THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE – Thomas Ligotti

          

          Gledate li seriju TRUE DETECTIVE? Ne? Pa šta čekate, Ghoulov Pečat Preporuke? Imate ga! To je izuzetna, možda se čak može reći genijalna serija: preostala je još jedna epizoda do kraja, pa ću se, kad to sve bude završeno, oglasiti sa definitivnim sudom i rivjuom, ali i pre toga, ako dosad niste – skidajte to i gledajte pod hitno. A paralelno s tim, dok čekamo završnu epizodu, evo savršene lektire da se prekrati vreme!

            Jedan u nizu kvaliteta pomenute serije je i njena jaka literarna zaleđina: ne samo što je scenarista Nik Picolato pre svega odličan (objavljivani) pisac, nego je i scenario pun eksplicitnih i implicitnih aluzija na neke klasične i moderne majstore horora. Prilično prominentan među njima je Tomas Ligoti. O njegovoj prozi već sam na blogu pisao OVDE, pa bacite pogled ako vam je to promaklo.

            Ovog puta želim da vam skrenem pažnju na Ligotijevu izvanrednu NON-FICTION knjigu koja, kao i većina njegovog novijeg opusa (npr. MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE; I HAVE A SPECIAL PLAN FOR THIS WORLD i sl.), ima bombastičan naslov: THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE. U suštini, to je teorija i praksa nihilizma, sa korenima podjednako u Šopenhaueru i u Lavkraftu, kao i u izvornom budizmu, ali sa nekim modernim misliocima (i naučnicima, i slikovitim ekscentricima) dodatim da ilustruju osnovnu ideju knjige: da je samosvesno postojanje u ovom svetu greška, da zahteva više patnje i muke nego što vredi, i da je svekolika egzistencija – kako to Ligoti bombastično definiše – MALIGNANTLY USELESS!

            Možda ste se primili na pojedine mračno-otkrovenjske replike koje u PRAVOM DETEKTIVU izbacuje harizmatično-mračni Rast Kol (Metju Mekonahi). Evo nekoliko transparentnih LIGOTIZAMA iz serije.  

            Samosvest je neprirodna i protivprirodna perverzija; sopstvo je iluzija; mi smo ništa koje misli da je nešto a najbolje bi mu bilo da i formalno više ne postoji:

"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."

Mi smo samo smrtne, mesnate marionete:

"People... I have seen the finale of thousands of lives man. Young, old, each one was so sure of their realness. That their sensory experience constituted a unique individual. Purpose, meaning. So certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Truth wills out, everybody sees once the strings are cut off all down."

            Ipak, ovo su samo sporadične replike u seriji koja ipak nije nihilistička, nego sa srodnim idejama samo povremeno koketira (otud masovna popularnost). Ako želite da baš zaronite u totalno crnilo – a da tamo, ipak, uživate u divnim jezičkim konstrukcijama, nadahnutim crnoduhovitim frazama i mislima, u dražesno neodoljivom gaženju organizovane religije i njenih metafizičkih pretenzija uz istovremeno utabavanje pod zemlju izvikanih klasika horora (Bletijev ISTERIVAČ ĐAVOLA) u poređenju sa genijalnošću Lavkraftovog Č. D. VORDA – e, onda obratite pažnju na ovaj izbor nekih od lucidnijih, duhovitijih i pametnijih deonica iz Ligotijeve must-have knjige THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE.

            Sve vam je jasno kad vidite citate na njenom početku, koji kažu:

“I have to admit that the results of these considerations won’t amount to anything for anyone who ‘stands in life still fresh and gay,’ as the songs says.”

—Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death

Look at your body—

A painted puppet, a poor toy

Of jointed parts ready to collapse,

A diseased and suffering thing

With a head full of false imaginings.

—The Dhammapada

   The Thomas Ligotti SHOW   

  (The Cult of Ghoul MIX) 

  Excerpts from   
  THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE   

Schopenhauer wrote: “Let us for a moment imagine that the act of procreation were not a necessity or accompanied by intense pleasure, but a matter of pure rational deliberation; could then the human race really continue to exist? Would not everyone rather feel so much sympathy for the coming generation that he would prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate would not like to assume in cold blood the responsibility of imposing on it such a burden?”

Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally. It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: “What are we still doing in this horrible place?”

Contra Schopenhauer, Nietzsche not only took religious readings of life seriously enough to deprecate them at great length, but was hellbent on replacing them with a grander scheme of goal-oriented values and a sense of purpose that, in the main, even nonbelievers seem to thirst for —some bombastic project in which persons, whom he also took seriously, could lose (or find) themselves. Key to Nietzsche’s popular success with atheist-amoralist folk is his materialistic mysticism, a sleight of mind that makes the world’s meaninglessness into something meaningful and transmogrifies fate into freedom before our eyes.

