I woke up at 6:00 in the morning as I am wont to do as of the last few years with thousands of thoughts raging through my head so I couldn’t really get back to sleep so I decided to randomly put down my thoughts and then punish anybody who would chose to read them by putting them out there on line for someone to read. It’s a narcissistic thing to do, but I seem to be genetically programmed, like many other humans, to seek validation and attention, even if the way I chose to seek it may actually reap the opposite result.
Plus there are some thoughts that can’t be reduced to 140 characters no matter how hard I try (as Mark Twain said, more or less, I was going to write you a short letter rather than a long one, but I didn’t have time).
And these are going to be random. I’m not going to bother editing them much, if at all, so if you are going to grouse at typos, misspellings and grammatical errors, I don’t want to hear it. But from this perspective, this is a sort of exercise, to let me thoughts fall where they may without thinking (yes, I know, irony) and see what happens.
I think I am secret nihilist, so secret even I didn’t know it, or more likely didn’t want to admit it to myself. The world and universe seem pointless and random and there is no inherent meaning in this vast expanse of space we find ourselves in for some reason that no one can essentially explain.
But even that’s not the worst of it. I am a nihilist, but in many ways, that’s impossible. I am genetically predisposed to not be. We all are. Just think if we, as a species really, fully accepted the universe for what it is: an existence of objects that have no value (you can’t even apply adjectives like cold and distant and meaningless to it because all that gives it value; a noun is objective until you give it a description and then it has value and meaning, but the universe can never be anything but an objective noun, objectively).
Again, just think what would happen as a species if we saw the universe as essentially what it is: we would give up, we would lay down and die, we wouldn’t move, we wouldn’t eat, we’d either kill ourselves, though to do so is to give meaning to something that has no meaning, so theoretically we might not do that; basically we’d just stop until we were non-existent.
But try and do that. Try to treat the world of any meaning. When you wake up in the morning, think to yourself, the world has no meaning. You’d just lie there, because any action you take, getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, sex, gives the world meaning. You’d just lie there and let the world and your existence be meaningless.
Yet you can’t do that, can you? It’s impossible. Try it. Eventually, everyone, except for an infinitesimal number of people, would find themselves unable to stay there. They get up and start their day.
Why? Because for some reason that can’t really be explained, we are not genetically programmed that way. We are programmed, like all species, to survive, and seeing the world as meaningless, even if true, will not help us survive as a species. So something in our DNA kicks in and we start acting as if anything we do actually means a damn. And we go about our day spending most of it blocking out the idea that nothing we do has any essential meaning.
And I find it very depressing. But again, the irony there is that I find it depressing not because it is depressing, but because somehow I have that genetic predisposition to be depressed about it.
Not everybody does. Have you ever met one of those endlessly cheerful people who are more Pollyanish than Pollyanna and are so positive and upbeat you just want to become a serial killer if for no other reason you could put such a person out of your misery? Well, don’t blame them, because that is part of their DNA as well. Most people fall on a spectrum of 4 to 6 where a ten is an immovable mass of flesh that is unable to even bathe by themselves, and a one is Little Orphan Annie on uppers and cocaine, but without the downer side effects.
What I don’t quite understand is how do I, as a sort of nihilist (I say I vacillate from an 8 to 9 on the scale) fit into the survival of the species. Everything that we as humans do or everything that we are in some way helps us ensure the existence of the species.
So how does nihilism fit into it all? Is it that if everybody was so happy and upbeat about life, that if they ignored the essentially meaninglessness of life, that we’d actually be worse off than we are, that we as depressives and nihilists put a halt or slow down the propagation of the species by ensuring that we don’t create so many of our fellow man, that we overrun the world such that only self-destruction and anarchy can result? Are we a brake mechanism of people who are optimistic and progressives who just have no thoughts about the consequences of their deeds because everything is awesome?
If so, then I say, you’re welcome.
But, god, if so, that’s really, really depressing.
Jim Thalman grew up in the neighborhood where they shot On the Waterfront, the famed Kazan, Brando film that forever changed the scape of filmmaking. His god parents actually met on the set: the deal was Uncle John would get the girls (my mom and aunt) close to Brando if Aunt Joan would go out on a date with him. Thalman’s Uncle kept his end of the deal; his Aunt kept hers; and the rest is history, or at least family. So needless to say Brando was always a topic of conversation. Thalman’s mother, an avid theater lover, introduced him to the NYC theatre scene at a very young age, but not the Broadway scene nearly as much as the avant-garde movement happening downtown on East 4th St. in the heart of the Bowery. Venues like La Mama were etched into his world with these really tough, no nonsense guys and sleek, sexy girls who were just as tough.
