Worlds Ending: Murakami, Melancholia, and Meeting the New Year

Warning: Spoilers

Justine, Claire and Claire’s son sit in a makeshift tipi, bracing for the impending impact of a foreign planet, and the destruction of all life. Tengo, Aomame and the little one inside her climb, freezing, up emergency ladders and scuttle over catwalks to reach a parallel world, and consign the one they have been living in to memory and oblivion. And January 1st, 2012, is a threshold crossed that, while possessing none of the gravitas with which the apocalyptic have attempted to endow it, is subtle and transformative personally, in its own way. A world has died, and a new world has been born, and this inaugural post is the birth certificate.

My wife and I brought in the new year quietly; apple cider, a couple rounds of Blockus (the triangle edition, which is, in my opinion, vastly superior to the rectangular) and a late-night showing of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in our living room. The “science-fiction plot as poetry in film” echoed many of the traits I appreciated most of Darren Aronofsky’s earlier graphic novel and film The Fountain. The change in registers between the profoundly personal stories (a disaster of a wedding, coping with the depression of a sibling) and cosmic disaster (in the form planetary collision) is jarring; mixing but never being mixed, a streak of oil across a plot of water. This resonated.

John Caputo, lecturing on the future of continental philosophy, gives a synopsis of Ray Brassier’s book, Nihil Unbound. It is not enough to reckon with the death of meanings that occur when philosophy is uncoupled from anthropocentrism; one must stare into the void and reckon with the heat death of the universe itself. Peter Rollins spoke in an interview about a kind of belief in God that lies hidden within atheism, a belief-on-our-behalf that is a comfort for atheists who are able to claim the intellectual high ground of denouncing theological answers, but who draw comfort from the belief of their parents, their children, or their culture. Brassier pushes towards a more devastating philosophy, one that pulls the roots out of every safe place.

But, strangely, that is not yet the end. That there is a philosophy at all, after the end of the world, is a curious, miraculous thing. Haruki Murakami explores this notion almost incidentally in his novel, 1Q84. The characters are dropped into a world that is a shadow of the world that they knew, and as situations evolve beyond their control, their options constrict until it seems that only death or self-imposed exile remain. But Murakami, like an accomplished illusionist, reveals a hope that escapes the pull of the world of 1Q84. Like the little one growing inside of Aomame (presumably woven from strands plucked from the air by mysterious hands) a new philosophy is pulled from the void, and strand intersects with strand until, with a trying journey fueled by a shared love and a hope without ground, a new world is entered into.

I’m skeptical of Murakami’s sleight-of-hand, and of the notion that a simple vector of escape will present itself, to draw us out of this world and its historically-contingent constraints. But I am open to constructing my own air chrysalis, pulling thoughts from the air and working them into words.

I hope to present my weavings in this venue over the coming year. You are welcome here.

Originally published at hewhocutsdown.net