Toward an Apocalyptic Literature

Letter from the Editor

We have officially entered the Apocalyptic Age.

And as we sit in our rooms writing our precious notes—our lists of what we’ll miss most and how we want our survivors to dress the corpses we leave behind—scrawling these thoughts on bits of paper and the odd receipt—as we wait for the door to be knocked in by the stormtroopers of the future—we must not look away from this dark rising. Rather than censoring ourselves, we must take this opportunity to speak the most terrifying of truths, for this may be the last moment we get to say anything at all before the duct tape is slathered across our snot-slick lips and we are bound to the particular vision of reality the cruel and heartless among us want to seer upon our skulls. Which is not to say that we should stare into the coming darkness with the timid paralysis of deer, but to stand with a pathetic confidence that we can withstand this blow of history even if it means everything we thought to be true turned false, and everything we hold dear crushed to dust by the oppressors among us. This is the literature for the end times.

It is not a theoretically-minded thing, but a literature that also is painfully aware of the actual, literal, physical happenings of the world—which does not mean a politically or ideologically motivated literature—but a practical one, that brings to light those affected by the sweeping statements of demagogues and gives vision to the dark forces of post-fact journalism—fiction must showcase the horror hidden behind the rhetoric of this mad villainy we see sprouting into our homes and throughout our country and Earth. This is the literature of a people drowning. This is the sounds we make as we drown, but whether we drown or not, it is important that we make these sounds. It is the literature of a dying animal. It is a literature written in the dark while we are dying, or while the vehicle has already gone careering off the cliff. We will work to understand, even as the bullet is shattering our skulls, even as they are battering down our doors, for once we have jettisoned the search for meaning in our efforts to simply and blindly react, we are nothing but puppets in the on-going game of humanity unraveling in its terror. This is a literature that weeps the black tears of the afterlife.

Back in the nineties, even as we chuckled at the romantically broken dystopia we saw playing out in the romantically gritty atmospheres of Hollywood, in the many blockbuster dreamscapes on display, from Mad Max’s endless desert to the schizophrenically-fueled streets and subbasements of Tyler Durden’s iconic universe. It was the beginning of PC, and the Neocon Movement was just finding its footing in its on-going attacks of the Clinton administration and particularly the private life of Bill Clinton himself, and many of the younger generation of voters were discontented with the entire political system. It was the time of OK Soda, retro fashion, and a boom period for indie music. Performance art was popping up in lofts and cafe’s around Boston, but that craving for the erupting apocalypse also led to the green anarchy movement in the Pacific Northwest, ELF, and the WTO riots, and to some of us it seemed not that the paradigm of progress was inherently broken but that it would of necessity and naturally be whisked into a total collapse of the money system, and the rise of a more ecologically aware localized society of underdogs and dirtbags everywhere freed from the oppressive weight of this artificial construction humanity had manufactured as a protection against the uncertainties of nature, disease, hunger, and the invasion of strange peoples—that we would shed the constricting skin of this particular brand of society easily and rise instead into a greener more dank version of the world. Then came 9/11.

9/11 didn’t change the world, but the response of the Bush administration did a lot to make America what it is today, while all the while claiming it’s 9/11’s fault that they had to make these drastic changes—throwing out the Geneva conventions, beginning our endless festivities in the Middle East, the Patriot Act, and doling out extreme sentences to the members of ELF, for example, caught during this period, all of whom were tried as domestic terrorists when all they had done was trash an SUV or two, and all of whom got massive sentences.

And now, here we are, watching as the car goes careering over the edge of the cliff, and we are calling our senators, and protesting, and all these are good and important things, but it is also important to continue to create, to grow communities and prepare for not just the moment of impact but the on-going aftermath, to look to each other and ask ourselves, What can I do to help the people around me? To become better people. To awaken the sleeping. To brighten our souls purposefully so as to be able to withstand the encroaching abyss of meaning.

This is the challenge.

When faced with a profound evil, it can always be understood as a deep and remarkable challenge of the good in us, and this challenge does not just relate to helping those on the street either. The time has come for us to put down and let go all the bullshit. Forget the idiocy of post-modernism, never mind the also idiotic metamodernism, and instead be an honest human with each other. Think, More David Foster Wallace, less Wes Anderson. “There’s nothing more frightening than a labyrinth without a center,” Borges once wrote in reference to Citizen Kane and its hollow-hearted protagonist—who happens to be a hero of Mr. Trump—and we who are makers of mazes must be searching for that inexplicable center wherever it might be. I’m not talking about centrists or Central Intelligence, but about the center of the person, the center of the problem, and perhaps to see into and past the center-less self and stare even deeper and directly into the “banality of evil” which is precisely that missing center in the center of the labyrinth, the emptiness of evil, the foolishness of evil, or as Bertrand Russell said in an interview near the end of his life, “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”

