Death and Desolation
The Breviary of Chaos is a curse for all humanity from Albert Caraco, the last oracle-prophet of the 20th century. The text of an ascetic who became a cult “in spite” of himself, with a destructive power that no philosopher since Mainlander has shown… Unique in its coldness, directness and lucid pessimism, the curse of an “objectivity fanatic”… A rejection of reproduction, production and consumption; a curse on cities, layers of concrete, clueless politicians, insectified masses, gods who have deserted from the sky… An intense, harsh, prophetic, provocative and dark text from the pen of one of the rare ascetic thinkers of our time.
We are heading towards death, just like the arrow is heading towards the target, it is certain that we will never miss, death is our only certainty, our only truth, we always know that we will die, anytime, anywhere, the form does not matter. Because eternal life is meaningless, eternity is not life, death is the rest we long for, life and death are interconnected, those who demand anything else are asking for the impossible; all they will get and their reward will be to go up in smoke. We, those who cannot be satisfied with words, are willing to perish and we are right to do so, we did not choose to be born and we consider ourselves happy because we cannot anywhere endure this life that is imposed on us rather than given to us, a life full of anxiety and pain, with its joys problematic or bad. What does it prove that a person is happy? Happiness is a species-specific condition, we only look at the laws of the genus, we think in terms of these laws, we ponder and deepen these laws, we despise those who seek miracles, we are not fond of eternal happiness, our reality is enough for us, the superiority of our species does not extend elsewhere.
Each one of us dies alone and dies completely; these two truths are rejected by most people, because most people sleep as long as they live and are afraid to wake up at the moment of their destruction. Solitude is one of the schools of death, the majority can never enter it, wholeness cannot be obtained elsewhere, and wholeness is also the reward of solitude. To distinguish between each other, human beings are divided into three teams: Sleepwalkers, who are herds; the sane and sensible live on two planes, knowing what is lacking in themselves and seeking what they have never found; spiritual people are twice-born, walking steadily towards death in order to die alone and to die completely, the only way for them to express their contempt for everyday affairs when they cannot choose the time, place and manner of death, even by chance. The sleepwalkers are idolaters; the sane and sensible are believers; the twice-born spiritualists worship what the sleepwalkers cannot imagine and the others cannot even imagine, because they are perfect human beings, and therefore neither seek nor worship what they have already attained, because that is what they are.
The cities we live in are schools of death, because they are inhuman. Each one of these cities has become a crossroads of hum and stench, each one a chaos of buildings, millions of us are piling into them and losing our reason for living. We, the helpless unfortunates, feel that we have entered, for better or worse, into a labyrinth of absurdity from which only the dead will emerge, because we are destined to multiply, and our only goal is countless deaths. The cities in which we live move imperceptibly one after the other with each turn of the wheel, yearning to merge with each other; this march is towards absolute chaos, humming and stinking. With every turn of the wheel, land prices increase, and in the maze that swallows up empty space, placement income raises the city walls day by day. Since money has to make money and the cities we live in have to progress, it is legitimate for each generation’s houses to double in height and for the water to be shut off every other day. The architects only long to escape the fate they have prepared for us and go to live in the countryside.
The world is closed again, as it was before the Great Discoveries, the year 1914 marks the arrival of the second Middle Ages, we find ourselves again in what the Gnostics called “the prison of species”, a finite universe from which we will never get out. This is the result of the optimism that has characterized countless Humans for four centuries; Fate turns back to History and suddenly we ask ourselves where we are heading, why this is happening to us, the vain confidence of our fathers in an unlimited progress that would accompany an increasingly humane life has evidently vanished: We go round and round in circles, unable even to imagine our own works. So our works have outlived us, the world that man has transformed is once again outstripping human intelligence, we are building our buildings in the shadow of death as never before, death will inherit our pomp, the time to be naked is approaching, our traditions will fall off us one after the other like clothes, leaving us naked, only then will we be judged, naked on the outside and empty on the inside, the abyss beneath our feet, chaos above our heads.
People are both free and dependent, freer than they desire, more dependent than they realize, because the mass of mortals are sleepwalkers, and it is never in the interest of order for them to wake up from sleep, they would then be ungovernable. Order is no friend of men, it is content to rule them at its pleasure, rarely trying to civilize them, even more rarely to humanize them. Since the order is not infallible, it is war that will one day compensate for its mistakes; it is because the order has exacerbated these mistakes that we are going to war; war and the future are inseparable. The only certainty is this: Death is, in a word, the meaning of everything, man is only a commonplace in the face of death, so are the peoples; History is a passion, a torment, its victims are many, the world we live in is hell, a hell softened by nothingness. In this hell, the man who refuses to recognize himself prefers to sacrifice himself, he prefers to sacrifice himself like those overpopulated animal species, like swarms of locusts, like hordes of rats, he imagines that it is more sublime to perish than to rethink the world he lives in, he imagines the sublimity of perishing too many times to count.
