You must be willing to die a meaningless death. In substance, this means you must be willing to live a meaningless life. Both statements are equally, utterly true, yet they are as unsatisfying as meaninglessness itself – in fact, they are synonymous with it. For life to be worth the traversal of its span, each one of us must retrieve something of value where there is none: an ordeal such that consolation is needed. Traditionally, this was the task of religion, and the miraculous retrieval of that ‘something’ worth living for was purportedly achieved via hieratic means. Alas, this model turned out to be as unsatisfactory as the trivial dread it initially sought to alleviate, leading to a kind of reversal: the ‘beyond’ – provided it exists in the first place – was revealed to have been of this earth all along. Indeed, the ‘beyond’ is but an intensification of the ‘here and now’. Transcendence, if it exists, is subservient to immanence, which means that we must settle for mere aesthetic instances as they manifest themselves, be it only occasionally. And on top of this evanescent experience of bliss, something else is now left over: quotations, reminiscences and intimations of a haunting, inaccessible otherness that, upon closer inspection, is inseparable from death itself. When it crystallizes into a mark or a remarkable event, its strangeness gestures towards a kind of opening – I do not know what else to call it – that holds up in spite of it all. It is a gap in the distinction between life and death (perhaps this distinction itself), lying neither here nor there. It is a vacant interval towards which art points, devising meaning. Yet even then the ghost of a doubt subsists: what was that? Was it meaningful or meaningless? As long as the nagging question remains, the answer will always disappoint us. For surely it is the latter – it must be the latter. Yet in spite of all this we’re not quite through with God’s wraith, whether it haunts us under this particular moniker or under another.
cosmin toma 