People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James Baldwin
Nemesis reveals its truths to those it is about to destroy.
We are living through the death of false innocence. Baldwin’s assessment is an equation. An equation more powerful than E=MC2. The mechanism he elucidates is the maw out of which spews the violence we unleash, leading to our destruction. This is how Nemesis works.
Nemesis reveals its truths to those it is about to destroy.
Death and destruction are not equal. The victims of our violence die. They are maimed. They must mourn immense loss, knowing their voices are unheard. And then the cycle repeats. More die. More pain. More loss.
Our destruction is different. What we risk by shutting our eyes to reality is that we succumb to false victim-hood and, insisting on an innocence long dead, we become monsters.
What is a monster?
As I write how many are caught up in lashing out at the natural world? Some shooting “Vermin,” from Wolves to Coyotes, to Raccoons, to Rats. Some netting sharks, slicing off their fins and leaving them to slowly die, wriggling feebly until they starve. Some squash spiders in the bath…. They all justify their actions, “Monsters!” As Conrad discovered in the Heart of Darkness exposed within himself as well as his fellow Europeans as they wound their way up the Congo over a century ago, muttering under their breaths, “Kill all the brutes.”
Are such creatures monsters? The animals, I mean. Not the people…. No.
So much of our trouble seems to be connected with a conflation, a misunderstanding of what predation is and how it works. Humans, capable of metaphorical understanding, caught in confusion, applying the tactics of natural predators to their own strategies for assuming power and control over others. An other-hood expanding throughout history to include everything and everybody else.
This is the kind of thing monsters do. Ask Mary Shelly.
Monstrosity lies right at the point Baldwin delineates. It metastasizes from the point at which we refuse reality and insist on maintaining what is already dead. In this seizing after Power we fall prey to Nemesis. An actual Power, power arising from within the very unfolding of Being; what we reach for when we say reality.
Writing this, writing anything, I keep coming back to the realization that we are all at various levels and at various points in a cycle of this false innocence Baldwin warns us of. To me this feels like trying to help someone overdosing on sleeping pills. We stagger under their weight, attempting to Will them to stay awake while feeling our own weariness coming and going in waves, rushing from peaks of adrenaline soaked fear to troughs of bone tired weariness and despair and back again.
In this case it is the Enormity, our Edifice of Thought, that we struggle with. Writing, and reading we keep falling back into these old habits. Like thinking we understand….
We tend to read, or listen, with a rapacious quality to our awareness. An awareness weaponized to seek out points of “agreement” or “disagreement.” We latch onto any appearance of either and then stop thinking. Stop listening. We’ve found what we were after…. Slicing away our capacities until we too can do little more than wriggle and gasp, awaiting our deaths amidst the ruins of our destruction.
It is at this point, when we rush from curiosity into a false certainty, “I understand!” that we return to insisting on our long dead innocence and feed ourselves to Nemesis’ wrath.
We “consume” “ideas.” We find, “what we’re looking for.”
Revelation escalates the more we resist actuality. The more we insist on “Normalcy.” The more we refuse to accept that what has been “normal” has been vicious and brutalizing and is killing…, everything.
Revelation asks us simply to stop. Feel the weight. Learn what every true victim has always known, that our wishing after innocence is at the heart of our darkness.
Failure to recognize reality is the norm. It is also alienating when we try to live in a way that is authentic, demanding we pretend to subscribe to the norm in our daily lives. The artificial things we have been taught to value have come to mean little to me over time. Even living far differently than a typical American, I have to sadly recognize that I am a monster simply by being one. To a great degree, we are trapped by not just the choices we make, but the choices we have.