This is the first final version of this piece. Expect minor changes as needed.
Our life is one of dynamic unmeaning. We preserve things like hoarders, minds wired against change, yet incapable of sitting still. Research has even shown that walking in circles is natural if in a space with no conceivable landmarks, which is funny to me in a dark sort of way. We build literal and metaphorical monoliths to beings that are still built of flesh and blood, letting mechanization of arsenals dissuade us from becoming dissidents. Our political, our philosophical, our art, a great pine tree rotted out by a fungal grasp, set to fall when we reach some unknowable peak where the tree has lost its little stability. This xylophagous fungus is parasitic, eating away at what isn’t even based within it, extending its grasp to sap all nutrients from the otherwise perfectly beautiful tree.
What many people miss, however, is that this fungus also attempts, in the very least, to stabilize this tree, and to adjust as needed to an environment that it is inherently destroying, that should otherwise fall. It becomes both extra roots, an anchor, wire-like structures running throughout the tree, making a sort of zombie out of the tree’s entire system. The worst part is, this fungal infection spreads, making other trees into nothing but dead men still standing, wood rotted out and cobbled together without regard to what it really meant to be a tree in the first place. These dead trees take up space and choke out the life that used to feed on them. Useless and cold, sapless and without any form of leaf or nut.
These dead trees must be set aflame. One tree set aflame by the wash of insurrectionary flame, a kiss that burns and makes a joke of the hellish fungal plague, turning the dead trees into ash. The ash settles, and there may seem to be a worse state on impact, piles of ash and dust; but this can feed the tired, once dry, harsh ground, feed a new wave of plants, returning animals and providing a living reality for all who depended once on it, blooming, growing.
Insurrection is not just some formless war machine, an ideal, it is a needed stretch to properly coerce a new state of being into a bright, beautiful world beyond the ash. I do not beg for destruction, or indifferent bloodshed; I beg for an insurrection as art, communization as a process, and a sort of phoenix to rise out of the political, philosophical, and artistic ashes made by the grasp of a successful insurrection. A world with emphasis on an individual yet social beauty, art, life, and love, made to be not in the image of some ideal, made to be made, lived to be lived.
In the book “No Longer Human,” Osamu Dazai presents a fictitious story that reflects the life story of its author. It is a devastating work, with a sort of spiraling effect, with many sorts of pseudo-philosophical elements, which I want to highlight in this work, along with encouraging you to read it for yourself, if you find yourself to be in the right mental state for it.
The elements of Osamu Dazai’s masterpiece work that I want to focus on are these topics: The delight in anti-utilitarianism, the reality of social unhumanity and alienation, and the individual’s perpetuation of “social” norms.
While there is more outside of these basic points, I’d like to focus on these, as they can benefit my point without adding excess weight to this work.
To start, as a child, Dazai says that his self-inserted main character, Yozo, sees things without utility as good, or wonderful, a thing that is definitely not held up by the extremely utilitarian society around him. He comments that it wasn’t until he was about twenty that he realized that sheets and pillowcases had utilitarian purpose, and it stirred a “dark depression in (him),” all due to a “revelation of human dullness.” While this can be seen as a further symbol for the alienation felt by Dazai and the distance he had from humanity, I think it can easily be commented on in a more face-value sense. I, on a personal level, absolutely agree with this sentiment. I agree that the utilitarian elements built into an imperial capitalist structure are dull, and unbelievably human due to this. As the very first element we pull from this work, I think we can absolutely take from this ideal, this anti-utilitarian sentiment, and seek joy and unproductive expenditure, not just as an individual, but as a societal ideal.
Furthermore in this text, Yozo feels a true societal alienation, not understanding why it is that humans do as they do, and feels a disconnect so great that the taking of his own life is very prevalent in the story, with him even viewing humans as sort of monsters; all despite the realization of his own inhumanity through alienation and institutionalization, realizing that he is “no longer human.” Yozo never really experienced a true work environment within this work, it’s purely a factor of living within the culture and society that makes him feel this way. I believe, above all, that Yozo, and people in reality similar to Yozo, should not have to feel this profound alienation, and should be given the ability to pursue art and be able to feel like their flow of desire is being actualized and put into being in some way.
