The height of the contradiction to bear is when these two sentiments are paired: that nothing is worth anything, that there is no inherent value or horizon of value in existence, that there is no extant or underlying reason to get up and go on, that the meaning of self and society is a fiction; and that precisely in such a situation of meaninglessness, of truth as abyssally fictive, figural—not despite or against this condition but from out of it, on its back—you will existence as infinitely meaningful, you say Yes to it as valuable beyond any evaluation, such that whatever happens is affirmed as worth happening for all eternity, and so is made beautiful, though it foil every attempt to understand it, record it, or remember.

In the face of this abyss, where nothing ever gets off the ground, where time consumes and cancels itself—for temporality is just a narrative structure that lacks consistency when the continuity of existence dawns—the air is thick here, every sound trembles—to nonetheless affirm the ground in its very vacancy: as the zero of every building and the truth of every building’s real height: so that dwelling in the boldness of that ground, there shoots up the passionate peace of a refining fire which climbs and destroys to transfigure what it licks—a blaze whose lack of outcome you will and enjoy with the freedom of the eternally playful, of the enduringly refractory to sense.

The liquidation, the outpouring, of all value must be borne, not resisted but affirmed, as the one fate chosen, because it was: no other way to perfection, no other way to vouch for the future, than for all the concepts and consequences to go crackle in the foundations which life itself denecessitates and sets free.

The crucible is this: To survey all one’s efforts (public and clandestine), all one’s ideals (the callow and the wizened), all one’s strivings (spanning the whole spectrum of the heart’s desire) as they lie lost, inert, forgotten even by the self that formerly willed them—and to smile at the magnitude of the glorious waste, for it has all led you to where the extremity of essential Voidance reveals itself, right where the longing for what is absolutely right is most intense and most absurd! To laugh at the dissipation of your thousand last trajectories, at the slaughtering of all those precocious premature colts who’ve raced past the eyesight of anyone by now! To binge-watch the dissolve of your thousand-faced clown, whose grin yet taunts with a magnanimity, with a scope of benediction for the ruthlessly gratuitous, as yet unattained! To sing vale veritas as your most earnest plea recedes into a birdsong that need not even wake you from the dream, as the ease of an absolute welcome betrays the folly of all your passions (all of them ‘literary’) along with the calmness of their majesty! To crown even your denial and duplicity as having educated this vital factor of growth, as having driven you to supersede all the confining illusions without regret for them, without feigning a total escape from their shadows but snuggling into the luminous minima of reason their disengagement displays, their frissoning shades all dancing like the playthings of time’s mask, all in the name of the inimitable ‘who knows’ that displaces you! To will the forgetting of any false destiny, so as to render your destiny whole again as it flashes higher, as it crafts its cunning style with your will-o’-the-wisp passivity; as the late-coming praise of generosity in your spirit serves succor to the loneliness in your eyes, to the sorrow and glee of your quiet abandonment; as you gallop yet again across the blade-ridden stage in the unattended show you call your life.

It was not enough to have fought once or twice or five million times: the battle with valuelessness goes on wherever the ideal, the fantasy, the telos, the god that obscured its stakes is stripped of its veil and is revealed in its transparency as the flimsy, provisional, ad hoc covering it was; such that revealed in turn is a vision of the sprawling unbound production of your past as the product of a freedom mishandled because only half-accepted so far. For you are not in possession of its pierce, of its force, of its charm yet: and so you must wield the olive branch and the sword.

The battle then represents itself thus: to accept in full the promise you are, whose responsibility is worse than tremendous, because unconscious, by handling it and answering it afresh from the again conquered perspective of a final triumphing over yourself, as real as a wound whose pain heals. To stand atop the rubble of the squanderings, of the dismissals, of the confused ravings, of the terrified glimpses at the ground, alone and unaccounted for, witnessed only by the heart in you that leaps further than you ever thought possible, through the script—the heart whose unheard pumping, in meaning’s void, gives all the meaning there is to your going on.

From those caverns of solitude and love in you, hidden so wittily from consciousness, a justification wrests itself from the drag of delay and excuse, and from the dying dimness comes the light, a new one, of the hardest-won innocence, a light this childlike will that shines on and on, that becomes unto life’s power’s own peak, like a brightness that adores its extinguishment, craving only to have been itself. There, invisibility is not retreat but the strength to be oneself without knowing it, coveting it, or putting it in. There, surrender to the divine adventure, finally, is complete.

—June 17, 2024