Nothing

It's very hard to be alive in this day and age . . . well no, it's not, being alive is a given, all you have to do is keep eating and breathing. And breathing, if you think about it, isn't even something you have to try to do, it happens by itself, the effort would be in the not breathing - which might seem a bit odd, it being harder to not do something than to do something. And as for eating, there's some effort involved there all right, but even still not a whole lot, you'd hardly call us hunter gatherers, and again it would probably take a lot more effort ultimately, more willpower, not to eat than to eat.

But outside of these physiological details, it's not easy to be alive now, and here by contrast it is perhaps a lot easier not to be alive than alive. Not that anyone is forcing one not to be alive, but it's, we'll say, a state, this inner unreality, perpetually suggested, invisible hands are pushing one into this unreal domain. Are they real, these hands, that is are there real people behind the pushing, or is it so to speak the inner logic of a process that hasn't really anything to do with anyone? Maybe, not that it perhaps really matters, it's a bit of both - to some degree behind the invisible suggestive hands are real hands, that is real people setting the pushing into non-being in motion, helping it along. But it could be - as far as they're concerned, the people doing the pushing - that all the movement, the collective migration into unreality, some great cumulative nothingness, is just to do with their personal gain, what they personally get out of people leaving reality behind - money, docility, whatever - and even if they were aware some bit of some inner logic to the whole process, this for them is all by the way, superfluous, secondary, unnecessarily complicated. It might even be an affront to their cleverness this supposed inner logic that does most of the work for them. And who knows, maybe if you mentioned unreality, they'd look back blankly . . .  though really that should hardly be a surprise, for what would you expect out of, or inside of, a servant of unreality but more unreality, and the higher up they've gone in that whole business, rather than the less so the more so.  So rather than cynically awake and aware at the controls, they're the most unaware of all. Which you could say is poetic.

So what is it, this nothingness: some kind of machine, something like an elaborate bicycle, various sized wheels, lots of whirring, smaller ones feeding into the movement of bigger ones, people pedalling, but it's not anyone in particular's bicycle however much they're pedalling and, even they might think, steering.

So all this impersonality, no one's to blame, not even the people who are to blame, they've just gone so deep into whatever they've gone into, there's nothing left of them. But then again maybe it's all not  so impersonal, maybe it's even the opposite - all this invisible hands and machinery and wheels and so on  is all Me, me, me! to the very core. But it just so happens that me, me, me to the very core is nothing but nothingness. And meanwhile maybe all that really matters, or the best you can do anyway, is not getting gently or not pushed into it all. For where's their wheels then?

Resonance

This piece has been accused of lacking emotional resonance, which is of course an outlandish accusation. It is perhaps one of the most emotional things ever written.