Prompt 20: November 1, 2022
“Unlike most of his monstrous brothers, the zombie is truly the harbinger of contemporary nihilism. The zombie has no magic, its arrival usually has no clear reason, but rather the zombie is couched in a biological accident, a disease, a plague. Simply an animated corpse, the zombie inhabits the indeterminate space of living death, roaming around in packs, the zombie shows us the mindless wandering of a mindless mob with an insatiable hunger for devouring others, for swallowing life. If the vampire is the monster of aristocracy, the zombie is the monster of the mass, of the accidental, of quantitative leveling. The zombie is the atheist insistence on the illusion of free will. It is an image of nihilism and of idiosyncrasy taken all the way to decomposition.
. . . . .
The zombie both typifies the mob, while simultaneously the absolute individualism, the absolute isolation of contemporary life, for the zombies in a horde only interact with what they desire and never interact with each other. The trope of cannibalism is a very ancient one. We find it in so many ancient stories. But the tweak in Zombies of eating brains is a very powerful one, because it is truly an image of the nihilist. The zombie is a creature without meaning. Without intelligence, it misses any form of personhood, and has this insatiable desire which mirrors what it lacks. It desires what it lacks, identity, meaning, and this desire appears in that materialist reduction of identity and personhood to a clump of cells up there in your cranium, the zombie wants to eat your brains because it cannot eat the mind, it cannot inhabit the mind.
Strangely enough the desire to eat the living is the extreme perversion of our desire for communion and it is also the distilled image of all our passions, our attempt to fill the unquenchable yearning through our passions always transforms others into commodities which can get us what we think we need. The zombie is both an image of the social breakdown, the person as a meaningless statistic, the disappearance of common values except the overwhelming desire to consume, so also as it is an image of the breakdown of the person itself into a soulless desiring death machine.”
Jonathan Pageau (Pentecost for the Zombie Apocalypse)
As it goes– misery loves company, and I suppose there is nothing more miserable than empty gratification; desire without satisfaction, pleasure without joy. At the apex of human flourishing, economic abundance and decadence characterize our society. Too much of our population is desperate, drug-dependent, drunk, or depressed. And in the absence of a routine struggle for survival that has traditionally characterized man in nature, we are left to decompose. All around us, we find reason to lose trust in each other, in our institutions, in our culture. It’s not hard to blame anyone for it; our leaders seem all too comfortable toying with nuclear conflict, food shortages, energy crises, and bio-weapon development. Not only this, but we are more and more likely to identify ourselves with things that are not considerate of us. We seek corporate platforms to share our deepest feelings, impersonal voices to fixate our attention, unsympathetic politics to support our worldview, and virtual standards to shape our self worth. As our world becomes smaller and smaller, we fragment finer and finer. And this fragmentation is felt in our lives, in the lifeless routines we allow ourselves to repeat.
If you doubt any of this, look around you and within you for death. Look for lifelessness in the eyes, expressions, words, and demeanors of others. Look for the heaviness of life that people carry. Consider the gospel, both as a reminder and as an answer to the zombified world.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.”
John 5:24-29
The thread is open. Create boldly, and may the Spirit guide us all.