The Despair Code (thoughts)

Warning: Discussion of Existential Reality. May lead to Despair (3223412)

Living out here in the Liminality, we spin through the void – somewhere between success and failure, urban and rural, youth and old age, responsibility and recklessness. Our lives are between beginnings and unknowable endings. Posessed by the daemon of Schrodinger’s design we struggle for certainty of anything, and against denial of everything. Wandering like ghosts seeking solid faith in something, swimmers seeking anything to hold us afload, we distance from the joy of loved ones beside us because of the empty-eyed shadows of those who have passed.

3223412 Alas! “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

In truth, we are safest in the Liminality. Because to go over the threshold – to truly Know the unknown, to Become Known ourselves is to release the Despair Code.

The inability of man(kind) to correlate all it’s contents perhaps is the most merciful thing in the world, but I think we often ignore the deeper implications (at least I do). And this act of ignoring what should be plainly written is not just a mercy, but a form of denial, a decision (conscious or otherwise) to hide from the truth so plainly writ before our eyes that it is itself a kind of madness, or at the very least inauthenticity in the manner of what Sartre called “bad faith.”

The knowledge I am speaking of is not the kind of forbidden lore found in old moulding tomes like the Necronomicon, nor does Lovecraft really ever say that it is. For it is never only understanding that posits a danger to our well-being; it is the combination of understanding and experience.

After all in The Call of Cthulhu, it is not ultimately the piecing together of knowledge that leads to crisis. Instead it is the Experience of Truth. There is no inherent risk in learning of the touched dreams of artists and dreamers and sensitive types brought about through the mental powers of some unknowable Alien Other.

The danger is in becoming truly creative, in letting down the walls we have erected that keep us from knowing the awfulness that hides at the core of the awesome. We know this somewhere internally and it is an ever present tension in life that leads people to adopt a wide array of strategies of avoidance.
This is perhaps why if you correlate the contents of the DSMV-V, it seems to indicate that we are all of us, at least partly, insane. (Insanity being some form of detachment from reality.)

And so we choose. We choose to either lock ourselves away with the study of books that describe (someone’s) reality, or to go out and experience it for ourselves. It is indeed a rare thing to encounter a person with the courage to do both things simultaneously.

Those that do seem to achieve both states at once sometimes go on to found a religion, or philosophy. Yet more often they meet some tragic end as they recoil too far from the Reality they have themselves discovered. Often, Religion and Philosophy are an attempt to cover or mask the true, awful beauty they have both witnessed and understood.

The ultimate denial.

Intellectually, I believe I understand that truth. But I can’t articulate it fully. I can at least be honest, however, by admitting that my greatest fear (and all if ours really), isn’t actually in fear of the unknown. The fear is (or should be) a fear of ever Actually knowing in our core how indifferent the cosmos really is. Because to Know (experience with understanding) is to let it in.

To really perceive beauty in the Cosmic Indifference would be to let it take us. Should that occur we are truly fucked (we fear). Because how can there ever be safety should we become like the cosmos: indifferent to life itself?

Stay crazy. Party on. Stay here in the absurdity of the Liminality. Make the most of the short time we have on this rock. Rage for as long as possible. Because whether we ever really KNOW it or not, the lights will eventually go out. Becoming intimate with Reality is at it’s core just another path to self destruction.