Eulogy for a Stranger: The Search for Nihilism in a Sea of Meaning

The eye abhors nihility. The mind will not endure it. At the sudden edge of meaning razed to silence, at the wreckage of our crashed codes of knowing, shattered pieces of understanding float like distant stars against a hulking blackness. We grieve at the loss of certainty and dig a hole to bury a mystery. For some or many the rope and bullet take the void’s shape in the maudlin indulgence of base delusions. The length of a receptor gene, the pot-luck neural fitness, the dopamine, the serotonin, the coded predispositions marinated in errant years of unlucky imprinting: such is life. Still, each day the irresistible drama plays in the cinema of the hero or the coward’s conscience. This contemplation is an easiness that comes to us which more than sentience or tools or language makes us human. For these other things I can show you in the grasp of the animal. I can show you how the ant takes a slave or makes a mockery of our agriculture or how the bower bird combines his manias in a monument towards he knows not what. Profoundly cognizant beside her fallen sister, study the anguish of the elephant. Likewise, the matriarch perished, the devastated chimp weeps and sways and grieves. This, this is morality and altruism and language (I say, for what grammar sits in a tear?) and so these things will not do. But man’s momentum toward annihilation, toward the gateway of his quietus, our grasp of it, the contemplation of it, our manic dwelling on it, makes us the sapient homo we see in the glass. It was the rhetoric of the stoic that he might walk into it without blinking. As for other religions and their adherents, well, every mouth has a tongue; and the earth’s dust, latched to the starlight, is infinite.

In every eyeful of seeing and in each made or making thought the mind must and will conceive a solidness, a form, a texture, a connection to rest on or to step across. We cannot in our thinking have at the end of the bridge our neurons trek an all engulfing nothingness as the other side. The urgent synapse will not abide a dead-end. Ever there must be the next thing. A destination. We will make it so. For this too is the occupation of every thoughtful person is it not? The homeless man, the priest, the working-mother, or banker each in his or her turn and in their best gathered eloquence will set it to thought or page and knead it like a dough all their lives until it takes its final shape in the last blaze of being. It is the cult of why sequestered in the land of now listening like the priests of SETI to the din of nothing.

What are these years that carry me all scars and let-blood upon my crested shield toward what revelation? We would not wait for it. We would steal it from its bearer would he or she but raise their head. And yet everywhere behold: a sky full of talking heads. We are like the prisoner immersed in his truest dilemma rounded and minimised by his life sentence who dares not dream and yet having recourse to dreams only. See him: his are the eloquent eyes of the ape who, burdened with his great comprehension, speaks to an illiterate zoo-keeper. What is that solid thing that I, meaning this warm bulb of brain, might grab blushing with understanding? It all rolls forward on a rail of tissue riding the slow metaphor toward the last rationalisation. Consciousness is the trick of the conscious to trick in turn and be itself not tricked unless by being tricked it better tricks again. I am exhausted by syllables that take me nowhere.

But soft you now, the fair – “ Hey!” the voice cries out. “Did you hear what I said…?” The voice. The voice lives in the throne of the throat in a castle of limbs and breasts, hormones and neuroses. It lives in the perfect memory of a fire-branded heart and whips me with its bellicose tone. It has infiltrated the marrow of my being, has entered the strands of what I might offer up to the next who come. Under the tiny lens that makes the gnat a winged-elephant you can see the voice as it waves back holding hard its flaghead harpooned violently between my little coils. This then is the sediment of love that we carry like vagabonds in our swags of dreaming.

The voice lives in the moment of now. The voice lives in the habitat of what it can touch and the vision of its piety surrenders at the gates of opacity. It is the anti-conscience and the anti-muse. The voice feels the wind and against it trembles never asking, what is force? It leans over the step’s edge and does not ask, why gravity? It looks up at the star and does not grasp the poverty of our metaphor. Sometimes I am the voice, most often when it dwells in my hands grasping with selected dexterity the tools that Ms. Goodall’s chimps surrendered to man. You know, a bonobo too could set a watch if they grew on trees. The voice makes and does in undreaming lucidity. It prays at the temples of pragmatism, its eye on the clock, its ear braced for the bell that moves it to the next act of doing. If one were to dwell, and here it comes, I am the voice all the way up to the hard curve of my gooseneck. I am a man in loosely gathered parts. A disunity of limbs, flawed calculations and anachronistic adaptions, these dissonant bits pulled and held together by a shaggy bandage of gravity and evolution the voice cannot see.

