The Keeper Recruits
It feels icky though. To sell someone a thing they do not want, even if they need it, feels counter to his way of being. It is a manipulation when the Void itself is not a manipulation. Or is it? What is the Void except a trap? A trap that, once sprung, summons The Keeper to guide you through your anger, confusion, and angst about having been manipulated, about having been duped.
There’s a difference. The manipulation humanity subjects itself to is a twisting of reality. That life is incomplete or not worth living if some mass-produced object is not acquired. That one’s worth is lessened by not completing an arbitrary accomplishment you don’t want. That one should fear missing out while giving them unlimited access to all the things they are missing out and couldn’t possibly experience all of. That you are unique and special and the best way to celebrate this is to conform — want what everyone else wants, seek to agree to the detriment of self. Humanity’s manipulation is designed to take, exploit, and subjugate.
The Void Keeper’s manipulation is a necessary one, it does not feed-upon its victims, it nourishes them. It traps them in the darkness so they can heal, grow, flourish. The Void does not ask anything of anyone. It just presents those that encounter it with themselves; it shows them the aspects of themselves they have difficulty seeing. And that’s it. The manipulation is an ambush. A surprise party. It does not demand that they do anything but see what it has to show. Here’s a gift. Do whatever you wish. Most people choose to throw it away. Angry, confused, and afraid they treat the Void like they have been violated simply by having to confront aspects of themselves they have deemed unsavory. And so they fuse with the protective energy of anger instead of listening to it and refuse to venture outside the confines of what they already know of themselves.
It is necessary to manipulate someone into seeing an aspect of themselves they refuse to see or embrace. It cannot work any other way but the way it’s always worked. The Void contains all things, but it cannot change the way things are. Quite the opposite. The Void is the way things are. It cannot be anything else.
The Keeper has been trying to embrace this other form of manipulation — making his own manipulation less obtuse, more overt. They are more receptive to the manipulation that harms them because it is familiar. It’s an ironic inverse really. The Void shows you the inherent interconnectedness of all things — an equal plane, a shared experience — and then invites you to be an individual in the midst of it. The human manipulation tells them they are unique and special and like no other and then shames them into obedience and compliance.
So The Keeper has been trying to make his manipulation look more like theirs. He has been selling them a fantasy. Trying to wrap a truth up in the same bullshit skin they broadcast to the stars. And they haven’t been purchasing. They have been avoiding The Void more than ever. Why is that? Maybe the trap is just not enticing enough. He needs people to dance with him, to enter into the trap with glee. He needs people to relish in cavorting with what they fear. To bring back the ritual, the celebration, the carnival.
He is tired. But he persists. Not because he wants to. But because he is persistent.
There are some Hedonic Sprites down the street. Hanging out in an abandoned alley, a forgotten part of the collective psyche. Strange to think how few they are now, how they teeter on the cusp of banishment and starvation. They used to be everywhere — they used to be worshipped, they used to be welcomed, they used to be summoned. You would see them cavorting in the Spring, you would see them tempting madness in the winter, celebrating bounty and mortality. And now they’re out back smoking and taking shitty baths. They are tattered, they are pieces of what they used to be.
They are surprised to see him.
The hedonic used to be a part of being human, part of the ancient recipe comprising the human soul, a part which has since been substituted for an inferior ingredient. Hedonism died by Puritanical sanction strangling it, replaced by a doctrine of self-restraint. It was snuffed out in the name of what they call progress. People produce more when they aren’t tempted by what makes life worth living, or so the thinking went. And now the Hedonic Sprites are relegated to the shady outskirts of the psyche.
Pleasure for the sake of pleasure is now a radical idea; revolutionary and dangerous. It is forbidden, not in the usury sense but in the moral sense. One must earn their pleasure, never indulge in excess. One must labor for the right to feel good. And in needing to earn it they end up deserving nothing, they are too tired to want pleasure, too scared of what it might cost them. There are no rights, just the obedient and the outcasts. The human soul is snuffed out in favor of increased production. Pad the 401k, plan for retirement. You can rest when you’re dead. Living such a life is not worth living.
If they have to earn everything and deserve nothing then there must be something wrong with them. Something which must be forgiven. They see themselves as unworthy, vile – they must make amends. They have sinned by existing and by having the audacity to have appetite, to have desire. They are guilty of crimes they made up in order to find themselves culpable so they can beg forgiveness. And they have found themselves wrecked by guilt and full of shame. For what?
Who knows.
Who honestly fucking knows? It makes one despair to think about the humans and what they’ve built for themselves.
But earning one’s keep has become increasingly difficult. No one is ever enough and thus no one is ever allowed to release what is pent-up. And so the pressure builds and builds and eventually capitulates into disaster. There is no breathing, no digestion. Just a steady build up followed by explosion. Screaming into the Void to no avail because they have forgotten that the Void is there to help them. And so the Hedonic Sprites have been abandoned — without a role to fulfill. To smoke and bathe and try to remember why they’ve been forgotten.
The Keeper of the Void goes to talk to them. To propose re-employment to them. Less an employment, more a vocational reorientation. An alliance for the mutual good of all against their will. He asks them to cavort with him. And in doing so maybe they can help the disreputable become not so much respectable as essential. They humans are trapped in darkness. And only shadow knows the way out.
