You think you know where you’re going but you aren’t going anywhere.
The world as presented is not the world.
Small village in the mountains of Nepal and barely a week ago Kathmandu erupted in violence. The long arched windows of Singha Durbar (or Lion Palace) framed bonfires swelling out from their neoclassical cage to turn the night red but in the morning all that was left was the scorched aftermath—and you’re left scrambling for—the day’s evolution into a haiku of habits? The moment when everything turns clear as crystal? A way out of your own decaying self? Who do you think you are? Who are you in truth?
We seem to have forgotten that we live in the 21st century and that we are actively working to end our world. We pretend that we can continue to evolve in classical Hegelian fashion from thesis (Modernism) to antithesis (Postmodernism) to synthesis (Metamodernism) but that evolution assumes that the paradigm of progress is still progressing gently up its incline of innovation and toward some partial perfection. When—who thinks like that anymore?
This train has gone off the rails. The train has become a bear and we are caged inside the belly of this beast as it cavorts towards the cliff. The end is more than nigh, it’s a daily nightmare. And the nigthmares keep getting darker.
But what you see is not what you get.
This is the apocalypse. We are the gnostics. The end is a beginning. The eye is a hook that’s hooked us. The coming dead pray for the imminent ending of our systems of control and our endless diarrhea of plastic and the chokehold of our bureaucracies and the blindness—the constant blindness of all and every—because the eye is a hook and it’s been hooked.
To find the Real, let go of realism. Objectivity matters and activism matters but the problem we face is larger. We are suffering from a parasite that eats reality and excretes fantasy. The body politic has turned sick from a blinding fear of what terrors it is unleashing upon tomorrow even as tomorrow is flying up to meet today as we barrel over the cliff.
This reality parasite is an algorithm. It’s a cancer of screens. It’s greed and complacency. But also the delusion of the artistic and intellectual class that we’re still living in the world of the 20th century and all its rules and hopes and possibilities when we’re already dead. We just don’t know it yet.
We are time travelers from the dead world of the future waiting for the apocalypse to catch up to the present.
How did this happen?
Truths turned into truisms. The realism of the early twentieth century evolved into the fakery of the post-modern and its obnoxiously audacious claims, tantalizing at first but ultimately inane and nihilistic, that led the way directly to the post-truth age and its rampant authoritarianism and casual double speak. Lyotard is responsible for the end of America.
But the worst is Metamodernism. Like a Centrist Democrat trying win support from every possible angle, metamodernists take no position of their own and instead want to forever live in past movements. Metamodernism panders to itself. It sucks its own cock. It is endlessly having its cake and eating it too as the sinkholes proliferate and the list of extinct species grows. It is a way for academics to legitimize their existence. It is forever looking back. It is the 20th century in drag as the 21st.
The answer to our times is a contemporary gnosticism.
We know what we see, and we know that what we see is not what we know. We have no ideological underpinnings. We have only belief. The future is coming. We write for this coming future. The world we live in is based on many elaborate fakeries. We write for the unspoken truths. We scream with our hands and we scramble through garbage for there is no place for us in the now of now. We will only have a place when we step out of here and into the outside of things.
As the instruments of power cannibalize their own citizenry and yet I do nothing. I sit and watch from the mountains of Nepal—as the police open fire on the protesters—as the halls of government burn—as the rolling curfews limit our movement—as the future becomes a shifting collage of the various unpleasant outcomes.
And you see it as hopeless too. You want to walk on water and take up arms against a sea of troubles and kill the Buddha you see on the road so you can come to know your inherent Buddha nature and dance with the devil and ride shotgun with Presley and all the other metaphors and fantasies of the doomed when faced with their doomed status. But all you see are the four walls of the world you occupy and there are no doors out of it and this closed system is itself toppling over a cliff as you watch all the things in said room slide sickeningly to one side. This is you.
Let’s take you a step further.
You are stuck in a glittering trap. It looks pretty but all its prettiness is also the walls of the room. You know this already. You laugh about this with your friends. You reference the invisible prison and that scene in My Dinner with Andre where Andre Gregory talks about New York as a prison. But all the same, you continue to stare into the glittering trap.
You have been taught to ‘write what you know’ and ‘stay in your lane’ when there are no lanes and you know nothing.
Write to explore what you don’t know. Get lost regularly in dangerous neighborhoods and unfamiliar countries. The known is the false. The known is the treadmill and this is a treadmill situated inside a larger landscape currently barreling over the cliff. Your goal is to find your way out of this larger landscape and to do that, you need to explore its most outlandish and alien landscapes.
The known is the glittering trash. The known is your comfort zone. The known is boring and worse than that it’s false. Only the unknown is fact.
This is neither a political or a religious or an artistic manifesto. It is all and none of them. It is what happens when the universe becomes unmoored—politically, economically, ecologically, epistemologically. When the paradigm of progress ceased to function, when there was no more future to work towards, no “better tomorrow” in which the experimental art of today is guiding us—when our climate models started blowing up and the global world order started breaking down—the need for this manifesto arose.
You see the invisible world. This is why you’re here. What you see is not the-thing-in-itself but a frame in which to place yourself. To inhabit the seen universe as it is—this is the challenge. Rather than using it as the screen on which we paint ourselves. The seen universe only has agency when we do not. Only when we blind ourselves does it see. Only when we are the universe looking back at ourselves, do we see.
The Ox Cart of the Buddhists and the LLMs of Silicon Valley are near identical. Their lack of inherent existence does nothing to the actual usage of them. We gasp at the seeming intelligence of the LLM because we too are nothing but language mimicry machines that convert reality into fantasy and the devices you surround yourself with only reinforce this process of unseeing the world but you can turn unseeing to your advantage. Turn your biases against yourself. Stop trying to make sense of the world.
Focus on no exact point and you will perceive all possible points indistinctly.
Gnosis is direct, experiential knowledge of divine reality, but what does this actually mean? It means God is a place where some holy spectacle lies. It means the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It means seeing through a glass darkly. It means constructing castles in the sand but knowing that they’re sand. Can there be a divine reality and a dead God? Think permanent revolution plus radical noparticipation plus the creation of a new culture plus seeing-without-seeing. The hand you create with is the zombie hand of a dead deity. The struggle you fight is for no purpose but because to not fight is not an option. You are the youths in Hong Kong hopelessly throwing their lives away. You are creating new forms of art and literature even as the world around you goes up in smoke.
Because the world as is is not the true world. And the art that you make is not the real art. The real art is what happens to you when you make it. The real world is what happens after the ending of the world.
The killing of history and humanity requires your participation. Your complicity is necessary for their fictions to continue to function.
