The Fall

'It so happens that I'm tired of being  a man...', Pablo Neruda

'The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?' Gilles Deleuze


December 22nd, 2012.

The rain outside continues to fall. Man continues to fall. Flood warnings are out in force. Somerset is 'scooping' ... Stonehaven lies under 6 feet of water. The island of man's self-imposed apartheid leaves him stranded. Stonehaven lies under 6 feet of water. Man... lies under an ocean.

In order for man to return to the surface, paradoxically to the deepest part of his self where there is no self, to return to harmony, to 'life in balance' and fulfillment, he has to finalise (not necessarily 'cease') his becoming, and doing. Industry is the great affliction. The Fall is man's own doing.

The Fall, as a distrust and a lack of Faith in things as they are, is depicted in Christian literature with Adam eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. This is a parable, if not a cautionary tale, of the 'desire to know' (the carelessness of consciousness) which dispels the opennes of the Edenic Adam to the Mystery that is beyond our knowing and thus cordons Man off from the cosmos, and, by extension, his greater immense Self.

'Deep in his heart,' writes E.M. Cioran, 'man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there'.

'It could be that the next great step-function in 'human' evolution,' writes Jim Norwine in A Post-Modern Tao, 'will be in some measure post-human (where human = Homo sapiens).'

That next step is the annihilation of Man. 'Man is the freak of the universe', Erich Fromm reminds us. Ambrose Bierce adding a little satire but no less serious writes of man:

Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

'The disappearance of Man at the end of History,' writes Alexandre Koyeve in his lectures on Hegel 1938-9, 'is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been for all eternity. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so called - that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History - that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so called or of the free and historical Individual - means quite simply the cessation of Action in the strong sense of the term. Practically, this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man no longer changes himself essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his knowledge of the World and of himself...'

In returning to 'animal', Man reconciles his self with anima and 'that which has soul in it'. Man is the Fall -  the Fall of Man is himself, his usurping of the great spririt of the universe and, accordingly, in his turning away from the light, his turning towards the darkness. The Fall of Man is himself, his false 'I' which predicates itself on doing, on industry, on action, collecting along the way so much karmic debt ('karma' itself means action) as to render him effectively soulless. To re-turn, he must destroy the self, de-structure it, empty it. 'Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man', writes E.M Cioran

Annihilation pure and simple. The end of History.

'THE CITY HAD FALLEN...'

The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. 'I remember, ' someone said, 'how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.'

Dušan "Charles" Simić