The Sword of the Stillborn

A Review of Thomas Ligotti's

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

(Hippocampus Press, 2010. 246 pp.)

Remember how, in Robert W. Chambers's "The Yellow Sign," anyone who attended the decadent play The King in Yellow or even read it was at once plunged into suicidal melancholy? Well, this new book by Thomas Ligotti is The King in Yellow. The real one   In his first nonfiction book, a text(ure) woven with all the skill of his superb fiction, Ligotti makes the case for consistent and radical pessimism. Along with a surprising number of previous authors to whose writings he introduces us, the modern master of the macabre argues that humanity is an uncanny alien presence in this world. We do not belong. We, and not some pantheon of gods or ghosts or Great Old Ones, are the intruding blasphemies against the natural order. How so? In what sense? Simply that human consciousness is an aberration of evolution, creating a brain too big for its needs, so it manufactures artificial needs, i.e., for answers to questions which are inappropriate and have no answer. We create delusions and illusions such as the very notion of meaning, not to mention fantasies like a hopeful future, gods, and life after death. Our consciousness, unlike that of the blissfully sleeping world of beasts and stones around us, and trampled by us, makes us aware of the eventuality of death and the acuity of suffering. Pain is the chief occupation of the sentient, Ligotti says, with a negativism worthy of doctrinaire Buddhism (which he discusses). In company with Ernst Becker, Ligotti unmasks virtually all human belief and effort as a pathetic series of failing stratagems to avoid facing the prospect of our own deaths. With Arthur Schopenhauer and Job, he avers that it would be better never to have been born at all.

Whatever joy we may experience ought to make us feel guilty for ignoring the suffering that fills and defines the existences of most people in the world, not to mention the animals we raise to eat. We sin against future generations whom we beget and bear, since we are condemning them in the moment of their conception to a pain life such as our own. Why do we have them? As a (foolish) device to project our doomed selves into a kind of future existence beyond our own deaths. The only decent thing for us to do, as a race, would be to extinguish ourselves. To agree no more to procreate. While Ligotti would have no objection to some act of race-inclusive suicide, he does not advocate it. Nor does he urge his readers to kill themselves, though he blames no one who does. He notes that when readers are moved to jeer at him, "Then why don't you just end it all, huh?" it is a cheap attempt at refutation by reductio ad absurdum. Not that the one who aims that quip would mourn if the pessimist did kill himself, since the former should be relieved at the silencing of a voice attempting to remind him of what he fears because he knows it: life is indeed meaningless, pointless, fruitless, "malignantly useless."

Would you dismiss Ligotti's coolly reasoned jeremiad as the product of a depressive's distorted outlook? Ligotti turns the table: no, it is precisely the depressed observer who sees things accurately. For him the fog of emotion has rolled away. He beholds everything as it is in itself, objectively, namely bereft of all value, interest, and meaning. You know the feeling, I'm sure. When you start feeling good again it is because your emotions are returning, and it is they which project a mirage-like sheen of interest and meaning on the things in one's life. Valorization is mystification. It is not the depressed observer who distorts; rather, it is the optimist whose bubbling emotions cause him to view all things through a rose-colored haze. The fumes of emotion in the brain make everything glow with a splendor that is pure hallucination. It is not the pessimist engaging in reductionism we ought to worry about, but the optimist engaging in mystification.

We are puppets dancing at the ends of strings which are held by no hands, directed by no purpose. That is, we are determined by our upbringing and our genes. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, but it has made us what we are and dictates what we do. And the knowledge of this, of which again, we remain uneasily and dimly aware, frightens us, impresses upon us the unwelcome knowledge that we are not "humans" as we wish to define them. Not autonomous, not even possessing an underlying self. Robots and toys, zombies, pods replicated by the Body Snatchers, cheap copies without any originals other than the genuine persons we falsely tell ourselves we are. We hate to know this, so we create or embrace foolish theories of free will. We tell ourselves we posses free choice, but, behind all our desires, there is some unknown agency which has delimited our choices. There are some we will never make even though a friend or neighbor readily makes them. We, too, one would think, are "free" to make them. But some prior hand controls even those strings. We are on the receiving end, puppets made to dance by an idiotic demiurge: Azathoth. How terrible, we think, to have to accept that another has scripted this play and that we are but characters within it. But that is what we are. And no sane mind wrote the novel—just the proverbial room full of monkeys madly clacking on typewriters.

Though Ligotti does an admirable job citing Eastern as well as Western precursors to his pessimism, I found, as I read, that I could not help thinking of some parallels in other Asian sources he did not see fit to mention. Some helped me appreciate his position more; others made me dissent from it. Let me take a little "journey to the East" with you.

