists absorb the messages of meaninglessness and are threatened. They fear the void so scramble to fill it by indulging in any offering of it. As Nolen Gertz wrote in Aeon in 2020, this form of blind self-protection is a ‘dangerous form of self-destruction’.
He added: ‘To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything …’
Which is how we end up back in the trap of meaningless meaning. Or standing in the supermarket aisle, trying to convince ourselves that a can of chickpeas really does matter.
As a more constructive alternative, Nietzsche ushered individuals to evolve into active nihilists. That is, to stare into the abyss and see the absence of meaning not as a tragedy but as an opportunity. To consider it a space to fill with your own values, to define how you want to be in the world and what you believe to be true. An active nihilist isn’t intimidated by chaos, they recognise it as a chance to create something new and better.
In my own journey toward sunny nihilism, I landed somewhere in the middle. I wasn’t horrified by a lack of absolute truth, but I also didn’t rush to write my own. Rather, I chose to pause, stare into the void, and consider the freedom of nothingness.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning
Whereas nihilism can prompt reflection and widen your view on existence, the commercial hijacking of meaning plays into the vulnerabilities of the passive nihilist, contributing to our era’s epidemic of self-obsessed selfishness. It not only encourages you to centre every action around yourself, but it deceptively presents this as a noble act. When you embrace this kind of personal mythmaking, you give yourself permission to spend a lot of time thinking about your own life, actions and experiences.
Speaking to Politico magazine in 2020, Virginia Heffernan, the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016), said: ‘the recent fantasy of “optimising” a life – for peak performance, productivity, efficiency – has created a cottage industry that tries to make the dreariest possible lives sound heroic.’
To help you avoid this decadent trap, it is worth being vigilant of, and guarding against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act – by positioning every brand, product or service as somehow meaningful.
Are those period undies really a symbol of rebellion, or just a convenient sanitary product? Does the bottle of hot sauce in my fridge truly mark me as an iconoclastic thrill-seeker, or just indicate a robust gut flora? Is my bank really helping me invest in family values and community, or do I just appreciate the low fees if I deposit a set amount each month?
While writing this article, I was conveniently served an advert for ‘Florence by Mills’, the new teen skincare range from the actress Millie Bobby Brown (I appreciate the algorithm recognising my youthful spirit). The entire range is clad in the familiar pastel colours and toothless message of ‘empowering young people through something something’ of so many personal care products. But the ‘Feed Your Soul Love U a Latte’ mask stood out in particular. Turns out it’s never too young to preach that enlightenment can be achieved in a 15-minute topical treatment.
I hope that the young people browsing these products are resilient enough to not fall into such narratives; that they’re able to pause to ask what these cheap exchanges are calling on them to invest emotionally or financially. Will this purchase make them happy, or is it an example of what Heffernan cautioned against when she said we were out to make ‘the dreariest possible lives sound heroic’?
Recognise the happy side of nihilism
When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialisation of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap?
I’m reminded of an episode of the Netflix sitcom The Good Place (2016-20). Chidi – a character who happens to be a moral philosopher – has the kind of existential crisis that inspires these queries. During his breakdown, he walks a classroom of philosophy students down the major paths where humanity has attempted to locate meaning and understand how to live an ‘ethical life’. After cycling through the arguments of virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology, he finally declares that all these pathways to meaning lead nowhere (it’s worth watching the show to hear Chidi explain why) before concluding that nihilism is the only logical philosophical view – at which point he has a full meltdown.
While I love Chidi, I find the scene frustrating for how narrowly it presents this cause and effect. Such a response has always puzzled me. After all, did you get out of bed this morning to search for the meaning of life or for a cup of coffee? Again, are such grand questions really bringing such grand comforts?
In contrast to Chidi, another pop-culture figure shows how nihilism can inspire greater happiness. In the film The Beach Bum (2019), Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, an epicurean, once-iconic, Florida-based writer. His is a woozy and colourful tale of excess and hedonism that involves a lot of drinking, drugs, avoided responsibility, and sex. All of which are indulged in with few consequences.
