DAVIDGOUGHART

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Enjoy the silence.


 “One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
Émile Durkheim,
Suicide: A Study in Sociology

It looks like I'm staring off into the abyss, pondering the muddy expanse of the soiled nothing, but it's actually that first contemplative pause before something happens, in a space fertile with possibility. It allows the chance as the song by Depeche Mode said, to enjoy the silence.

As the year comes to a close, it's no accident that the piece I'm planning is about the heralding of a new dawn.

In the other spaces in between, I've been reading Chris Hedges new book-"America the farewell tour." Distressing raw meat for a series that is peppered with ill omens hurtling us towards the end times. Take me at my sarcastic best, when I say that if his previous tome-"American Fascism" is a side splitter, this one will put you on the floor. 
At any rate, the irony isn't lost, given that it arrived during a four day power outage, while a place called Paradise burned itself out of existence. Lest we forget the horticulture tips in response,procured from the odious shitgibbon in chief.

The whole thing left a somber cloud that hasn't loomed as bleakly since Cormac McCarthys the Road.

In the face of what Hedges propounds as Durkeim's anomie in real time, it's hard to see a way forward, to not sense that all of our tomorrows shall be a continued assault of cyclical traumas, imposed by the will of a small dogmatic proportion of the populous, intent on nihilism, subjugation and extinction.  If my previous series-Purgatorium-was partially informed by Artaud's essay -"Van Gogh, the man suicided by society", then this one ascribes to a society, in essence suiciding itself.

Whatever hope then, can only come with the vast expanse of ideas, from the reflective silences pregnant with possibility. 

Otherwise, the only sound left to hear will be humanities final death rattle.


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