The Chasm: Navigating the Death of the Future

Apocalypse is a recurring event

Content note: This post contains discussion of suicide.

I. The Chasm

Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

— H. P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

When I was at my most suicidal at the age of 23, two particular images intruded on my imagination every day. I have OCD, so there was nothing new about this phenomenon itself: I was—and am—accustomed to assails from malignant thoughts and unwanted imagery. But these ones were different.

The first was simply a light switch being turned off.

The symbol felt appropriate enough, which is probably why it persisted: a definitive, physical act of extinguishment, not too different in terms of motion from pulling a trigger. One night, I nearly pulled it. The recurring image of the light switch turned out to be fitting: when moved from abstract ideation to reality, it felt as crudely physical as turning off a light: cold and impersonal resistance that, once overcome, invited nearly instantaneous darkness.

The expected question is perhaps why I thought about turning off the light; the more interesting question is why I didn’t. That’s the question I will address further down.

The second recurring image at this time was of the stars in the night sky burning out. This one held special significance to me. When I suffered frequent depressive episodes in my adolescence and early adulthood, which often left me bedridden for days, I used to focus upon the joys and promises of smaller things that weren’t going anywhere as a sort of mental crutch. Whether or not they happened to be out of my reach, I knew there were countless things brimming with potential joy: the scent of flowers, new music, new things to experience. No matter how dark things became for me, I was energized to some degree by the knowledge that something worthwhile persisted somewhere. Even beyond my reach, they represented something.

Distant lights in the darkness were a good symbol for my brain to sort of drift to. The stars, like the fundamental joys of life, were non-contingent: no matter how cloudy or polluted, they would always be hanging in the sky. They represented potential. When I felt at last that they had started burning out, it’s not that these things stopped existing. Something more fundamental had happened to me. The potentials within these stars no longer held any meaning. It was as though the thing that underpinned them had ceased to matter. Joy was beyond my grasp, and after many long years, I eventually forgot what joy even felt like. Enough years like this, and it seems inevitable that one eventually begins to question the beauty of the stars when compared to the weight of the abyss in which they hang.

Everything that was once beautiful simply became mathematics. When I walked along a creek in the park in my hometown—because that’s what I used to do in my adolescence, trying to find a quiet spot to read Oscar Wilde—the once compelling views of birds and water burbling over the rocks, which held a secret and transcendent meaning, became the affective equivalent of a math workbook.

I now see the same dynamic playing out across the world, particularly the United States, as the contingencies of a society that once felt imperfect but fundamentally immovable have become apparent. We are watching all of our potential futures—futures both personal and societal—extinguish. We look to the various possible futures as lights which both guide and fill us with the strength necessary to move forward. As these guiding lights disappear, what is left behind is an empty patch of eternal void where each possibility had once been. I’ve come to think of this patch of darkness where once there was potential as The Chasm.

I used to want to start a business in writing, or, failing that, use my career as a fallback. I’ve already started to build one in publishing as a book editor, after all. It seems plausible I could launch something in the time we have left before It’s Too Late. But even then, there is a clock counting down to midnight, and everyone can hear it but no one can see its hands. Like most everyone else at this moment, I feel I must rush or be left behind. 

I used to wonder about retirement, or caring for my parents in their latter years, or whether I should add the weight of one day needing to have myself taken care of to the “Have a child—Y/N?” scale. Now I cannot even seriously engage with any of these questions. I look to start a creative journey, or to start establishing a baseline of knowledge in a certain subject, only to have my enthusiasm dimmed by the question of whether it will in some currently inscrutable way be cut short.

“Chasm” feels like the correct word to describe what is left behind, because what has been done to the future, in a process that still seems nowhere near its conclusion, is essentially an extraction of possibility.

One until very recently could, for example, work more or less safely in the sciences, as a close friend of mine did before all of the research grants her lab relied on were cut. The fact that she is an immigrant fills me with fear every time she goes to travel. My parents and I have had our health insurance taken from us. Their futures, and many like theirs, including most everyone I care about, relies upon the naked, hand-waving whim of the monster digging The Chasm. It feels the social contract is collapsing in many similar ways, and the only way out is to scam before you are scammed and flee with the fruits; money is being drained at record pace to the top (and what is money extraction if not an extraction of possibility?); many of the plans that once relied upon a stable society—a stable world, perhaps—have fallen into question.

Many feel this, including many of those who will tell me I am overreacting to the collapse of my country, or at least the social order that made living within it not wholly contingent on the errant whims of its stupidest leaders and oligarchs. I have seen countless people giving in to despair, or willfully blinding themselves, or beginning to speak like prophets (this post included). This last part is most interesting to me. While I have no studies to illustrate this, I feel as though many artists and other creators I follow have begun to release what I’ve termed “apocalypse art”: art that, unlike some of its predecessors, seems to engage emotively and sincerely with Whatever Is Coming rather than engaging with collapse as a hypothetical. The difference is noticeable.

