The Abyss Absolute: Autobiography of a Suicide (Book Two)
- “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous ontheway, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
- What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.”
- —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Introduction: The Abyss and Its Avoidance
Let me start with a confession. The attempt to write anything about the subject I wish to deal with here involves me in a dilemma. I find the writing itself implicated in the very contradiction I am seeking to resolve. It is not a theory for me but a living experience that every proposition I produce dissolves itself in its own contradiction.
In essence, the living expression of this problem is simple and wellknown. Language is inadequate to understand, explain, and express actual reality; indeed, language can communicate nothing. I will not waste time establishing this wellknow fact but will try to explain how it leads me into a special kind of experiential state as well as what that state is like. This has to do not only with my ability to write here in a way that expresses my thoughts or understanding, but also, and more important, with the limits of my thoughts and understanding. Like everyone else, I have a sensation of knowing or understanding something but feel incapable of expressing it. Then I discover I really do not understand it, and finally that I really understand nothing.
I begin writing or lecturing and everything flows easily. One topic falls spontaneously into another. Examples pop into my head. It is not that I cannot “communicate” when I want to, but the reverse. Exactly when the expression and the thought seems most clear the shadow falls: “Yes, what you have said sounds and is valid, but only within the structure of assumptions you make but do not understand; the house of your knowledge has no foundation; your ideas lack unity and the whole lacks roots in life; so why continue.”
In my last work in this series, Meaning and Creativity, I referred to this experience as “meaninglessness.” Here I will call it “the Abyss.” Both terms refer to a single kind of state, but for me today “the Abyss” has more powerful symbolic significance. The term “abyss” refers to a bottomless pit, gulf, or void. It comes from the Greek adjective as used in the phrase abussos limine or “unfathomable lake.” Used substantively, it indicates just “the unfathomable.” Both “the bottomless pit” and “the unfathomable lake” expand the symbolic meaning of “abyss.” “The bottomless pit” stimulates the sensation of falling in darkness.
When I face this abyss, I respond to it in two ways. Either I draw back from it and continue making the web of my ideas increasingly intricate only to find the netting still too coarse as I fall through it again into the abyss, or I drop the attempt and move on to something else. But when I move on, I always do so feeling incomplete, as if I were leaving what should not be left. The moment of discomfort eventually passes as I become involved in the new activity.
One of the reasons for my enjoyment of simple yet attentiondemanding tasks is that they absorb time without requiring a commitment to them as important and so they allow me to avoid the judgment of how meaningless they are. I will never choose to get involved in these kinds of tasks, but when others impose them on me, I enjoy them immensely. When I am trying to be serious and committed to any task such as writing down these words, the abyss yawns before me. I know neither why I continue nor why I leave off to do something else. But both are a way of avoiding the abyss.
When I realize what I am doing, I become what others would see as lazy. They call those who keep writing “industrious”; those who flit from one thing to another they call “alive and energetic”; but I am lazy I see emptiness in industriousness and see escapism in variety. Yet it is worse to be lazy at heart than at activities devoted action is only a way of hiding a lazy heart, a heart that refuses to face its own abyss. Passive paralysis in external activity arises out of a reluctantly active heart.
I use this personal reflection to make two points: first, the subject I am dealing with is not distant and in the realm of ideas but is life itself including my life and the conclusions I come to have no value unless they immediately also reflect the reader’s concrete life; second, the primary problem I am concentrating on is the contradictory character of life the way that everything pursued for a time ends in the abyss and turns into something other than as it began.
This second point needs clarification. The confrontation with the abyss transforms everything into its opposite. When I doggedly push on with my work and writing despite the abyss, I am no longer writing because I find positive value in it but only because it saves me from the abyss. My originally positive motive has been transformed in to a negative one and one that is substantively outside the significance of the activity itself. Similarly, when I turn from my task after seeing, even at very low levels of consciousness, how it is leading me to the abyss, then I pursue the alternative to my work not because I find it to be valuable activity but only to escape from the confrontation with the abyss. In the end, I fall victim to the temptation of power. I persist or desist because I will to. I fight obstacles to my goals not because they are wrong but because they are right because they are true reflections of my deep reluctance to act as I am acting, a reluctance that only my fear of the abyss overcomes. I fight them not because they are bad but because they are the abyss.
