Amerika

Thomas Wolfe wrote a great book called You Can Never Go Home Again whose title referred to how moments in the past, with the intersection of experience and people that gave them significance, act like places which one can never revisit. You cannot go back to the combination of your childhood home, innocence and the world as it was. You can simply soldier on.

I can never go back. I refer to a different type of place, which is the intersection of feeling good about the world and my future in it, and the lack of experience which allowed me to avoid seeing the sickness that pervades everything now. Like a childhood home, that time to me represents innocence and a sense of potential in the wide world beyond the home, but I can never return to that view.

I am alone for the most part. I just recently realized how few I have left. How few we are who still hold on to what we once had. I spend most my days the same way. Get up long after the other slaves have gone to their jobs. My bus is mostly empty, for half the trip at least. I buy a cup of coffee at the usual place. The people who work at the various places like that like me. People of the working class are those most likely not to care about my views. 

Town is strange these days. It is not what it used to be. Now it is not only the bad things I see that bother me. It is the sum of the things that are not there. And all the people act like that old innocent time still exists. Maybe they hope it will come back. Everything is sterile, like a background that does not fit the way they behave.

I can sense some faint noise in the background. I know it is still here, just pushed back into the shadows. Will someone suddenly jump at me? I sometimes wonder, but it’s not likely to happen there.

During the last two years I have not given it much thought. But as I fell out of the haze of illusions, I started thinking about it. Who is out there? Can they find me? And who will bother? It sometimes come out of nowhere when I’m almost at my door. A feeling of presence. I wish I could erase the places where it hides. Or perhaps just go somewhere else now.

These days I closely watch the cars in the street. I know all of the regular ones. If they are not from one of the houses I get alerted. This happened last week. A car came slowly down the street and stopped by my house. I just walked on as it seemingly stalked me like a animal. I scanned the street for routes of escape, even though I know them all.

As always when the monster manifests, I know the first step is to look like I am oblivious like the rest of the people here. Three or four fast steps and I will be out of sight. As I reached the bottom of the road it sped up and passed me by. Some days later I saw it parked by a garage three houses up. They just bought it, a good-looking new wagon.

Mostly I feel safe. It take life for what it is. Despite that, I feel a great deal of fear of what might come in the near future. My preparations in earnest began some time ago. Even so, they must all be watched. This darkness is not a physical thing, but a force that can manifest in anyone at any time. Vigilance turns to paranoia as I wonder where it will materialize next.

***

I found myself in church. I was asked to go and I said yes. Not someone very close to me, but I often saw her. “Sure, I will be there”. About half a year before that a certain musician had pulled the plug, jumped of the train. Taken a final stand against the Demiurge. A fellow traveler on some questions going down. It had started a trail of existential rumination, or fueled it. And much of that was ruminated upon when listening to Olivier Messiaen works for church organ. Music that opened up to something incredible strong I had not experienced before. A composer I somehow missed exploring when I studied music and composition but had rediscovered by impulse about the same time in 2006.

The organist was playing low tempo music in minor keys as people came in the main entrance. The atmosphere was haunting and I felt a bit out of touch with something and had a deep sense of the color green. Deep green from somewhere out of a place outside space and time. I could not connect it to anything and unlike Olivier I don’t experience colors to specific modes, chords, timbres and tones. The large church was about half full. I took place at the left behind the others. A bit bothered perhaps. Sad to see the old proud woman go, I admired her presence when I met her. She had this dignified peace radiating from her after over ninety years as a wife, mother and grandmother.

I knew she went on with a pure soul and few regrets. But I was not close, so I remained in the background. I found my place at the back of the crowd to the left, The preacher talked about the beauty of life, death, the afterlife and then the triumph over death. I was having the opposite question in my head. Is death a victory over life? Our escape from the Demiurge? The organ played on. This time with a violin soloist playing lots of notes that were a fifth flat or sharp.

I wanted to go up there and smack him in the head with the score. You don’t sit there in someone’s last ceremony and play your instrument out of tune. I thought for some reason that it would not bother him at all. He probably thought no one of those “uneducated morons” noticed it. His arrogance radiated. The church got that dreamlike quality of the unreal. Sickness in everything. Disharmony, discord and the de-tuning of our souls and the universe. It all turned sour. Did we have souls at all? A sickening green substance and something vague was dissolving me. I was still nine years away from interpreting it. Were we just chemistry, electric activity in matter? Nothing more? Something was cutting in the very core of my consciousness.

