Of Note, Of Thought

Ever since I read a review of Tom McCarthy’s C I have been thinking of one thing that I cannot escape.  It has bothered me for weeks.

The review discussed the death of the modern novel and the way that stories are all the same these days, that nothing new is being done and that few authors have stepped up to dispute that claim.  ”Okay,” I thought, “realism is dead, magical realism isn’t an alternative, and anything beyond that is pure imagination (re: science fiction, fantasy, etc.) and is simply unacceptable. Poetry has never really mattered except to poets and the slow change of culture that they refer to (and are often right, but noting the change of culture or ideas for a few thousand readers has rarely mattered less than in our modern age).”  So, to fiction, the last bastion of the true writer, I wondered what could exist beyond trying to accurately describe the world, even if you slipped into our dreams from time to time.  And I wondered if this was a problem of humanity and our current position of accelerated collectivism, a generalized belief in the greatness of our species through the Internet and information.  I tried to argue with myself that it wasn’t.

Because here’s my conclusion, as much as I don’t want to believe it: if the novel has failed, if telling the story with compassion and honest psychology no longer owns any sort of interest for the population, then what is left other than something that is meta-human?  If you truly stop to think about the human story, this suggests that we are now bored with it, with its importance to our own race and species, and we are looking for a story that now lies beyond the world of our own creation.  We are tired solipsists, asking for an assist.

And yet, the second idea that I recently posited, suggests that because of collective human archetypes (as shown through Campbell and Jung) and the decline of religion in the modern world (current church attendance lies at 29% of Americans…just wait for the baby-boomer bust in that statistic), is that through our collective similarities we have found, online, the only religion that we can believe in: the sameness of others of our race.  What a strange idea: the only supernatural we can accept is a greatness in humanity that lies beyond our understanding of it. It’s accepting that we are too dumb at this point in time to see our imagined world for what it truly is: the reality we have chosen to believe in, regardless of what it really may be.  This is no longer the Hindu Absolute, the Buddhist Enlightenment, the Christian Salvation and Heaven…no, this is a magnificence that we imagine to exist only through our own existence.  

Seriously consider Nietzsche’s Overman and humanity’s dedication toward his existence, and then look around and wonder what these people are doing for that cause that this culture unconsciously believes in.  Seriously consider a world where God doesn’t matter, if He ever has during our lifetime.  Consider the idea of Art providing meaning in any context to your life other than in the individual sense, and the fact that you are relatively bored with your own existence the moment you consider it in more than narcissistic terms.  And then, consider any argument for morality you’ve ever possessed and try to apply it to the greatness of humanity…to the culling and perfection of humanity.  

Do all this, and then tell me that you don’t believe you aren’t the master of your own destiny. And please, tell me how that feels.