A N G S T
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There comes a time in a boy's life when he knows he's eventually going to die. He is never the same after.
Sein sum Tode. German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote of death as being something completely other than what it is thought to be. One's own inevitable death cannot be comprehended in terms of other experiences. It is not a state or an event. It is so completely "other" than life that it defies comprehension. It is an abyss that opens up in under you and swallows you and that is the end of the life in terms of which everything you have ever known and done and been has been determined.
Death is not something that happens in your life. Death is the end of life.
Your death is the end of your life.
There is a little-discussed phenomenon in the private life of some people - something extremely personal and secret and all-encompassing and shared with very very few others - that I will call "terminal angst". When you are gripped by it or become the confidant of someone who is gripped by it, it changes you. It consumes you. There is nothing else like it.
"Terminal angst" is the firm and unwavering (but secret and undiagnosed) conviction that you are terminally ill and about to die. You are convinced that within your body is a disease that has gripped its claws on you and is about to snuff out your life forever. The angst-ridden person may fear the disease is cancer or heart disease or a terminal infection or an aneurism or some unknown malady.
The person may be so convinced of his rapid deterioration that he refuses to seek out medical attention to confirm or deny or treat it. Diagnosis and cure have nothing to do with what's going on here. The operative fact gripping the person is that death - inevitable death and most likely imminent death - is unavoidable. And in a sense, he is right: for nothing can keep the person from eventually dying. It's at the end of his road (and the roads of each of us), and he now sees it for what it is.
The person begins to feel great sorrow for himself and his failing body and his life and his world. He sees the world through sad, melancholy, tearful eyes. He feels his body like a precious gift about to be destroyed. He is mourning for himself. He is always on the brink of bitter tears. He feels the blackness of the grave creeping in on himself. He fears the night. He feels like a faint candle burning inside a skeleton, waiting for the winds to blow and snuff it out. Absolutely nothing in the world or his life or his conversations or his friends can sway him from the ceaseless conviction that he is about to die.
Heidegger wrote about the false ways in which we approach the issue of personal death. We think of others dying; we think of funerals and graveyards and empty spaces and such; we focus on rancidity and morbidity; but on all of these occasions, we look at death through the eyes of the disinterested observer. Death is an event to be comprehended and placed in the context of all the other things we think about. Heidegger said this understanding of death is a kind of defence mechanism which protects us from the angst that accompanies the genuine realization that I will die and all will end at that moment.
Kids die too. Kids see death. Kids wonder about death. Kids fear death. Kids feel themselves dying.
Picture a child in kindergarten, sent by his family to a funeral service for a child in his class. The service is absolutely oppressive. The crying and eulogizing is oppressive. The coffin is oppressive. The graveside is oppressive. All of the black and sadness and comfortlessness and formality is oppressive. It is all-consuming and far far more than the child can bear. But the child cannot escape the situation because it had already gripped hold of his mind. The earth is swallowing him up so that he will be alone and cold and in darkness forever. Whatever matters of religion and faith he has been taught are separate from this new and disturbing revelation that the earth waited for him and would take him, despite his protests, to be inside it, forever, all alone.
See him awakening in a cold sweat time after time, and nothing can comfort him. He'd turn on the radio in the hope that it would distract him. But the sounds seemed distant, detached, unreal. Nothing can break through this alone-ness, this morbidity, this temporariness of existence. It is not something to be bypassed. It waits at the end of the road, and there is no re-routing. And it gives no warnings. It lurks with stealth. It is the shadow behind you in the park at night. It is the low mournful sound in the midnight forest. It is the heavy darkness cutting away at the floor underneath your bed. It is the black realm behind the closet door, waiting for you to close your eyes and drift into unconsciousness.
Hear him in his thoughts: I love Nirvana and all of a sudden, Kurt Cobain is dead. He has left a suicide note. Everyone is reading from it. Everyone has a distant stare in the eyes. Everyone is stiff and cold and without humor. I listen to the music again. I listen to "All Apologies" and I realize he really did it. He really took his life, and he really is no more. It is not a stunt, not a game, not a fiction, not something to be gotten over and remedied, not something to be forgotten after a week of news. It is permanent, forever, oppressively irreversible. The flesh is already rotting off his bones. There is nothing there anymore that we would call life. There will be no more singing, no more music, no more motion, no more ambition. There is a great vacancy in the sockets where his eyes used to be.
I am hunting. The deer that was just leaping through the bushes now lies at my feet dead. Never will it move again. Something has finished. Something has gone. I have done this. I have made a permanent impact. I have acted, and its life is no more. Life - that most vibrant of phenomena - is snuffed out. There is no undoing what has been done. The die is cast. For this animal, there is no longer even blackness, emptiness, vacuum. There isn't anything at all. It has ceased to exist, and this lifeless cavern shrinks to the forest floor like an empty shirt, shriveling and putrifying and returning to dirt.
And I too feel the blackness coming on - and there is nothing in the world I can do to prevent myself from ending in this way.
What happens in those moments when the thought of one's own death becomes oppressive and demise seems imminent? Is it perhaps more than the person can bear? What if he cannot shake the feeling? How does he go on without going crazy? How does he protect his sanity? Does he joke about it, hoping the laughter will chase away the fear? Or does he rage in fury, reacting in anger to the fragility of the life that he holds so dear? What is the point of building a life if it all comes crumbling down in the end in a heap of maggots? How grossly unfair - but who in this evolutionary cosmos do we complain to, if life is but an accident and there is no special notice of any particular individual and no ultimate court of appeal or second chance?
