(mandatory) Special inaugural welcome to all new readers and special sustained welcome to all those who are sticking around; to all — most radiant beams of appreciation and virtual (if a bit awkward) hugs.
(a bit cheeky) This project aims to recreate Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” with modern vocabulary and setting whilst remaining faithful to its original energy and the type of consciousness FM conjured in this book.
(advised) Read previous instalments of “Posts”: Pt. 1 Ch. I, Pt. I Ch. II, Pt. I Ch. III, …
IV
— Lol, so you’ll find pleasure even in back pain then! — you’ll cry out laughing.
— Why not? There is pleasure in back pain, — I’ll answer. — My back hurt for a whole month; I know there is. Here, of course, you don’t suffer in silence — you moan; but these aren’t genuine moans, these are bitter, sarcastic moans, that’s the whole point. In these very moans the sufferer’s pleasure is expressed; if he didn’t feel pleasure in them, he wouldn’t bother moaning. This is a good example, dear readers, so I’ll develop it. These moans express, first of all, the entire pointlessness of your pain that’s so humiliating to our consciousness; all the biological stuff, which you still suffer, even though you obviously don’t give a shit about, just like it doesn’t give a shit about you. It expresses the awareness that you have no enemy, but the pain exists; the awareness that you, with all your Instagram chiropractors and osteopaths, are completely enslaved to your back; that if someone wants, your back will stop hurting, and if they don’t want it, it’ll keep hurting for another three months; and that, finally, if you still disagree and keep rioting, all that’s left for your own consolation is to beat yourself or punch your wall harder, but nothing more decisive than that. Well then, it’s from these bitter insults, from these mockeries from god knows who, that pleasure finally begins, sometimes reaching the highest ecstasy. I ask you, dear readers, listen sometime to the moans of an educated person of the twenty-first century suffering from back pain, say on the second or third day of the pain, when he’s no longer moaning the way he did on the first day, that is, not simply because his back hurts; not like some simpleton, but like a person touched by education and liberal and progressive values moans, like a person who’s “alienated from traditional values and his roots”, as they say now. His moans become somehow whiny, passive-aggressive and continue for whole days and nights. And he knows himself that his moaning brings him no benefit; he knows better than anyone that he’s just being insufferable to himself and everyone else; he knows that even the audience he’s performing for, and his whole family, are already sick of him, don’t believe him for a second and understand perfectly well that he could moan differently, more simply, without all the drama, and that he’s just fucking around like this because he fancies himself an arsehole. Well, that’s what makes it feel so good — being conscious of your own degeneracy. Like, “I’m pissing you off, driving everyone at the party crazy, ruining the vibe. So don’t party then, you lot, feel it every minute that my back hurts. I’m no longer the hero I wanted to seem like before, just some pathetic person, a loser. Well fine then! I’m so glad you figured me out. Can’t take my whiny bullshit? Well so be it; I’ll make an even worse show of it for you right now...” You still don’t get it, dear readers? No, you must develop and become conscious to a much deeper level to understand all the layers of the paingasm! You’re laughing? I’m delighted. My jokes, dear readers, are obviously cringe, all over the place, rambling, full of self-doubt. But that’s because I have zero self-respect. How can any conscious person respect themselves even a little bit?
V
Well, how can you respect yourself even a little if you find pleasure in the very feeling of getting owned? I’m not saying this out of some performative guilt trip. And anyway, I couldn’t stand saying things like “Sorry mummy, I won’t do it again” — not because I wasn’t capable of saying it, but on the contrary, maybe exactly because I was too capable of it, very much so! I’d somehow get myself into shit, as if on purpose, precisely when I wasn’t even remotely guilty of anything. That was the best part. Meanwhile I’d get all emotional, feel guilty, even cry, and obviously I was delusional, though I genuinely wasn’t faking it. Something deep down was just fucked... Here I couldn’t even blame biology, though biology has been fucking me over my entire life more than anything else. It’s disgusting remembering this, and it was disgusting back then too. Like a minute later I’d already realise with spite that all this was bullshit, bullshit, fake performative bullshit — all the guilt-tripping myself, all the getting emotional, all those promises to change. And ask why I put myself through this delusion? Answer: because it was too boring to just sit there doing nothing; so I’d start spiralling. Honestly, that was it. Pay closer attention to yourselves, dear readers, and you’ll see it’s true. I’d make up drama for myself and invent a life just to feel like I was actually living. How many times did I — well, for example, get pissed off over literally nothing, on purpose; and you know full well you’re getting pissed off over nothing, it’s all performance, but you work yourself up so much that by the end you’re genuinely pissed off. I was drawn to pull these stunts my whole life, to the point where I eventually lost all control over myself. Once I even tried to force myself to fall in love, twice actually. And I suffered, dear readers, I swear. Deep down you don’t believe you’re actually suffering, there’s this mocking inner voice, but you still suffer, and in a real, unironic way; you get jealous, lose your shit... And all from boredom, dear