Humans live their existences locked in their own Byzantine theatre, denying most of what happens around them and screwing the rest of reality over as disinterested as the cosmos is disinterested in us.
All this which encapsulates and permeates those small humans means nothing. All of the world we know is an epiphenomena of planetary venting of the plate tectonics. That’s all of nature and all of life, for billions of years, a quaint planetary epiphenomenon with no discernible sense or rationale or even a somewhat plausible explanation. And in this endless sea of life there are these humans, dear gods, these utility machines with their passive aggressive instincts, ugly and beautiful, stupid and often too smart for their own good.
Then one day a pale blue fleck passes by and we can do nothing about its transit.
And the visitor moves, and it dances and then it catches up with us with very few interest in the matter. Like a Neptune rising from the deep, passing by with a cold eye flecked with white, an for the briefest of moments we are transfixed as an Iris in its majesty blue clouds, and then we evaporate.
And you see the essential human when this happens , the fear and then the realization – that all this means nothing. All we did, or nearly most of it means nothing. One day we attribute meaning to that we all were and then suddenly the reality of an indifferent universe passes us by and all this these wondrous things we were the only ones to bear witness off is becomes a sinking vapour in the outer shell of that blue visitor and we are carried with Melancholy into the black void between the stars.
To be seen is to have meaning. To be of relevance is what is the most ultimate significance in the human state, and then to find very few even glance with interest in our direction, that is bad enough, but in each of our lives we face that – this unbearable lightness of being.
But here we see a moment in time when nothing will tomorrow perceive us, or be there to perceive, period and we’ll be gone, forever.
It is a good thing there is no Melancholia headed for us, as far as we know – and Melancholia would make it so simple – we couldn’t even begin to avoid that nemesis. We’d have no chance, absolutely zero. It would be a very brief message of how things really are.
But right now are we not heading out to a future that’s potentially just as horrific? And what do we do?
Not a goddamn thing. It sometimes seems we do not care enough.
Go watch this movie. You get a nice scene what severe depression does to Kirsten Dunst, as she can’t lift her leg to step in to a bathtub. She just fades before her time and briefly awakens to face Melancholia. She doesn’t mourn in advance or do elaborate self-pity – only displays a modicum of self hate. But then her cold dead eyes face reality and the others in the movie have to hurry to catch up to make sense of The Great Nothing.
The theatre was quiet as a Mausoleum when we all walked out.
Only this will be left.