Watching The Beach Bum, you feel you’ve seen this movie before, you know to wait for the fall, when Moondog will collapse under the weight of his shirked responsibilities and the system will catch up to him. Except the fall never comes. After seeing it at South by Southwest film festival, the critic Hazem Fahmy wrote: ‘Rather than simply not address these issues, the film goes out of its way to remind us that nothing in this strange dimension truly matters.’
Moondog doesn’t care about anything, he lives for pleasure. Towards the end of the film, he outlines his life’s mantra to a reporter: ‘We’re here to have a good time.’ For all this destruction, and clear disregard for rules, values and consequences, Moondog isn’t punished. By the end of the film, he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and several million dollars. Although, true to form, he shows they’re meaningless too (I won’t spoil the finale).
Moondog’s embrace of nihilism demonstrates that, when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee. Or, in Moondog’s case, a lot of booze and parties.
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness
Moondog’s experience sounds great to me, but it leads to a second concern surrounding nihilism. It might not make you miserable, but what about everyone who has to hang out with you? If nothing matters, you’re not part of some larger plan and you’re not held accountable by any rulebook. Motivated only by what feels good in the moment, what’s stopping you acting only for your own interests?
Nietzsche was mindful of these pain points, writing in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
Nihilism asks us to toss out meaning and gaze into the void that’s left in its place. But rather than being a simple, terrifying black hole, a void can prompt reflection. It’s a space to be filled with whatever you want. In that way, nihilism can serve as a funhouse mirror, reflecting and distorting your own beliefs. Approach it with pain and fear, and those feelings will be magnified. Go to it looking for a way to excuse gross behaviour, and you’ll find it.
Stare into the abyss
Give it a go yourself. Take a moment to truly submit to your own smallness in the Universe. To admit you are meaningless. That you don’t matter. That your name, ego, reputation, family, friends and loves will soon be gone.
This needn’t be a destructive experience. Once the discomfort passes, and your ego abates, stop to consider – how has your understanding of your own time and energy changed? Is your job really so important when coupled with the knowledge that even the greatest achievements in human history will eventually be lost to time? Are the issues, people or situations that cause you stress or pain actually worth the worry when you remember that no one will ever remember or really be impacted by them?
The only real impact these earthly concerns have is on what they take you away from: things that may not ‘matter’, but at least bring you joy.
Focusing on the scale of your own life, and how insignificant it is, also allows you to ask: OK, if I don’t matter, and neither do the issues that take up so much of my time, how does the world show itself differently? If I’m no longer the centre of my own universe, what takes that space?
You might start wondering what you want to last after you’ve gone, and what needs to be protected and treasured.
I considered these points recently while witnessing a widely affecting mass collision with nihilism – the delivery of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The shots showed an inconceivable array of distant galaxies that existed billions of years in the past. It was an overwhelming view that crashed into any understanding we have of time, scale and distance – not to mention the potential for life and realities beyond our own. Responding to it, it felt like the whole world had a mass awakening to individual inconsequentialism.
But the reaction wasn’t mass depression or hopelessness. It was awe. People wondered over the beauty and scale of worlds they could never truly comprehend. They saw how their own lives barely register on a cosmic level, that our own galaxy wasn’t even a blip. This sense of our own meaninglessness was humbling. It didn’t break people’s hearts but excited them, reminded them of the inconceivable beauty and majesty of existence. People felt thankful for being a dot in an endless sky, to be part of this cosmic tapestry, even if just for a meaningless moment.
It takes guts, but you too might find that the abyss reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself. Art, community, the people you love, their right to feel safe, respected and well. If you’re looking for somewhere to redirect all this formerly self-involved energy, start there. In place of existential angst, psychological annihilation or selfish abandon, you can find relief in larger causes.
Try a light meditation on death
When I’m overwhelmed, remembering that one day I won’t exist makes whatever’s stressing me appear small. Accepting this finality transforms the bland environs I’m ignoring into an overwhelming buffet of smells, sights and experiences that suddenly feel impossibly rare.
