All of my life, I've been considered as the worst, lying to my mother, even stealing out her purse. Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion, I know my mother wish she got a fuckin' abortion. She don't even love me like she did when I was younger, sucking on her chest just to stop my fucking hunger.
I wonder what my skull fragments will look like splattered against my wall. From the angle I'd shoot, my blood would spray all over my typewriter, splashing keys and mixing with the ink of every page of every book I'll never write. You could say I've been depressed lately. I never finished college. I'm simply a high school graduate living in the United States, and I'm on the job hunt. To be realistic, I filtered all of the jobs down to everything that would earn me less than $30,000 a year, and it feels like every job posting is laughing at me. Most of them are work in restaurants, where I swore I'd never go back. It's mocking me. They're trying to pull me back in with everything they have, where I'm to be yelled at by either managers or customers, anytime someone has something nagging at them that they want to get off their chest in open air. Working in restaurants in the United States is like getting paid to be verbally abused whenever someone has the inclination to do so. It's then when I realize that depictions of Hell are inseperable from our daily lived conditions, where every day one can easily be tormented and poisoned by demons. The worst is feeling like I'll never be able to do anything more than this. This is my fate. Revolutions be damned.
I've yet to describe myself as a counter-revolutionary, actively going against any kind of progressive current, but I've recently felt the embrace of a sort of icy nihilism. Whether it's my reading of Georges Bataille or Felix Guattari, I've become less and less enthusiastic for any kind of alleged revolutionary change in this country. Perhaps it's my own personal return to base matter. There's a certain essay of Georges Bataille that one can easily find on the internet, entitled Base Materialism and Gnosticism
, setting aside his rather curious descriptions of more obscure varieties of early Christianity, there's particular passages where he lets the backwards dark of base matter shine through unperturbed, in all its hideous glory:
Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations. But the psychological process brought to light by Gnosticism had the same impact: it was a question of disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before something base, to the extent that one recognized the helplessness of superior principles.
I think my first experience with base matter was when I used to look at gore on the internet quite reguarly, I still struggle to forget one particular video and a few different photos that, for your sake rather than my own, I'll refrain from describing in detail. But, I can always do it rather indirectly. I think I've started to describe my own life as embodying something alien to human aspirations, the more I rot in my bedroom until I either shoot myself or end up getting kicked out by my parents for barely being able to hold down a job, the more dreams of anything I ever wanted to accomplish slowly slip away, while the CEOs responsible for our dilemma get to die peacefully in their sleep. I am the helplessness of superior principles. Lately I've been thinking that I'm not particularly unique, that when I die with any dreams or aspirations unfulfilled, I'll merely be entering into continuity with almost every other person's unfulfilled hopes. Every song I listen to, every painting I look at, all of them now seem to me like little miracles, wrenched desperately from base matter itself. But, even my desperation has left me. I've recently tried to do my best to avoid describing my feelings as alienation
, it feels like too easy of an answer, too simple of a description. Anxiety
doesn't quite work either.
Sometimes, it gets worse, when I start to think that I should count myself lucky to be merely verbally abused by management or hungry customers, when I think of Roman or Helot slaves who would've been beaten instead, or when I think of those incarcerated in our country who have to deal with the daily reality of physical violence much more frequently. It makes me think, maybe our condition which Deleuze and Guattari as well as Bataille try to describe to me, is that every mode of production is merely the daily production and reproduction of repression, and to Bataille, divine trauma. Well, it's succeeded. I no longer have any fighting spirit left in me. Nothing to yell back. All of my violent capacities are directed inwards, towards myself. Walking as a living undead has become my inner experience, I am merely an opfer for capital, and every day I embody this sacrifice. So please, rich of the world, managers, customers, neighbors, eat from me, and drink from me. Do your worst. Tear me apart limb from limb, and when I've been reduced to a pile of legs and arms, along with a pile of organs and intestines, when my head is ripped from my spinal cord, when my eyes are gouged out with any piece of metal you can find, I will smile. I, base matter, will be there to haunt your great superior principles and human aspirations for the rest of your life, until you meet the same fate as me. And my corpse will smile.