I am reminded of Kant’s concern regarding Hume. As he said in the Preface to the Prolegomena, “No event has occurred that could have been more decisive for the fate of this science than the attack made upon it by David Hume,” and goes on to say that, “Hume proceeded primarily from a single but important concept of metaphysics, namely, that of the connection of cause and effect” (4, 257; 7), and specifically that there is no clear logical connection between the two, that the idea that the impact of one billiard ball causes another billiard ball to move is a pure act of faith, and basically the entire Trump campaign and philosophy seems to be based on taking Hume at his word. “Who are YOU to say this billiard ball hitting this other billiard ball CAUSED it to move,” he seems to be saying with every late-night tweet, and what we are seeing in the workaday world is, on the one hand, realists who are shocked that a person could possibly behave as if facts were a matter of opinion, and … well, I’m not sure what’s going on on the other hand.

Thing of it is, though, that actually there is a subtle difference, because Trump is actually asking us to not believe that the billiard ball was moved at all, but this bald-faced lie both highlights the fact of causation as an act of belief and is demanding us to put aside what is clearly real and true for whatever falsehoods we are presented with by the ruling powers. This is, of course, classic coercion, as has been documented in various places, but most famously, quoted in 1984: “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” This is an attack on realism and specifically, any kind of clear confidence that what is being reported by news outlets is accurate or true, and rational debate is met with the crudest of insults. This is what the collapse of civilization looks like, and it is our duty as creators and distributors of meaning to not only counteract this miasma daily and to whomever we meet regardless of political affiliation, but also to prepare ourselves and those we can for what’s coming. There is no more avant garde—there is only apocalypse.

Now, when I say, There is no avant garde, what I actually mean is that there is no sense of an evolving artistic form as presented by radical individual artists. This age has ended, but there are those of us who, when faced with this profound break, and profound loss of a culture and community that nurtures the arts, and has for a long time, we are like the hero in the action film who has just performed his daring leap for the helicopter only this time he missed and is now tumbling towards the approaching earth. We see it coming. We are aware that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but still we have faith, and maybe that faith can lead to us becoming lighter than air, for the fight we are presenting is not a fight full of screams. That fight may be coming, but for now—as the body politic continues to go tumbling towards its total collapse—and as the ecosystems of the earth go tumbling towards their eventual collapse—and as the body politic flails, AS IT SHOULD—and as we all SHOULD—protesting, contacting those in power, funding the organizations working to help those in need and fight policies that are dangerous to each other and the environment—as all this is occurring, there also has to be a little part inside this body that works to bring the faith, to show the way, not just politically, but poetically, to mine the internal darkness, and scream the most warm-hearted of screams, to be the eyes within, for to not reflect is to die. If we are not reflecting, then we have already ceased to be human.

Of COURSE, the car is indeed careering over the edge, and I don’t understand how to talk anymore now that my tongue’s been cut out. And perhaps there IS nothing left but silence, but… that having been said… when faced with this terminal silence, then the only appropriate literature is an on-going scream. This is your apocalypse. Do what you need, but do it loud.

For before truth was put in a false equivalency with fake it was lessened as always plural, frequently personalized, inevitably relativized, or more specifically that all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making them. There is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish universal truth according to post-modernism. It was post-modernism that gave us Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, made news organizations and scientists acknowledge and accept as equals the ignorant voices of the paid corporate shills brought on to debate them.

But the subtle unraveling of a shared sense of reality governed by universal laws and obeying certain basic principles finally snapped into an oblivion of meaninglessness with the rise of Trump. Here is a quote from a recent New Yorker article:

“There is nothing subtle about Trump’s behavior. He lies, he repeats the lie, and his listeners either cower in fear, stammer in disbelief, or try to see how they can turn the lie to their own benefit. Every continental wiseguy, from Žižek to Baudrillard, insisted that when they pulled the full totalitarian wool over our eyes next time, we wouldn’t even know it was happening. Not a bit of it. Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation. They are not postmodern traps and temptations; they are primitive schoolyard taunts and threats,” (Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America, by Adam Gopnik; Daily Comments, Jan. 27, 2017).

And no Kant has stepped forward who can truly do battle against this solipsism on its own level. This is us.

But even more than this, like the idea of post-industrialism, post-modernism itself is a clear indication of the very symptom that has led to the unraveling of the old world order. These are nonexistent ideologies for meaning obscuring actual truth on the one hand [post-modernism], and nonexistent economic ideologies replacing the former working model with literally nothing [post-industrialism]. This is how the world came apart and what we are faced with instead is the new medievalism of Alexander Dugin and geopolitics in general and the accompanying fascism and tribalism and disregard for everyday people and everyone bracing for this violent collapse.

