The “darkness” that pervades mythical, the archetypal evil, the adversary, the real enemy of good, worse than the shadow… it is the dissolution of reality. It is the nihilistic dissolution of reality that renders nanorealities1. When everything means anything nothing means everything and everything means nothing. This is not the simple rant against postmodernity.
Postmodernity is a useful lens, but postmodernity stops at the idea that meaning is so fluidly relative but just leaves it hanging there. The same way nihilist realize there’s no meaning and they stop there… it’s the Buddhists and the some existentialists who go beyond nihilism to say that since nothing matters we get to determine what matters.
And does that make me a hypocrite? Do I come right back around to the nanorealities that I’m so critiquing?
For almost all of my life I’ve felt that there is a base REALITY that underpins everything and that what I considered to be RIGHT or WRONG was somewhat relative to this base reality. From there I could point at the “squares,” the “adversaries,” “the Marjorie Taylor Green’s” of the world… and I felt like if I could hold these up to the majority of the population as “absurd” then I had a more then tenuous grasp of reality.
What is happening now is so frightening because my reality’s majority is r u n n i n g t h i n … and by some metrics, it’s no longer a majority at all. It’s a unique feeling, having to hold tightly to a reality that is less and less shared. And faith in that reality seems to drop exponentially when the majority share dips below 80%2… if you’re a thinking person you start to wonder…
Because, not to get all cartesian on you now, but even the most cocksure can be nuckin futz.
So the darkness that is overtaking us is the dissolution of reality.
Or maybe it’s the opportunity that the darkness provides.
Pardon me while I converse with myself… ahem, opportunity?
Well, yeah. Light is only light when there’s darkness. You know this.
Yes. I say this shit all the time. Sometimes you’re aim is perfect… but at the wrong target.
Yes. So reality is fucked. It’s been fucked. You’ve known this as long as you can remember. Nothing ever really fit.
Yes. So I gaslit3...Gah slighted myself into thinking I sucked and I didn’t fit.
And you don’t, but that’s another story for another time. When you don’t fit, you know your ill-fitting surroundings so well that you know when they are fucked. Because even when you force yourself to fit, what should work doesn’t.
Our concepts of “central” and “shared” have to change. You mourn a shared reality only because you are experiencing the dizzying morass of chaos. Lost souls scream and the loudness of their wails create a resonant gravity that pulls similarly tormented souls together into “societies” — demi-realities masquerading as good and right. Untouched by the gravity of the bewildered moans you drift in the seafoam until you eventually wash up onto the shore of a continent of wails.
Lost, you mistake these lost for founders. You can’t keep up with their Kardashians and you fall into a spectrum of loathing (self/society) that is ever-shifting.
But these archipelagic asylums are ephemeral and when they dissolve you see the rug unraveling beneath you and you have that dumbfounded coyote-just-realized-there-is-no-ground-eating-grimace before the plummet, but the ground never comes and you start to find other pieces moving at roughly the same speed as you are in this whendiditstartwhenwillitstop fall. You start to create a web of reality and you realize that maybe it is on you now to use your scream to create a galactic gravitational force that will last, something more stable, more sustainable than the banshee wails that seemed so solid but withered like gold leaf under acid rain.
Because thus far your shrill squeaks only annoyed them. Your scream’s power is in it’s silence. You scream brilliantly inwardly but go shrill outside, filtering through snark, venom, and you’re good at it. But you’re even better when those inward screams come out through your full-throated voice.
Then I don’t have to scream.
You simply direct.
Yes, direct, conduct, facilitate, engineer, cultivate.... connect and create...
The hero is called from “reality” into a darkness. Reality itself is dissolved.
In the belly of the beast the hero constructs a pathway where there were only obstacles.
The hero emerges into a new light
Shining off reflecting off the beings around him
Only to realize that he is that light
That 1000 candles share a flame without losing their spark.
I use this to refer to the idea that rather than one shared reality or even a few dominant realities, we all seem to possess our own nanoreality. ↩︎
This is an arbitrary threshold I just made up. My point is that it is far easier to have faith in a reality if you share it with a significant number of people. But as mom used to say, if everyone’s reality is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge… ↩︎
Gaslighted? Gaslit? Slit? Slight? Slit of light? Gesundheit? ↩︎
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