There is a conversation in the book that also piques my interest, that being the conversation over “society,” and how the concept of society is made through the individual, in a sort of perversion of the ideal of the social contract. The only thing holding society and normative ideals together is the individuals living within it, as Dazai puts it; “It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it - right?” The conviction reached by Yozo rings true especially now in the internet era, when collectives of people (of individuals) form false imitation societies, the imitation crab of civilization, each individual making it clear that they wish to be in some part a machine of social ostracization. This structure, feeble as it is, is infinitely less real than even Baudrillard’s idea of the hyperreal renders most things, it is so much more signal than substance, so much cream and so little coffee.
While all of these seem just to be interpretations and a sort of pointing to ideas proposed initially by Dazai, this will help to coalesce some of my ideals as it comes to my conclusion, and will help to provide ideas of what to look to in Dazai’s work, and what I personally take from it.
Many have a religious or pseudo-religious explanation for all things, how they came to be, and how they should be analyzed and put into a sort of chain of principles and priorities. This is my take on a genuine attempt at a sort of mottled, quick, absurdist abstract of religiosity.
I want you to imagine yourself in a line for a concert, people excitedly milling around and muttering things to each other and themselves, checking their pockets for anything metal or trash they’d rather remove than have some security check find. Imagine these excitable people as a slow, but orderly rush into a place they’ve been waiting to enter. A sort of controlled chaos of shambling bodies and brains inside of them. People from all sorts of backgrounds, with all sorts of ideas of how the world works, or various levels of experience with how the concert will even operate, or various levels of fandom for the artist whose work they’re seeing.
These people move in an organized flow, and eventually they reach a destination, the destination in question being life, or in this case, it would be a long, unbelievably long hallway. Now, a lot of people, impatient, excitable, and told how amazing the show at the end of the hallway will be, run, or question what the utility of the hallway is, or simply don’t enjoy the hallway, or find that they’ve been walking for too long, and decide they no longer wish to walk the hall, and collapse.
The people who run the hall, to start, tend to have some ideal of what there is to expect at the end of the hall, this concert, told by them by friends also in the hall, who often show them things written by people who have seen the band before, hyping it up to the point where it truly feels like the only possible option is running. These people get tired quite quickly, some even collapsing, or spreading ideas of what they can do in the hallway to make the concert at the end better. The ones that convince others to run as well sometimes lead others to completing the journey, but rarely will pull others into pushing others down, or will encourage running until they all collapse, all with no reward at the end.
The people who question the utility of the hallway (why it’s built the way it is, why it feels like they’ve been walking forever, asking the walls for purpose, despite there clearly being none) only find desperation, fear, desolation, and uncertainty. The walls tell them nothing, and no one really knows why it was built this way or by who, no matter who the people ask or beg for some semblance of a purpose for such an unreasonably long hall, unless they are meant to do something of utility and purpose within it. These people often collapse too, finding no reason or utility (which only more so undermines their own thought), causing a panic attack and rendering them unable to continue.
Those who don’t enjoy the hallway enough to finish it simply find it miserable, and most often don’t even want to be consoled or comforted out of this state. They argue that the concert cannot possibly be worth the foot ache and pounding headaches they’ve gotten walking down this hall, and that they’d rather just go home. These people at this point realize that there’s not really an option for turning back after coming so far, leading them right to where their contemporaries land, on the floor.
The last group, which I haven’t mentioned yet, are the people that do make it to the end of the hall, which is admittedly most of us. Those who walk the hall with a sort of careful indifference, either through ignorance or through love of the nature of unutilitarian bliss, who make it to the end of the hall. While the hall could be looked upon as just something that impedes you on the path to a bliss state, it should just as much be looked upon as a chance to reflect, or to feel a bliss unattainable in a structured, or even chaotic environment of utility and moral structure. The opportunity that walking this hallway brings is not the opportunity to reach the end of the hallway, to get to the main event, it is the opportunity to delight in simple bliss, and delight in the experience of being there with who you came to see this place with. For me, this is my partner, and in the bliss that is brought simply by walking this hallway, and taking their hand in mine as I lead them through it is more than enough to justify taking my time, and simply living.
