Another Petite Opus
Here at Poets & Suicides we are sensitive to the non-existent demands of our imagined readership. Thus we hereby introduce to you the opening section of The Author’s essay-in-progress, aptly titled (given The Author’s tired nihilism-shtick) “Everything You Do Is Completely Meaningless But It Is Very Important That You Do It.” We hope you do or do not enjoy it. — The Editors
Everything You Do Is Completely Meaningless But
It Is Very Important That You Do It
Some Thoughts on the Limitations of Craft
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
-- Carl Sagan, from Pale Blue Dot
Within the tony precincts of Manhattan’s upper west side exists a curious edifice known as the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a great glass cube within which enormous replicas of our solar system’s planets appear to levitate unassisted. Among the venue’s many cosmological mind-benders is a long descending walkway that spirals around these same planetary mockups. The apex of this trail represents the Big Bang—the moment at which Nothing became Everything—and with each downward step you travel roughly 100 million years through the history of the universe and toward our current position in space-time. Placards along the railing illustrate your journey: here the first hydrogen atoms are born; here, hundreds of millions of years later, the first stars explode into existence, spitting heavier elements into the void; here, billions of years later, the first planets form from fire and enter into precarious orbits. Down and down you go until finally, after taking hundreds of steps, you arrive at the bottom of the helix, where you find a small glass box displaying—on a canvas of white cotton—a single human hair. Beneath the box it says: The width of this hair represents how long humans have been here.
It is difficult to synthesize the meaning of this wispy human hair with our prideful aggrandizement of human accomplishment. In reality, the human race just got here and will be gone before the universe can blink. All of our histories, all of our wars, all of our economic doctrines and societal models, all of our extant and extinguished cultures—these net out to zero in the cosmic prospectus. Anyone willing to look this truth in the eye experiences a cognitive dissonance, as two incompatible visions of the human experience collide. We may be ephemeral to the point of practical nonexistence, but human consciousness has evolved to see itself as the hot, gravitational center of all things. Our lives don’t feel as tenuous as that delicate strand of hair; they feel enormous. Our capacity to love, to grieve, to compete, to desire, to rejoice, to lament… to hurt and to be hurt… it all feels endlessly large. The entire universe seems to orbit the heliotrope of the self.
I want to argue that the embrace of this contradiction is the first necessary condition for the appearance of art. And I want to argue that the vast majority of our literature—even and especially the literature most often praised by the literary establishment (and those who ratify its choices [i.e., readers])—fails this test, proceeding from an implicit confidence that the Rose Center’s nearly invisible human hair is, for all intents and purposes, the entirety of God’s great universe. Our literature more often than not settles comfortably into an illusion of stability and permanence, while ignoring the context upon which literature (like all things) so tenuously rests. Our literature is overwhelmingly myopic, willfully ignorant, and determined to go forward as if this were all permanent, as if our importance (and the importance of our systems and institutions) were a mathematical given in need of no further scrutiny, as if that fragile and delicate hair were more akin to a steel-wound suspension-bridge cable, than to the single horsehair holding aloft the terrible sword of Damocles.
In fact, to make art is to risk sitting on Damocles’ throne despite, or in rejection of, the “lesson” that Damocles seeks to impart to his servant. We must sit atop that throne not in ignorance or envy, but knowing full well that one day the hair will snap, the sword will fall, the king will lie dead and bloody on the polished marble floor, the kingdom will collapse and its people will scatter to all corners of the wasted earth.
I compose this essay from such a position. I know that art, like all things, is essentially meaningless. That it will be extinguished, along with everything, any moment now. And yet I refuse to be paralyzed by this unhappy reality. I sit beneath the Sword of Damocles, and I write.