This December, our world survived the end of the Mayan calendar. Amidst online prophesies of impending Armageddon, we weathered the end of times — and resurfaced unharmed, if not unfazed.
Remarkably enough, 2012 is not the first time that we have managed to avoid certain existential destruction. The Smithsonian magazine reports that Assyrian tablets dating as far back as 2800 B.C. warn of the world’s immanent demise, while 15th century mathematician Johannes Stoffler frightened Europe with predictions of a catastrophic flood. Scarcely a year ago, Christian radio personality Harold Camping twice proclaimed that the long-awaited Rapture was finally at hand. In an act of shocking resilience, humanity survived yet again, twice.
Perennial predictions of the destructive event we have all expected for centuries may disappoint — but predictions of yet more doomsday predictions are never off the mark. Far more certain than the occurrence of an actual catastrophe is our continued fascination with eschatology, our facility for invoking the prospect of our own obliteration.
Something about the existence of our world seems to consistently hint at its own negation. Yet there must be more to this phenomenon than the mere fact that the world is. After all, we are uniquely inclined to theorize about the end of the world and we tend to avoid apocalyptic alarmism about all sorts of existent objects. When, if ever, has anyone ever precipitated mass hysteria by predicting the end of something as inconsequential as Fair Isle sweaters, for instance?
In his poem “The Hollow Men,” writer and critic T.S. Eliot articulates his vision of a thoroughly dissatisfying apocalypse — for the “stuffed men” who occupy Eliot’s oeuvre, the world ends “not with a bang” but with “a whimper.”
Eliot isolates what I regard as one of the main attractions of a dramatic apocalypse — it functions as a bastion against mediocrity. The hellish scenes that pervade Hieronymus Bosch paintings and traditional theological texts may be unnerving, but at least they are never boring. Fire and brimstone could salvage even the most banal life by infusing it with an element of much-needed adventure. Perhaps the collective cultural fantasy of sensational death is a backlash against its perceived opposite — scenarios involving Fair Isle sweaters and other J. Crew merchandise, which is to say, life at its most elegant but least eventful.
The glamour that accompanies bloody and dramatic destruction is not only a salient feature of many artistic traditions, but also an accepted fact of contemporary culture. In countless TV shows, suave protagonists clad in form-fitting spandex save the world from the looming menace of nonexistence time and time again, inflicting and receiving injuries along the way.
World-saving violence is portrayed as exciting, even sexy. In pop culture artifacts like “True Blood” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” consensual sexual exchanges are often suffused with brutality. In one scene of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” what begins as a sparring match between Buffy and her undead love interest quickly transforms into an amorous encounter. Ever the feminist, Buffy pins her former opponent against a wall and kisses him passionately as a building crumbles around them.
The eroticization of death finds its precedent in the operatic works of Richard Wagner, who originated the concept of “liebestod,” or erotic death. In “Tristan and Isolde,” death functions for a pair of doomed lovers as the consummation of an affair that went unresolved in life. Apocalypse, too, is a sort of seductive force, promising an alluring oblivion and allowing for personal capitulation to otherwise repressed savagery.
Mass death also presents itself as a unifying phenomenon. Total destruction presents us with an alternative to confronting death alone — and to leaving a vibrant world behind us. Rather than exiting a rich reality, our own death would coincide with the demolition of everything we might have missed.
Of death, poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer…not to see roses and other promising things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one’s own first name behind.” In a doomsday scenario, we are spared the difficulty of conceptualizing the world absent our experience of it — we can sustain the comforting illusion that our presence in the universe is an integral part of its continued existence.