Complete indelicacy, maniacal and severe in its blandness. Brusque movements, rough and choppy, lacking nuance, manners, courtesy, decorum. Making only noise, noise of a purely, plainly noisy variety, not sound, asonorous. Reactive, deliberately inadvertent, even negligent, triumphantly so, giving impulse and instinct bad names. An atmospheric sloppiness of language which speaks to a world distilled to morsels, snippets, easily, quickly consumable attitudes without perspective. A bold, proud imprecision in this speech masquerading as the real and raw but which merely belies faulty or incomplete thought, an in-fluidity of meaning and purpose, a moving truthlessness, elusive sense and senseless sensibility, both in content and patterns. All is arrhythmical—pace and tempo are mere accidents, chance occurrences we’re bound to encounter as the network-web-mess of energies and actions intersect, overlap, and overlay, profligate and proliferating.

Where is our dark side anymore? Frightening thought: We have become it, champions of an all-inclusive mediocrity—the clique of all cliques, club of all clubs, tribe of all tribes, the mass- and mid-cult ubiquity of a hyper-egalitarianism without either foundation or mooring. All is sameness in the name of difference; we play in a state of inversion, puppets to ourselves, gleefully feigning originality and dumbing metaphors down with nescient literalism. The dark is out in the open, the light now in the dark corner, relegated, ostracized, to some extent banished as the slow-moving and past-dwelling sideshow to our great, base carnival of now. And we have the nerve to see our forebears as primitive.

I once saw this as loss, insisted it was, making the mistake of romantics and angst-ridden, self-proclaimed misfits since the beginning of forever. But I now see it as is, and that is milder, truer, and infinitely more distressing, for this eminent epochal phenomenon of vacuousness and disentangled chaos and the anti-“ism” has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with nostalgia, nothing consciously to do with history, and everything to do with forgetting—we don’t even remember what we had and who we were, and don’t much care to, believing ourselves mythical descendants of a future we’re so blindly marching toward, not realizing it’s just a loop, an endless loop, fully out of our control, “For whoever pretends he does not have that other, dark side exposes himself to the vengeance of the spinners of Fate.”[1] 

[1] Czesław Miłosz, “Distillation,” in Road-Side Dog, p59.