On Despair

"You can't talk about the meaning of life without using phony words. Imprecise ones. But there aren't any others. If there is anything, it's movement. At some point a solar system got established, which doesn't move anymore because it moves according to laws. To get it moving, something has to come along and smash things. That's why human beings were invented. But that wasn't part of a plan. We are no longer allowed to say: We are here to..........The plan of the powerful takes part of our causal thinking, which is always intent on setting up value systems, creating meaning. All history, all mythologies grow out of this notion of planned chains of causality...........But we just stand around, the creator of values. That's what we are here for. We are not capable of accepting the opposite of things as they are. So we are nowhere near freedom. We won't become free unless we accept destruction the same way we accept the ordered solar system, which makes for our paralysis...........I am not talking about intellectual knowledge, but about the physical certainty in everything the individual does. The possibility of understanding this is withheld from him for a long time, and he experiences it physically only much later.If the certainty that he had to die became physically palpable for the individual early on, he would lose the existential pains.........hatred, envy, jealousy. No more fears. Our relations are cruel games we play with each other because we don't recognize our end as something positive. It's positive because it's real. The end is life in concrete form. The body must understand death..............
Destruction isn't the opposite of what exists. Destruction is when this concept no longer exists, when it doesn't have any meaning anymore, when it has a reality that makes it disappear. What people invent then.........that would be exciting".

Fassbinder, 1977