In this perspective, the true importance of the experience does not rest on what the hallway means, or what comes after it, but an experience of what it means to walk this hallway. Do not collapse, do not reduce yourself to that ugly, brutish state of being, just walk, and make it last. No matter how long or short your hallway is, it should be walked in revelry of the simplicity of the hallway itself.
So be it.
Anti-Humanism in concept necessitates a sort of apathy to the humanistic culture of human exceptionalism as a standout from all other animal species. It contests the idea that we have the innate right to subjugate or express our will onto an already crafted world of beautiful tapestries of life. But there’s one question I don’t really think anyone wants to answer, partially because it’s inane, and partly because it’s strangely grotesque.
Does anti-humanism justify veganism as a radical idea, or does it justify cannibalism as a valid mode of consumption?
My answer: neither.
To explain, we must look at a more animalistic approach to anti-humanism, as often a vegan anti-humanist would, claiming that humans are purely self-important animals, and that the animal as an equal to humans must be treated as such. (IE. deep ecology treating all life as equal to humans, often on familiar or good terms with Veganarchists/True Liberationists, which propose very similar ideals.) While I would not normally use “nature” as a framework for analysis, as I see defiance of “nature” to be a universal experience for all that lives, since this is the field being played about in by veganarchists and deep ecologists, I will frolic momentarily as well.
To begin with this perspective, we must look at the way (most, I'd rather not work in finalities lest some repugnant basement dwellers or actual ecologist or ecology student prove me “wrong” on semantics) animals tend to treat each other within an ecosystem, and how they often treat their own kind. Most often, these animals have a sort of order within their societies, with their own species being seen as community, whereas other species are either associates, tolerated, food, or intolerable.
This community aspect often makes it so that the unit of whatever species will not consume another of its species, mostly out of respect for the unitary “selfdom” of the others of its species. This is reflected nearly perfectly in humans, with the outsider species being associates, such as any pets, tolerated, such as certain wildlife like squirrels, food, such as cattle or chickens, or intolerable, such as certain bugs or unfavorable animals like snakes. Now, of course, these outsider categories are amorphous; some can view a snake as food, cattle as a pet, or pets as intolerable, but that doesn’t diminish from the categorization dynamic.
Instead of attempting to prove this assertion right, I will address the cannibalistic side’s potential refutations, samples of where it is even possible to be seen as wrong, and then address two causes for cannibalism that overlap in both humans and animals alike.
Firstly, we look at lions. As I began to draft this work, I started to perform research into different species and if there are any cultural or societal situations in which animals will tend to cannibalize. In this case of lions, cannibalism is used as a form of symbol, a symbol of dominance above another lion, and a sort of bloody, horrifying message. Now, in this case, while the modern human often does not cannibalize for this reason, (purely because the President irradiating two port cities after reducing them to ash is a much larger scale power move than the President consuming the corpse of his fallen foes) that it can be very well seen in the actions of past humans, before we gained more effective methods of spreading terror. There are examples in history of kings, warriors, and nomads alike that would, to the horror of nearly everyone around them, consume the corpses of fallen enemies, purely for the sake of intimidation. This reasoning is not one removed from the human condition, it is one purely INGRAINED in the animalistic vanity and frailty of the human, just as it is one ingrained in the animalistic vanity and frailty of the lion condition. This is not a case of human “nature,” where you could argue that the elimination of the abstraction of human nature would exempt the human from the vanity of this concept, it is purely a case of social dominion, which I seek to eliminate regardless of the inherent vanity or plague of dominion taken upon by humanity in order to justify any concept adjacent to it.