Some men darkened by death-thoughts blame their parents for having brought them into the world. Some want to leave the world in a blaze of glory so no man can say they didn't make a difference. Some want their final act to highlight the absurdity of it all - of life, of love, of caring, of dreaming, of hoping, of planning, of saving, of building, of progressing, of trying to stay healthy, of trying to stay alive. What more does one gain by accomplishing things before dying? How appallingly unsatisfying!
Brought into the wrong family, brought into the wrong body, brought into the wrong town or the wrong country, brought into the wrong time, brought into the wrong species. It is all a cruel accident, to be stuck with this one life, this one paltry existence, this one chance at living - and look what a mess it turns out to be?
I listen to dark music, dress in dark clothes, tell dark stories, pursue dark hobbies, think dark thoughts, dream dark dreams, live a dark existence. I am what the imminence of death does to a person. I am what the absurdity of life does to a person. I am what it means to be utterly screwed up. I am the botched abortion. I am the hanged man who lived. I am the man who spent 50 years in a dungeon and has no hope of escape. I am the only living man on planet earth - and I can't take it anymore!
Depeche Mode sings "Blasphemous Rumors". It is black and empty and angry.
I listen to The Cure. I listen to Killing Joke. I listen to Sisters of Mercy. I listen to Peter Murphy and Bauhaus. I listen to Joy Division. I listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees. I listen to Ministry. I listen to Nine Inch Nails. I listen to Marilyn Manson. I listen to Sepultura. I listen to Cannibal Corpse. I listen to Deicide. I go from angst to bitter-angst. I go from fear to wrath. I go from depression to rage. I curse the heavens and vow to have my revenge on existence.
How can one have a preoccupation with morbidity without having at least once felt the abyss of personal death hanging inside like a growing vacuum? When the abyss inside grows until the skin is the thinnest cellophane layer keeping body and soul together, what then?
Can you imagine a boy who is absolutely preoccupied with death and killing and maiming? He writes it and draws it and talks it and sings it. He wears it and carries it and demonstrates it and lives it. He sees guns and bombs and knives and pincers. He feels so close to death that he feels himself becoming an Angel of Death. The abyss is eating him, consuming him, devouring him, encompassing him, emptying him, obliterating him, annihilating him.
What do you say to the boy who, like so many other boys and girls in this generation, has absolutely no hope? More guns are used in some places for suicide than for murder. We see Kurt Cobain. We see countless kids throughout America and Canada and Sweden and Russia and other countries, killing themselves, walking into their own tombs with deliberateness. What is moving them? What is the nature of the blackness that has gripped them? Why do they have no hope?
We see schools where it is illegal to teach religion and homes where there is no time to teach faith and television programs where religion and faith are ridiculed. The new religion is scepticism. The new faith is accidentalism. There is no God. There is no Truth. There is no absolute value system. There is no point. There is no future. This is not Generation X. This is Generation Zero! Generation Nothing! Generation Empty! Generation Gone! Generation Stupid! Generation "X"ed! Generation Up-Yours! Generation F@#% YOU!!!
If a kid is not instilled with values he can believe in, then where will he get his values - and what makes you think he will adopt any values at all? When he visits the black hole of death, nothing keeps him from being sucked into the vortex, because he has nothing to cling to. America replaced religion with pan-humanistic tolerance of all points of view. And Surprise! - when you tolerate all points of view and give no particular view superiority, then you have no value system whatsoever. If no belief system can make an absolute claim to truth in the mind of a young person, then all values are relative - and the act of valuing is pointless. Arbitrary valuation is no valuation at all.
Church-state separation is one thing, but when the parent abdicates his responsibility to instill in a child a coherent value system, then you end up with a valueless child. And why the hell not do drugs? Why the hell not join a gang? Why the hell not do a drive-by? Why the hell not blow my brains out? If no one can say for certain what really matters, then who is to say doing these things is wrong? It is my life, my freedom, my chance on this planet, and I'll do as I please.
Life without principles.
Oh, we have principles: be nice to people and obey the rules. But when push comes to shove, you can pick and choose who you are nice to, and rules are open to revision and re-interpretation. Don't trust strangers, and live on the edge. Don't let yourself be tread upon, and break all the rules you can get away with. Live for yourself and be free. (The natural progression of pointlessly-inconsistent principles.)
What are the values one picks up from TV? We live in a world where there are too many people and everyone is a number. Few can escape the crowd. Few can stand out as special. Only the beautiful and the strong and the wealthy and the sexy and the smart and the musical and the athletic and the outrageous can break out of the routine. Everyone else is lawn grass.
Terminal angst takes hold, and I feel myself slipping. What do I do? Do I sit here and mourn? Do I make my life right with God? What if I've been given no God? What if I'm too pissed off to mourn? What if this is the very last straw and I just want to explode for once? Who is to blame when the valueless youngster expresses this valuelessness in an extreme way?
Ask young people today what really matters. Ask them what is absolutely true. Ask them what is absolutely right and absolutely wrong. Ask them what the point of life is. Ask them what it all matters in the end. And ask them not just to give you the answers you want to hear. Ask them to cut the B.S. and tell it like it is. And brace yourself! Brace yourself, because you might just catch a horrifying vision of Generation Zero! Generation Nothing! Generation Empty! Generation Gone! Generation Stupid! Generation "X"ed! Generation Up-Yours! Generation F@#% YOU! Generation Blow-Your-Brains-Out!!!
Tell me - who is responsible when a kid has nothing to believe in?
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