The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (28 page)

backwards, not a real-life story. It would lose what little value it had. It would become a nightmare, a story that stayed in one place, a real horror tale about a self-conscious nothing stagnating at the end, a puppet dancing in its own death. There could be no build up, nothing to distract one from the death at the end of all life stories. To know the how and the when of the ending makes all plot impossible. But everyone knows what is going to happen at the end. Everyone is conscious of that. We just do not know what it will be like when what is going to happen actually happens. One would think that would be enough to spoil the story, knowing what is going to happen—that no one is going to make it through. Somehow, though, it does not spoil the story. Our heads have taken care of that. They have thought a thousand different endings, or not thought about the ending at all. Yet when it comes, it comes. Nothing will turn away that visitor. After being long refused admittance into our lives, death materializes on our doorstep and begins pounding to be let in. Now everything quivers with an aura of something unseen, and shapes begin to form just out of sight. As consciousness surges, the pieces fall together into patterns that are not good to know. Being alive is all right, or so most of us say. But when death walks through the door, nothing is all right. It is all wrong. We are seized by a supernatural stage fright, as though we had been invited to speak in the dark to an audience whose faces we cannot, and do not want, to see or be seen by. Death is something that, deep down, we believe should not be. That is its terror and its fascination.

Without death, no story of supernatural horror would ever have been written. Apart from human mortality, there is also the death of sanity, identity, ideals, and hand-me-down conceptions about the universe and everything in it. Death is accepted in horror stories because a plot that did not arouse its terrors—in a fictional world, that is—would be a forgettable dud. Real life also offers these sensations, but morgues and mausoleum chambers are abysmal diversions, though we may avert our minds from reflecting on what puts us in these places. Being alive is supposed to be all right, but not when you are forced to consider the alternative. (“I think, therefore I will die, I will die, die, die.”) To our consciousness, death means that something has begun to function in an unfortunate way, something has failed, something has gone off course. To give a relatively prosaic example, we might consider the plot of a traffic accident, a mischance that is commonly experienced as a dreamlike ramble with unforeseen stops along the way. You may be traveling on slippery roads when, without warning, your vehicle begin sliding across several lanes of oncoming traffic. You know in principle that such things can happen.

They may even have happened to you on a prior occasion. You know that they happen to other people all the time. Nevertheless, this accident was not in your plans, which is why it is called an accident. It seems a mistake, even if it may be explained by a cause-and-effect confluence of circumstances. But you had an idea of how things were supposed to be that day, as you do every day, and spinning out of control in your car while others try to circumvent a metal-crunching collision with you, perhaps unsuccessfully, was not part of your schedule. One second ago you had a firm grip on things, but now you are careening toward who knows where. You are not filled with horror, not yet, as you career along the pavement that is slick with rain or snow glistening in the moonlight, the wind howling and shadows scattering. At this point, everything is all strangeness. You have been taken to a different place from where you were, and you are no longer in control.

Then it begins. This can’t be happening, you think—if you can think at all, if you are 126

anything more than just a knot of panic. In fact, anything could happen now. This is the whispering undercurrent that creeps into your thoughts: nothing is safe and nothing is off limits. All of a sudden something was set in motion that changed everything. What was not meant to be, at least according to your deluded conception of life, has descended upon you. Of course, these things happen, as everyone knows. They have always happened and always will happen. They are part of the natural order of things. But this is not how we would have it. This is not how we think things should be for us. Confusion now reigns between what we believe should be and should not be; and it is on this confusion, we remember, that all supernatural horror depends.

Might we have avoided this confusion, this special horror, by warding off any belief in what should be and what should not be, by believing only in what is? No, we could not.

We were doomed to this belief and to the confusion that, at certain times, emerged from it. What doomed us, glaringly enough, was consciousness—that which should not be yet had become . . . the primeval confusion. It was consciousness that awoke us from our slumber in the natural. But we still like to think that we know the difference between what is natural and what is not. We like to think that, whatever dissimilarities exist between us and every other living thing, we are not in essence wholly alienated from them. Perhaps there is something a little unnatural about us, but nothing too far gone from nature. We are not perverted organisms who frequent haunts on the other side of the unreal. We do have a sense of the supernatural and its horror, this is true. But we try as hard as we can to eject this confusion born of consciousness out of our heads. There are certain times, admittedly, when this special horror takes possession of us, when our belief in what should be and what should not be comes up and clashes like two worlds within us. No other life-forms know they are alive, nor can imagine what death might be like.

This is our curse alone. Without it, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for so long that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with all of our might not to say: We have never been denizens of the natural world. Even as we survived and procreated there, we knew something that other creatures did not.

