Survival

I was rereading Vita Contemplativa and its wages against our productivity zeitgeist. That is, modernity holds no room for boredom, contemplation. Waiting.

On any other day it makes sense, where you’d cue the audience nodding emphatically in agreement: why yes, one shouldn’t have to be a robot! Let’s do away with all the performances and commodification.

Though the treatise always swivels back to this idea that we are more than mere survival. We have more to live for than living thereof: the fruits of culture and arts therein, or sure experience where one waits about the bench and comments on the pigeons to the gent strolling by.

But I keep tossing back and forth about it. Ultimately I want to say it’s a fatal mistake to assume there’s anything more to this existence than survival. Survival haunts everything.

Child’s play, after all, is the mimicry of the day where they have to kill and fend for themselves. Stand still enough as an adult and there’s an uncomfortable clarity as to why someone has you around or is waiting to dispose of you.

One could wiggle in an argument how one needs some semblance of enjoyment over a lifespan. To make it to the best end.

Still, the book tries to elevate our fleshly domain beyond enjoyment. Perhaps it’s due to the other part of modernity, beyond the productivity circuits dominating: an era characterized by minue mori, a constant forgetting of death. People no longer even bother to begin thinking about the day this ends. For death alone confronts man squarely and injects introspectivity to our time remaining, to one’s folly spent. To forgo that while in pursuit about “living for more” seems like an awful recipe.

If you don’t pay your dues to the reaper then you, too, may be convinced there’s something more here than mere survival. This lack of patronage is precisely what’s so interesting about modernity. I think everyone assumes they ought to enjoy their existence. That they’re even entitled to a good time. If you gesture toward a mud hut along a highway most would scoff at the thought.

This constant yearning, coincided with our minue mori, obscures the cycles of everything, of lifespans. Every idyllic cul-de-sac ignores the forgotten street alumni now economically consumed, starved. And the arcades hold whispers never intending to spook. Even the melody of the band holds a note which paints about a crowd ten years prior, ten years scattered. Every social media site looks away from the profiles long since missing. Last update: eight years prior. How do you think this cycle — our cycle here — ends?

If you don’t think about it, so you can entertain that it’s art that redeems us. That our culture or high trust society or monuments so tall and so declare: yes, humanity is simply waiting on angelhood. Blue halo for the thoughtful, red for the determined.

But if you ever watched enough people cry and writhe you may eventually conclude the morbid thought of its supposed inevitability, this anguish. An anguish inevitable. Not just inevitable, but consistently and cyclicly so.

In fact, I am confident that if you had the perfect life today, and the world was conceived in your perfect machine, the malaise would come all the same. You’re going to have to abandon everything and throw it to Survival, which informs all happy beings. I can make you feel better, but I also know you have much more anguish in store.

In the largest stroke of irony those who prioritize survival above all else are the ones happily chugging along. They figured out their lands, their tasks, their patriarchal structure and investments. Each day they go out to the world not to learn for sake thereof, but instead to synthesize, to take advantage of it. How calculating and amoral, and free: you could denounce them as cold-hearted, and yet they beat so swimmingly. Memento mori, and thus their will is itemized, projects certain: immortality in view, 2045 on our horizon.

They’re happy because death informs life.

One could stammer so much and suggest this little cyber field on the side, with both of us in incorporeal form talking and observing and such, surely this reveals something more waiting, something spectacular about our strange beings. Heaven around the corner, surely! Maybe.

Instead this seems to be some incorporeal plane to forget about all of the tasks waiting, knowledge lacking, to make the most of the world out there.

Minue mori: blunt one’s trembling.