Chiliad: A Meditation

by Clive Barker

There is in our natures a calamitous hunger for consummation. Having begun, without a choice in the matter, we want to be sure we have some hand in the conclusion. We want to mark it, on the calendar of the ages. There we began. Here we end. And if at our demise there is a universal ending, would that be so bad? If we leave only filth and dead seas to those who come after us, would that be so bad? Mark me, though this wretched appetite is only confessed by hysterics—by the maverick messiah who leads his shabby flock onto the mountain in readiness, counting down the hours to his Armageddon (which is postponed by their prayers)—it is a universal desire. We all count the hours. We all look for completion, even if we fear it. We long to be consumed. I long to be consumed. If I were to meet Shank along the river I would be hard-pressed not to put myself in the way of his knife.

Pleasure is a reward, given to the human system by evolution in return for services rendered to the preservation and increase of the species. I serve nothing natural in the business of making stories. It does not advance the race a jot that a writer tells tales of doubt and darkness and revelation. Why should I be rewarded with pleasure? I think the truest evidence of the divine in our dealings is the fact that our imaginations are indulged at all, that we are not simply breeding machines, programmed to procreate. The queer in his sterile heat, the anchorite in her sealed cell, the scientist measuring the distance between unreachable galaxies, and the poet agonizing for want of a syllable, are all living lives that serve no evolutionary purpose. Is the divine not most visible in our lack of practical application? Our dreaminess, our resistance to the imperatives of egg and sperm and family?)