II. GENESIS OF INHUMANITY

Ending and Beginning

Their lives are broken upon getting out of bed like they were broken in infancy and at the dawn of history.

How can you tell it’s the end of an era? When a suddenly intolerable present crystallizes in a short period of time what was so uneasily put up with in the past. And everyone is suddenly quite easily convinced that he or she is either going to be reborn in the birth of a new world, or die in the archaic netherworld of a society less and less adapted to the living.

With the first rays of dawn, a new lucidity is born. And it shows everyone instantly how drawn and quartered we’ve been by the clash between the desire to be human and the daily obligation of renouncing that desire away through the history of humanity and the recent infancy of the individual.

Everyday Exile

Although the day begins beautifully, the weather always ends up disagreeable. The fog of work tarnishes the shine of the days. The alarm clock’s fanfare lends a certain military stiffness to the roundabouts of the watch. Got to go, to get rid of the imprecision of nighttime, got to answer the call of duty – it’s like coming running at the whistle of an invisible master.

The moroseness of the morning sets the decor. Their eyes open upon a labyrinthine symmetry of walls. How do we know we’re on one side or another, on the inside or outside of the moebius strip unraveling a continuity of street, housing, factory, school, and office?

Once they’ve pushed off the sheets and blankets of nighttime reverie, full of errantry and frivolity, necessity steals them away, dragging them off into the comings and goings of a laborious destiny.

Civilization bridles them. See them prepare themselves for the obstacle course, ready to conquer a world that long ago conquered them, one which they’ve learned they’ll have to leave behind before doing anything else.

Without the daily morning trumpet blast of reveille to put them on the right track, where would they get morality, philosophy, religion, State, policed society, and everything else that authorizes them to die for things, gradually and reasonably?

Well, you’ve got to have a good grip on their lives if you want to keep them from going wherever they please. Their nightly calm has the unfortunate effect of making them forgetful. If habit is a second nature, as they say, then there is a first one too, happily deaf to the injections of routine. Pulled from sleep, in effect, the body becomes reluctant; it argues with itself, rears up, stretches out, and at length, shakes off its laziness. And you’ve got to make your mind persistent and stubborn, and make your body get up – damned body, never wants to do nothing with any heart… Could I put any clearer the feeling that to put your heart into work, you’ve got to have hardly any left at all?

Beneath the sun and on the pillow, the wave of obligations pushes back the foam of voluptuous solicitations. The sweet smell of a towel, the embrace of a naked arm, the presence of a loved one, the desire to hang around in the streets and the fields – everything seems to murmur, with a troubling simplicity, “Take your time, or time will take you… There is only pleasure or death.”

But, trained for quick calculating, reason soon rounds up the herd of constraints. At the first moment of reflection, the time-card and schedule sheet come down like roadblocks, obstructing the passage of desires. Like so many chimeras!

The day, duly roped-off and divvied up, cements a reality that is certainly chosen, but chosen begrudgingly; it is chosen at the expense of another reality – that of the body, which is demanding with great cries the freedom to desire endlessly.

Everything happens as if there was only one universe, the second vanishing in the haze of a puerile enchantment. The porcelain of your dreams crumbles beneath the weight of the trepidation of business and of lucrative activity. It’s literally a business-matter of instants.

The evening sweeps together the debris of humanity at work. The night pieces back together all the desires that the windshield-wiper of mechanical gestures had pushed off to the side. It readjusts them, for better or for worse : ten upside-down desires for one right-side up, maybe a little love, if there’s any left.

At dawn, the scenario is repeated, enriched by the fatigue of the previous day. Until, night and day having become commingled, the bed folds out beneath a body that is at last completely and definitively vanquished, wrapping in its funeral shroud a life that had failed so many times to come to life.

This is what they call the “hard reality of things”, or, with a laughable cynicism, “the human condition.”

The Omnipresence of Work

They spend their weeks waiting for Work to go put on its Sunday clothes.

The effects of serving others from Monday to Friday make them experience their fun just like they do their work. They can hardly manage not rubbing some spit into their hands before throwing back glasses of fine wine, tearing down the galleries at the Louver, reciting Baudelaire, or fornicating savagely.

At fixed times and dates, they leave the offices, the shop-counters and establishments, and throw themselves, with the same measured gestures, into a measured, accounted for, charged-to-the-room “free-time” which is labeled with names that sound like bottles being emptied : weekend, holiday, party, leisure time, R and R, vacation. Such are the freedoms work pays them with; such are the freedoms they pay for by working.

They practice meticulously the art of coloring-in their boredom, getting their fix of passion from exoticism, a pint of alcohol, a gram of cocaine, a libertine adventure, political controversy. From eyes as dull and lifeless as they are well-informed, they observe the ephemeral stock-quotes of fashion, which taps in, from discount to discount, to the promotional sales of fancy clothes, high cuisine, ideologies, events, of the stars of sports, culture, electoral politics, crime, journalism, and business – the ones, at least, who support their interests.

They think they’re leading an existence, but existence is leading them, through endless rows of pews, to a universal factory. They consistently obey the old reflexes, which command them throughout the working day, whether they’re reading, doing odd jobs, sleeping, traveling, meditating, or fucking.

Power and credit pull the strings. Are their nerves tensed up on the right? They stretch out to the left and the machines start up again. Anything and everything is used, it doesn’t matter what, to console their inconsolable minds. It wasn’t just by chance that all throughout the centuries they’ve worshiped, in the name of God, a slave-market that first grants them little more than one out of seven days a week to have a rest, and then demands that they sing praises to it.

And still, when Sunday comes around and the clock strikes somewhere around four in the afternoon, they start to feel, to know, that they are lost, that they’ve left behind the best of themselves at sunrise. That they’ve never stopped working.