2. Do our fellow earthly beings have fits of meaninglessness, of experiencing the undesirability of all things? That is, do they experience nihilism? If we assume their lives are invested with meaning, then of course: every meaningful life has the possibility of encountering nihilism on the way from birth to death. And in the case of our fellows, precisely our projects of meaning may wreak destruction on theirs. Consider building a house, or a roadway, or a new hospital or school, how much havoc came with its construction, how much shifting of others’ foundation in establishing ours, how much new lines drawn and forced removal from the old ways, is imposed upon the lives of countless beings when we build and create–anything. Even a poem’s creation chases away the birds if it is sung aloud; if written, it involves and is complicit with the harvesting of plant life, the draining of the soil in the demands made on it by marketplaces, an industry of materials, manufacturing, publishing, networks spanning beneath seas and along highways, over our heads.
Constant overcoming, life may whisper. But overcoming of what, when there is ineliminable plurality? When a probing eye can see the cowardice involved in eliminating this plurality, as so many human enterprises do, wanting to monopolize on the utterances of the earth, of the solar system, of the galaxy, of all things! Not–overcoming nihilism? Not when nihilism is always, as we just reminded ourselves, as much dispensed as left behind, in every deed. Overcoming, the gesture of overcoming, the desideratum of overcoming, is ever becoming complicit, as though the proper way to envision it is not a simple one-thing-over-another but a more complex and ambiguous one-thing-into-another, as though folding were its best diagram, as though the being that we are is really nothing more than a crevice in this folded–what? Something? Nothing? The All, the One? Well, we could go on prattling on like this, but what’s more important than this metaphysical picture is feeling in ourselves the crease and seams of other lives, in their living and their dying, as other lives are bound to us in this fashion. Always complicit.
So our co-beings on this planet are complicit, as we are, in this folding up and overcoming that is a folding. Overcoming, in any case, is not being through and over with something, for example nihilism. So what is the difference? Is there a difference? When we turn to their faces, or experience those whose faces we do not readily grasp, for instance the termite, eating away with abandon at what we’ve built, how does it stand with them and nihilism? As it stands with us, complicit all around. In other words, no difference. Unless it’s going on about it the way we do, aiming for some kind of resolution, for making plain, making a plane of, what only desires to fold into itself.
If a lion could speak, we know what he would say to us, and we would understand: Oh, what a world, what searing troubles, what rapacious joys! This and only this he would say, and we, instead of performing feats of repentance and bemoaning our complicity, apologizing for it, we would listen, we would understand. If there is any perseverance in life, any power in the step or slither or wing-beat of the long march, it is this, this understanding.
Love the Dust 