And anyone can guess what that something was: that we would die. Having this knowledge, we could never be at home in nature. As beings with consciousness, we were delivered into another world—the one that is not natural. All around us were natural habitats, but within our every atom was the chill of the unknown, the uncanny, the unearthly, and even the terrible and fascinating mystery of the holy. Simply put: we are not from here. We move among living things, all those natural puppets with nothing in their heads. But our heads dwell in another place, a world apart where all the puppets are dead in the midst of life. We are those puppets, those crazed mimics that prowl about for a peace that will never be theirs. We are the undead who cannot live with what we know and are afraid of what we do not know. And the medium in which we circulate is that of the supernatural, the special horror of those who believe in what should be and should not be. This is the domain where we secretly exist and inwardly rave with an insanity on the level of metaphysics, fracturing creation and breaking the laws of life. From across an unseen divide, we bring the supernatural into all that is manifest. We walk alone as beings that are not as we seem, strange even to ourselves. Our occurrence was an aberration on this earth. Even as we survive and reproduce, we know we are dying by degrees in the darkest corners of existence. No other things around us have this 127

supernatural sight, nor would choose it if they could. These skeletons of ours—when will they come out and show themselves? They rattle inside us, dancing toward death. How long will they last before their burial or burning? Time breezes by with such haste. Is the child in that old photograph really an erstwhile version of you, your little hand waving hello or farewell? The face of that child is not the one you now see in the rearview mirror of your skidding car. That child is now disappearing into the darkness behind you, before you, around you. The child is waving and smiling and fading. Bye-bye. Then another face appears beside you. The face is smiling, but too much to be real. The scene shifts moment by moment. Places, people, and things appear and disappear. You appeared as others had expected but not as you chose. You will disappear as if you had never been, having taken your turn in this world. You always told yourself that this was the natural way of things, something you could live with, as if you belonged only to nature . . . MALIGNANTLY

USELESS nature, which coughed you up like a little phlegm from its great lungs. Yet all the while the supernatural cleaved to you, working its oddities into your life and waiting for death to begin beating on your door. It has not come to save you, but to bring you into its horror. Perhaps you expected to make it through this horror that sat like a gargoyle upon your life. Now you find there is no way through. The days pass by, each one strangling you a little more with its horror. Incantations are spoken all around. They have lost their power. The living and the dead jabber inside you. You cannot understand them.

Dreams become more lustrous than memories. Darkness is shoveled over dreams. What is this life! you cry out. Only silence answers, and it is eloquent. Shining eyes open in the darkness, the eyes of that face, smiling too much and too long. Without a word, that smile coerces from you an old question: Was it all so useless? The smile pushes up at its edges, too rigid to be real. You cannot look away as it widens past all natural proportion. There is nothing left but that big smile. It is the last thing you see: a great gaping mouth like the entrance to a carnival ride. Then: the sense of being swallowed. That is the story; that is the plot of our lives.

ENDINGS

It would be as facile to believe that Zapffe was wrong as it would be to believe that he was right. If his analysis of human behavior and consciousness appears secure within itself, so do other theorems and formulas that have been argued or overturned. Nothing means any more than one wants or needs it to mean. Was Zapffe’s Last Messiah closer to the truth because he called for the extinction of humankind? Was he any less a thing that believed it could choose to choose? Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species would still look to the future and see no need to abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves. What a laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That we might be only self-conscious nothings would not really be a secret too terrible to know—a paradox and a horror . . . the insufferable condition of a planet of puppets that are aware they will die, shadows without selves enshrouding the earth, puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky like lost balloons. If that is the way things are, go shout it from the rooftops and see where it gets you.

Being somebody is rough, but being nobody is out of the question. We must be happy, we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy, we must believe because it is absurd to believe.

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Day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better. Vital fictions for vital persons.

They shoot horses, don’t they? But as for shooting ourselves—ask Gloria Beatty, ask Michelstaedter, ask Mainländer, ask Weininger, ask Hemingway. But do not ask Jean Améry, who made his exit with a drug overdose. He survived Auschwitz, but he did not survive his survival. No one does. With our progenitors and the world behind us, we will never hold this life and its horror to be MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our existence.

Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, “The stopwatch has started.” The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everything that is and everything to come. Then all will be as it was before we took our place in this place.

Human life: it does mean something, but not so that it might as well mean nothing. So be it.

There will come a day for each of us—and then for all of us—when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, as day follows day and generations fall into the future like so many bodies into open graves. The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others while the clock is still ticking. Could it be possible that we all deserve to die, and to die out? But our heads are not obsessed by such questions. To ask them is not in our interest .

. . or what we think is our interest, which amounts to the same thing. And to answer them hand on heart and not with our heads in the sand could put an end to the conspiracy against the human race. But that will never happen. Ask anybody.

NOTES

1. Hemingway thought Pío Baroja, a Basque writer whose works are of a pessimistic, cynical, and atheist tendency, was more worthy of the Nobel than he was and visited him in the hospital to tell him so as the author of the 1911 novel The Tree of Knowledge, a meditation on the uselessness of both knowledge and life, lay dying. Some years later, as we all know, Hemingway committed suicide, his second attempt, using a shotgun.

Depression and suicide are tragic themes running throughout the saga of the Hemingway family before, during, and after its most illustrious member took his own life.

2. This contention may seem counterintuitive, since much of the distraction-value of reading fiction stems from the reader’s acceptance of the characters in a narrative as more lifelike than many of the persons in their lives and certainly more so than most of humanity past and present. However, since “actual persons” are here considered only as fictions (selves), the distinction is between competing realms of unreality, a situation that is abetted by a fiction reader’s embracing the substance of beings constituted of words on a page, which would be madness without an underlying recognition on the part of readers that the substantiality of their own world will never be eclipsed by that of the story in which they are “lost.” A reader must take comfort, as counterintuitive as it may seem, in the sense of her reality being real and that of the characters in a narrative being unreal.