THE SLUMBER OF EROS, OR WHO WE'RE BECOMING AS THE WORLD UNRAVELS

WHY THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING, AND WHAT IT'S DOING TO US

We’re seeing the ugliness of the wretched thing that America’s becoming. It’s unfurling before our eyes now, its shadow stretching through a place that used to be called a future.

We’re going to talk about civilization, what it really is, why it matters, and who we are. In the deepest ways of all. Sit around the fire with me. We are old friends now.

To men like Trump, there’s a thrill, not one that’s erotically charged so much as charged with Thanatos, death drive, the antithesis of Eros, life force, the will, striving to live, to create, to give the gift of existence, all of which is love. Behind the barely concealed glee, the revelling in power, lies pure Thanatos itself. Men like Trump seem to “get off” on violence precisely because they are “driven” by Thanatos, not Eros. They climax that way, not this way. Thanatos is in both the bomb and the algorithm. It is annihilation. And we are living in an age where it is becoming all that is left of us.

I take it. I do whatever I want with it. A body, a nation, a world, a civilization.

Civilization is Eros’s child. But in our age, Eros is slumbering. While she is slumbering, her wrists are being slit. Our age is becoming one of annihilation, of Thanatos. What do I mean? Am I just calling names? I know Americans will find all this difficult. They are taught that only materialism matters. So let us begin there.

Now the world will pay the price for Trump’s obscene wars, but to use this capitalist language is inadequate. It conceals the reality. Still, let’s begin here. The world will pay the price. In higher prices for all the basics, which will affect the world’s most unfortunate disproportionately. Here, too, the truth is concealed. The “unfortunate” are merely those dominated under the boot of centuries of violence. Now they will go hungry. They won’t be able to keep the lights on. Annihilation unfurls this way.

Trump has conquered a world. This is the power of Thanatos, of death, the triumph of the skeletal beast of annihilation we once wished to leave behind. Its riders break the backs of the present once again. They draw and quarter the failing project called civilization, ripping off its limbs, laughing in delight. Trump has conquered a world, with annihilation, just like that.

What is a war? The war isn’t really on this country or that one. It never is. It is on Eros itself. The only point and purpose of men like Trump is to be missionaries of Thanatos, and executioners of Eros. Their only real job is to erase the joy, laughter, happiness, kindness, goodness, in the rest of us. To leave us drawn and quartered, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. To numb us with endless horror, speechless in transgression, revolted and in shock at the lurid spectacles they create. And so Eros dies.

The point of men like Trump has only ever been one thing. Which is the point of their wars. To annihilate Eros herself, in all of us. All of us. And we must understand how fatal a blow this truly is to the moral circle of humankind, stretching back through the millennia. We do not, because Eros’s teachers and masters and disciples have fallen strangely silent now. They are afraid, diminished. They quiver and whimper and whine. And what goes left unsaid is this.

Some wars, it’s true, are political, economic, or social. But these are not really those. Wars like these, Trump’s wars, are lessons and warnings to worlds and civilizations, about what is allowed to exist. These wars are for annihilation against, over being. That is why they seem so “stupid” and “foolish” and “pointless.” In political and social terms, indeed they are. But in existential ones—ah, in those terms, wars like these are the truest of all. They never end, never begin, they only recur, in the hands of those possessed by the demon named annihilation, Thanatos, undoing, ruin.

So these wars are not really land or money or titles or any of the rest of it. But to annihilate Eros herself, to claim the victory of annihilation over being, and in that way, to attain the closest power men like this know to being gods. They cannot bring what they truly wish to life, which is to be loved, respected, held, so they kill life itself, in the purest way it can be killed, which is to annihilate its force, power, truth, meaning, purpose, all of which are love. I am death himself. What are you? Who are you? You are only who I let you be, because I am death. I am the bomb and the gun. I am starvation and rape and agony. Know me. I exist only to annihilate you. I exist only to annihilate.