We left church for a dinner afterwards.

“Don’t you want any food?”
“No, thanks..”
“Don’t you eat?”
“No, I don’t feel good, sorry.”
“You feel sick?
“Yes…”

I sat there for a few more minutes, contemplating as little as possible. Around me, people were filling the gut; mine was empty, wide open, and receiving the multitude of signals that life gives off, the little tell-tales and warnings that trigger something below the conscious mind. These non-meditations were interrupted by the increasing nervousness of others.

“But aren’t you going to eat anything?”
“No, I’m not. Why do you care?”

I sat for five minutes and I found a excuse to get out. I went to a kiosk and bought something simple with sugar and more nicotine. A breath of air made leaves on the pavement crawl in circles. A dusts devil, rare, in particular at that place. I stopped and felt the ground open up underneath me, like it had torn a hole in reality. I pushed it all back into the background and went inside again. 

It would not leave me. 

“Coffee?”
“Yes, thanks.”

I drank five of them. For some reason some part of me thought it would help me run away. I was fleeing for dear life from something so deep and troubling I could not bear it. The disgusting sensation of unreality and the strange current. The damn thing always came after me, I had pieces of glass in my throat, cutting it from the inside. I felt the distance grow between me and the others. Whether I liked it or not, what I had seen could not be unseen, and what I knew could not be forgotten. My path opened up before me and thrust me away from them.

My dreams returned the few hours I was asleep. Always lost in places deep down underground. Crypts the size of mountain halls in deep green. Places that morphed and twisted behind my back, with no way to escape. Not even when awake. I was lying on my bed staring at the wall for hours dissolving and melting away in some growing sensation of impending doom. Something so enormous and dreadful and impossible. I would never have thought it was possible to reach such a deep. I started to find excuses to be away. Walking outside I stared at the roads in the cold evenings, The strange current was running through them and through me. I could taste it, a sickening taste like something vague from the past. It tasted like the pencils that I chewed on in school. It had all become unreal, like my surroundings were only drawings and I had become a empty shell. A ghost disconnected from time and space. Those things had no meaning anymore.

When we followed that old woman to her final destination I must have started to think about my wife. Would we lose each other in the end anyways? And everyone else us?

The Western and North East Asian populations differ from the rest of the world here. Both have a deep rooted history towards K-strategic pair bonding. I believe that is not only cultural, but has deep biological and spiritual origins as well. But we are sold the lie that “it’s just sex” constantly. And that a series of relationships where partners are more like products are just fine. As usual when people are deceived by ideas that does not harmonize with what they actually are, the result is as expected. Disastrous. This degrading process is fueled further by atheism and materialism. I know that firsthand from my own relationship.

In 2007 the propaganda on both was at its height. After the funeral sent old woman to her final destination, I must have started to wonder exactly where that was. Nowhere? At a time when I was not sure about that it was enough to send me into the deep. If we had no souls who could transcend. What was the point? That gave me such a sadness I numbed. It was by far the worst thing I have ever felt. And I think that doubt followed me for years. Until I sat down and read serious science that turned out to not support the materialist view one bit. But for most people it is settled. There is no soul, just chemistry and flesh. People fear this, so much they will run at the first glance of it. The hurt is to much to carry.

And look where we are now.

I despise the so called “hook up culture” from the bottom of my soul. It did not take me long to realize that it was poisonous to the core. I have one long term relationship behind me. In my circle we were the only ones who had one in the old Western style. Everyone else had superficial ones in series, slept around or did that plus extremely unhealthy and destructive relationships. The results of that are that almost everyone around me are completely and utterly unable to have anything like it today.

***

In the doorway, as I passed, was a heap of papers that I had abandoned. I picked them up to move them, and was hit with this sense of deja vu mixed with a kind of wanderlust. It felt like the world had rushed past me, and now in this pocket of silence, I had time to figure it out. And yet I could also feel panic, the sense of entropy running in, like some kind of virus which can infect anything and turn it evil. But now I was late.

At the coffee shop I ran into a fellow who is talkative and has a lot to say about society. He speaks about random topics with high energy and little continuity like some kind of whirlwind. The combination of caffeine, mental disorganization and a fairly vapid outlook makes him seem utterly chaotic. He is fairly annoying, and even dishonest. But I somewhat appreciate his presence as long as our visits do not last for very long. He is a small dose person. Obviously not very bright and hyper social.

