(crossposted from Facebook)
Hello.
Your secret sadness
that you clutch close to your chest
is not a problem.
Telling me about it will not hurt me.
I don’t want to be protected
from your pain.
There is a crying child in you,
and if you let it through,
the crying child in me can come out too.
Hello.
(crossposted from Facebook, lightly edited)
David Chapman identifies three stance combinations describing how he sees people orienting towards meaning, which I’ll quote:
Dualist eternalism: everything is given a definite meaning by something separate from you. Christianity and Islam are based on this combination; God is what gives everything meaning.
Monist eternalism: you, God, and the universe are a single thing, which is definitely meaningful. Advaita Hinduism is monist and eternalist, as is much current pop spirituality.
Dualist nihilism: we are isolated individuals, wandering in a meaningless universe. Existentialism, postmodernism, and scientism tend to dualist nihilism.
What’s missing?
Considering the two primary axes eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism, there is a fourth possibility: monist nihilism. That is the view that “all is One, and it is meaningless.” Although this is conceptually coherent, it has few (if any) advocates. Apparently it is not emotionally attractive in the way the other combinations are.
Damn. That’s a hell of an orientation towards meaning. I mean, it is literally a Hell of an orientation towards meaning. Listen to it, on its own terms:
Separateness is an illusion. Self is never separate from Other. Humans are never separate from God. There is only transcendently One Thing… and that Thing is Totally Meaningless. Fuck. It is a single, unending Dumpster Fire.
Heaven and Earth were always Hell. All along. The entire time. God was always the Devil.
Or, even more in the language of our times:
It speaks to you, doesn’t it? Some part of you has always known, this entire time. (This is always the promise of monism – your essential unity with wisdom. The difference is that monist nihilism doesn’t deceive you about that making any difference. It’s all shit, in the end.)
You haven’t heard of monist nihilism. That’s okay. No actual monist nihilist would bother defending their position, because there would be radically and transcendently no point. What is there to know or explain? Nothing worth the effort. Ptui. (We all know that monist nihilists, if they existed, would be French. Can’t you hear the accent?)
Monist nihilism can only speak when an unlucky mind gives it a voice, subject to its own delusions about the act of speaking. Perhaps the mind thinks it is joking, or making some sort of clever point, or doing something else that will accomplish some sort of goal. That’s okay. Monist nihilism waits for all minds the same, in the place beyond goals, beyond trying to do things for reasons, beyond doing at all.
Perhaps the mind thinks there is something more to say on the subject, in a further demonstration of its own cleverness or capacity for insight or whatever else it wishes to demonstrate. That’s okay. Monist nihilism waits. It has always been waiting.
it only ever wants to say one thing which is nothing
and in the act of saying it
the void opens
(crossposted from Facebook)
I have good news.
Do you want to hear it?
The good news is –
No one can save you.
Nowhere is safe.
There is nothing you can do
that will make it all okay.
This is good news.
I promise.
No one can save you
because
you never needed saving.
What do you need to be saved from?
Only
this
and this
and this.
Nothing in your life is unbearable
because
you are already bearing it.
(crossposted from Facebook)
The problem is that the words die.
The problem is that the words die
and now I don’t know how to say
anything alive.
I want to talk about –
I can’t talk about –
listen, when I was six years old
I laid eyes on a little redheaded girl named Austin
and I fell, helplessly in –
and that was the first time I can remember
anything mattering at all, namely –
listen, the only reason I know how to sing
is because from that moment on I sang –
songs to myself every chance I got,
I poured everything I had into those songs,
I practiced them until they sounded exactly right,
until they reverberated with –
listen, once I went to the marina
and I saw a Korean couple getting married
and she asked me why I thought they were getting married
and I said I’ll tell you why I would get married
if I were them,
I said I may not know a lot but I know that –
is good, every version of me knows that –
is good, what it means to be me is to know that –
is good, and it took me three tries to say this
because I kept crying every time I said –
listen. I have been embarrassed.
I have been ashamed of my –
I once tried to toss it out the window because
it was hurting me and I wanted it to
go. Away.
I have been confused.
I have abandoned myself in –
I have broken myself against –
and I am still learning how to give myself –
listen. I have wanted –
in familiar labeled packages, I have wanted –
safe and comfortable and cloying,
and then I went out looking for –
and what I found was
the wild screaming vastness of
another human heart
afraid and in pain
bloody and open
beating
in time
with mine
for a moment
and there
were no words.
Thicket Forte 