Three tales of awakening Consciousness

This is just one of those random things that've caught my attention whenever I've stumbled across them in my reading or viewing and I thought it would be an interesting thing to take a look at.
Be warned though. It's going to get a teeny bit dark.

It concerns three interpretations in three different properties concerning the time when, and this is provided you follow along with evolution theory for the moment, mankind, in earlier form or not, first became aware of his self.

Three moments for the awakening of man's consciousness. 2 are semi-positive and one is very much negative.

Coming fresh out of the review for Something Wicked This Way Comes it seems right to put this one before the rest. It's a positive little story, or at least more positive than the others, and in the book itself its introduction is mostly odd as it comes from a man who is deeply introspective and as such has made up his mind about life's purpose.

"First things first. let's bone up on history. If men had wanted to stay bad forever, they could have, agreed?Agreed. Did we stay out in the fields with the beasts? No. In the water with the barracuda? No. somewhere we let go of the hot gorilla's paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore's teeth and started chewing blades of grass. We been working mulch as much as blood, into our philosophy, for quite a few life-times. Since then we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels.

It was a nice new idea and we were afraid we'd lose it, so we put it on paper and built buildings like this one around it. And we been going in and out of these buildings chewing it over, that one new sweet blade of grass, trying to figure how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different.

I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever.
Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her.

And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them.
And he felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness.
So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: Our hour is short, eternity is long."

So in telling this tale, he gives voice to his understanding of life's futility. Nothing lasts for ever and sorrow is inevitably coming. A bleak end to everything. Nihilism. There is, however, one thing he spends time on and one thing that he does deem worthy of merit and it is something that shines through in his story.

"With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love...

...What could he say that would make sense to them? could he say love was, above all, shared experience?..

..We have common cause against the night...

..We love what we know, we love what we are."

The love people carry for one another, the love between family members, something that is above all, A shared experience. Something one shares, something of another that is also in oneself; ultimately still something selfish. But a connection ascribing deeper meaning to something that has none. The appearance of meaning and purpose where all is once again illusion. But a welcome illusion nonetheless. A reason to keep going.

But despite this aspect of his welcome positivity, this is still about consciousness so...

"So, in sum, what are we? we are the creatures that know and know too much."

-----

Another one of the tales I wanted to look at comes from Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Oddly it's been nominated for the Bram Stoker award. I think someone might not've got the point.

"For ages they had been without lives of their own. The whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation.
How long they had thus flourished none of them knew.
Then something began to change. It happened over unremembered generations. The signs of a revision without forewarning were being writ ever more deeply into them. As their species moved foreward, they began crossing boundaries whose very existence they never imagined.
After nightfall, they looked up at a sky filled with stars and felt themselves small and fragile in the vastness. Soon they began to see everything in a way they never had in olden times.
When they found one of their own lying still and stiff, they now stood around the body as if there were something they should do that they had never done before. It was then they began to take bodies that were still and stiff to distant places so they could not find their way back to them.

But even after they had done this, some within their group did see those bodies again, often standing silent in the moonlight or loitering sad-faced just beyond the glow of a fire. Everything had changed once they had lives of their own and knew they had lives of their own."

Here we are again with a group of newly awakened primates, looking up at the stars in dawning comprehension of how small they really are. How little they themselves matter.
With a dawning awareness of death and what it means.

And here too, the texts' 'They', begin to love.

When they see the shapes of lost ones beyond the fire, sad-faced and lonely, they are of course conjuring up images of their dead ones out of the sorrow arising from the loss of a loved one.

Oddly re-reading this segment now also called to mind another memory.

Someday they'll have secrets, someday they'll have dreams.

-----

Though I've added some relevant tales on the sly here and there, now we come to the third of the stories I wanted to talk about. One of the three overt ones that speak of the time before the thinking man comes into the knowledge of his own thinking.

'...Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey "He said for you to give me your fucking share."...'


Huh, I thought that was gonna be a little longer.
And of course, it actually is. This story has a 1000 connotations because of its position in and relevancy to True Detective Season 1. You just can't go and name them all.

It's Rustin Cohle's views and experiences that inform everything about this story.
As such, spoilers for True Detective season 1.

The first thing that is apparent in this story is the unfiltered, negative nihilism. There is nothing redeemable about humanity in this story. It is remarkable that as smalle as it seems it actually says alot. It is undisguisedly a story with a basis on greed and violence, designating the human race as 'monkeys', imbuing them from the get-go with swearing and obscenity. There is no mention whatsoever of Love.

It's a harsh contrast with the other tales and it begs the question. Why is there no filter on Rust's nihilism? Where is the necessary positivity to make these ideas palatable?

Is it the fact that Rust, at the end of the tv-show, seems to find an eventual catharsis in his glimpse to the workings of the universe (Though he is in truth lying to himself again. It is what he does.), that the show can get away with a bleak statement like this?
Is it because it's easier to dismiss these ideas because as they're in a tv-show they stem from a visual point of view, and are thereby easier to dismiss?

In an out, make way make way for the very next scene, of deep dialogue and the strumming of snares and then to firing of guns, and action, make way make way make way?

There's no real opportunity to let these things sink in because we are given no time to soak them up. There's always something next and though the tv doesn't pause, the ideas do. and when they do, they fade away in the general clamour of sensory stimulation.

It is in part because, In the written word, in books, these ideas are insidious and they reverberate around without pause and maybe an alleviating pressure is somewhat necessary. The methodical writer can also not think of these themes without giving every aspect of the theme a look, and in turn they become a part of the whole, inextricable.

Or maybe these tales, taking a hypothetical caveman, who still has hope, who views a possible coming loss of his family. simply must be in harsh contrast to the modern caveman, squatting drunk in his cave , who has already been forced to face the terrible bleakness head-on, who has already lost his hope and has already hit the flat wall of reality and who has to go on living, despite having already have had the worst happen to him; the loss of his family, the loss of  love.

When Rustin thinks he connects to his daughter at the end of Season 1. The love returns. and he becomes a new man, barely recognizable from how we have seen him thus far.

-----

The answer to nihilism, going by these three interpretations, is love. A panacea to the bleak introspection to the fate of all life.

But, inescapably, through time or other unforeseen calamities, love will inevitably fall away and we'll all end up staring at the dark doorway once again, without surcease, until we ourselves step through it.