As the world becomes stranger, so do our ways of speaking and interfacing with it. The rate at which I have seen former materialists turn to talking about magic, fate, and the unknowable nature of the universe’s metaphysics would stagger me if I were to explain it to myself from 15 years ago. This seems to be a common pattern throughout history, as peoples of the past faced various groundswells of change—many of which were apocalypses that came true, and now go unremarked upon and taken as quotidian because it is simply part of the world we were born into.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

— W.B. Yeats, excerpt from “The Second Coming”

I speculate that the openings of such Chasms as the one that now lay before us—this graveyard of the future where what was once known or expected vanishes into an abyss whose contents cannot be guessed at—generate mysticism in the same way that being unable to see in the dark generates monsters.

In the unknowable darkness we guess, often through quick visual flashes (not unlike burnt-out stars and light switches) and more subtle sensory impressions, the kind of monster that could be lurking in our bedroom closet or between forest trees. A large and alien smile on a pale face; wide eyes of something mocking a human expression; swiftness, claws, and empty laughter. In the very same way, perhaps a dark future births images of unstable ground, flames, darkness, and myriad things far more abstract that can only be described by the sort of manic and often abstract language that typifies prophetic speaking. If things are murky and unclear but massively high stakes, we describe them with exaggerated feeling, because that’s how they are experienced. This makes sense. Describing a tiger in a cage has far less prophetic potential than describing glowing eyes smoldering at you from between two bushes at three o’clock in the morning.

In October [1913], while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision last about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.” That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.

I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not really imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me at all.

[…]

On August 1 the world war broke out.

— Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

II. Gravity and Grace

In her posthumously published collection of notebook fragments, Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil meditated on what she says are the two fundamental tendencies of humans. The first was a tendency toward baseness, or Gravity:

Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth their pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within and poisons him.

This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity?

Gravity is powered by the human need for equilibrium: I am hurt, and so I must hurt others; I have given and not received, and the equilibrium imbalanced as a result; and other such curiosities of human nature. When the equilibrium is disturbed, a Void is created, waiting to be filled by Gravity. It is Grace which allows us to bear and accept the Void rather than engage with filling it by harming others or in other ways acting base according to the calculations of Gravity.

Weil was a theological thinker. For her, the existence of Grace contradicts Gravity, a natural force, and so Grace is a supernatural force powered by God. (My explanation here, and especially in the above paragraph, is lacking, as any Weil scholar will probably tell you; you should read the book. It’s one of the best texts I’ve read, and its complexities are worth your time.)

While I am (probably) an atheist, I’ve always found this idea of Grace as a supernatural force opposed to Gravity to be compelling. In fact, the Christian focus on grace is what compels me the most about the religion. But while Weil might disagree with me, I feel there is something profound to be learned about love and human nature from these ideas she’s working with, no matter what our metaphysics.

The concept of grace is memetically attractive. Anyone who has ever experienced true grace from another person understands the almost transcendental feeling of gratitude and love that results from it. It does, in fact, feel supernatural—to both give and to receive.

Speaking of memetic attractiveness, I try to avoid the “All religion = All religion” ways of thinking, but I have to admit there is occasionally something to the idea. More Weil:

The extinction of desire (Buddhism)—or detachment—or amor fati—or desire for the absolute good—these all amount to the same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes.

To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good.

I feel there is some through-line to draw between ways of dealing with The Chasm and The Void.

Buddhism teaches detachment and equanimity. Hinduism teaches detachment and Karma Yoga. Christianity teaches to turn the other cheek. Weil, and Christianity, teaches Grace. There is one way to carry forward through pain, and that is to accept it just as we accept our joy. This is an oversimplification of a lot of complicated ideas, but I feel they can help point us in the general direction we need to go.

During the darkest time of my life, I only found solace when, faced with no other choice besides oblivion, I accepted that my life was hell. Paradoxically, this allowed me at great length to find beauty again in the misery, and the blackness of the night where once glimmered stars of futures and potentials grew to have its own kind of beauty. The pain had re-injected meaning into the what had become flat and meaningless. I had to accept that pain itself could be meaningful—had to be meaningful—for what I was suffering through to be bearable, whether I viewed the world spiritually or materialistically.

