Quote from: Andrew McIntosh on September 05, 2015, 04:48:52 PM
Finally got stuck into Ligotti's "The Conspiracy Against The Human Race" and as satisfactorily pessimistic as it is I get the underlying impression that his desire for omnicide is from compassion for humanity's suffering rather than contempt for humanity's existence.
I do often wonder about that. Have often wondered. Not to say that Ligotti's protestations on the side of compassion are insincere. This is the guy who once quipped (though I emphasize "quipped"), "I politically self-identify as a socialist. I want everyone to be as comfortable as they can be while they're waiting to die." I have no reason not to take him at his word.
But it is comments like the following which set the internal wheels in motion:
"Nabokov's statement that portraying an atheist as a decent person is a taboo subject in literature betrays his stance as someone who felt atheism to be an unjustly persecuted intellectual posture."
This is taken from what is probably Ligotti's most infamous interview, "Literature Is Entertainment Or It it Nothing", which road tests a lot of the ideas to be explored in TCATHR. Ligotti has repeatedly made clear, over the course of several interviews, that he feels pessimism to be an unjustly persecuted intellectual posture. What tends to follow is a shit-ton of words that might, en masse, amount to a shit-ton of pro-pessimist PR.
Before TCATHR was published, a pdf of the work-in-progress was made available to anyone registered to the
ligotti.net fansite. Aside from containing one glaringly not-particularly-publishable (or at least, no particularly pluralist) choice of words, "corrected" in the published version (the surprise or shock registered by some readers was described by Ligotti as "exactly" the reaction he had intended...), the pdf contained several indexed quotations from one UG Krishnamurti. "UG" is a man, now deceased, who apparently claimed to have achieved ego-death- a man, in other words, who gave even less fuck than
THIS GUY. He comes off as quite a character, but the essence of his point, on the subject of ego-death, comes to this: "Yes, I really did achieve ego-death. No, I have no idea how that came about. It was pure fluke. No, you cannot do anything about it. I got lucky. You all are fucked. Now piss off, there's really nothing I can say to you that will help you except to repeat, ad nauseam: 'you all are fucked.'" I may be gravely misrepresenting UG's statements. But the fact that Ligotti chose such quotations for his magnum-opus-in-progress speaks volumes I think. If there are to be words of compassion from him, it is because there is, most assuredly, nothing to be had beyond lip service on the subject. We are all fucked. Now piss off.
(Heh. Just pulled this up from UG's wiki: "I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second statement is negated by a third and so on. My aim is not some comfy dialectical thesis but the total negation of everything that can be expressed." Think I will be reading more UG in the future.)
Ligotti's compassion is often set up in opposition to forces typically regarded as pro-human or pro-life. That is to say, in opposition to the merciless forces of positivity (of creativity*), of nature. At the end of his short story "Sideshow, and Other Stories" the narrator overcomes his crippling writer's block, an ending which one interviewer describes as "unfamiliarly positive". TL offers the following analysis: "To my mind, the narrator's eagerness to continue writing is actually quite monstrous. At the same time, it is, as you say, very positive. In my observation, the most monstrous and vile people are those who are filled with energy and confidence. The more energy and confidence they have, the more monstrous they are. These people make life miserable for those of us who have doubts about everything we do and above all about existence itself."
Going back to the quip: "I politically self-identify as a socialist. I want everyone to be as comfortable as they can be while they're waiting to die."
It continues thusly:
"Unfortunately, the major part of Western civilization consists of capitalists, whom I regard as unadulterated savages. As long as we have to live in this world, what could be more sensible than to want yourself and others to suffer as little as possible? This will never happen because too many people are unadulterated savages. They're brutal and inhuman. Case in point: Why is euthanasia so despised?Answer: Because too many people are barbaric sons of bitches."
I can (and will, with little encouragement) go on endlessly, but this quotation from short story "The Shadow, The Darkness" might endarkenate:
"There could never be anything written about the 'conspiracy against the human race' because the phenomenon of a conspiracy requires a multiplicity of agents, a division of sides, one of which is undermining the other in some way and the other having an existence that is able to be undermined. But there is no such multiplicity or division, no undermining or resistance or betrayal on either side. What exists is only this pulling, this tugging upon all the bodies of this world. But these bodies have a collective existence only in a taxonomic or perhaps a topographical sense and in no way constitute a collective entity, an agency that might be the object of a conspiracy. And a collective entity called the human race cannot exist where there is only a collection of non-entities, of bodies which are themselves only provisional and will be lost one by one, the whole collection of them always approaching nonsense, always dissolving in dreams.
"...There was only this consuming, proliferating blackness whose only true and final success was in merely perpetuating itself as successfully as it could in a world where nothing exists that could ever hope to be anything else except what it needs to thrive upon."
(A wee bit more discussion on the above
HERE.
* noise is entertainment or it is nothing?
