The Maggot

You hate. You hate, don’t you? Don’t tell me that you don’t, that there is nothing you abhor, nothing which fills you with anger, nothing you wish would fade from this Earth. But it’s justified - it’s always justified. The people you love would be safe. You’d finally get to live the life you want. It would be better that way, if it just disappeared. If people just started behaving like they should, and if some people just stepped out of the frame completely. Really, they should be ashamed of themselves. If they were to break down, make a desperate show of regret and fade from public view, that would be a step in the right direction. And they deserve it, all of it. The scolding, the ridicule, countless righteous voices rising up against them. They belong in exile, until they learn to play nice. But judgment is a one and done deal. There’s never really any coming back. Not with dignity, anyway.

I can see you smacking your lips, I can feel your tongue rolling in your mouth. Your spiritual bloodthirst. I respect your ruthlessness, your desire to sanctimoniously destroy what you loath in the world, everything that makes you feel unsafe. You are full of righteous anger - and I empathize, I understand. It’s only that my righteousness is directed at righteousness itself. So I am self destructive, corrosive. I am a cannibal, a flesh eater. I want to show you what happens in the minds of all the “moral” people who are just trying to “make the world a better place.”

And I understand wanting to destroy someone, something - because it deserves to be destroyed, doesn’t it? I am on your side. But I see you for the demons you are, blinded by your righteous anger. I love it. Really, I envy you and your heroic fantasy. I am an ally, and oh, if only you could understand what it’s like to ally with a bloodthirsty demon, innocently picking the flesh from its fangs. A demon who feels with a deep conviction they are an angel. I watch you gleefully perform your gruesome function with a dark sense of respect.

But I make the rounds, the one who has been quietly watching, listening to all the complicated people. Sooner or later I come knocking at the door, the butcher of farcical dreams, a maggot in the rotting flesh of culture, who feasts on and savors its tension and instability. Mine is not only a tough love - it is a cruel love. I want to tear you apart, and I want you to pick up the pieces. The future will not be what you dreamed of. You have been speaking, making it all more and more complicated - like it should be. I adore a confusing mess. I have been listening, waiting in the crawl space, putting it all together. I will win. I have already won in my own mind, my perpetual battleground. It is simple - I have a more cohesive dream. You talk and you talk on your soapbox, and I watch the faces of everyone listening - I know how they feel. I care what you have to say. I do your dirty work in the background, advocate for you, ask people to see things from your perspective. You cajole and admonish, but I never judge. But then I see the verdict, and I get to work breaking it all down - they are afraid to disagree with you, you don’t know what a terror you are. Outside of your circle of conformity, quietly I assure them all, it’s okay to feel how you feel, you have your own perspective. I give you a warm smile as I covertly aid people in questioning your positions. I turn the soil, I help it decompose. What doesn’t survive this process doesn’t deserve to exist - don’t take it personally.

The plants will come and make something beautiful of my decomposition, something enticing. And the people will devour the fruits of my labor, blissfully unaware of the excremental dimension underlying the flesh of the crisp apple, ripe for consumption. As we devour, we dream of the future we wish to create. But ecologically speaking, the role of every animal is simply to eat and shit. We only make life from life. We are second order beings. Only a plant can make life from the lifeless. Our whole lives are devoted to processing, breaking our meals down to their constituent parts, and returning them to the Earth. We create ourselves from our feasts - and we only feast on the living, or that which was once alive.

That’s the kind of being I am - one who decomposes, who makes available the raw materials. A worm writhing in the rotting flesh of a dead man reveals something in the character of life we wish to remain ignorant of. Not only what we are, but what we are. We are maggots, and walking corpses ripe for the taking. All of our love, dreams and ambitions take place in these bodies, the bodies of voracious animals with gnashing teeth who roam Earth looking for their next meal.

Ours are the dreams of maggots, the love of maggots. Who would suspect that the spirit of God could be found in such a grotesque and lowly station, an expressive and creative spirit writhing in darkness and decay? I made you from the dirt, from clay, spoke the Tree of Life with the voice of God. But muttering in the background is the worm - yes, but then again, who made such exquisite dirt? Could you have really gotten the job done without the prerequisite materials?