This ‘mindfulness of death’ is central to the work of the artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher Nikki Mirghafori. To access this feeling, she counsels trying a form of ‘death meditation’ to help confront your fear of death, and experience the strange wonder that can come from that.
To try it, she instructs meditating with the mantra ‘this could be my last breath’. The theory is that by doing so, you work through the terror a little at a time, observing what comes to the surface during the practice and confronting each fear until you eventually reach a place of peace.
Mirghafori posits that, by accepting your own mortality and facing life’s impermanence, you can align the way you live with your truest values. It’s many people’s lack of interest in contemplating death – and as such, how precious and fleeting our lives are – that allows so many to waste their time.
I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. It’s like rehearsing your final moments, inviting your mind to flood with fear, regret, longing, loss, love and gratitude. When you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival. Even after you’re done, it’s impossible to not enter the rest of your day with a degree of elation at being alive.
Doing it, I’m reminded of what Epicurus once said: ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ Epicurus didn’t believe in life after death, as either a punishment or a reward. He taught that life and all it could offer was happening to us right now.
Just as nihilism has become associated with narrow-minded destruction, Epicurus is often synonymous with hedonism and a ceaseless pursuit of selfish pleasures. But in reality, he was certain this kind of living would usher people away from materialism and greed. His ‘pleasure principle’ championed being and doing good, arguing that, with one precious life to enjoy, not a moment should be wasted in guilt or anxiety over pain caused to others. The only way to feel truly good was to treat people well.
Remember pointless pleasures
I’d like to end by lightening things up a little. One way to refocus on the pointless pleasure that actually forms the bedrock of our lives is to start a ‘nice things’ list. Across the day, make an effort to jot down moments, people and events that make you happy.
I’ve been doing this for years. Reviewing my own rambling lists, I’m always surprised by the simplicity of the entries: the smell of fresh basil, an excellent joke, two dogs meeting in the street. Alone they are innocuous (and usually overlooked), but together they flavour my days with endless sweetness. Learning to pay attention to them returns me to what actually provides solace in my day, training me to not overlook the now for the promise of the one day.
So often in the pursuit of greater meaning we erase not only the joy of these forgotten delights, but also their collective power. Yes, a flock of galahs on my nature strip, or crying to a Paul Kelly song, or the spasmodic energy of Junior Bake Off (my most recent entries) are not life-altering – but, taking time to notice and appreciate them, they form the sum of their parts. A handful of treasured beats becomes a good day, a good week, a good year, a good life. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
Key points – How to be a happy nihilist
The rise of meaningless meaning. The search for meaning used to be a noble pursuit, but it’s become commercialised and now inspires more angst than awe.
Nihilism as a solution. This is the philosophy that says life is meaningless. Handled with care, it can be liberating.
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism. This is a kind of optimistic nihilism that highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday.
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism.
Passive nihilists scramble to fill the void with anything to hand; active nihilists are undaunted, and fill the space with their own values.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning. To avoid passive or toxic nihilism, it pays to be vigilant of, and guard against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act.
Recognise the happy side of nihilism. When you stop focusing on a greater point, you’ll find you can ask simpler but more rewarding questions, such as: what does happiness look like right now?
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness. When you stare into the abyss, it reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself.
Try a light meditation on death. I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. But when you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival.
Remember pointless pleasures. From the smell of fresh basil to an excellent joke, start a ‘nice things’ list. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
Why it matters
The young philosophers embracing nihilism
For uplifting and earnest examples of nihilism’s application, check out the way younger philosophers are exploring it. Two TEDx talks by teenagers stand out in particular. In 2018, Elias Skjoldborg, a student at Harwood Union High School in Vermont, used the platform to introduce his take on ‘optimistic nihilism’. In short, he argues that if life is meaningless – and we are not pinned to some greater existential task or goal – then we may as well focus on finding happiness during this brief, meaningless flash of consciousness we call existence.