In this post-fact world, our fictions must fill in the gap and show reality as it is. We have a duty to explore and shore up the cracks in our epistemological frameworks. We have a duty to come face to face with the brutal truths of our times and to write, present, and distribute these truths regardless of whether they are desired or whether our books are readable. The time of literary pop that is gauged based upon readership and returns is over. The publishing industry is as clueless as the mainstream liberals who walked right into this disaster. (Along with the rest of us in all fairness.) We, the everyday creators need to work, proselytize, and to promote. We need to think beyond the four corners of the book.

I am reminded also of Yiannopoulos’ comment when Hillary held up some particularly offensive Breitbart article, “You made this!” The idea of Yiannopoulos that all of this is just a hilarious gag he’s pulling is also very po-mo. He’s ironically detached from the horror he has wrought.

And that having been said, we must be emotionally engaged in our subject and our work. Both irony and ideology create a distancing effect, a framework I can place around my product without having to engage it in its terrifying literalness. Because we ourselves as creators have been kidding ourselves. To honestly and sincerely create things of importance that will in some way work to change the world, we must also work daily to honestly and sincerely examine our work critically, and not just within one particularly cozy ideology, but through as many eyes as we can find within ourselves.

I mentioned DFW just now, and, although I think he’s a good light going forward, actually, similar to William Blake, DFW doesn’t quite fit in either age—not truly post-modern but also not truly apocalyptic either.

This literature of the end times is one part a record of a world that will be gone, one part an effort toward understanding and preparing for the world that’s coming, and one part wild card, like a trick you don’t understand but you perform it anyway. We are the makers of tomorrow’s religion and the last generation who have the leisure to capture our world in print. Can literature save us? Even when we’re not much more than confused asses staring into the abyss? And that’s on a good day?

Regardless of whether we can do it or not, we are the voices of our age, and our age is an age of apocalypse, whereas modernism and even post-modernism were still working within the paradigm of progress, that from the Enlightenment, the planet has been slowly and increasingly growing, and maybe the modernists wanted to open up new vistas beyond reason with their surrealism and fractured narratives, but that the artist could show the way towards something new that has not yet come into being, when in truth, this progress turned cruel to become a machinery that chews up individual persons in its bureaucracy and can lead to mass destruction and suffering. But still, at that time, there was a sense that society will continue to grow on the foundation of reason, and on through the second half of the twentieth century—even as more and more people were becoming disillusioned and disenfranchised, both from the arts and the political sphere, as the conspiracy theorist became a thing, and “outsider art”, like there were these people who weren’t artists but somehow making art all the same, people who we chuckled at knowingly even when they were sincerely expressing their ideas with a brilliant clarity—and all the while the overarching ideology of progress was creaking under its own weight.

The idea of progress was done by the time I was young, but it has received its final death knell recently.

Now we are left screaming as the car goes over the edge of the cliff, and we are all looking at each other uncertainly as we chuckle the nervous chuckles of those who don’t want to admit that they are about to crash against the rocks below. Our jobs, as artists, writers, documentarians, and general-speaking ne’er-do-wells is to instead stare the rocks in the face, because just as the general delusion levels are reaching the epic heights usually reserved for crack addicts and the serial killers of yesteryear—as post-fact begins to blossom into reality like a kind of reality parasite—let us rejoice in the most unpleasant of truths. Let us treat these ugly truths as the most beautiful alcohol-smeared of hopes while diving straight into the end with the ecstasy of persons who crave nothing more than to be spliced into pieces by a bedrock consisting of the sharpest of blades. Stare the end in the eyes and you just might steer clear, but this ever-increasing shifty-eyed routine’s something like talking casually to your buddy at top volume as the semi barrels you down.

Point being, wake up. It’s not a game. None of this is a game. The game has gone on too long. To hell with the game. This game must be ended. We shall end the game. Let the game end. It is time for this to be ended. Let us end this game.

But how? That is the question on which this apocalyptic literature shall be based. And the only answer is to dive.

Apocalyptic literature is a literature by the people and for the people. It is a literature of everyday losers writing to their loser friends in weird strings of poetry inspired by string theory and long strands of of dialogue inspired by Barbara Streisand. It is the saddest saps looking up to say, “Goodbye, American government. You were good while you lasted, but now we are going to suffer through this darkness you have brought upon us. We need to sing in the sounds of the new constituency. We are death, and we are rising.”

—GBoyer

Brookline, MA, 2017