Zombie Biographies
I’m coming up to the finish of my semi-serious reading of The Notebooks of Malte Lordis Brigge by Rilke. I get it. Well, at least I get the gist and flavor of this book and I have to say that I’ve been spoiled by Nabokov. Still, the interior life of Rilke’s characters / self is extraordinary. He takes the simplest occurrences to any number of implications and through metaphor captures a kind of bullet-time portrait in 360 degrees of the mind and of the moment. But then he circles around a second and third time revealing consequences of consequences that pin down the ineffable into a stuffy cloud of comprehension. The air around Rilke’s subjects is thick and humid with meaning such that you can not only taste their fear or confusion as you breathe it in, but their mother’s contribution to it, and the weight of regret for what they failed tell their lover that time on that day years ago.
It is my conceit that I prefer only to read stories of heroism, bravery for characters trapped in the consequences of circumstances beyond their control. It’s probably the Stoic thing to do. But what I hate is to read stories of people whose confusion and randomness create jungles of their own hearts and minds as they struggle to accomplish the most mundane aspects of daily life, and then they inevitably spin out of control as they cannot help themselves. My favorite heroes are ready to die the inevitable death pushing themselves to incredible limits. I can’t stand the man who sits in his cramped apartment listening to the bumping next door, paralyzed knowing and saying to himself that his life is fucked.
Then what do we do when in fact, our life is indeed fucked? And the briefest of previews for the film of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegies brings that to mind, as does some of the implications of the film I almost finished Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The fact of the matter is that the majority of us peasants haven’t done what we might have done in disciplining our minds, bodies and souls. Life is only fair in that it will ultimately abandon us to suffering, misery and death. Our dissolution is inevitable. We will all die alone inside our heads, some of us far further than others from our actual deathbeds. We will be zombies. Most of us, slow zombies, largely incapable of cracking open skulls and feasting on prey brains. Some of us, however, are fast, even superhumanly so. Some brains are offered freely. So our world is thickly populated with spreaders of the mind virus that zombifies the weak, who then become part of the plague.
Thus, Rilke has dipped my toe into that chilly water that freezes mens’ life-force. He makes the corruption speak. He doesn’t do us Nabokov’s favor of giving us Humbert’s articulate pathological exegesis. We’re just somewhere that’s nowhere good. That may not be the point of Rilke’s book, but that’s where its most poignant passages took me. Also, it neatly fits in with the other book I just finished which is Lock-In by John Scalzi a story of a inexplicable virus that creates a new species of human - kind of inverse neanderthals with a specific handicap, all inexplicably complex and inevitably despised.
This week, Wink and I talked about another aspect of life, that of the role of aspiration in identity. I guarantee if you’ve liked anything we’ve done, this one will have a highlight reel. It got me to thinking about why so many best-selling books seem to me such garbage. In other words, where’s the literature? I should know the answer, and it is that Deadpool is such a very well understood character to us American peasants. His life is fucked. So much so that he has to save an entire universe and lurch through alternate multiversal timelines just to have a decent birthday party with his clique of oddball freaks. Everything he has ever cared for is contained in one room of his pitiful apartment, with him facing that fact that despite his immortality, he’s an absolute loser - so bad that the only person who will give him a chance at redemption is full-blown psychopathic criminal. There is a metaphor for our times if there ever was one. Desperation. Regret. Insurmountable odds. Hate me if you must, but this film is better than Barbie and Oppenheimer put together, because we get to laugh all the way through it.
The darker it gets, the harder I laugh.
Somebody once told me that my psychological profile fits a particular supervillain. That would be Apocalypse, because I believe in survival of the fittest and I believe that I am the fittest. Odd that. I have an upcoming post, ‘Think Your Way to Safety’ because I’ve got enough nerve to write something of an advice column. I pat myself on the back to say I’m a giver, but I might also be a villain. Apocalypse sounds kinda cool.
What this essay is really about then, is the coping mechanism of ingesting zombie biographies - of getting the proper dose of feels, because one thinks it is impossible to think one’s way out of the musty stink of human existence. If Agent Smith knew Elon, he would book the first ticket to Mars. In the meantime, he watches MSNBC and novels like The Queen’s Daughter which is something I just invented - a story about two queers who attempt to murder each other because they resent the bodies the other have chosen for themselves out of a mix of jealousy and disgust, but they botch the murders and get caught, one gets exonerated.. but Agent Smith is a machine and he finds himself drawn, against his will into the human drama of novel. Now he understands frustration, having lost the captive Morpheus - and in the infinity of calculations between the time he finally faces Neo, he comes to realize his is an act of suicide which he kind of embraces. Stories that burst with irony into meaningless, purposeless oblivion. These are the zombie biographies. They sell because misery loves company.
Speaking of vacuous psychopaths whose proxied power gives our meaningless existence much needed drama if only for the ecstatic schadenfreude of watching the losers lose their shit, I am reminded of that great song by the Cranberries. Maybe you sensed this was coming. Look closely. Now ask the question. What’s in their heads?
The 20th Century is still with us. Like flashbacks from ‘Nam. Echoing like artillery shells pounding meaningless hills in Korea. Like the frozen bloodpools in the streets of a renamed Volgograd. And we still want to get high.