When he says ‘if you died right now, it wouldn’t really make a difference in the big picture. Had you never been born, nobody would really care,’ he presents it as good news. He adds: ‘That life has no meaning is not a reason … to be sad.’ Rather, he explains, if our lives are needless, then the only directive we have is to figure out how to find happiness in our momentary blip of consciousness. Skjoldborg suggested that his audience get hobbies, help others, solve problems rather than creating them, and just try their best.
Skjoldborg is not alone in his observations. In his talk a year earlier, Siddharth Gupta, a student at Kodaikanal International School in India, also opened up about how nihilism has helped him. Giving his talk the title ‘Confessions of an Existential Nihilist’, he explained how his belief that life was worthless had given him the ‘opportunity to find meaning in all that I do’.
Meanwhile, over on YouTube, Khadija Mbowe, a Gambian Canadian vlogger on sociology and media, recently looked at nihilism and absurdism in a video asking if life still had value if it was a meaningless random occurrence within an uncaring universe. Clad in a bright orange graphic T-shirt with matching statement makeup, Mbowe looked like any other luminous member of Gen Z, asking: ‘What does our life, our existence, mean when we don’t believe we’re put here for a reason?’ as easily as if they were reacting to a viral mukbang video. Drawing on references from as broad a field as James Baldwin and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mbowe asks big questions that don’t lead to dense, depressing answers. Instead, this vlogger’s takes are thoughtful, exploratory and ultimately hopeful.
Each generation has a tendency to make the case for why their set of circumstances is especially dire. But for young people coming of age during rolling crises of pandemics, climate catastrophes and quaking world economies, they might have a strong case for being particularly hard done by. Yet basking in the aforementioned reflections of these fresh-faced philosophers, one feels a little lightened, not only by their constructive interpretation of nihilism, but also by the resilience it appears to offer them.
Links & books
In my book The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy (2021), I explore not only the modern tendency to overinvest in meaning, but also the darker consequences of such a relationship. In particular, how it intersects with our notions of work, love, family, capitalism and politics. I also explore how people can detangle themselves, and how gratifying it is to do so.
The literary darlings Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder and Lisa Taddeo all frequently return to themes of millennial nihilism in their work. Meanwhile, the writers Jia Tolentino, Susan Sontag and Jenny Odell are looking more broadly at our interest in meaning, worth and community in a way that intersects with these ideas. Their deep folios of writing are edifying reading – I suggest starting with Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (2019) and Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), both books are as digestible as they are illuminating (and have personally been reliable elevated small-talk fodder for the past few years).
I already mentioned the TV show The Good Place (do check it out if you haven’t already), but nihilism is present in many of our other favourite entertainment offerings, such as BoJack Horseman (2014-20), a cartoon that follows a clutch of humans and anthropomorphic animals as they navigate Hollywood, fame, and their own cycles of ambition and destruction. One nihilistic moment involved Mr Peanutbutter, a lovable and dim-witted Labrador who is a successful TV actor, consoling his then-wife by tenderly reminding her: ‘The Universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t the search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense and, eventually, you’ll be dead.’ I promise it’s funnier than it sounds.
Nihilism has found its way to other screens too. The films Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Palm Springs (2020) both show how fun and bombastic these ideas can be. Although my personal favourite surprise nihilistic resource might just be SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-). If a chatty sponge can’t convince you of the chaotic charm of existence, I’m not sure what can.”
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
On this Leap Day, which repeats only once every four years, we abide in a liminal time sandboxed from all the rest in a special way, for its memories which define us both here in the timelines of social media which construct our personae in reflection of the gaze of others, and in the chambers of our imagination, a chiaroscuro of our vast chasms of secret darkness and our realms of exaltation, rapture, and light; all this is surfaced but once in every four years.
Such a weight of responsibility, such a limitless freedom of being, to be given this time in which to act without judgement, unanswerable to the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue or normality, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and discover truths written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.
We answer to no other, and this is the greatest of our powers and our freedoms, this secrecy, this privacy, this autonomy.