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent putz who soiled Himself and the universe with His corruption, a born screw-up whose seedy creation led the Gnostics to conceive of this genetic force as a factory-second, low-budget divinity pretending to be the genuine article. They trust in anything that verifies their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain, unclear, or an out-and-out nightmare, but which sates their appetite for values not of this earth—that depressing, meaningless place they know so well and want nothing more than to obliterate from their consciousness.

Newsflash: anyone who must receive instruction in morality will not benefit from it. Those concerned with morality are not the ones who need concern themselves with morality. The ones who need to be concerned with morality are those who will never be concerned with morality.

Should the puzzle ever be put together, it would be the greatest disaster in human history. To piece together a picture of things as they really are in both the human and nonhuman world is not what anyone wants, for it would be the end of us.

Utopias are ersatz heavens unsupported by any knowledge, logic, or portents we have or can ever have. Life is suffering and the promise of a future of non-killing jobs or a jobless leisure is but an inveiglement to keep us turning on this infernal Ferris wheel of life, a booby prize when set beside nonexistence. Pessimist conclusion: at all levels, the systems of life — from sociopolitical systems to solar systems — are repugnant and should be negated as MALIGNANTLY USELESS.

Any killjoy will tell you: “If even one person’s life is a living hell, then the world and any happiness within it is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.”

The result is a being that is not what it believes itself to be, a puppet that cannot realize its puppet nature. Everything in our world coils around this grotesque misconception of ourselves. Our incompetence in seeing through this misconception, these lies that perpetuate us, is the tragedy of humankind.

To salve the pains of consciousness, some people send their heads to sunny places on the advice of a self-help evangelist. Not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it shines. Their only respite is in the unpositive. The best thing for them, really the only thing, is a getaway into bleakness. Turning away from the solicitations of hope and the turbulence they bring to the mind, sanctuary may be petitioned in desolate places —a pile of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book wherein someone whispers in a dry voice, “I am here, too.”

What we call “evil” captivates us from childhood to old age, never paling in its seductive entreaties, its heady effects on our imaginations and our glands. We are gluttons for atrocity and yawn at the quiescent. The most prominent of the angels is the one who started a war in heaven. In a milieu where there seemed no place for anything new, he invented evil... and has been on our minds ever since. One thing about infamy — it is never boring.

A self-acclaimed “non-entity” in his own time, Lovecraft has enlarged in stature since his death. This should not be taken as a sign that the world has “caught up” with him. That is not the issue. Neither the public nor the academic mind can embrace the consciousness of Lovecraft any more than it can latch on to that of Schopenhauer or Cioran, much less Zapffe’s. None of these writers portrayed a world acceptable to either average or distinguished heads, not as long as those heads can believe in God or Humanity, not as long as they are disgorging gospels of purpose and meaning and a future as vomitive as the past.

The narrative parameters of The Exorcist begin and end with the New Testament; those of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward could only have been conceived by a fiction writer of the modern era, a time when it had become safe not only to place humanity outside the center of the Creation but to survey the universe itself as centerless and our species as only a smudge of organic materials at the mercy of forces that know us not (as it is in the real world).

The works of both writers (Lovecraft and Poe) have been hooted down for what appears to their critics as bad writing, which translates as meaning that they wrote with an emotional intensity and in a spirit of self-disclosure that violated the rules of detachment to which professional authors largely adhere. True, their prose styles are often high-strung to hysterical. This is not untypical for solitary writers. It is also true that if they had not written as they did, nobody would be reading them today. The possessed quality of their writing is precisely why their works have lasted.

In one of his plentiful moments of fulgurant clarity, Schopenhauer spelled out why he thought that “sexual desire, especially when through fixation on a definite woman it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little.” The lesson is a straightforward one: everything in this life is more trouble than it is worth.

No one in a productive society wants you to know there are ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects that drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated. Drawn to peruse further that small library of the hopeless, the futureless, they may happen upon minds whose soundings into certain depths of thought immediately become indispensable to their existence. Some may fall to their knees to hear a voice other than theirs execrating this planet as a nightmarish penitentiary, not excusing its dust as that of a dreamy paradise in the making. By these words they have been confirmed.

The tolerance that we, the people, have for submitting ourselves to a life of toil gives one a sense of why the rulers of this world have such contempt for us and enact their villainies whenever the mood strikes them.

The game is to get the smalltimers to identify with the big-time players, those for whom the lines between money and power have become blurred. This is an elementary con, since on the whole people are only too willing to believe they have a fair stake in the game. (A government-run lottery, which everyone knows as a “stupidity tax,” is proof against arguments to the contrary.) Napoleon referred to his troops as “cannon fodder,” but you can be sure that they spoke well of him, because by doing so they believed they were speaking well of themselves as the sidekicks of a Great Man. Such minds are convinced that they are part of a greater cause than any to which they could aspire on their own. They will argue for it, they will kill for it, and they will die for it. All they require is a paper-thin slice of a humongous pie, a walk-on role in a historical epic, and a few shares of common stock in Project Immortality and Sons, Inc. They will never be allowed or allow themselves to understand the real workings of the system.