Am I talking about Trump? Epstein? Some comically evil tech baron? Am I talking about capitalism, fascism, authoritarianism? Money and power? What the fuck is Umair talking about? Ah, my friends. Come, see through the veils with me now.

Around us now, everywhere, Eros is slumbering. Dying, even. Can you feel it? Sense it? What I’m talking about? Let me put on my American-white-guy pundit suit, and recite for you, in a toneless voice, some statistics. You already know them. Relationships aren’t forming, intimate ones, or even friendships. People aren’t having sex. Levels of anger, despair, and distress are though the roof, and so of course are depression and anxiety. Come on, we all know this. Only we won’t say it out loud. Because we don’t really know what it means. So we say that we don’t “live in happy times,” but this misses the point altogether.

The joy has gone out of everything now. We put on the TV, and hate-watch. Tap and swipe, and doomscroll. The “creators”—LOL, imagine any real artist or musician reducing themselves to that—”rage-bait” us. And then of course there’s Trump and the wars. Fishers of Thanatos, drawing from within us what dwells deep in the subterranean fathoms of our souls, the blind, wretched things writhing there in hunger. Anger, envy, jealousy, greed, hatred, despair. And so here we are, joyless, and afraid to really admit it, because then we will punish each other for violating the taboo. But it is Eros who is being violated here.

They are winning this war of annihilation over and against being. Things have gone grey. Hazy. Empty. We barely exist at all anymore, have you noticed? We just fade away into grey. You can sense the numbness in people. Why is that? We’re ceasing to exist at all. The war is real. It is not just over there. It is right here. You are its subject and its object. The point is to annihilate you, as it always is, because through you flows a universe, an everything, which is simply called love, or being itself. We “fade away” precisely when Thanatos’s abyss claims us as its own. How does it do that?

The joy has gone out of everything now, and is it any wonder? Some will say, as they always do, that I exaggerate. They’re going to be—LOL—the most joyless ones of all. The ones who obsess over the latest articles in American media, which are always so “well-balanced” that they don’t even seem to see there we are, teetering on the edge of the very abyss itself. Is it sensible to maintain the pretense of happiness while the world burns? What do cowardly lies like this do for us—and to us? Thanatos beckons. The way begins with just a…just a…tiny…step. Which becomes a dive into an abyss.

This is why the feeling of obscenity now surrounds us and drowns us. To murder Eros while she slumbers is the most obscene act of all. She is being murdered around us by the demagogue and the algorithm, the machines and their masters, the bomb and the missile, the kinds of men who have never read a book but dream of rape. Eros is being shackled and caged and enslaved. What does that leave of us? I sense that Americans will shrivel away from sentences, ideas, truths like this. Is this what made cowards of them?

We joyless things, wretched things. The truth, too, is that this is what we’re becoming. Cowards and idiots, numbers in algorithms, silent sleepwalkers amidst ruins. In an eternal journey towards ourselves, only Eros unlocks our doors. Where else does courage come from? Do these seem like courageous times? And what does it mean to be courageous, now, anyways?

We must damn ourselves to exist first in order to live. Do you understand? The reason America became so grim, and so compliant, so obedient, so easily tamed, is that this first, primal truth is called a lie. We must never fully exist, and only then are we allowed to live, in America’s inverted way. And it is wrong. It hasn’t worked. No job, no healthcare. Keep still. You are only prey. Be silent. Or else.

I remember joyful times. Do you? I remember not so long ago when the world was better than this. In every single way possible, really. Fashion sang, music roared, film glimmered. Politics aspired, economics tried, intellect lit, the world was full of ideas and concepts and things and knowings and doings. Things were fun and cool and interesting and not just this total all-engulfing shit. Can any of us honestly say that we feel that way anymore? Maybe if you were never there, you can. But if you were? Come now. All the world around us now seems almost laughably dead, and this is precisely why being laughably dead is so modish that it is the only way of being left to us. No, “but I had a great time on vacation in Provence!!” is not the disproof, but the proof. Remember the statistics? We’re all becoming “the statistics.”

