On the Verge of Nothing: Pessimism's Impossible Beyond, by Gary J. Shipley

🤯💀🖤

I loved this book. I loved it despite the fact that I didn’t understand a full half of it. But I didn’t understand it in the same way that I don’t understand much of what goes on in a David Lynch film. Both invoke a state of joyful delirium, of ecstatic incomprehension.

Let me back up. Gary J. Shipley is an author of genre-bending science fiction and horror. But he’s also a pessimist and a scholar — and in that way, this work bears at least superficial similarity to Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, reviewed here.

The book starts from the premise that pessimism is correct: namely, that existence is pointless and serves no purpose, that life is predicated on suffering, that consciousness is some cosmic mishap, that in short, “as long as humans exist you will have the problem of human suffering; and given this, nonexistence is always preferable to existence, in that the former precludes the possibility of harm while the latter in practice necessitates it”.

From that premise, Shipley sets out to answer the question: “So now what?” His answer, although obviously opposed to the resignation of Schopenhauer, is at best only superficially related to the heroic pessimists (Nietzsche, Camus, Leopardi, Unamuno, etc.). Instead of proposing that we become heroes of futility, he advocates that we become junkies of futility — “those who although they accept pessimism as true, and eschew all contrivances to undermine it, are still actively engaged in neutralizing its negative effects through a creative program of lucid intoxication.” (emphasis mine).

He then proceeds through a number of explorations of that lucid intoxication — from a mind-bending discourse on the dreamlike and self-annihilative love of Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”, to the “fractured zombies” of Robert Walser’s “Microscripts”, to the non-human materializations of Franz Kafka, and to the inhumanity of being alive in the works Clarice Lispector. He also throws in aphorisms on cosmic pessimism and performance art and human immortality as the rise of the Drone-God. In all, it’s an intoxicating menagerie that sets your head spinning and your heart sinking. This is chicken soup for the void.