Prospective parents may indeed be ogres, but it is too ghastly to contemplate that anyone consciously enters a new vertebrate into the rat race with the idea that its life will be preponderantly an unhappy one. Its death, a cheerless certainty, is another matter. None may plead ignorance on that score. Then how do they do it? How are people able to look their children in the eye without flinching? How is it that they are not haunted by remorse for embroiling them in this high-volume business of putrefying bodies?

But some individuals do not care for the evening news, viewing it is as a ticker tape of fragments and abstracts from a world simmering in its own stupidity. Real-life misery has no coherence to it, no vision to channel. As Mark Twain said, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” Not every mortal who owns a television wants to consume the raw data of the world any more than they must. Instead, they would prefer to attend to the words of someone who will stand up and say, “Life is just one damn thing after another” rather than surrender their heads to some jackass of a news anchor who presents the day’s horror as so many human interest stories and tearful installments of emotional pornography because his corporate overlords figure they can use this kind of stuff to sell advertising minutes. Everyone knows that this is the case. Everyone knows that this is an abomination. And everyone, more or less, is hooked on it.

From the wallflower Brahma to the lame-brained Yahweh to a menagerie of prime movers who spawned the earth and its denizens through unreasoning verve or groaning defecation, Creators come off as a rather sorry bunch. Their products are so shoddy that they are constantly dying out or blowing up or breaking apart right out of the box. And their antics remind one of toddlers who are playing with their toys one moment and smashing them the next. For pure brainpower, Creators are unqualified to carry the deerstalker hat of Sherlock Holmes, a construct that outshines any star set to explode in this spilt-milk of a universe.

As luck would have it, Adam and Eve could no more choose not to do what they did than they could choose not to choose not to choose. . . . And their Master was no help, choosing to keep His own counsel about the booby traps he had strung between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After they tripped the wire, He had his excuse to throw the recalcitrant twosome out on their ear from Eden, so that they might become the first family of a race of inbreds. As fall guys go, so they went. Lucifer, of course, had inside information, being a longtime acquaintance of the Creator and knowing full well what He was capable of. When paradise was lost, those two people in the Garden of Eden played second fiddle to the Tempter, who also upstaged his former boss and took over the puppet show. It is Lucifer, rather than the Elohim —in singular, plural, or Trinitarian format — who would sustain us, or rather sustain our imagination of ourselves. The Gnostics’ biggest mistake was their attempt to rehabilitate this figure as one of truth and knowledge in opposition to the Old Testament imposter, whom they disparaged as an evil demiurge. Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most convincing as a character, which is to say, as a fiction that has been so fully realized that he misguides us with a false feeling of our own reality because we are the ones who made him: he is subordinate to us, especially in the art of lying. For the acephalics among us who have said that the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he did not exist, it must be said back: if he did not exist, then neither would we. God may have created humanity in his image, as the story goes, but we created the Evil One in ours. In a universe that was already rife with built-in torments, Lucifer, following our lead, chose to complement this standard hell with an optional one of his own making. God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one has yet written the obituary of the Devil. He must endure to represent us to ourselves as the fiendish miscreations of this world—so tortured, so deceiving, so real. He is the true hero of the race, and as long as we keep him breathing, as long as we outrank him and any other beasts of our invention, then we are the immortal, the deathless, the superior, if not literally then at least in literature.

Having this knowledge, we could never be at home in nature. As beings with consciousness, we were delivered into another world —the one that is not natural. All around us were natural habitats, but within our every atom was the chill of the unknown, the uncanny, the unearthly, and even the terrible and fascinating mystery of the holy. Simply put: we are not from here. We move among living things, all those natural puppets with nothing in their heads. But our heads dwell in another place, a world apart where all the puppets are dead in the midst of life.

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            Imajte na umu sledeće: ova knjiga je za najveću sirotinju dostupna onlajn, odavno. Uz malo guglanja možete je naći za free download. ALI! Ipak treba znati da to NIJE "kompletna" knjiga nego njen raniji, kraći draft iz 2007. godine. Ovo je suviše genijalna stvar da je ne biste imali na papiru – tim pre što njeno štampano izdanje predstavlja znatno prerađenu i dopunjenu verziju u odnosu na ovo što imate online. Najpametniji i najpovoljniji način da ovu must-have knjižicu sebi nabavite jeste preko sajta Bookdepository gde je trenutno oko 11 E.

            Za kraj, ili početak (ako Ligotija do sada još niste otkrili niti ste sebe njime do sada častili) evo i ovog draguljčeta: