What has me so stricken is simply that, for my entire childhood I was lied to. In my teen years I realized this and saw through much of it, and everything that’s happened since only confirms the hopeless negatives.
Universal corruption and a determination to make ourselves extinct rules everything. Nihilism prevails. Psychopaths demand it all now or no one can ever have anything ever again. Scorched earth is their policy. It’s open now, they state this clearly now.
So basically all hope I ever had for a good life or a good world has been destroyed thoroughly and we’re left with a meaningless universe of indifference. Great.
Other than that, hey, what a stone cold groove it all is.
Jean-Paul Sartre tried to warn us.
Camus worked hard to show that meaning can be made. Meaning is made, not found, not inherent, but he showed how to make it.
Except … it was still futile.
Camus follows Sartre’s definition of the Absurd: “That which is meaningless. Thus man’s existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification”.
Camus wrote: the Absurd is the result of the “confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
He did not think meaninglessness led to nihilism and rejected suicide as a negation of human values. He proposed we accept absurdity and live with it. This parallels Zen.
I’ve written many poems about the silence of the Goddess, which is expressing this. Unresponsive universe versus needy humanity leads to a one-sided conflict in which we too often attack ourselves. My fiction focuses on finding unseen beings and worlds with which to expand our experience, on which to make some meaning.
Get as far as you can and fall forward. Once is always. Reality’s a solid. Namaste.
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