The (Paranormal) Silence of Animals

There are, if you attend carefully enough, moments in the course of your ordinary daily life that reveal deep insights over and above (beneath and below) the understanding you actually have of something. They appear to correlate, these epihapnies, to a feeling you have about something, about the state of society, about the state of the human, about the state of the western world of civilization and progress.

One man who has the latter close to his heart, John Gray (former Professor of European Thought at LSE), would be quite amused at my discovery the other day: that is, finding his latest anti-man tract The Silence of Animals, not as one might expect to find it in the philosophy section (or even in the food and nutrition section), but... wait for it... in the Paranormal section of the local library (Hillhead, Glasgow). You might think this unimportant, and it probably is on the surface, but insights don't deal with surfaces. For me, this discovery was as powerful as discovering the absence of a philosophy section in the WH Smith's (Strathclyde Uni's Bookshop) in Cathedral Street, or the placing of the philosophy section of Border's Books in Buchanan Street next to the toilet in the windowless dungeon-like basement. And Gray's book wasn't there by accident. Apparently, so they told me, when I suggested to the staff that perhaps it was in the wrong section, it belongs there. 

Hmmm.

You think?

Then, I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, it does belong there, insofar as speaking out against 'man' and his ascent towards godliness (if he isn't already there), against progress and western civilisation (the art of destruction-construction-corruption), is going against the grain to the point where 'you are not normal', and this is not normal. It's beyond normal. Ok, I'll maybe go along with that. Normal people don't speak of civilization as a disease, of man as a deluded little god, of his behaviour as demented and quite frankly shameful. Normal people just go about their business, inadvertently contributing to the problem in many cases, whilst thinking ahbout nothing in particular. Indeed, many people (living a life of quiet desperation) do not like to think period. They are afraid of what might emerge if they do. So they don't. They distract their selves to the point of dementia. And this is what we call 'normal'.

So, I guess, paranormal is the new philosophy, the new cultural crit. The new metaphysics, and poetry. Everything else is 'normal': the fiction, the travel, the shit-lit, the reams and reams of books about nothing, and about the same old shit. Maybe then, the library should be divided into two sections under which all other sections could then be assumed: Normal, and Paranormal, normal being for the already deluded with no intention of undeluding their selves, and paranormal being for the same deluded but with a view to undeluding their selves. Maybe.

The silence of animals is different from the silence of men. Max Picard