Our youth feels condemned, that’s why the universities are boiling, the youth is right, we are wrong, we are preparing a new war for it. Order and war are linked, our morality is well aware of this, just look at the teaching of the great moralists: This is the only certainty, we can’t even imagine life-long peace, the order can’t bear it. Our youth have grasped this relationship in which order and war are compatible, they understand the connection between our values and their own misfortunes, this is now an irresistible discovery. But the paradox is that our youth is right and wrong, because in this universe threatened by uniformity, peoples are not contemporaries; there are still enough nations for which the youth is ready to sacrifice itself. Do our youth think that declaring peace in this world is enough to make the world listen to you? We are in Hell and we have no choice but to be cursed, to suffer perpetually, and there are demons responsible for this torment.
Death itself is facing us, we have enough means to kill each person forty times, we don’t know what to do with our weapons, buildings are no longer enough for us, we have already begun to carve mountains, our instruments of death are piling up deep in the earth. Our world is like a military arsenal, tens of millions of people are working for war, we no longer even dream of breaking this solution in which morality and self-interest are allied, our youth will pay the price of the paradox tomorrow, they feel it and rebels, we cannot promise miracles, we do not even dare to make insipid speeches, we know that we are already doomed and that revolutions will not change his lot. It is too late, History does not stop, it drags us along, we cannot expect any slowdown in the downhill trend (or in the trend of its proposals), we are heading towards a planet-wide catastrophe and the universe is full of people who desire this catastrophe and will desire it more and more in order to escape from the order; an order that is becoming increasingly absurd because it exists only to the detriment of coherence and therefore to the detriment of human humanity.
We live for death, we love for death, we give birth and work for death, our work and our days now follow each other in the shadow of death, the discipline we observe, the values we uphold and the projects we undertake all correspond to one end: death. Death will gather us when we are ripe, we are ripe for death, and our descendants, a handful if any on this ashen world, will continue to curse us by burning everything we worshipped. We worship death in the guise of contrived figures, but we don’t know that it is death, our wars are wars of sacrifice to what we praise, we sacrifice ourselves in honor of death, our morality is a school of death, the virtues we value are only the virtues of death. We cannot get out of it, we cannot change the order of the world, we are condemned to endure what tears us apart, to carry on our backs what crushes us, all that is left to us — before we die ourselves and before we are the last to die — is either to perish or to kill; I say it loudly, a third way is impossible.
The hell we carry within us corresponds to the hell of our cities, our cities are the measure of our mentalities, the will to die leads the will to live and we cannot distinguish which one inspires us, we rush to repetitive tasks and boast of reaching the heights, we are captives in the hands of immeasurability and we are constantly building buildings without reflection. The world will soon be just a construction site. Here, billions of blind ants will toil like automatons in the hum and the stench of carrion until they run out of breath. One day, they will wake up like madmen and start slaughtering each other relentlessly. In this universe in which we are embedded, madness is the form that the spontaneity of the alienated man, the demonized man, the man who has fallen behind his possibilities and become a slave to his creations will take. Madness is now incubating under our fifty-story houses. Despite our urgency to eradicate madness, it is the new god, we cannot appease it even if we offer it some kind of worship, it is our death; it demands everything without ceasing.
If we want to know who our real gods are, we should not judge us by our principles but by our works. Then the answer will not be difficult to give, and what we avoid saying or even thinking can be said: They worshipped madness and death. In fact, we worship nothing else, but we are not always convinced of this, because madness and death are the final fulfillment of revealed religions, and these religions, above all the Christian faith, actually include madness and death. We have placed madness and death on altars, and if we say that Almighty God is both mad and dying, what is left, I ask you? It remains to pay the price for the paradox, and I foresee that it will be paid, the ideas we once played with are now beginning to play with people, and people will exhaust themselves beyond measure. We will not be able to escape from anything and nothing will favor us anymore, the order we have maintained will never recover, madness and death remain the foundations of this order, the order depends on them and since it cannot change in a healthy way, what supports it will kill it, even if we don’t want it to.
Because ideas are more alive than people, people live by ideas and die for them without making a peep. But all our ideas are murderers, no idea obeys the law of objectivity, of measure and consistency, whereas we, those of us who perpetuate these ideas, walk to our deaths like automatons. Our youth will die first, they know that they are ritual victims, they judge the universe as devoid of meaning, we cannot disapprove of them, we are becoming more and more malicious and stumbling in our response. What can we say to them anymore? Dialogue is impossible, because they are right and they are imprisoned in the same fate as madmen, fools and liars. No matter how necessary the New Revelation may seem to us, first the scandal must erupt, our murderous ideas must exhaust their madness by exposing their malevolence, we are not going to bypass the catastrophe, the catastrophe is in the order and we are its accomplices, we prefer catastrophe to reform, we prefer to sacrifice ourselves than to rethink the world; we will only rethink this world in the midst of ruins.
