a story

There once was a town on the edge of the mountains that no one really knew of. No one except for the townsfolk, that is, who had settled there thousands of years before in times that no records spoke of. Part of this was due to the fact that the town kept no records, and that life had not changed here in so long. Wars and empires had spanned their durations while this small pocket of reality continued unafflicted. In terms of economy, it yielded just enough to feed its own children and was far enough to be unprofitable.

            One day, however, a foreign element entered this town and stayed there. The legends which later grew from this were attributed to the village’s long stock of hard workers, whose heroic spirit was to be seen as ineffable, but it was only so in the fact that they had never fought wars. The man who’d come was a traveler from western lands, a barbaric figure having escaped the clutches of a fallen kingdom whose fate became unknown to him. He took up a house and plot of land far from the village’s middle and brought a child.

            The child had never known of any place other than the village. He had not even scaled the feet of the mountains, and had never heard of an outside world from his caretaker. For simplicity’s sake he would have claimed himself a father, but something like honor compelled him from that lie. Instead he raised the child where he could eat, breathe, and live without the immediate risk of death. It was a much better life, he imagined.

            The child himself was not as sure of this. Like all youths. Why am I wasting my time. Would an editor really want to read this dribble? There is nothing to it. Yet I’m sure they get things like these every day, and what do they publish in the end anyway? Look on the shelves. Tonnes of literature, with nothing particularly special about it, other than the ability to weave characters that keep the reader attuned for the duration of the novel, after which becoming only useless additions in an already bloated storage of memory concerning entertainment. They are disposable goods. That is the state of marketed literature these days, and by “marketed” I mean manuscripts that can be found on your bookstore’s shelves. Yes, placeholders for a person’s attention while the book’s length is processed, after which they become quite relevant.

            At some point we must ask ourselves if there are simply too many books in existence, with too many characters and minor characters that simply do not all deserve to exist. I do not hold my own literature in such regards with supremacy. But the sheer quantity of placeholding universes is staggering and unecessary. Are the publishing companies really responsible for this bloated ontology? This corpulescent existential body, whose substance, meaning and livelihood grow paler and more insignificant by the day because of their sheer nauseating corporeal quantity and abandonment? No, like the forgotten orphan-children of the world that were born and then died without anyone knowing them, these figures only suffer by their prolonged existence. If they were to see the scope of the situation from the fourth wall, they would immediately terminate their paleogeneses.

           This is because most literature is now conceived for the purpose of filling space. There is no greatness anymore, and the little that exists is swamped out by the sheer sea of “writers”, which makes everyone anonymous. Instead of having a Poe, or a Lovecraft, or a Mishima, we instead have a hundred or a thousand of such people who take inspiration from these figures – who were “inspired” by their literature to follow in their footsteps – yet possess little if not none of the pure artistic ability to produce on their level. We have quantity over quality. Whatever their reasons, this huge sea of writers – a result of the increasing laxness of an American middle-class with the inspiration of dream-chasing, no matter how suitable they really are for such an aspiration – prevents any singular figure from making a name. This means that the potential Poe or Lovecraft of the twenty-first century simply has no chance of reaching the same level, because publishing itself has changed. The sheer mass of people now existing in the field of art, most of which are there for reasons other than manifesting previous talent, means that writing itself in human society can no longer revolve around individuals or personalities. It has become an entirely automated and impersonal process, suitable for integration into the business-matrix of the global capital machine but little else. It does no service for man’s spirit. Instead it has only drawn the potential genius into the corner where he is further alienated from sharing such work.

            The same problem exists in other fields, where a mass of unrecognized people is seen as favorable over a system where only a few figures become very powerful. This mentality, a safeguard of mediocrity and pettiness, is responsible for the situation we find ourselves in now. We no longer have a chance, to reach for that position, because the position itself has been labelled as immoral. The struggle has been labelled as immoral (for, after all, struggle ideally should not exist). Our desire to spread art of the most singular magnificence has been labelled immoral. Our souls have been labelled immoral. For the sake of maintaining a soft society where people can imagine themselves with all kinds of conceits safely, that they are this or that, what is necessary for us to live freely and truly is labelled immoral. We no longer live in a society of patrons but of propagandists, and where the quantity of works has replaced the content as the measure of quality for society. It is hyperreal, and the concept of art has been lost altogether through the suffocating lens of the most dire humanism. The art no longer matters. Only what the consumer-unit feels, or professes to feel, which influences their milkability. 

As many have said, we live in the age of "the self". And what is "the self", when we look at a social system? It is the mass of units in an economic system each bound to act in accordance with an egocentric system, rather than for something outside of the individual's economically-integratable self, such as art. The age of the masses, of the majority, where the artist and thinker find himself completely alone and alienated.