Empty faces in an empty world – you’ve got to love it, haven’t you? You’ve certainly got to love it, no doubt about that. Absolutely you have. That’s the whole point right there. That awful, frightening emptiness behind every face – it’s all rather splendid, don’t you think? Splendid in an eerie way. Of course, you’ve got to be the sort of person who likes that sort of thing. That kind of goes without saying, I would have thought! It’s no good at all if you don’t.
Focus on wealth, they told me, focus on abundance… They’d make you laugh, wouldn’t they? Here we are in the jolly old Preta Loka and they’re telling me to focus on abundance! They’d have to see the irony in that of course, they’d absolutely have to. No one could be so stupid as to miss that. For sure they couldn’t.
Machines don’t have the capacity to be ironic, as we know. That goes without saying, of course. They can’t pull it off no matter how hard they try. They just can’t manage it and that’s very heartening for those of us who still pride ourselves on being good old-fashioned non-mechanicals, deeply unfashionable as that may be. It’s up to us to be as ironic as possible in everything we do, to promote – as far as we are able – the pursuit of irony in all aspects of collective life. That’s a joke by the way – I don’t really mean it.
Alas, I – like so many others (like all of us, in fact) – can’t help noticing myself becoming more and more strident, more and more earnest, more and more uncouth, more and more belligerent and – therefore – less and less ironic with every day that passes. The rot has set in you see. It’s set in very deeply. The contamination has caught hold and now it won’t be denied. It insists upon rearing its ugly head. Life has become – for so many of us – a mere matter of brute survival. Or a brute matter of mere survival. We survive so that we might live to survive another day. We survive because that’s the Rule and everyone always has to obey the rule (as I’m sure you yourself know only too well). We survived because we’ve become Survival Machines and surviving is what survival machines do.
Fate is a cruel thing, is it not? Fate is such a cruel thing and none of us can avoid it, which is also very cruel. Sometimes I think that’s the cruellest thing of all. Sometimes people want to know all about my life and stuff like that. They want the inside information. They want the gossip. There’s really not much I can say on the matter, however. There is in fact very little I can say about it because it was all a big misunderstanding. It never really happened. They would cover this up if they could of course. There’s a big plot going on to cover it up, to make out that everything is going just swimmingly. It’s all going to plan, the officials tell us. None of it actually happened but the official story is that it did and that it is ‘totally true’.
Reality is a terrible risk, as I imagine most people will be only too happy to agree. It’s a terrible, awful risk. An absolutely horrendous risk… It’s a terrible risk and that’s why we play the game as cautiously as we do. That’s why we make sure to obey all the rules. That’s why we make sure to obey whatever rules might be going. ‘Focus on abundance,’ they say. ‘Be very careful that you don’t accidentally focus on extreme psychological poverty because you know what will happen if you do that!’
We survive because we have to, each and every one of us. We are survival machines through and through. We make up stupid stories in the privacy of our own heads to try to make sense of this senseless existence of ours and then we fight viciously over whose story is the right one. We’d happily kill each other over it. There’s no end to our foolishness, you see – no end at all. We babble hysterical nonsense as fast as we possibly can; we babble hysterical nonsense non-stop in order to distract ourselves from the knowledge of our terrible fate…