When faced with pain and a rapidly extinguishing future as the equilibrium of society grows further afield of anything that can be called just and equal at speeds more elevated than usual, perhaps not fighting back is not what is needed, but right action in a quickly darkening world without expectation of reward. All of it may amount to nothing no matter what we do. History, and indeed modern society, which involves genocide, bigotry, and perverse financial incentives, is replete with recurring apocalypses. Thousands die each day, many in our very own back yards, others overseas (such as in the Palestinian genocide), whose deaths are the decision of someone who could have decided something different.

And now we find ourselves in a new apocalypse: as the triplet pincers of climate change, fascism, and the black box of AI enclose themselves around our neck, we are faced with the reality that we don’t know what will happen when they snap shut. Many of us may well needlessly die, as so many have, and as so many do. This is the unavoidable reality, but it at least represents a target, and a target represents potential, and that potential is a guiding star that continues to exist whether we do or not.

III. Supernatural

On the night I nearly killed myself, I remember feeling surprised by the weight of the gun. That is, it was lighter than I expected. The blandness of this experience of near death is impressed upon my memory almost as strikingly as the memory of the dull orange light of the room. The light switch imagery also kept flickering in my head, roughly in time with the more subtle flickers of the actual light bulb.

I had been trying to reconcile this overwhelming blandness with the severity of what I was feeling for some time when my phone started to vibrate.

It startled me. I don’t get many phone calls, a fact which was doubly true back then. Someone I knew very well, who lived a thousand miles away and had every reason to dislike me due to a dicey personal history, had just stepped out of a bar and decided to call me. I put the gun back and stepped out of the room to answer. For one reason or another, I never went back in.

“I looked at the sky and thought of you,” they’d told me.

They don’t know about this, and they never will. I don’t know what I would or wouldn’t have done. I think it’s better for both of us to not ever really know.

But I think about it frequently. As I mentioned earlier, they had every reason to dislike me. I had every reason to dislike them. And yet something between us—a forgiveness that allowed us to accept each other as we were and work toward something better that we knew we were capable of—opened a potentiality where that person may have saved my life.

I find myself filled with rage lately. The injustices of the world are someone’s decision. The people who got us here are all around me—in my community, in my family, in the raging arguments I have with them in my head. I am filled with a ravenous desire for revenge, to inflict some kind of punishment in order to fill the Void and restore the equilibrium for what they have inflicted on me and so many others.

I fear many people in my political category are the same. And it’s understandable—undeniably logical. So logical, in fact, that we regularly cast out even those who agree with us for infractions that it is logical to expel them over. Yet every time this happens—every time we enact revenge—the darkness lengthens, and yet, strangely, nothing is better for it. I am speaking of those around us who, to put it bluntly, have fucked up and will probably continue to fuck up because they show no remorse, no thought, for what they’ve done.

The trouble is, I have also fucked up. I have hurt others and acted selfishly in serious ways. So have you.

When I think of the small amount of healing I’ve managed in the decade since my near-miss suicide, and I try to compose some sort of advice for others in similar situations (or even situations entirely dissimilar), the complexity of the task dwarfs my ability to articulate somewhat cleanly every experience, thought, and feeling that led to my small improvements. So many untransferable elements are involved in the partial mending that much of it would boil down to “live precisely the life I have lived.”

The human condition is comically unsolvable. When we die, finally having healed to a reasonable degree some minor number of the grievous wounds we’ve endured over our lifetimes, the next generation will replace us and find themselves inflicted by these same wounds, both personally and politically, and the cycle of needing so solve them will renew. There is a wheel of hurt that turns forever, generation upon generation, because we are in ensnared in the unsolvable trap of pain, which is reinvigorated with the blood of each new birth.

In a world where mistakes are inevitable, especially mistakes made in pain, we must learn to tolerate them. Too many from my generation expect perfection, and offer no road toward redemption. This is a serious problem. The desire to inflict pain upon those who have done wrong, if not checked, can simply be an expression of Gravity, when what we need if we wish to attain to the better world we’re always talking about is Grace. Grace acknowledges the mistake and brings the offender to account, and it’s within that ledger that we can create a better condition for everyone; Gravity tells them to jump off a bridge to atone, knowing that even that won’t be enough.

When I envision a better future, it’s one where evil is brought to account through Grace. It’s one where we try—really try—to stop the needless death and suffering by whatever required actions, which can be quite extensive, rather than hurt for the sake of hurt. We stare now into both a Chasm and a Void. My hope is that we can navigate it with Grace instead of Gravity, and that we can do so by understanding that the pain is inevitable: it can only be endured with equanimity, and we must act well even in the face of it. The importance of this increases as the world gets worse, even though the world worsening makes it harder to act with Grace and equanimity. Even when it’s all said and done, even if we have done our best (which we won’t), it may not be enough; it may require supernatural intervention simply to get us to a more tolerable level of pain. But Weil’s key insight was that supernatural intervention exists.

Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace