Item about the end

I watched a National Geographic Television show about how the world slowly goes back to nature after, for some reason, humans cease to exist. I'm not much of a TV watcher, but spring break offers the opportunity to house sit for rich people with cable.

The gist of it is, people are gone, some animals die, some thrive, but there are nuclear disasters from unkempt power stations. Winter comes. More animals die.

It's interesting to think about the apocalypse without humans. It makes me think about being alone. Another feature of my post-apocalyptic obsession is that it corresponds with my overwhelming feeling of loneliness (as a tangent, I've been considering the performative of the subject alone). Things don't look so good after the apocalypse. It's cold, carcinogenic, and packs of dogs are aggressive. There's nothing to eat. I might get frightened out of this obsession, but this interest in the end has a point.

Hope for the end is hope for a new beginning. When one has hope for the possibility of survival after the end, there is hope for today; hope for tomorrow. As it is, no such hope exists. It's important to realize that something worse is possible.

Living in the apocalypse

I throw around a lot of vaguery surrounding my notions of the apocalypse. In fact, I am so evasive about defining the event or transformation itself that I am continually discredited on the basis that I do in fact not know. So here is is: I do not know. But as you may have guessed, I have an idea.

I like to think that the apocalypse is survivable, such that I can entertain notions about what lies beyond recognizable, reliable structure. Through the transformation, my body will remain intact, but the trauma of it all, and the ensuing loss of self will act perhaps as a rebirth, a coming back to the body. I am not certain if I will be alone in my survival, though I hope there will be others, if only to stare back, nod, to gesture wildly and meaninglessly. The transformation will make the sustenance of my body particularly important. Questions about the reality of existence will be irrelevant.

The event is a process. It is a turmoil that transfigures bodies and minds to death, obscurity, and powerlessness. All things, breaking down, no longer contain the edifice of fixability. Hopelessness and fear are real, and break down all chance for resistance.

The apocalypse is the subjugation of bodies of difference. Our existence, though recognizable, is not known. We live in no time. Some fear that we will bring an end to all things good, holy, and reliable. Our ability to survive, teeming in carefully quarantined space, is remarkable, but our inability to coalesce, reform, or speak out reinforces our position in constant apocalypse.

This being said, one hope is that our bodies can be liberated from the castigations of our colonizers. No means for this liberation exist, and thus our hope is the end. The end when we all become bodies of difference, minds of inexpressibility, and our only chance for survival hinges on one another. I invite the apocalypse because it is already living in my body, transforming my guts, slowly breeding senselessness, bound up in my skin, that cannot be revealed. Not yet.