We Believe in Nothing

by Ştefan Bolea
translation from Romanian by Simona Sămulescu [MTTLC student]
 
click pentru versiunea română

I am more and more inclined to consider that one can believe in nothing. If you are true to yourself you come to realize that almost anything can be destroyed, that almost nothing can withstand total criticism, which leaves behind the bitter taste of sterility. Let us tackle them one at a time:

1.   Family. Your birth is totally arbitrary; your family is a result of contingency. If you would have been born in another family, you would now have been attached to some strangers. Between you, your mother and your father there is a only genetic continuity and a hazardous psychological connection. And, anyway, they have thrown you into the solipsism of individuality, in the absolute solitude in which there are no connections. What connections can you have with the ones who, in other circumstances, would have been total strangers to you?

2.            Friendship. A strategic alliance, in which truth plays a third role, not a secondary one. We gather together like porcupines (Schopenhauer). We are actually protecting our interests only to play along in the detriment of passion. There is no pure friendship, but only escape from oneself in otherness. Fear of being alone is the driving force of friendship.

3.   Love. A fight for supremacy, which more often than not you lose. A sublimation of the purest sexual instinct.

4.            Children. Create the one who will take you to a nursing home! Their innocence is doubled by cunningness and determination.

5.   The Individual. A mask for the monster in the closet, an interface for Mr. Hyde, a sound without a substance. ‘Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name’. ‘Myself am Hell.’

6.            Freedom. The interval between two imprisonments.

7.   Work. If you don’t like what you do, you are a failure. Otherwise, why repeat until retirement activities worthy of a chimp’s intellect?

8.   Money and property. Death is free but you’ve won a special prize, sickness!

You could argue that there are still things that cannot be destroyed completely, but they are also ambiguous, they too are not ideal.

1.   Music. Without music, life would be a mistake (Nietzsche). Why does music not make it through? Because you sometimes can be tortured with ‘manele’.

2.   Art, life seen as an aesthetic phenomenon. What can be said against art? Sometimes is has no flesh and furthers the general void.

3.            Pleasure. Unfortunately, sometimes one’s whole life translates in waiting for it.

4.            Intelligence. We can perceive intelligence as the clarity of one’s sight. You look in the distance, from above; while others stumble, block up. But you also see the chains and the cage. Too much intelligence isolates: you are the first without equals. Stupid people seem more trained to survive because they are more tolerant. A stupid person can be a pleasant presence.

5.   The feeling that your life has meaning, that you do not live in vain. Why is the feeling of personal or transpersonal sense insufficient? Because if we change the angle of the camera and see things from death’s perspective, Caesar’s and Beethoven’s life is just that of a future corpse. Because ‘the ground is calling out to us’. Just picture how your corpse will look like in 60 years and it’s enough to cure yourself of notions like ‘soul’, ‘oversensitive’, ‘transcendence’, ‘eternity’, ‘human dignity’ and ‘value’. ‘On top of all a shovel of dust settles’. Nothingness is the only profitable investment, the only god which will have a church even after the death of the universe, the grave digger of all the other gods.

We believe in nothing. Almost nothing. And when we do believe, we do it with half a heart, because we know we will pass into nothingness without discrimination. But let’s not consider that the religion of nothingness preaches resignation… There are other worlds to destroy and there are other universes on verge of creation! Let’s search them weapon in hand! Fiat finis!