Secondly, there is the more directly survival-based cannibalisms of many animals, such as any starving animal, or more prevalently to this conversation, the specific examples of the Black Widow spider and the Praying Mantis, both of which kill mating partners and consume them afterwards. They do this not out of aggression, as most people contend, but instead out of a need to sustain themselves, especially with the fact of the future offspring, which (in the case of the Black Widow) are being created to the tune of around 700-900 possible eggs. This, in humans, can most often be seen in horrific survival situations such as the Donner Party, in which cases cannibalism was necessitated by environmental factors, just as it is in other animals quite often.
In conclusion, I contend that there is no sustainable argument for either cannibalism, or a form of veganism or “True Liberationism” presented by anti-humanism, despite the attempts to use anti-humanism as justification. For veganism/deep ecology, carnivores and omnivores, animals, equal to humans, as you often contend, eat each other, just as we eat them. The humanistic-industrial approach to which is understandable to oppose, but ultimately the logic of your own sentiment seems to fail you. And for cannibals and cannibal-moralizing anti-humanists, the argument of “nature also operates under a system of cannibalism,” (which I honestly do not know if anyone has posed, and just found to be a funny strawman, and a more interesting argument to postulate on and write about) the nature of cannibalism (which, yes, is an appeal to nature, but I am, to repeat, working on the level of a veganarchist) is very similar to the humanity of cannibalism, with most instances of cannibalism in history aligning with prevalent animalistic reasons for the exact same thing. There is no need for some moralizing of the idea of a totality of cannibalism being normalized, as it simply makes no sense, even from the standpoint of anti-humanistic theory.
(As a note, this section kind of uses anti-humanism as a toy, and I don’t really expect you to take it as seriously as I expect you to take the rest of this work. It’s honestly an idea I had and wanted to write out, because I thought the argument “if you’re an anti-humanist and you’re arguing that humans should eat animals, you are also arguing for cannibalistic behavior,” (which I have had the misfortune of encountering) was a silly one. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this, and I won’t revisit it or clarify it, so don’t ask.)
While one could argue that this should be simply tacked onto the end of my pseudo-religious section on the hallway of life, I feel that this is a more material situation, and should be evaluated as such, under a clearer lens. The material situation I speak of, of course, is the material situation of death, and what I believe, both materially and immaterially, should follow.
Starting with the immaterial, what was ultimately missing from my concept of the hallway was what the ending would be. This is ultimately because, as a work, the whole concept of it is to describe how the process of walking the hall is more of the point than whatever is at the end of it, and that you should take your time and enjoy what you can find as far as it comes to raw experience while walking down this intentionally unutilitarian concept I established with the idea of the hall. As a sort of post-script to that, I would like to complete the ideal, and reveal a blink of an idea as to what I see at the end of the hall.
I want you to imagine, instead of the light as is often depicted in various forms of media, an oak door, raw, unfinished possibly, at the end of a hall you’ve walked for longer than you care to admit. You walk to this door, you open it, and what you will see reflects perfectly who you are, and whoever else you brought along with you is. Not in a sense of showing some deep Freudian inner self, but in the sense of showing a place of comfort that hugs you like nothing can, not as a reward for some herculean tasks, but instead simply as a gift for those who made it to the end of the hall, which some may call a herculean task in and of itself. What this will be splinters, and I don’t even use it in a literal sense. This is not heaven, this is simply a comforting final refrain, a resting place, and a reminder of all of that which once was you.
Now, with that in mind, let us return to the material. What should happen when we lose someone? When they slip through the door at the end of the hall, what are we supposed to do to make clear the way we felt for them, or the way their life impacted ours in little ways?
Many people say to mourn, to wear a black dress and to place flowers on a grave, to cry and to attempt to repair, repair all others around them, despite the cold truth that there’s nothing they can really do, not with flowers or words. Nothing reaches the mind of the human wrapped in the constricting grief, nothing truly allows for a conversation, at least for a while, at least until it’s too late for that conversation to have an effect. This solution is a medical treatment provided only after the virus has already run its course. It’s most often more of a cause of spite or distance than a cause for repair, and I’ve experienced that on a personal level.
This method fosters a spite for all, for a world that would do this, for people who no matter how they responded within the modern system of grief, despite there being nothing better. I know this as well.