I see that you hate. And I see that you love, you fear, you dream, you desire, you suffer. I see you in your tangled mess. I see it all bound together in the shape of “you.” I will tear “you” apart. I am coming for “you,” but not you. All of it will still be there in an excremental pile, where once it appeared to be part of a coherent whole. But it was always a sandcastle made of bullshit. And that is a compliment, because I, the maggot, love bullshit. I don’t care what shape it comes in.

It’s how I see myself. Again and again I deconstruct myself, tear myself down, build myself up, making new models from a malleable pile of dung. It’s exhausting, it’s so exhausting - tearing myself apart, putting myself together in an endless cycle. I am much more skilled at dismantling than assembling - so a perpetual pile of rubble is the natural conclusion. Oh well! One of these days, one of these days…

Do I disturb you? Would you like me to hide my face, quiet my voice? Would you point your righteous anger at me, your disapproval, your disdain? But you’ll find it has no effect - I have nothing left to lose. I have already bathed in my own venomous vat of resentment for so long that yours has no effect on me. I have smothered myself in shame, hated others and myself so deeply, ridden a million times the nightmare merry-go-round that is my mind, and I’ve made it out the other side loving myself. And if I can love myself with a full awareness of the darkness of my soul, then loving anyone else is a cakewalk. Listening is easier for me now, because I don’t love the shape of the castle, but the shit it’s made of.

That’s why I will win, even in all my obscenity. Because I can love complicated people. I see you, trying to insulate yourself from risk, trying to prevent all conflict, all tension. I see what’s on the other side of a perfect vision, everything outside the frame. No one can measure up, no one can play the part. So I will shamelessly destroy it, the culture you seek to construct as a stage for your heroic fantasy, the enactment of your ideal of life. I am not watching the play, but the miserable actors, the dark rings in the eyes of your Disneyland employees. You don’t seem to care what your dreamland is made of. But I do. And when I see a house of cards, I do the responsible thing. I blow it down. It was bound to fall apart anyways - the longer it stands, the more everyone involved suffers. Now is the time to savor the dark pleasure of watching it all collapse. When the farce is laid bare, you find yourself in an open space, the space of possibility. What next?

I am not a nihilist, I have a dream. It is a dream about day to day life. It is not a dream about a grand future, but about the particulars of cultivating people who unconditionally love and affirm themselves. It’s a dream about retaining our sense of self worth through any endeavor, come rain or shine, in success or failure. It’s a dream about strength and resilience rather than safety and security. And I don’t know how to get there, I don’t know how to do it, because I have been wallowing in shame, trying to live up to an ideal this whole time.

That is what nobody seems to recognize. The beauty of life in decay, of what is worthy of admiration even when we are at our most fallen. The dignity that still remains even in the sorriest of states. Don’t cling to the ledge. Don’t cling to your vision, the one that’s already breaking down. Take the fall. Let it fall apart, and you will see what is left.

Most of us long to be understood, but then again, sometimes deep down we know that we are not what we perceive ourselves to be. We want to be more than we are, we want to have already become what we admire. And it’s too late, we are already playing the part. It’s too embarrassing, it’s just too much to ask, it requires too much vulnerability.

I’m not coming for you - I’m coming for the corpse you are trapped in. I’m here to liberate the flesh from a sick social body, which is not really a body at all, but more of a grotesque meat sculpture. There is more dignity in simply being a plot of fresh soil, a fertile patch of ground, than being part of an obscene edifice which makes a mockery of life. The humble earth, which all the creatures which feast on decay participate in nourishing, is the seat of all possibility, all new life. From it every plant sprouts, everything which is innately worthy of being.

