Spectators to the Apocalypse

Apocalypse and paranoia are buzzwords these days. It is the cultural zeitgeist, especially on the internet, where schizoid memes can aggregate, mate, mutate, and replicate exponentially. As we gaze at the flicker of devastation, fed in a never ending deluge of spectacle which fills the space where being used to be. We exchange our surfaces face to face and our real face is in a digital book to be referenced by dataminers and intelligence agents.

 Our inner space has been invaded and inhabited by a cthonic pull. At any moment it always seems as if a subterreanean undercurrent threatens to pull the veil and unleash the zombie apocalypse that haunts our dreams. We have all seen that it takes as little as a sale on plasma televisions at walmart to trigger the toxin. Have no delusions folks- There is a fire in the morphic field. A white horse gallops on the horizon, into an ever present storm that at any second threatens to sweep over reality and change everything. The levy has broken and now our psyche has been flooded, saturated, and molded into rot. The pile of bodies left in the wake of our collective blindness stack up and the stench in our unconscious is toxic.  

We all wait for the explosion which will transform us. The collapse which will pull back the illusion and allow the real to come in it's place. The explosion which permeates our symbolic ocean of hypermedia with it's reptilian limbic system- fossilized consciousness-oil and clorexit cognitive dispersant which dissolves every perception into smaller invisible molecules. Experiential molecules swept away into the water column of the collective unconscious, choking the emotional-base of the food chain, the perceptual phytoplankton in our mental ecology. We no longer consider ourselves capable of anything except bracing for the inevitable end, but each time the inevitable comes, each horror visited upon us, just makes us seek more. A seeking which keeps us toggling between browser frames looking for the one which leads to a new world but yet we arrive back where we started, in front of the screen. We have become a population of people shell-shocked from our own power to be empty-shells in post-modern packaged programs of perpetual paranoiac paralysis.

We try to follow the different strands but it seems as if each one turns back upon itself as a Möbius strip. When you've crossed a precipice into a knowing and out of the matrix, you've actually only turned the corner onto the other side of the strip. Climbing narrative staircases in an shifting labyrinthine network, we think we have finally gotten to the top and out, we find ourselves back where we started. We don't know what the fuck to believe anymore and we look for answers and scapegoats incessantly trying to climb to the top of heaps of isolated perceptions, never realizing that the false awakening is a part of the fractal rat maze. The carrot on the end of the stick which allows us to avert our eyes from our own responsibility. In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false. Our seeking, while stemming from a desire for what is true, pulls our power away from us and sells it back to us as tickets to the epic blockbuster 3-D imax film experience of the end of the world. In order to get you to accept your role of victimization,  you have to come to it yourself. It has to be layered in a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream... 

And like the existentialist philosopher living in Nazi-occupied Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre, we seem to have concluded that there is no way out, there is No Exit. We could very well be dead already and hell is other people, we are locked in a room without a window, mirror, and only one door. We scream to be let out and the door flies open but we are crippled by our fear of the unknown. Paralyzed by it- We can't go through.

At the turn of the millennium, we appeared to be collectively waking up from the Matrix as we went and saw the Matrix in theaters. We grew wary of the plastic nature of our prefabricated ikea nesting instincts as we collected our limited edition Fight Club DVD collector box sets. Tyler Durden remains our shadow and we continue the main character's mistake in thinking that the only thing that can cause him to be integrated is an explosion, the big catastrophic event. A missed gunshot to the head. The explosion which will make it real. In short, an apocalypse.  An archetypal habit pattern of morphogenesis in a homeostasis of cyclical self-fulfilling prophecy, a fire in the unconscious fueled by paranoia's center of gravity. The truth is that the apocalypse has come and gone again and again.. We might have seen that but we were too busy self-destructing... If you missed it, don't worry- I suspect THEY will be playing reruns..