In this moment free from imposed or authorized history, memory, or identity, in which we are only who we wish to be, as Living Autonomous Zones and in Rashomon Gate Events like Leap Day which bring the Chaos to the rule-bound games of order of those who would enslave us, let us seize the day, and every day, to hit the reset button on who we are and how we choose to be human together.
For only in this state of no rules and no masters may we truly become human as self-created and self-owned free beings.
Such are my thoughts on the primary meaning of such Defining Moments as a free space of creative play and Chaos as the adaptive potential of systems; for its secondary meaning as a leap of faith into unknown futures and possibilities of becoming human, here are my thoughts as written in my post of
October 8 2023, Day Three of the Mad Hatter Festival: Madness As a Faith of Poetic Vision; As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll on his birthday, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; but only in those truths which I myself create or claim, and which in turn claim me.
This is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation, especially by men with badges and guns.
Let there be total truth and absolute transparency between us, O my brothers, sisters, and others; for our word must be an inviolate force of nature if we are to mean anything, one which shapes, defines, motivates, and informs not only how we choose to be human together but also our own possibilities of becoming human. Lies dehumanize and falsify; therefore do I pursue a sacred calling to discover and live the truth.
Having so defined the ground of struggle in my writing here as in all things, and with an awareness that this self-disclosure and public intimacy is terrifying to others in some cultures and part of my personal myth as it is for Kenzaburo Oe in Japan, for high self disclosure values can be used to create intimacy, what do I mean when I use the word faith?
My intention is not to deceive in this or any regard; its simply that this is a complex, ambiguous, relative, dangerous, and highly fraught issue, one which bears the legacies of both my personal history and that of my family, and of our millennia of civilization.
A full accounting and interrogation of my influences will not be brief and merits its own study; here I am primarily questioning its praxis as vision, described in the film Oz in reference to Thomas Edison as “the ability to look into the future and make it real.”
In terms of personal history, I grew up with formal study and practice of Taoism and Zen Buddhism for ten years from the age of nine, and claimed Zen as my religion through my twenties, though influenced by my reading of Jung and his alchemical studies at university, by reading Frasier’s Golden Bough when I was twelve, and by the system of magic taught to me by William S. Burroughs as a young boy which synthesized his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche, Acephale, with his master Lovecraft’s reimagination of Crowley and western occultism, and Grimm’s Fairytales as a third influence.
I seized upon Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade as a counter text to the Bible, in high school during my enthusiasm for James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein failed to learn the Kabala as its written in Andalusi Romance and a coded scholar’s Aramaic, and at university adopted the poetry of William Blake as a kind of sacred text.
During my Great Trek across Asia I lived in Katmandu as a Dream Navigator of the Vajrayana Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism and in Srinagar as a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Islamic Sufism. I have also studied Shaivism as a member of the Aghori brotherhood of warriors, unique as the only group in India who totally reject the idea of caste, and Tantra with a priestess of Kali.
Like the chambers of a shell, growing with the passage of time, the layers of my relationships with the Infinite.
Often I use the word faith as solidarity of action with others; as loyalty, allyship, and recognition of our interdependence and the universal nature of our humanity which connects us. But I also use this word faith as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, whatever the source or where it leads, an idea from ibn Arabi.