And this is the first step Thanatos wants us to take. The surrender of Eros, this guarded, suspicious, numbed, dulled down, shrunken way of living. Which says: I don’t remember, don’t need, won’t champion, a world, a life, that was so much better than this, in every way imaginable, not so long ago. It’s too dangerous to want such a thing. It’s too dangerous to want the people that made it so, and to want to be one of those people. I will settle for the mediocrity and embrace the disappointment that marks now, the meek submission to it all, the bombs, the rage, the spectacle, the killing, the idiocy, the lowest common denominator, hey, just feeding tube me some fucking Netflix already. There are two sides to every story, you know! It’s Not That Bad! It Was Worse in the Middle Ages! Hey, At Least You’re Not a Slave!! Whine, whine, whine. Where is the moral bar of a position like this, I always wonder? How low can you go?

Instead, here we are, whining and bitching not about how much the world sucks now, but how much nobody should ever say it. Whine, whine, whine. Is that the sound of a coward, or is it Thanatos sharpening his knives?

Ah, my friend, if only it were true that the world didn’t suck now. Isn’t full of dull, all-encompassing mediocrity leaning towards something like, “shrug, fascism, what do you want from me, dude?” It’s a million facts that the world sucks now. We all know it, we just won’t admit it—worse, we’ll sullenly squabble over it. And that makes us, to say the least, sigh-inducing cowards, but more than that, useless, impotent. Whine, whine, whine. But, but, but. But they came for you too, in the end, is how that story concludes. And this one does too. Are you even here anymore? Who is? Who wants to be?

Eros whispers songs of emancipation. But we must sing, speak, hear them. And we aren’t. To love is to emancipate, to liberate, to elevate. We are on an elevator to hell, and if you say so, some earnest New York Times reader will say: but at least it’s a very nice elevator! See how burnished the gleaming wood is? Slap! And so Eros has fallen silent.

Let me clarify my point. We are now locked in a raging battle between Eros and Thanatos. We always have been, only in some ages, this battle becomes all too real, overt, engulfing all like a tidal wave. It spills out into war. World War. Fascism, authoritarianism, hate. The globe convulses, as the missionaries of Thanatos preach their message of fear, and make too many drink their poisons. And then we fall. The elevator to hell, remember?

How do we fall? What the fuck am I even talking about? Mom, Umair’s being mean to me! He called me whiny!

There are, just as there are the missionaries of Thanatos, those on the side of Eros. But we are not doing so well these days. We. We’re the artists, musicians, poets, intellectuals, teachers, writers, thinkers—add to the list, it’s as long as the night. We’re the ones whose job is to spark fires in the human soul that lift it to the stars themselves.

And what are we settling for? Nothingness, really. Shit, crap, in many people’s eyes. The awful stuff that’s come to define now, whether in film, music, literature, or don’t make me say it, the stuff “creators” and “influencers” make. Imagine if Jean-Luc Godard or a young Charles Dickens or a budding Nelson Mandela were to confront this sea of not just mediocrity, but the fatal idea that the only job of the missionaries of Eros is to…give people numbing agents…that temporarily dull the pain…of Thanatos just ripping their souls out and turning their hearts to ashes. Where would we ever have been? Gotten? Who would we have become?

It’s not just that the bad guys are winning. They’re winning because we’re barely even trying anymore. You can include me in that condemnation, if you like, which is more an observation. Can you honestly say that a book, film, song, anything, has been written that’s adequate for now? Don’t kid yourself and tell me that the Hunger Games are 1984, or that the cheesy show or book during jour are Animal Farm. Etcetera. Don’t kid the world and tell me that losing the progress we’ve made over decades and centuries is somehow OK because, fuck, look, we’ve got iPhones and influencers and AI flavored soft drinks now! Don’t. It’s not just false, worse, it doesn’t just make a fool of you, worse, this is the awakening of Thanatos, and the slumber of Eros.