readers, all from boredom; I was rotting. Because the direct, natural result of consciousness is rotting — that is, consciously sitting on your arse doing nothing. I already mentioned this above. Let me say it once again: all these normies and achievers are only active because they’re stupid and limited. How do I explain that? Like this: because of their limitations, they mistake immediate and secondary causes for root causes, and therefore convince themselves faster and easier than others that they’ve found solid ground for their actions, and so they chill out; and that’s the key thing. To start doing something, you need to be completely at peace beforehand, with no doubts left. Well, how am I supposed to chill out? Where are my root causes to lean on, where’s my justification? Where do I get them? I exercise my thinking, which means every root cause immediately drags another one behind it, even more fundamental, and so on to infinity. That’s the very essence of consciousness and thinking. So that’s biology again. What’s the end result? The same thing. Remember: I was talking about revenge in my previous post. (You probably weren’t paying attention). I wrote: a person takes revenge because they find justice in it. Meaning, he found a root cause, found a justification, namely: justice. So he’s totally at peace, and therefore takes revenge calmly and successfully, convinced he’s doing something honest and just. But I don’t see any justice here, don’t find any virtue either, so if I were to take revenge, it’d only be out of spite. Spite, of course, could overpower everything, all my doubts, and therefore could successfully work as a root cause precisely because it’s not a cause. But what can I do if I don’t even have spite (that’s what I started with earlier). My spite, again because of these cursed laws of consciousness, just chemically breaks down. You look — the target dissolves, the reasons evaporate, you can’t find anyone to blame, the bullying stops being bullying and becomes just fate, something like back pain where nobody’s at fault, and you’re left with the same way out — bashing against the wall harder. So you just give up because you never found the root cause. Now try losing yourself in a feeling blindly, without overthinking, without a root cause, shutting off your brain at least temporarily; hate someone or love someone, anything to not just rot. Two days later max, you’ll start despising yourself for knowingly becoming delulu. End result: the bubble pops and you’re rotting again. Oh dear readers, maybe I only consider myself smart because my whole life I couldn’t start or finish anything. Okay, okay, again I’m posting more rambling, endless, pointless rambling. But aren’t we all? Honestly, what else can I do if the actual and only purpose of an intelligent person is conscious shitposting into the void?
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(by way of comment) Now, we do want to hereafter refer to the character as “a type of consciousness”, a certain archetype called “Undergound Man”. In FM’s book, the underground and “undergroundness” are an image of isolation, of the narrator’s separation from the world of normal people, but also a metaphor for the human subconscious, what’s going on in the poor guy’s head below under the surface, in contrast to the conscious or hyper-conscious he’s so obsessed with.
Dostoevsky’s short epigraph to the Part I of the novella, called Underground, reads as follows:
The author of the notes and the notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, individuals such as the author of these notes not only can but must exist in our society, considering the circumstances under which our society was formed. I wanted to present to the public, in a more vivid way than usual, one of the characters of the recent past. This is one of the representatives of a generation that is still alive. In this excerpt, entitled “Underground,” this person introduces himself and his views, and seems to want to explain the reasons why he appeared and had to appear in our environment. The next excerpt will contain the actual “notes” of this person about some events in his life.
In the 21st century, somewhere in 2025, people will understand why this structure is beautiful: in the Part I, the author throws a bunch of unhinged thinkpieces at the public, in the Part II, once the trust is established and the public is hooked, he begins actual narrative fiction — a proven method to grow readership, as many will have noticed. In other words, the Part I establishes him as the Poster, in the Part II, he starts trauma-dumping.
This type of consciousness, as it seems, was rare in FM’s times, whilst now, as it seems, it’s pretty wide-spread, to the point it triggers “Literally Me” response in literally every other person, regardless of who they are. This could, as it clearly is, be a result of an increasing isolation of an individual from the society combined with increasing rationalism, not in a “we’re not partying anymore and nobody’s going out to touch the grass” sense (we fucking do; we ball even), but in an ideological sense, as in everybody believes in their own thing and sees what they want to see and has the capacity to do so and all the tools to maintain that state, that is, a smartphone and the internet, which both, for better or worse, provide a spatial underground for a person and channel the person’s underground into that space, thus creating all conditions to an Underground Man — as a sexless archetype — to exist in multiplicity.
It’s easy to see then, why “one of the characters of [the middle of the 19th century]” is so “Literally Us”, and marvel at how a text from those olden days understand us better than we do.
As a bonus, a few illustrations by Alexander Alexeyev, made for the 1967 Russian edition of “Notes from Underground”.
(the end)
Frist! Can't wait to dig in!
I'm loving it!