So for myself, faith is a process of questioning, one which is antithetical to its usual use as submission to authority. Any who stand between ourselves and the Infinite serve neither.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision as symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical truth, as reimagination and transformation, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Herein my ars poetica uses methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy, an extension of the interdisciplinary methods pioneered in The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite which I read in high school during a time when I chose the origins of evil as my field of study, to interpret the meaning and direction of current events as they unfold in real time, and to change the balance of power in the world.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and imaginal truth allows us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, On Creativity and Poetic Vision as Revolution, Transformation, and Liberation; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Keats
My sister wrote of her recurring vision of the Night Mountain this morning, a vast and enormous city or structure of lights floating in the sky above the desert just before dawn, and it provoked memories of and reflections on my own many visions and encounters with the transcendent, especially those which became Defining Moments and shaped my becoming human; among them the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws as I crossed the Thar desert in Rajasthan by camel, the Games of Beauty and Vision as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities as a monk in Kathmandu, the Kiss of the Fallen Star which struck my hand in a meteor shower as I reached for the Impossible among the heavens, the Dream of the Toad transferred to me as a chthonic guardian spirit and guide of the soul by one of my father’s Beatnik friends, William S. Burroughs, in a line of succession from Nietzsche as its avatar, in the strange fairytales he told in the evenings of his visits as the coals of the fire burned low and darkness swallowed us in its endless chasms, and the moment of my Awakening and vision of Possible Futures of Humankind when as a child at my mother’s side during a protest in People’s Park in Berkeley the police fired on the university students in the most terrible incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, and I escaped my body and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.
Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a cosmic event like tonight’s Quadrantid meteor shower, like the hand of a rebel angel bearing the stolen Promethean Fire, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.
This meteor strike was witnessed by Jim Shafer, Jennifer Wendt-Damico, Kimberly Wine, Claud Gipson, and several others who had assembled on top of the old artillery battery overlooking the valley below Cavedale Road in Sonoma California in the 1980’s, with its awesome petroglyph caves hidden behind a waterfall, where a door to the Unknown was opened possibly thousands of years ago, letting beings of strangeness through.
If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence in nature of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Unknown Infinite and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope and the fire of liberation.
I have been no stranger to what is strange; it has defined my Otherness and the kinship I feel with those others, however different from myself, who are marginalized, excluded, vilified, and oppressed, those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed and the powerless, the silenced and the erased; the monsters and the freaks whom I claim as my family and my tribe.
Of all the gifts and wonders life has given me, this I cherish most of all; that with all the numberless and unimaginable horrors to which I have been witness, in Mariupol and Sarajevo and the crimes and atrocities whose names become an endless litany of woes which define the limits of the human as a fragile and ephemeral quality among chasms of darkness, I have emerged from the legacies of our history Unconquered as in Henley’s poem Invictus, with the ability to bond, empathize with, and inhabit the lives of others as the bearer of sacred wounds which open me to the pain of others. I cherish my pain, for like the Abyss which I have embraced and wrestled with it has made me human.
If I can do this, so can we all. This is my faith as solidarity, hope, and love.
This above all else defines what is human; our ability to transcend the limits of our flesh and of our differences, to share and learn from the lives of others, across vast gulfs of time and space, through the civilization we create as partners in a Great Conversation. Much of who we are is stored potential in the form of our most precious resource, the written word, which is created by our historical community and belongs to the commons; this is both its power as a shaping force and its danger as a limitation of our uniqueness and autonomy.
Such are my thoughts on creativity and poetic vision as revolution, transformation, and liberation; but I did not invent the language with which I create them, nor the millennia of historical antiquity which informs my ideas; rather they are instruments with which I create myself. Who then owns the artifacts of my thinking? To this I must answer with a line from the great film Il Postino; “Poetry belongs to those who need it.”
In reverence for the gifts and guidance I have been given I have tried, however poorly and within my limitations, to understand the meaning and significance of such moments of insight, to enact them in my life as a fulcrum of change and to use poetic vision as leverage with which to transform the balance of power in the world.
Regardless of how we name and taxonomize the Source of our reality and the sea of our being in attempts to rationalize and control life, it remains wild, irrational, uncontrollable, and also very real. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, Ibn Arabi the Ālam al-Mithāl, and is termed the Bardo in the Tibetan classic which I translate as The Book of Liberation, in the contexts of four lineages of ideology in which I may claim membership, has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.
The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.
Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding as well as in politics as choices we make about how to be human together, and in our ongoing creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.
Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.
Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch figures and images I called my Dream Gates; William S. Burroughs would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heaven and hell, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in discomfort and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Godels Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memiors: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. There is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Six Impossible Things: Slaying the Jabberwocky
Faith as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; a reading list
A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa, Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle translators
Torch of Liberty 