We reminisce as we live, in fragments. Take a minute to consider the hour you spent in primal intensity three days ago – you remember, you were there – no, not the experiencing self, that’s you now; I mean, you, the remembering self, the you of then. Or do I have it backwards? Go on then, read your Kahneman. Right, remember, absorbed wholly in the manic industry of being, of reinforcing and signalling, signalling, ever signalling the insurmountable importance of who and what you are. Remember the moments. Think. They are made surreal now, like a dream days later recollected. Yet, at the time…Does it all sit in the mind, our string of moments lived, like a cinema on a coiled twin ribbon of sure memory, accessible but for the closed curtain of how to do it? Again, fragments. What would we recover and what left condemned to oblivion. A trick of language, of metaphor: Everything returns. My amygdalae, my amygdalae, why hast thou forsaken me? I hear Socrates from the cave: the examined life is not worth living. And yet the examined life is unbearable. This is a dialogue with orbiting shadows flickering in a tunnel so bright I dare not ope mine eyes. I hear the din of their meaning as it bounces off the walls. It falls in line well behind me, takes its place among the train with the other futilities I drag along. They are like mute advocates who seek an audience with a deaf Caesar. There will be no more bread. The fields burn and the smoke rising collects among the clouds each now shaped grotesquely like the bodiless head of Pompey. Poor Pompey. Poor indeed: we read of him still.

What price will you pay to sit well posted in the posthumous ledger? Penniless, I am penniless, you answer. You do not know me behind this stone. This will be our eulogy. There was a greatness, once, gathering in the boy’s man-making years. It was the voice
Wallace Stevens stole from the mendicant masses and like a hoarder kept it to himself. Have you not seen the posters? I was Achilles before the sail and now my ship has sunk. See these hot-blooded shapes that wear my half-mask and love me bone-deep and sit on my shoulders like moons: they are my epitaph; they are the heirlooms of my having been. In time the speech of my adoration will flower but what mouth is this to speak among the things of gods? And yet, what god would carry such beauty into oblivion? What forgiveness follows with such knowledge? My every imperfect utterance corrupts their meaning. Ultimately we are all sacrificed upon the altar of the gene. Only the gene is great.

Bullshit. I will show you greatness in the face of a shrew. Just look at it. It is its nature. It has well perfected the essence of shrewness. Not a single false move, the gears of its locomotion a marvel of shrew doctrine. What is the secret of the shrew? Alas, it does not know it is a shrew. Emerson flushed with earnest hyperbole would paint on the door lintel whim and live from the devil if that be his nature. His nature. Such a door lintel sits like the labouring card at the bottom of a house of metaphors. It is like catching smoke in your hands. In every extremity of human behaviour, in love obsessive, in jealousy, in kindness, in violence, in rape, in blind devotion to a deity or charity or an object of revenge we too act in a well perfected humanness. Our ordeal is a different conflict of ignorance.

I have many close acquaintances, say I, whom I have never met but feel we are entwined through the meeting of our minds. It is a transcendent discourse we have made and make still although I doubt they have heard me. They live in their books and words quite vibrantly. They have spoken and in the silences I have listened. Every line a thread in the tapestry of my understanding. This, however, is a delicate construction in the extreme: the broad or narrow matrix of our random comprehension. More than all else might this be my thesis! How so to chance is left our understanding! I ask any of you, what is the world and why? And your likely answer in my ear is the cracked egg-shell of your culture: a perplexity of dripping gibberish founded on the platform of a broken premise:

...foolish Moses who did not jump
Into the burning bush;
And the plagiarists of Zeno
Who built an empire upon a shipwreck
And called it Man:
Behold: here then is your son
Lost in the labyrinthine days –
What?

It is a simple thing, really, the whole marvel of waking to a sunrise in this world, the boring doctrine of a Dawkins or other: either it is a natural phenomenon or a supernatural one. Choose. There, I too have said it, the trembling and mile-wide line drawn. And yet even the dichotomy of this choice is an abstraction the veracity of which means both everything and nothing. The great tree limb that breaks and falls on my head will kill me whether of supernatural or natural origin. And yet, again, either it is utterly natural that I love or it is supernatural. By supernatural I mean of course I love for I am human, a child of god, among his children, here beneath the rising sun nearing an action in mind and body the morality of which sits on a balance sheet that needs must tip to the side of good or else the condemnation by the deity, the prison sentence of infinite tortures, the least of which more such metaphors as these. That; or this: I love because I am and this is what we do. Love is a metaphor. My dog loves me. I sense the voice returning and predict much conflict.

