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Life is emotion and memory — motion, intuition, doubt, pain, desire. But for today’s nihilists — and who is not a nihilist today? — it just a clump of matter, a bundle of biology, to be preserved (so that it can be squeezed for more energy, which is eventually converted into money). We are like bulls in a bullfight: we roar and bluster before society, we think our opponents are cowering — that they are ours — but really, it is only a matter of time before we can taste our own blood. When we find ourselves performing our vitality, we can only know that the end is near….
It feels as if people, individuals, are clogged up with Totality, as if all the ‘news’ — all the articles, tweets, posts — we consume displace any original action or cognition; we think we’re part of a community when we go and bang pots or clap at 7pm, but we’re really just doing the little tap-dance prescribed by the Internet, doing our part to fit in, to feel like we have the right to claim our membership in the Club of Conventional Virtue.
To me, the word ‘lockdown’ has come to signal a state of paralysis, and really, a state of cowardice — a spiritual suicide — in which we wait for the terrible boredom of normal to return for no other reason than that we can replace an acute anxiety with passive anxiety.