What I offer instead may be worse, or better, but I know I’ll try, and I urge you to experiment with this as well.
I contend that you should imagine them, if they were close enough to hold your hand in the walk down this hallway, as waiting for you at that door, as watching you as you walk down the hall towards them, smiling and bright. I want you to, instead of a mourning, to celebrate and revel, to eat cake and do what you’d usually do with them with family or friends on their birthday, to celebrate the day of their passing like a holiday, taking the day off to be with family and friends, to raise a glass, to smile and find solace in the fact that they want you to revel, that they want you to remember and smile, and that they want you to bring about what you can, taking your slow methodical steps through this hallway without meaning until you reach your destination, wrap yourself in their arms, and throw yourself through that unfinished, old oak door, and to be nothing but in bliss.
This is the nature of death. Not as a black wall of unheeded dark melodramatic nothingness, not as some blind suitor, sweeping people away without aim, but as a destination, as somewhere that shouldn’t be feared, and instead should be reveled in, and seen as something parallel and not opposing to life. The modern grief is one of placation and material, of I’m-sorries and condolences, of mindless, aimless panicked comforting at something no one could have claimed to orchestrate.
The nature of death is revelry. The nature of death is an unfinished oak door. The nature of death is a tails to the heads of life.
The nature of death is yours.
Bright melancholia is an ideal based mainly in optimistic nihilism, and a satirical regard for the now (for that-which-is) and a love for the what-can-be, which is in a constant flux, impossible to make solid until it is here. The whole, compressed ideal is a cry to get the restraints off of you, to let you be and exist unimpeded by the grasp of an nonconsensual conceptual chokehold.
The insurrection, burning away chains of vegetation and fear, allowing for ideas previously disturbing or taboo to be explored in further detail with “logic” and clarity, clinging to the irrational just as much as the rational, all while promising a undefinition that allows for unproductive expenditure and a phoenix-like wingspan of liquidated inferno.
The lifeblood of the ideal is a cry, a cry for those who sit hedonistically in a state of pleasure and a state of ignorant blasphemy to seek an absolution above all else, a cry to arms, differing itself from the party-camp calls to arms, the proletarian asks and whispers, due to its urgency and its conceptually suicidal nature. So cry, cry and bleed, awaken in bold, and build an ideal, collect insurrectionaries such as you, and become the spark, become the flame, and make the unmade real. Manifest the natural, the flow-state of pure, unfiltered desire, and let yourself flow unfettered into the future, let yourself embrace each other and embrace the ideals of bright melancholia, discarding race, gender, class, and creed.
Burn the rulebooks written by infantile losers and show them what insurrection means, in the face of petty useless squabbling and pantomiming radicality. The time is now, and the crisis is impending. Let yourself undo the knot binding us to our uncaring ideals, our abstractions and useless ultrastructure, let us abandon value and social abstractions like bastard children with a world we left behind much the same.
With destruction and creation becoming one mass, one bloated being whispering solidarity, you can create a new state of being through destruction, just like the ash from the rotted-out tree of artistic philo-sociology is created by the fires of successful Foucauldian insurrectionism. There becomes a new state of being just by principle of destroying the previous iteration of existence, making things bloom into a fruitful plant fed by this ash. Now’s job is not to spread the seeds for what to come, but to be a spark and to create the ash to feed it in the first place. Destruction blooms, just as life does, and we must become the light of day for destruction, a signal for the flower to bloom in the light of spring, and when it closes again, we will no longer have that-which-is, and then it will be a spring for creative freedom beyond the event horizon of the truest absolution.
Any utilitarian society demands of you a becoming-useful, a disgusting task that is anti-existence and stamps out any form of true creativity or absolution. What becoming-communist necessitates is not the proletarian screeching of utilitarian mind-fascists, but the freedom not promised by any of these partyists, any of these structuralist neigh fascistic hogs. You must revolt against this becoming-useful, whether that may be a “communist” becoming-useful or a capitalist one. You must become uncapturable and extravagant, avant-garde in production and translation, unuseful in the purest. You must live art.
In conclusion.
Thank you,