I think of a cosmogony shared by Samkaya Hindus, Patanjala yogis, and Jainists, all of whom purportedly believe that universal human suffering is the result of a contamination of the primal ocean of undifferentiated matter (prakriti) by a rainfall of germs of purushas (or jivas), life monads. The entrance of these magic bullets caused the primal stew to start percolating, issuing in the formation of countless matter-forms and life-forms, each dominated by greater or lesser amounts of the three gunas, or modes: awareness, energy, and inertia. (The envisioned scheme is much like that of the pre-Socratic Empedocles as well as the Gnostics.) Your ego or psyche, the conditioned, ever-changing psychological "self" you see reflected in the mirror and on Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Tests, is material in nature (even we admit brain action is chemical in nature, right?), and if the luminous mode of buddhi (cognate, I assume, with Buddha, enlightened one) was not awakened by the unwelcome and unnatural intrusion of the purushas, you would not know pain. The purusha becomes the isolated, unconditioned, and eternal self, the atman, which is carried along passively from one incarnation to the next, held by the conditioned self and the karma that propels it. The purusha, being unconditioned, unaffected, does not suffer (like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover). But its linkage to the ego self makes it possible and inevitable for the material ego self to experience suffering, which it does in incarnation after incarnation. Yoga of various kinds promises techniques to enable the suffering soul to find liberation from reincarnation and suffering. Through meditation one learns to pry the atman / purusha loose, whereupon it flies back up to the summit of the Universe whence it originally came. Bingo! For the rest of the duration of this last incarnation, the yogi abides in a placid state of "mere witness" (the ego-death state Ligotti discusses) and then vanishes when the final incarnation is over. The atman is like the battery in the flashlight: it does not itself illuminate/experience suffering, but it makes it possible for the lens of the flashlight to illuminate it.

In much the same way, I think, Ligotti is envisioning a frightful, blundering cosmogony in which consciousness popped up as an unfavorable mutation, enabling creatures to experience a uniquely painful existence. And the goal is to end it. And, as the Beatles said, "no one was saved" (Eleanor Rigby). That is, the matter (prakriti) falls back into the pool of placid unknowing, unaware of pain or of aught else. And the atman / jiva / purusha ascends to unknowing bliss, omniscient knowledge of all which is therefore nescience of anything in particular. All personhood is dissolved, on both sides of the divide. For this reason, Eastern "salvation" has never appealed to me (Western is more palatable, but fictitious). But this is all right with Tom Ligotti, for whom existence "is not all right." He wishes, with Lovecraft, to return to Oblivion, the end of the only world we know.

I am reminded, too, of Denis de Rougement's essay Love in the Western World, where he explains the Gnostic origins of outlaw love, illicit devotion to a love Object beyond dull domesticity, beyond this mundane world (originally Sophia, the divine Dame Wisdom). Seeming transcendence of domestic commitments reawakens the "on the prowl" excitement of youth as we seek out secret liaisons and dalliances. All we remember is the transcendence of the mundane, so we seek transcendence through transgression. We seek the freedom and fulfillment of another, "realer" world than this tedious one. Only there is no other world but death; thus such out-of-bounds loves end up beyond the bounds of existence—in death. Just ask Romeo and Juliet and others who "don't fear the reaper." And Ligotti certainly doesn't fear him.

What is the source of Ligotti's utter disappointment with this old world? It seems to me he is exclusively rational, disappointed at existence because it possesses no intrinsic meaning. It does not scratch the itch suffered by his (like ours) too-big, too-active Homo Sapiens brain. The world does not meet the cognitive need that he admits is artificial. I agree that it does not, and that it cannot. The earth has become unchained from its sun and wanders now through the coldness of space. God is dead. The category of "truth" is empty, while that of "fiction" overfloweth. Tom bemoans that every attempt at assigning meaning is fictive, artificial. If meaning is not inherent and discernable by reason, it is no good. But is that so? I am of the opinion that meaning is, and is "supposed" to be fictive, pure play with the necessary gratuity of art (as Camus discerned). There is more to Homo Sapiens than the brain. There is the imagination, the wit, the creativity. And it is more than enough.

Back to Asia. I treasure the Dialectic of Nagarjuna who realized that Samsara (this world of suffering and reincarnation) seems so terrible as earlier Buddhists regarded it only because and insofar as they were disappointed in it for not being what they deep-down sought, namely Nirvana. Once you realize it isn't and that it was foolish ever to mistake it for Nirvana, one need no longer despise Samsara. One need not deny the beauty one cannot help seeing in it. One appreciates it for what it is, not for what it isn't. It has the shining colors of a soap bubble which is truly beautiful though it lasts no more than a moment. Is all pleasure spoiled by an awareness of its transitoriness? That is the point, I think, of the Theravada doctrines of anicca and dukkha, impermanence and suffering. But there again, one suffers only when one expects too much! It is no delusion when we treasure life and joy all the more for their transitoriness. The man who tramples streets of gold does not and cannot value a gold coin.

I believe in a combination of Tillich and Derrida. Tillich says that "Being is an affirmation of itself over against non-being." Derrida says that the very notion of Being is undermined and vitiated by the factor of differance which renders all language unstable in every usage and unable to convey any truth that finally manifests in fullness. But then again, that is the very chaos against which Being, a condition that is dynamic, not static, asserts itself. Yes, Thomas Ligotti, I have no atman, no eternal soul, no unconditioned self. What I am keeps changing. It is not even my creation. I did not write my own script, though no one else wrote it for me either. But I rejoice to play my role. I do not kick against the goads as if I wished I might have been someone else. I will die and not survive it. In the end, after the inevitable solar nova, there will be no one in the unfeeling Universe to know I was ever here. But why should it be otherwise? Is it not insane ego-inflation to want to expand like some metaphysical life raft until my "significance" fills the Totality by virtue of being forever known by some Whiteheadian Deity?

Life is all right, actually more than all right. It is full of challenges which, when met, enrich it. It possesses color and joy and plenty of things and people to enjoy. It is (I am) full of emotions, and, you are right, it is these which give meaning. But is this any different from recognizing that the taste of the apple is in the tongue, or in the brain, not in the apple? I don't think so.

Let the future generations come! And let me try to prepare good things in store for them. Among them, Tom, will surely be your fiction.

So says Zarathustra.