I am a spec of dirt, and there is already a dignity in that. I am part of that glorious, rich soil of our magnificent Earth, a unique cradle of life which is unique in all the universe. I long to be part of something healthy, something alive. I would love for human culture to become like the DNA of a thriving species, which recreates a long lineage of healthy beings. But the natural world is not like the products of our intellect. Single celled organisms came together into multicellular ones in a totally emergent way, guided only by the individual behaviors of the constituent cells. We cannot engineer the ideal whole and describe what ideal behavior looks like as we describe the specifications for the parts of a machine. Just like a mysterious “principle of life” underlies the emergence of more and more complex forms, the social form, at the end of the day, is not only the product of our philosophies about how it should or shouldn’t be. It’s the product of our behavior, and we are irrational, hypocritical, and lack self awareness. Our thoughts, which partially govern how we behave, are part of its coalescence, but it cannot ultimately be governed by our designs.

You might quip and say that according to that reasoning, isn’t everything already natural? And you’d be right - yes, it is. But there is chaos in nature. There are points in time when things have not yet coalesced into a coherent whole. Don’t be fooled by appearances. We are very much still in pieces, part of something unstable, incomplete. We are a tiny bubble in the span of time. The human story has only just begun. We are much more like a jumble of bacteria in a primordial soup than cells in a healthy body. Life comes together through trial and error, starting as loose networks, gradually becoming refined into what retroactively looks like an elaborate, perfectly designed plan. But it was not designed by one author - it emerged from a process, the interaction of many parts. And that is where we find ourselves as individuals today. We are part of a writhing mass with loose synergies but no “DNA.”

What does this mean about how we should live our lives? It means we must be dynamic rather than controlling. We shouldn’t overregulate our own behavior or the behavior of others. It means that we should be authentic. If you feel like you are getting stuffed in a box, if your health, mental or physical is failing and you feel your way of life is unsustainable, you should strive to live in a way that feels right to you, all values and ideals be damned. If you just can’t put your finger on what’s wrong, it’s because “trying to put your finger on it” is a doomed endeavor. Trust your gut, even when your mind is unable to articulate what it is saying. We are hopelessly complex beings. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to explain what we think and how we feel (what do you think I’m doing here?), but our emotions are irrational. We are always trying to express something which simply is.

Like single celled organisms bumbling about in the muck, we can only approach life as individuals with our own peculiar behavior. Somehow in nature, many small parts come together into complex self repeating structures. And this goes on at every level, even at the level of whole ecosystems, with organisms relying entirely on compounds that are a product of other organisms’ biological processes, such as the essential amino acids that the human body cannot produce. We are social animals, we want to experience a natural “coming together.” But when we force ourselves into a shape that doesn’t feel right, we become part of something which doesn’t serve us. We become part of a pattern of sickness, a pattern that doesn’t deserve to persist. And it won’t - when the form betrays its flesh, the flesh betrays its form.

Maybe you aren’t part of anything yet. Maybe you feel that what you are a part of has failed you. But you won’t end up anywhere if you don’t respect your nature, if you measure yourself against an ideal, working against rather than with yourself. It will come together, or it won’t - but it will never come together if you are inauthentic, if you aren’t real with yourself. It will never come together if you try to regulate and control, rather than becoming flexible and resilient. Real strength accommodates tension and conflict. All too often fragility is mistaken for stability in an nearly Orwellian fashion. Happiness, tranquility, security, social harmony - we must learn not to be too desperate for these. The less we are able to cope with, the more of a burden we place on others to maintain a facade for our convenience. And this ultimately circles back to ourselves. The aforementioned are only a byproduct of a process, the substance of everyday life, and that is where our attention should be focused.

Righteous anger explodes from fear and insecurity. We judge, we denounce, we ostracize, we humiliate, we shame. And I understand why. Because we live in a frustrating and dangerous world. Because other people’s behavior frightens us or tests us emotionally. We would rather be in a space that feels like less of a burden. And so we demand it. We demand that others be uncomplicated. We sacrifice ourselves to our perceived end - security, peace, harmony, etc. We crave an appearance, and measure each moment by how it deviates from a perceived norm. Everything that disturbs this perceived state of stability is a perturbation, and we have a tendency to condone any behavior that can quickly bring the situation back to “normal,” no matter how brutal.