We have to better than this. We. We will never make the bad guys less bad. Never. There will always be Trumps, just as there were always mad kings and crazed emperors. Our job is to tend to the human heart, to give the human eyes vision with which to see, to mend the broken places in the human soul—before.

Before the missionaries of Thanatos can plant their bitter harvest in that arid soil. Before it grows into the failed harvest of hatred. Before it becomes the pockmarked, poisonous fruits of violence, rage, and stupidity, which we see before us today.

We are the lovers. We always have been. And we are failing our era. Eros slumbers because we have not awakened her. The bad guys aren’t failing the era. They’re defining it. But we are not teaching the world anymore how to, why to, in which ways to, love, tend, mend, need, grow, desire, speak, be, exist. And so there the world is, doing just the opposite. Divided, breaking down, stupefied, spellbound, still, silent. We are failing so profoundly at our job that we are not even capable of admitting that we are. And this is the greatest failure of all.

Me? I’m fading away. Winking out. A friend recently accused me of slinking into obscurity. She was right. I am. I long for it, secretly. I stare at the sea and whisper: just take me. I wonder how I grew so old so fast, and failed at so much along the way. It weighs me down like a million anchors. Take me, drown me, end me. But I am not the man anyone needs me to be then. I am wrestling time and it is turning me to dust. In this there is nobility and grace. Only in this. Yet some days, here I am, lost in my regret and sadness, only pouring the seeds of Thanatos through my hands, instead of taking Eros in my arms, which are all I have left.

Maybe you understand me. Maybe you don’t. I can’t say anymore. I often wonder: should I write the way Americans want people to write? Here’s what the markets did today, Bob! Great Powers Compete! Bombs Are Made to Fall! So are we. The question is what we fall into. Annihilation, slumber, or dust. So just. Just. Take me, drown me, end me. Is this a jeremiad? A eulogy? A lament? Maybe it’s all those things. And maybe none of them matter anymore.

Civilization is Eros’s child. It is a being made of love, or it is nothing at all. We forget that not just at our peril, but at our ruin and self-destruction. The joy has gone out of everything. Where did it go? It turned to fear, despair, pain. How did it do that? In the hands of Thanatos. Why did it happen? Because men who are possessed by this greatest demon of all rise among us, and they have only one purpose: to turn us, too, into agents of death. Who silently say nothing, as the world around us unravels, into mere specks, until all that’s left is pure death itself. What is that? Nothingness? It’s not even that: it’s just the desire to destroy, to hurt, to kill, what is most alive.

And if we become inured to that, blind to it, or worse, accepting of it—then, my friends, the game is already over. And the one who sits on the throne above all the mad kings and emperors laughs. Death himself. Having taken ourselves away from us, his missionaries having made his word our flesh. Death is all there is, was, ever can be, all you are allowed to be, you will not sing, smile, laugh, fuck, need, touch, taste, know, want, become, anything, anything, but me. I am annihilation, and annihilation is all you are now.

Hate watch me. Doom scroll me. Like me, follow me, hit subscribe on your way out! Obey me. Worship me. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want now, and all that’s left, anyways? To be little Trumps? Smash the button. Smash the city. Smash the body. Thanatos shrieks. Eros is patient, true, real. Nothing is anymore, is it?

Thanatos says: I am the algorithm and the formula and the machine, the object and the subject. I am the demagogue and the spectacle, the war and the bomb, the nothing that is becoming everything. There is no more than this to a thing that was once called life. Here, here is joylessness. It is all you can tell yourself you deserve. It is the beginning of me.

And I am the destroyer of all things. See my arms whirl. Feel the blades of my nails. I am everything. And you are nothing.

Who are we now? What have we become? The wretched thing we see before us is only ever made of us, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)