Notes from Underground: The dark reality of life and literature

There is no philosophy that adequately suits the needs of today, and when there is created such a philosophy, by tomorrow it will be irrelevant, for no philosophy once born and recognized retains it's embryonic validity and potential. Life is not a static event, and in the end it produces no concrete answers. The human nature of logo-centrism and the search for the transcendental signifier, as Derrida termed it, are fruitless tasks. Everything is always shifting and everything is always contingent on the moment. Given this reality, why then would any author/artist produce a piece of work that provides answers or soothes and comforts the audience? It would seem that before one begins to create it is of the necessity that one should reject all philosophies, schools of thought, and ideologies that have preceded them, and break onto unstable ground in order to produce something of worth.

One needs only to turn on the news, or in some cases look out their window, to see the conditions of the world in which we live. Prostitutes spread disease through their stale thighs, infants are devoured from within by worms and torn apart without from various insects and parasites in mud huts, cultural cleansing and attempted genocide, alley way and school shootings, heroin addicts, the smell of burnt skin off the electric chair, the cries of the desperate and the dying through the cold night air...

I do not evoke these images to call for sympathy or to moralize but leave that to those whose concern is not the art. I merely wish to show that to any person with sense, it should be obvious that the world is not a secure and comfortable place. How pitiful then, the art and literature that would appease and comfort the nerves of the receptor! In a world that has never produced a religion or philosophy that adequately or even remotely provides us with answers, what could possibly move the author, whose job is to represent and challenge reality, to lie to his readers by showing that the world actually is an "ordered" place. To quote Artaud, "What is most important...is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract...ideas whose compelling force is identical with hunger." (From the Theater and It's Double).

Art and Literature, for them truly to be called so must always be something of an unsettling experience. It should be something that disturbs and excites the senses and awakens in them the precarious physical, emotional, psychological and metaphysical wire that we balance on every day.

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