Recently I have spoken to some length of a necessary “terror”. One which society must experience and carry within itself to achieve moral ends. For fear of losing what I had previously spoken of, and for the excitement of furthering this new line of thinking I intend in this essay to mark this new waystone in my thoughts.
However, terror really isn’t the right word. I haven’t yet found one suitable, but at this moment, the closest I have come in finding one such word is repentance, though I begin with terror as it is more useful for the audience, as you may hopefully see.
Then, what use is terror? In my view, morality and the path to morality, which is philosophy (not in the intellectual sense but rather in the social one), have been left in such a terrible languishing state by a singular source. That being comfort, which I would classify as having a series of subordinate aspects including apathy, hubris, a lack of conscious awareness, and uninterrupted rote action / ways of living.
But I should be quick to secure you from a pitfall in thinking that comfort requires the ability to live well or afluently, and that our terror should be one which aims at worsening the conditions of living. It would not produce the correct terror at all, only misery and further apathy, worse still it would encourage one to look only for themself within a systematic sense and seclude themselves from community and their external sensations.
No, terror aims to instill first moods, and then values where there are none.
Speaking finally of this terror, it possesses two portions. The first part is ironic humor. This portion is what produces the ideological corrosion which was mentioned before. It wipes the slate clean, forcing one to look inward.
I find it difficult to explain the idea in its perfect wholeness, but irony is the only force capable of disarming one’s seriousness. People with strong ideas not gained from a social philosophical process have a pretension, they lack the necessary humility to carry out the Good.
Humor washes away the identity produced through inherited values, it destroys any identity whatsoever. It destroys identity, leaving just the human being.
This humor is no laughing matter, it is despair, one which reaches deep, straight to the core of the soul, it questions everything and by such means destroys everything. Humor like this is dangerous, and if one employs it, they should take extreme care to not harm the person underneath the ideas.
They bear a heavy load, they are exhausted by their ideologies and their identities. If one moves too quickly, or too carelessly, the humor will add its own weight upon the person, before the others have been relieved. It will crush their soul, and may shatter them into something less than human.
But if done correctly, the individual should be perfectly confused, absent, their head will float down in jungle mist, even flooded with questions they are buoyant in the emptiness of silence. The answer demands their further questioning until all at once they are subsumed, not by any rational or scientific truth, not even an objective truth, but in something greater, more powerful, something beyond worldly finitudes. They are subsumed by the demand of the answer.
The answer may be god, or the forms, or an artistic essence, or the unconscious collective mind of mankind. What the individual thinks the answer is is quite irrelevant. What matters is the inaccessibility of that truth by way of infinitude.
In infinity all thoughts of evil are vanquished. It is not that one stops thinking evil things, but that evil ceases to be a moral measure, and ceases even to exist in the mind of the individual.
The world falls differently into the mind. Not good and evil, but rather between the Good and entropy, or negation. The world is on or off. Growing or passing away. Good does not become an end, but a process and a choice. It is active, maneuverable and cunning, strong and flexible; it is everything that exists. And there is non-existence too, an absence, but merely so. Natural and flowing, but nothing to regard with worry.
In the wake of ironic humor, if properly and tenderly cared for, the individual lies in an ecstasy of peace and worldly flow.
It is in this context that perhaps one can understand my fumbling use of the word repentance. Perhaps you understand that I don’t really mean any sort of atonement, or remorse, but really a sincere turning of the leaf. Repentance is the word I use for the first choice towards the Good. The ascension of the person into the ability to make true choice. At this point the individual has earned their choosing, no longer do they repetitively act by instinct, like either predator or prey, now they act with understanding, capable of choice beyond judgment.
It is not that they act perfectly, or always choose the Good, but now they are simply aware.
This awareness is the second portion of terror or repentance. There is a certain fear which comes with this, but not a material one. This fear is simply something which passes through the individual, really it is more similar to concern which relates closer to the awareness, but still lacks the urgency.
I must apologize, this final portion is the hardest one to explain, but you must think of it in a stoic sense. There is now no worldly thing which this individual fears, they only fear that they shall not be themselves, that they will regress, or rather that they shall not grow. Which is really ludicrous, because of course they will falter, of course they will make choices not in service of the Good, but all the same they will never lose themselves again. Because for that first time, they chose themselves in their own infinitude, as the myths of history are a reflection of the inner self.
Their fear is unwarranted, but so beautiful and necessary. These people who have given up the world to gain themselves…
It makes one cry to think of them, the emotions cannot be untangled from each other and explained because they all unify into one greater feeling which this petulant language bars me from expressing.
I wish one could lend me the words to fill the holes of this work and this language, but I also do not wish it. If such words were accessible, then who would paint, sing, or write? If there was such a word, this work would have no need to exist, because the world itself would be whole, and flat.
...
That was the end of the formal part of this text, though there is something further but separate I wish to include. Please first allow the text to have settled for you before continuing further, take however long you may need for that to occur.
...
After writing this I was reminded of a song, because, if anyone has ever spoken the word I am searching for, then they took sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds to say it.
Earnestly I am convinced that The Dead Flag Blues is the greatest piece of music ever to be made, and I feel it is critically relevant to this work, not only in what it communicates, but also to its effect on me personally.
I hadn’t realized how important it was to me until I sat down and listened to it again on the evening in which I wrote this.
As I listened to it, I thought back to all the previous times. Honestly, it had been a while since I had listened to it. I saved it only for my lowest points, made a point to never listen to it more than two or three or four times a year because I was afraid that it might lose some of its power over me if I heard it more than I needed.
Speaking plainly and briefly, the piece not only saved my life, but my soul as well, for, if I had by some means lived without it, I would not be half, much less any measure the individual I am today.
As an illustration for those who know me of what a cornerstone this piece is to me I will say that, I had listened to this song half a year before I ever had heard of folk music.
This music taught me something which I have only realized I know now, and likely only in part. There is much more to be said, but I will restrain myself.
I only ask that if you have not heard the song, that you listen to it, and if you have, to listen to it again, and in either case, listen to it without distraction.
Godspeed You Black Emporer - The Dead Flag Blues