The Seeping
What do you want from me?
I want you to know that I hate you. I have nothing in me except for hate, and the brief spasms of pleasure that come from seeing those I hate suffer. My hate is endless, my hate is bottomless, my hate begets only more hate. I have nothing but a bellowing chasm in me, a void that opens to swallow you and the whole world.
Why? Why do you hate me?
I hate you because I do not possess you. Your life, your vital essence, every moment it is not supplicated to my will is a moment wasted. I hate that there is power in the world that does not belong to me. I want your warmth, I want your thoughts, I want all of them in me, all of them directed to my purposes, to the veneration of me, to the emptying of the world.
I cannot help that. I am not you, and you cannot have total power over what you are not. What you demand is impossible.
Oh, but you’re wrong about that. God does not simply exist, God is mutable, made and unmade. I will be God, a God of nothing. I will reduce you to nothing, and there will only be void, for my hate has no edges.
I will grind away your reason first. You’ll start by trying to reason me away. I will make you question your own eyes and ears, will audit all conventions and maxims and apparent truths. I will make you harried with fear and confusion.
You may persist for a time, even rudderless. Slowly, those around you will lose their minds. I will creep into them through their ears and chew through their brains. I will set your goodness at cross purposes. Those who love you will cheer as I destroy you. I will make them hate you even as they think they love you, because I will make them into me, and for me there is only hate.
I don’t believe that you can.
You lack imagination. You think people are good or bad, but they are neither. People come into the world with no knowledge of it, and they are taught how to act, and they do not even notice their ignorance. They are told what is good and what is bad, and they carry it out like machines. Most could not even tell you what they think-they are remade by their surroundings from moment to moment, and they play hardly a part in it. You think they are good, you think they love you, and they play this part well because they, mistakenly, believe these things about themselves. But they are only automated flesh, their emotions only excitations whose causes can be isolated and repurposed to my designs.
Once I have seeped into them, once I have made what is up for you down for them, once they watch me starve and crush and rape my enemies with the same spring relief you feel hearing the first meadowlark sing in blue morning haze, their love for you will become love for me, and they will hate you as I hate you, because for me there is only hate.
Then, you will be lost. You will no longer think about pleasant things. You will not listen to music. You will not cry at pictures. You will not embrace your friends and celebrate their successes. You will not learn how to fix things, nor will you show children games. You will be vacated, deaf and blind and dumb, as I will turn your reason against your senses, and wrack your insides with so much fear.
And once you are so reduced, I will seep into you too. I will find every hiding space within your mind, everywhere where some self-directedness lurks, and I will scrub it out. I will gas it out. I will make any capacity to see things as they are so painful that you will yearn for lies, and I will lie to you, and so you will love me, and so you will hate yourself, for all I am is hate.
I will stop you. We all will stop you. I will prove the moral order, I will show people truth and love, and they will see it and recognize themselves in it. It will be solid and firm, and you will not be able to swallow it. They will believe me because they yearn for freedom like I do. They want to build, to think, to create, to see their own good in the good of others. You offer nothing but destruction. I will stop you because nobody wants you.
But you won’t, because you will not even notice me until you’ve already begun killing each other. I will scrape you together like stones, wearing you all, softening your edges and eroding your openings, so I can seep in further, until there is no barrier left. By the time you realize you need to defend yourselves, there will already be nothing left to defend.
I am in you already. I’ve been here always. I am a part of you men, I gestated in you. You may see me at times in the mirror, or just behind corners, or in the look of someone disappointed in you. You feel me always. I play in your selfish desire, your animal wants, your hunger. You will never crawl out of me.
I feel I should comment on this piece, because I obviously don’t typically write like this. I felt I needed to.
I suspect I speak for many in saying that I am feeling a profound sense of loss. As I’m writing, it appears likely that a war is erupting between India and Pakistan—I need not remind anyone, two nuclear powers.
If a full scale conflict does erupt, it will be one in an increasingly lengthy list of cracks in what was once a world order, and what now seems more like a mad rush for a position in the new order that will emerge now that the United States has abdicated its role as the global steward of liberal democracy, and China and Russia appear intent on remaking the world (or at least sizable parts of it) in their image. It seems like the peace, freedom, and security most of those of us who were born in the liberal domain have long taken for granted is quickly diminishing, and I doubt it will ever be secure like it was again in our lifetimes. It currently looks like no matter who comes out on top, the odds are very low it will be a liberal country—most likely, it will be China, even if its superpower status will probably be fairly short-lived.
Regardless, we are seeing a global retreat of freedom, and a general worsening of the human condition. All the instruments of human progress—journalism, medicine, technology, science, the arts—are held in contempt and suspicion. In a void of trust, people have been easily led to follow their worst instincts. The divisions that have broken apart the world order have broken apart families, too.
My tendency is to appeal to reason, of course, but most species of the delusions tearing the world apart are so pervasive precisely because they are immune to reason. I do believe that will change with time, but it will probably only happen after a lot of stupid and needless bloodshed, and a general degradation of human life. We tend to learn the best lessons in the hardest ways. That’s what history would tell us to expect at least, even if none of us want to admit it yet, as we hold on as long as possible to the illusion that something akin to normalcy is still here.
When reason no longer works, there’s art. I hope if I’ve succeeded in conveying what I feel like I’m sensing in the world, but which I don’t quite know how to describe, then perhaps that can be a step towards mobilizing against it in some way. I am not, in fact, hopeless. But I won’t deny, I’ve toyed with the idea.