One topic that frequently comes up is the “fucking immigrants”. That is after he has looked nervously around, scanned the place like it was bugged. He will do that and lean towards me, poke my arm and whisper it or say it in hushed tones: “Those damn Muslims! There are so many of them. I’ve seen a lot…”

He diligently informs me of this, almost like I could somehow solve the problem for him. This happened again for the 323th time one day. And I responded for the 47th time.

“Nothing will change until people are no longer afraid to say that out loud.”
“But they don’t dare…” he said.
“Why don’t you dare? What are you afraid of?”

And it came: his new girlfriend was a complete SJW and he was trying to keep that fact out of the public eye. I wanted to say a lot about that. Like how it is lowlife and all that. Even worse because of the seriousness of the matter. Not to mention the fact that the relationship will go down the drain because of it. Just like the last one he spent a year complaining about losing. Yeah, I wonder why…

This made me think of another episode. An acquaintance was complaining about a women bothering and annoying him on Facebook. I never got to understand exactly how. As what he told me seemed like fairly normal female behavior that is beneath the threshold of what should annoy or surprise a man. I made a tongue in cheek comment about oppression and rings on fingers, since that works for me.

“But if I say something like that, I won’t get any.”

He meant that he fears he will cease to get meaningless sex with the few used and broken girls he has access to, for now. I did not bother saying this…instead I started to think about the implications for our civilization that can be extrapolated from his patterns of thought and behavior. This was a good thing to think about while he described some television show he liked, which sounded to me like it was made of spare parts cut away from better ideas, like scrounging through the ruins of a war-torn city to make a fortress of junk.

I despise the so called “hook up culture” from the bottom of my soul. It did not take me long to realize that it was poisonous to the core. I have one long term relationship behind me. In my circle we were the only ones who had one in the old Western style. Everyone else had superficial ones in series, slept around or did that plus extremely unhealthy and destructive relationships. The results of that are that almost everyone around me is completely and utterly unable to have anything like a functional relationship today. 

It should not have been this way. Looking back how it all rotted away. How could I not have connected all of this? I even tried to accept it. Everyone else is doing it. It is normal. Yes, I am the problem. Everyone said so. Just move on and replace! Go out and have fun with someone. Yes, sure! I can do this too. But I can’t. I tried to convince myself of that. As I looked toward the roof of that church, with a miasma of green voracious emptiness and out-of-tune violins floating around me, perhaps battling it out with the spirit of a woman who had lived a good and full life, I realized: I just can’t. If I do it their way the last fractions of my soul are lost forever.

I started thinking just how deep this problem runs. I never seem to follow that train of thought through. It disappear into the rest of the mess. A friend of mine had the best conclusion to that train and I found myself agreeing with him: In our time we need stable long relationships leading to more sane and functional children being born, not people living on lies to make whatever they sold their soul to work for a day or two more.

Every now and that, at the same coffee shop, someone will say this like it is wisdom: “Some men are better of home jerking off to porn.”

It is the same pattern here too. Why have a soul? It is more convenient to be a body that has needs and desires than it is to be a metaphysical being incarnated in a mortal form. When the body is all, the question is not how to find a soul-mate and live a fulfilling and natural life, but how to efficiently reach orgasm without disturbing whatever fascinates you at the moment. They think they are clever, these modern people, for having taken great things like marriage and simplified them to a few quick flicks of the wrist.

If you have a soul, and care about what is right, you are going to end up saying something that will offend someone. Reality is offensive because it is outside of our big brains. People won’t say this or that because of something they don’t want to lose: friends, network, social status and a lack of rejection from women. But what they are really afraid of is convincing themselves. When you see the disease, you will no longer feel that home is home; it will feel alien. Homeless, you will find yourself on a path like me, condemned to walk the empty spaces of this world, seeking that which is true in a time of convenience and disposable values.

To these people, I am a crazy man. I am risking a total loss of sexual convenience because I have some contentious opinions. I have chosen a path of pain and constant struggle, not the easy way that everyone else has. But there is more for me to gain. Having a soul means suffering constantly. But it also means that the moments of beauty in life are more intense, and that I can struggle for what is right and enjoy a much greater satisfaction from life than they will. I think that is what they fear, and why they try to con me into joining them in their despair.

Tags: abyss, emptiness, homelessness, sickness, void