Conflict because the voice would save the world unperturbed by the metaphysics of why it should be saved. The resources will be marshalled. The words spoken. The communication made into bricks and rafts. Whereas I, encumbered with the hesitation of an unperfected rationalisation will add and subtract in a disembodied stupor until having miscalculated yet again I watch the water rise above my eyes.)

There is no duality in this as in other things. Our minds conceive of bodies in terms of either what is animate or inanimate, what has volition or lacks it. The baby expects the cat to walk but not the box and as it does watch her frown. This is the duality too that makes god easy to contemplate. See the brain in the jar? It possessed agency and commanded a voice once that spoke of love. Now, behind the mountain, or the moon, beyond the eye’s range, I tell you true there is a giant brain in a giant jar and it commands the agency of everything save, alas, free will. Through progressive steps of inference toward a mind less tangibly evident a god will make itself before us. Intelligent design is a false duality, a doomed reductio, the eating not of our cake but its baker. And yet, in this, what is the world and why, you must choose and it will define you. The poetry of unrequited love too is itself an ancient genre. Is it fair that God has made fuck with but one among us? Work with me: with whom was your early dialogue? Take your time. What chance interlocutors, what priests, what witnesses, which wise men or women? Who manned the helm or helmed the men, as it were, of your clan? Who shaped the accent through which your mind accuses the world? Did you find love under the hypnotic spell cast on yourself from within by this duality, this abstraction? If so, a Robert Trivers would break your heart and your will in an hour’s lecture. It was true and it was not true all along. With whom or what do you now hold a dialogue? Did you not see the neuroscientists testing the chemistry of the lover and the believer, scanning the neural colours of their minds? They find they are, it is, the same:

Gazing through the god-blurred screen
Searching for the dopamine
We do not comprehend…

It’s a new day for an old maxim, where Thoreau instead says: the mass of men lead lives of tragic cognition. Did Darwin save us from ourselves? Give us back our lost comet dust first so brightly lit within the Galilean glass? It was a liberation of shocking simplicity, elegance and horror over which Mr Darwin did ruminate with a heavy conscience. To tell the truth is no small thing, a life’s work, the last labour of the stonemason. Every made thing is subject to the tyranny of metaphor, as is truth, which, like a landscape or a horizon, resides in the mind only. Truth, perhaps, is not a law but an agreement, a collective acquiesce among a tribe of believers, a meme, say, that like a gene is subject to flawed replication, to whispers in misheard repetition, piled one on another like corpses in a blurred photograph. While it distils our own colloquial brew – indispensable as our genitals - our culture also makes our gods. Drink up. Who stands at the pulpit of a culture, bids us bow our heads? Who is the arbiter of knowing in the chaos of the whirlwind? The priest? The scientist? The newsreader? Our neighbour? What is truth to the lion? Would you look him in his orangey eye and ask him? Who is above the legislature of the ape?

Bring forth the cosmologists that they may, with the patience of a growing star, speak to me about infinity. This so saithe the king whose well grooved countenance bears the lines of a listener impatient of the truth. You and I, we are the kings, deserved of decent council, not a rabble of Ruperts, condescending to a demographic’s prejudice created by a prejudiced maker of demographics. What would Chomsky say under the spotlight, beneath the masthead, against the jury, the majesty of the editors and their Ciceros? A dozen books. A million words. All false. Or true. For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure, or so Emerson surmised. But only if the world takes notice. What is truth beyond the construct of a conscious? It is the deft walking on stones across a creek that our feet might stay dry. It is the answer to your clansman, the waiting gatekeeper’s question. While at his back, through the gate, the beckoning, nodding tribe welcomes you home. Welcomed in, within the confines, within the sturdy walls of thatch constructed with such colloquial skill that it is the very mark of a culture, our tribe, the wise and the knowing speak with hypnotic eloquence. The definitions are made. The many things are named. The stories are told and the heads are bowed. Moments later, beyond the open doorway in the lowering light of a distant mountain sky, smoke from some other tribe’s fire rises in a young child’s gazing eye.

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© Rhett Talley 2010