And so all we get is just that - an appearance. And we become dependent on that appearance, because our suppression makes us unstable, unable to cope with challenging circumstances, because we are already in a state of perpetual emotional distress. The only way out is to become stronger, to not be so desperate for comfort. You have to be willing to create tension, make people uncomfortable, and practice remaining level headed as situations arise, instead of clamoring to quash deviation. Instead of restricting your own behavior for the sake of other people’s comfort and expecting them to reciprocate, which creates an anxious system of self-regulation based on mindreading and guesswork, learn to tolerate emotionally demanding situations and make that the standard. Expect others to be capable of putting up with some amount of your bullshit.

Be willing to be a brat, to make a fool of yourself. Not all the time, not for every little petty reason, but when something really matters to you. I would rather live in a community full of brats who know how to properly handle each other’s tantrums than a bovine herd of goody two shoes perfectionists who never allow themselves to be complicated human beings. We aren’t born knowing the “right” way to express ourselves, to get our needs met - children cry, throw tantrums, they don’t know how to do any better. We then teach them to go about getting what they want in a way that isn’t so infuriating. But what if sometimes, what you want is to be infuriating, just as a way to confirm that you can still get away with it?

Because we should be able to get away with it. Not so that we can go around doing it all the time, but because sometimes what we feel is so difficult to articulate that we think we’re going insane, and we feel that it’s simply impossible to speak our minds without pissing everyone off. Sometimes it’s simply not possible to come up with a way to broach the subject without causing a stir - and those are almost always the most important feelings to discuss. But of course, the community is not always prepared to deal with the strain you place on it. Your behavior is seen as unacceptable, a perturbation, and you are asked to shut up or leave. Often, you are not even offered the chance to shut up. You get the silent treatment. You are already effectively out of the club.

Don’t be afraid of creating or cultivating tension. Don’t be afraid of tearing the community apart, or being torn from it. Any group which doesn’t mature into a space that tolerates tension doesn’t deserve to persist. When insecure, righteous people set the norm for how a community responds to conflict, its fate is more or less sealed - it’s bound for decay. When someone goes around trying to set a precedent of stern disapproval towards the expression of some viewpoint, that is the decisive moment. Will this be a community where you feel comfortable sharing what you think, or will this be a community governed by fear and shame, where everyone can clearly see that the territorial, defensive behavior of self-righteous people usually gets results? How people respond on the whole to that behavior ends up deciding what it will be like to be a part of that space. Normalize strength, firmness and a secure sense of self which isn’t threatened by challenges to one’s perspective.

That should be the primary goal of any social organism, anything made of humans - to be a place where people can express their nature, be their complicated selves without fearing the loss of their dignity. And all those shamed by the righteous, made insecure in their self worth, come to me, the maggot - the one who would let it rot, the one who is quietly taking down the circus tent, who gives you a soft smile and nods after you’ve gone on your diatribe. I don’t have to listen to the words. I see it in your eyes, hear it in the tone of your voice. You are weak, you are insecure, you are not yet ready to lead, to set a precedent, to be a role model for others. I care how you feel, I care what you think - but then, I care about everybody. If you test me, if you ask me to cast someone out for the sake of your comfort, to choose sides, you will be disappointed. I don’t play that game anymore.

I am not some angel. I am resentful, I am anxious - but I am self aware. I understand insecure people, righteous people, because it’s my natural disposition. I’m sensitive. I’ve had many angry rants and obsessions. But more than anything I’ve directed my criticality and hatred at myself and others like me. I am sick of weakness, sick of fear, sick of anger. But I sympathize. And I don’t hate myself anymore, which makes it a lot easier to not hate you. But when I see something coming apart at the seams, I just can’t help myself - I have to pull the thread. And that includes whatever you are desperately trying to hold together. I destroy to make way for new possibilities, and your ship has long since sailed and sunk. Better get on a new one - I’m finding the cracks in that one too, and prying them open. If you’d like me to stop, you better squish me - but I think you’ll find we’re everywhere, us maggots, quietly taking it all apart to make space for something new. Once you squish us all, you might find there’s no one left, and the only one left to squish is yourself. That’s right, it’s maggots all the way down. Enjoy the feast!