Depression and Nihilism
With the loss of a man's faith, something necessarily has to come in its place. To keep the mind balanced lest it eats itself.
But to this day, I have not succeeded in giving meaning to my life without it.
Where once was my faith, there is now a bottomless hole, and it devoures everything that is tossed in. Without divine meaning and purpose, death becomes the end, and since death is inevitable, nothing we do matter.
Without meaning I instead stand at the yawning hole of the abyss, unable to look away from its darkness. And with every distraction, capable of turning me away from its dark contemplation but a fleeting fancy, I am forever teetering on the edge.
As a pessimist by nature I usually see only the worst in things. And every worst thing leads to sorrow.
These days I mostly rationally choose to believe that nothing truly matters. There was never anything greater guiding us, there is no goal and no purpose; we lead an aimless and painful existence, and when we die, we simply end. Our brains halt and we stop functioning. We decompose and our bodies are reintegrated into the energy that is cycled throughout the living things of this world. There is no damnation and no exaltation because there is no design. And that in itself has become both excuse and goal.
Because of the above it might seem that the depression that comes and goes is entirely contingent on my relationship with my faith and upbringing. This is of course not true.
There are various factors, not all of which I'm able or willing to share.
But one major thing is that I'm a sensitive little fucker. A stray word, an odd look, a huff or a puff can unhinge me enough that my day is ruined. It becomes my mind's focus for the longest time. It makes me think and think and it's always in the direction of the worst.
I suppose I should call it 'Highly Sensitive' but labels have always been annoying to me. Nobody fits in anywhere perfectly, and when one is labeled it gives others the license to look at you one way while dismissing all that you are.
So, one of the consequences of that is that I severly overthink things. Like a dog worrying at a bone I can't stop chewing at the images and sounds and my pessimism obliges by then immediately offering me the worst case thoughts and scenarios.
That way I risk slipping further into the self-defeating spiral of depression and when that happens the nihilism comes into play.
I seek reasons to stop caring, to make the thoughts diminish, and sometimes it is with nihilism that I take away their sting. 'Nothing matters' becomes the excuse. it becomes the balm and then in the bleakness it also becomes the goal. It is a trap and it gets me every time.
I know that, as an individual I can't go through life thinking everything is useless. It leaves me uncomitted, uninvested and very much adrift.
But I can't help it and I can't look away. The serpent bites its own tail and the venom makes its jaws lock tight.
It's something that continuously saps my strength and something I keep struggling with every day. And as someone who can't talk to others easily and whose friendships dwindle with the passing of the years, It's hard to speak of these themes and these horrors. because no-one else is willing or is unable to truly understand or has in fact no need to adress these things.
So, isolated, I try to shunt it aside and find an outlet somewhere else. Mostly, and most benignly, in fiction.
Meaning through stories
Games, tv-shows, movies, comics and above all, books.
Fiction is safe because for fiction to work, there needs to be a purpose, there needs to be meaning to the narrative.
And it is almost always made clear to us. Willing investment is a prerequisite. And immersion takes care of the rest.
Things start to matter, because we're told that it matters. We follow the characters along and their views become our views. We follow along and ready ourselves for the coming of joy and heartache. But it's always at a safe remove. And these stories will never end if we don't want them to. Things cycle and purpose becomes ever renewed.
It is Heaven.
But it's a choice. and not everyone can commit to it.
I used to be able to commit to any kind of narrative. Until I started thinking about what I read. This is not an indictment of those books or the age at which I read them. It's rather more something like wistful regret. Of a time when I didn't continuously think. when I didn't seem to have this inability to switch off. When meaning didn't need to be found and I could just enjoy the story for its own sake.
Most likely this is just another rose-tinted lens through which I view the past. I likely always overthought things too much. But I'm digressing.
In fiction there is meaning, but there was once a time when there was also meaning in my life.
So I seek out works inspired by the tenets of my upbringing because they still resonate with me. Because they can not help but connect on a very deep and almost spiritual level.
I don't think I purposely seek out these stories to find a meaning to ascribe to the reality through which I move. But I can not deny that it is the stories that could possibly slot into my past upbringing and the world-view that came along with it, that have hit hardest with me.
When you label something, a guiding influence, that was and still remains important in your life, as a fiction, everything that is associated with it or that draws inspiration from it, becomes fair game.
That's why anything demonic is so interesting because it is only tangentially related. Because as it's not the center there can be no real need for purpose here and it becomes mostly just for fun. Mythological stuff and meta narratives are also a huge draw. They don't even have to be dark.
I'm digressing again.
The thing I'm talking about is stories with Christianity as its foremost understructure, (Here read Christian Doctrine, meaning; The Bible, this is not Protestantism or even Catholicism, I always identified just as a Christian, basing myself solely on the Bible.)
Some of the things that have been special:
-Clive Barker's Next Testament, which could give an explanation for the madness of the old Testament and the 2000 year gap where it seems God isn't active.
-The Third Testament by Xavier Dorison, proposing that things were supposed to go different and God might have abandoned his ideas of apocalypse.
-The Goddamned; The Old Testament viewed through an ultra-violent lens. Noah, the same. Exodus: Gods and Kings, with God as a lunatic child.
-Hellblazer, though it rambles on and broaches alot of topics, it's very good at times. Preacher, with its crap comic that has a great central idea and nothing else, but it did give rise to a potentially very good tv-show. Lucifer, which goes too fantastic sometimes but damn me (haha) if it isn't magnificent.
-Penny Dreadful ,which was cut way too short, with its introspective look on good and evil. With the main character; the beautiful and incredibly tormented Vanessa Ives forced to take a choice between God and the Devil, it was taken from us too soon.
-American Gods and Small Gods, with their very similar takes on power through belief. Though these books aren't really about Christianity and with especially American Gods taking a coward's road in not adressing Christianity in a world filled with active gods, they are centrally about power through belief.
-Vikings, in its inclusion of gods both old and new, and how the characters deal with this. I've already mentioned the quote above, and it gives a good insight on how deep the show can go. It's mostly up to the viewer though; not everything is shoved right in your face.
-Malazan, also not about christianity per se, but it's got philosphising on anything under the sun, including beliefs and gods and how they interact with the world of men. That and I have some ideas about the Crippled God himself.
And lastly, but firstly in meaning and importance.
-The Second Apocalypse, with its secret reactionary subversion to the themes and central tenets of the Bible. I'll talk about that in the next post. But I'll be unable to do it justice regardless.
There are of course alot more narratives and types of narratives that have drawn my attention and that I have ended up loving. But this is only about those narratives that I'm drawn to because of their relation to my past faith and upbringing, though these are hardly the sole reasons why these books, comics and tv-shows are so good. Each has their own merits.
These stories will inevitably attract me because it is very much a primal thing, isn't it? As a person raised within the tenets of Christianity, draped and hung with chains and tethers of guilt and shame, sin and love, sacrifice and redemption and who, most of the time, has cast off his religious convictions and beliefs, to actually have been immersed inside all of that religious imagery and faith for half of my life, and devoutly believing it too... Regardless from what environment you're raised in and how far you end up from it; the things you were raised with as a child, never truly leave you.
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These days I have less time for fiction, and this is partially because of the blog, partially because of work. With less actual reading time and not alot of down time in between work and blogging; what I consume, inevitably gets to be ruthlessly analysed. I'm not sure yet if this is a bad thing.
As I've said before, it is my hope that the darkness will be left for a large part behind in this post.
I'll have to see how that goes. Now on to the finale.
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