A (Healthy?) Dose of Horror

I'm reading Steve Erickson's The Sea Came in At Midnight. I'm finding it exhilarating.

It is creating in me lots of emotions. Lots of odd facial expressions. Lots of pain. Lots of feelings.

The story is this shocking mixture of surreal sexuality, fleeting moments of violence, and eruptions of vulnerability and the desire to be loved.

I don't often write in fiction books. Sometimes I do. I like to underline this or that passage or whatever.

So far I've only underlined a single sentence. One of the main characters is Japanese. While describing the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Japan, and the Emperor's confession that he is in fact not a god, he writes:  "Now there was no god, only a new sun in God's place. In annihilation there had been honor, in God's disownment there was the void."

It reminds me of Heidegger's essay 'What Are Poets For?' There he claims that our age is defined by the default of God, by God's failure to appear. What we truly lack, he argues, is "the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love" (in Poetry, Language, Thought, 95). We are in a position of staring into the void, he says. Our task, he says, is to turn away from the void, to find a way to understand pain, death, and love.

Sure enough, Erickson's book is loaded with the word 'nihilism', with references to the void and the apocalypse.

How odd it all is.

I watched a video of Richard Dawkins earlier:

I agree with Dawkins in this video. We don't need an absolute morality, we need an intelligent  rational morality. One that operates through conversation, consensus, and reason. 

Yet the difficulties of our age, the unconcealedness Heidegger discusses, emerges out of our commitment to reason. Nihilism emerges out of our unhealthy relationship with science and materialism.

Because while reason allows us to think clearly about things, it also encourages us to objectify things. To reduce them to usefulness.

I am very emotionally stirred by all these problems.

I don't wish to think clearly about them right now because that would be too much work.

I prefer to just feel the feelings that these thoughts are causing me.

I'll leave you with a quotation I read on the internet. I'm paraphrasing.

'People are meant to be loved and things are meant to be used. The world is in trouble right now because people are being used and things are being loved.'

This use of people and love of things, I believe, has something to do with the culture that emerged out of scientific materialism and rational inquiry (i.e. The Enlightenment).