Sunday, June 8, 2014

Nihilism #6

One of the benefits of being a bachelor is that it is possible to wake up on a Sunday morning and turn on the television unimpeded by spousal complaints and watch the French Open finals from Roland-Garros, the sporting event that -- seeing all that orange-red clay on the TV screen -- always reminds me of the high school year coming to a close and 17-year-old Mats Wilander -- a guy my age -- winning the 1982 tournament.

Normally, I would be out on the road. June is a great month to hit it early. The weather is mild and the light ample; it is possible to get in a long run before 8 AM. But I'm nursing a bad foot. So I'm studio bound. What better time to return to the topic of nihilism?

What I've been driving at in these nihilism posts is some sort of understanding, grounded in everyday experience, of what it is. A common description of nihilism is Nietzsche's "God is dead." Nietzsche, writing in the second half of the 19th century, thought that he lived during a time heralded by the "cockcrow of positivism," stage four out of six in his "History of an Error" from Twilight of the Idols (1889):
4. The true world -- unattainable? At any rate, unattained, and being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? 
(Gray morning, The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
Stage five moves us toward stage six, what Nietzsche called, "Noon: moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA." Stage five is a deepening of nihilism; it is a rejection of the idea of a "true" world. Stage six is the realization of nihilism; it is a rejection of the "apparent" world along with the "true" world, leaving us as merely beings in the world, what Heidegger calls Dasein, or what a Zen Buddhist calls satori.

The problem is that we've been caught up in the cockcrow of positivism stage of nihilism, with all its various democratic capitalist permutations, for the last two-hundred-plus years. The 20th century saw the rise of social democracy. And in the last 35 years that has been rolled back to its 19th century predatory antecedents in laissez-faire capitalism. God is dead but the acquisitive self is king. It is a barbarous bloodthirsty world in which we live today. Nature is under assault. The state exists to produce lies. The paradigm is fractured but keeps functioning because, apparently, we are very attached to it.

I was carrying a large cheese pizza in a takeout box up the front stoop stairs to my apartment building when one of my neighbors opened the door for me. He is a nice guy, quiet, I would guess in his 30s; he looks Udallesque, tall and exuding decency. He has lived in the building several years. I have run into him in the laundry room numerous times.

After he opened the door for me, he said something I couldn't quite make out. I think it was, "Wow! Thanks for the pizza."

"Thank you," I replied. Then I noticed that he wasn't wearing any shoes. He had on a pair of spotless, brilliant white socks, tube socks, like the ones that were so coveted when I was an adolescent athlete.

"I like your socks," I told him. Then I turned away to open my mail box.

This guy used to be a loner bachelor like myself. But for the last year, maybe more, whenever I see him he is the company of a woman. She is a big woman, stout. They are seemingly attached at the hip. I think they might even be living together. Whereas before, this guy, when he was alone, had a edge to him, a vibrancy, a formidable quality, now it is all softness and subdued tones. Which made me say to myself, "I'm sure the sex is great, but at what cost?"

Which got me thinking further, about the Hippies and that period in the early 1970s when the music became so heavy and bloated with hero worship, the ascension of Led Zeppelin's "cock rock" or "ass rock." Most of the Hippies left behind their aspirations to transform society and settled for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll -- right at the time of the Powell Memo counter-revolution.

The moral of the front-door encounter with my Udallesque neighbor is don't settle for sex. Something of which the Hippies -- the Punks, too -- should have been mindful. I hope my neighbor gets his mojo back.

I had picked up the large cheese at my neighbor pizza parlor. Right as I was ordering the mayor of the Emerald City blew in with his entourage for a quick slice. It was like something out of the movies. You had all these young men in ties and button-up shirts and several other men in dark blazers with round lapel pins signifying that they were part of the security detail. And then there was the mayor sheepishly greeting well-wishers. He lives in the neighborhood.

I didn't realize until reading the story in the newspaper the next day that he had just come from the scene of the shooting at Seattle Pacific University.

We are so used to these campus shooting gun deaths that they hardly register anymore (Jill Lepore's "Battleground America," though over two-years old, is still a great place for an overview of the mass-shooting epidemic in American culture). Brutality is the hallmark of our age.

I began these nihilism posts, even though it was in the form of "The Colt 45 Chronicle," by mentioning Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. McCarthy's latest exploration of nihilism is the The Counselor (2013), a movie directed by the great Ridley Scott. It is a film devoted to the savagery and wealth-worship that rules the present age. The final scene has Cameron Diaz's character delivering a prediction that, "The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining." I think that is about right. Then at the end of the trailer below you will find the perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism from the Rubén Blades character:
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."

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