Mankind and the Destruction of Reality
Our daily actions, in the vast majority of
the cases and for the most part of us, seem to be purposeless, having no real
target, no grounded meaning.
As in this inexorable motion, an always
larger part of the human race tends to live in a sweltering megalopolis all
around the world. The life of any randomly chosen simple individual in one of
those looks like it is less and less connected with the objective reality of
Life, that is to say its Essence, and more and more to a virtual one.
But what is exactly this objective reality,
this Essence, what does it stand for?
If you take for instance any animal, the
objective reality for it is connected with its five senses, these have a sole
purpose, its own survival, which includes of course procreation. Sometimes, it
can be observed in wildlife completely gratuitous acts, like an elephant trying
to save a rhinoceros stuck in a pond from a group of starving lions, or a
monkey trying to get a small bird out of some water where it had unfortunately
fallen. We will never really know, I guess, the real motivations of those clever
mammals whenever they try to help a specimen of another kind than themselves,
and thus acting in a gesture of total generosity regardless of their own
welfare. And maybe it’s better not to understand all of it in order to keep the
sheer beauty of these actions intact.
But ourselves, we are for the majority
condemned to stay trapped in small apartments made of concrete and glass within
huge cities. Almost all the spectrum of our behavior, most of our actions, tend
just to give us the comfortable notion of a well-organized routine.
What impact does this superficiality might
have on us? This a few generations after we all have stopped cultivating the
earth for food or simply going to fetch water every morning in order to survive
on a daily basis.
Many would argue that this is actually the
very goal of civilization, to free all human beings from the original bonds of
mere survival, and enable them to enjoy this new freedom throughout their
lives. Then, as years go by, to enable them to gather more knowledge to better
understand the world, or to play various games, and by the same token gather
all sorts of new goods.
But I sometimes get the feeling that all this
freedom is turning more and more into a labyrinth for many of us here.
Our actions tend to just mimic the ones of
our surrounding environment according to the country where we live. We go on
vacations when everyone else does, mostly in the summer, some amateurishly
paint during their weekends, thinking that they will maybe be famous, like Van
Gogh, but only after their deaths. Ignorant that these are actually paintings
that nobody will ever see out of their limited family circle. In the same way,
some play tennis in their free time, keeping in mind the performance of the great
champions whom all can admire on cable television, or on various other screens.
We each day recreate over and over an
egoistic world, made out of our icons, of illusionary models, while eating junk
food made by robots in factories, or buying disposable clothes that children or
adult slaves have woven, in order just not to starve to death, on the other
side of the planet.
A Russian poetess told me this, not such a
long time ago, while walking in the center of Moscow and watching the crowd:
“if these people could only see themselves as they really are for one minute
they would totally fall apart”.
And why could it be? Because the sole purpose
of all our empty tasks, our superfluous leisure activities, is a common single
goal, and that is to put the maximum possible distance between us and this hole
in the ground, already waiting for us in some not so far away graveyard. The
human race, after extracting itself out of Nature, is lying more bare and
vulnerable than at any given time in its past history. Being utterly lost, the
destruction of the planet is actually the logical consequence of this simple fact,
this awful masquerade. That is why logically it can and will not be avoided,
however hard we try to prevent it. This, not because we are getting weaker or
more ignorant than before, but because it is the only way left for humanity to
continue its erratic motion inside the Universe, now that only symbols are left
around it like walls, themselves cut off from any grounded reality.
Ivan de Monbrison
Ivan de Monbrison is a bipolar artist and writer from France born in 1969. His two chapbooks were published in English, The Overflowing Body with Greyingghost press, USA 2018 and The Other Self with Back Room poetry press, UK 2023