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In choosing your pleasures, you also make an equal an opposite choice…
I’ve never deliberately set out to make a mistake, but by God, have I made plenty, the burdens of which weigh heavily upon me from time to time, those days when my consciousness seems more present than on others.
Self-Consciousness is pain, the act of being alive, is itself a type of pain! There’s the pains we like, there’s pains that we don’t like, joy is just another type of pain, a pain that is most acutely felt whenever it is absent. It’s also a pain, that by the looks of it, doesn’t come around all too often for those of us who like to write. We write out our pain in the hope that you too might identify with it and feel it almost as much as we do, that we might all become compatriots in pain, pain is the gift that we most love to share. The ship of lost and damned souls is real and we’re its crew! Our cargo is pain, pain expressed in poetry, in the critiques of art, architecture, the lost lands of nostalgia, the pain of race relations and bad politics, the pain of economic injustice, we write for pleasure, but all we do is express our pain.
The point of life it seems, is to be in a position of no pain at all, that’s what the advertisers tell us with their glossy magazines, polished commercials on television, radio, the internet. Pain is bad, so you should do all that you can to get rid of it, but what happens next? What happens when the lottery has been won, when the riches start flowing, when the book deal has been signed, when the new couch has arrived, when you’ve ate the burger? What happens next? The pain returns, slowly at first, creeping like a burglar at an open window, the unwelcome thief, the pale criminal then avails himself to all of your stuff, those pretty arrangements of mind and matter that you call ‘good,’ those prior remedies for pain, no longer effective, opiates of idealism now weakly felt. He takes the lot, contemptuously he demands more, yelling ‘I’ll be back!’ The cycle continues…
Civilisation is the process of making pain predictable, pain becomes consumerism, we will all suffer, but how we suffer is up to us, not like our ancestors, those stupid semi apes, the half men who had no choice but to die of infections, plagues, warfare and famine. Pain was inflicted upon them by Gaia, but we at least choose our own and declare ourselves to be free of her! Comfort is king says Nietzsche’s Last Man, but what is comfort but an attempt to sooth pain. The young girl wraps herself up in a onesie and curls up on the settee for the day watching TV, eating chocolates and hiding from the winter skies outside the window. Safe, warm and happy, her Will to Power inverted into consumerism by the zeitgeist of our times. It’s cold out there, the wind strong, russet-coloured leaves blow across the landscape, the rain, hard and cold, strikes the window.
The ghost of Nietzsche would rap her on the head with a walking stick, screaming from his psyche to hers that she get out there and ascend the nearest mountain, climb all of the way to the summit and amidst the cloud, the jagged wind, the thin veneer of ever-changing mists and the stinging rain, screech to the heavens, “I am life, and I will overcome!”
“And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold, it said, I am that which must overcome itself again and again.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche).
