"You could be a wondrous creature"
A new series from Better Strangers about fighting nihilism, believing in magic, and making art, told through the work of the acclaimed comics writer Alan Moore.
This article discusses depression and suicide. If you are struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis hotline.
IN THE 1998 CULT CLASSIC The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ character Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski is antagonized by a trio of failed German technopop artists who are attempting to extort him for a million dollars he doesn’t have. The trio — led by a former pornographic actor who goes by the name of “Karl Hungus” — loudly proclaim that they are nihilists, shouting “VE BELIEVES IN NOSSING!” while tossing marmots into The Dude’s bath, threatening to cut off his “chonson,” or lighting his car on fire.
The movie’s greatest moment is the final confrontation between the nihilists, the Dude, and the Dude’s friends, Walter (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi). When the nihilists threaten violence, Donny leans in and whispers:
DONNY: Are these guys gonna hurt us, Walter?
WALTER: No Donny, these men are cowards.
As it becomes clear to the nihilists that they aren’t going to get their money, they start to plaintively whine. They’d cut off a friend’s toe as a sort of “proof of life” to extort the ransom, and felt cheated they weren’t going to get anything.
NIHILIST 2: His girlfriend gave up her toe!
NIHILIST 3: She thought we’d be getting a million dollars!
NIHILIST 2: It’s not fair!
WALTER: Fair?! Who’s the fuckin’ nihilists around here, you buncha fuckin’ crybabies?
Nihilism — or more specifically, existential nihilism — is a tricky philosophy. It claims that there is no objective meaning to anything, and that everything is therefore pointless. But while this philosophy appears on its face to let you off the hook for having to stand for anything, it causes problems if you wish to follow it to its logical conclusion: In his famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” French absurdist Albert Camus suggests that if one really believes that life is meaningless, it would seem the only sensible answer is suicide. If all of the suffering and struggling we put into our lives is ultimately for naught, achieving nothing and eventually becoming lost to time and entropy, then what sensible person would choose to continue to live and suffer?
Our culture is dotted with stories of nihilists being tested: Karl Hungus is perhaps the funniest, but he is far from the most famous. The story of Rick Blaine, Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca, is a tale of nihilism tested and defeated. When Ilsa, the love of Rick’s life, abandons him during the invasion of Paris (to return, we later find out, to her freedom fighter husband, Victor Laszlo), he loses all of his will to fight, curling up inside a gin bottle in the refugee haven of Casablanca. When Ilsa and Laszlo show up at his club, he interrogates the antifascist, Laszlo:
RICK: Don’t you sometimes wonder if it’s worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for.
LASZLO: You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.
RICK: Well, what of it? It’ll be out of its misery.
LASZLO: You know how you sound, Mr. Blaine? Like a man who's trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe in his heart.
There are, of course, instances where the nihilist hero does not choose something to believe in, and instead commits to his or her bleak beliefs. These characters almost always die. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is Macbeth, who at the end of the play, upon learning of his wife’s death, despairs in a famous soliloquy of the pointlessness of living:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, of course, then rides into doomed battle and is killed.
When worlds collapse
My obsession with fictional nihilists is, of course, because I have, on and off, been a nonfictional one myself. It perhaps goes without saying that nihilism is the ideology of the depressive. It often arises on the heels of some major loss or trauma; it is the dark pit that you land in when your world collapses.
For me, the struggles of fictional nihilists have served to illuminate the paths available to me. On my best days, I hope that I am Rick Blaine, that I will transform and commit to something more meaningful when it really matters. On my worst days, I worry I am Macbeth, that all hope is gone and there is not much longer left before it all falls apart.
But most of the time, I suspect I’m Karl Hungus: that my nihilism is half-baked and emo and serves no purpose except to let me off the hook for having to actually try hard at anything, that if you really tested my nihilism by taking away things I want, I’d start whining about what’s fair and what’s not.
But! To be fair! I earned my nihilism honestly: I was raised in a conservative Catholic household in the midwest in the 1990s, and I’ve spent the decades since effectively deconstructing every single thing I was ever taught about what was right and good and true. What started with productive, healthy teenage exercises in critical thinking and questioning authority — such as my abandonment of the Catholic Church and the Republican Party — snowballed into picking apart everything that I’d grown up with, from patriarchy to toxic masculinity to racism to capitalism to anthropocentrism to the very structures of my thinking about what constituted concepts like right or wrong or knowledge or being.
Was this a good and necessary thing for me to do? Yes! Racism, misogyny, and capitalism are bad! More people need to deconstruct them! But was it a particularly safe thing to do without any sort of coherent worldview to take the place of the ones I was tearing down?
No! Not at all!
It was like someone gave me a hammer and said, “See this ship you’re standing on? Tear down anything on it that sucks.” And I did, only to realize one day that I was no longer standing on my previously shitty but nonetheless functional ship, but was sinking beneath the waves. Worse, every time a piece of driftwood came along, instead of clinging to it, I was attacking it with the hammer. If I kept going it would be, if nothing else, a very intellectually honest form of suicide.
The Wizard of Northampton
Mercifully, during this period of trying to keep my head above the waves, there were a few pieces of driftwood that floated by that I could not find a good reason to destroy. I grabbed a few of them and paddled in the direction of their source.
Their source, it turned out, was a wild-eyed bearded man who refers to himself as a “wizard,” worships a sock puppet of a snake, regularly turns down the million dollar paychecks that are freely offered to him, and who has written, among other things, a pornographic comic about Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a 1200 page book about the 10 minutes a toddler spent choking on a cough drop, and a magazine insert entitled “Astounding Weird Penises,” which features an anthropomorphic schlong in a spacesuit named Astro Dick (“He comes from outer space!”).
The man, if you haven’t guessed, is the legendary comics writer from Northampton, England, Alan Moore. In mainstream culture, Moore is broadly considered to be a kook of the Grandpa Simpson sort, occasionally emerging to shout about how the superhero genre he helped define is vapid and juvenile. Moreover, his intense criticism of acclaimed adaptations of his work — from V for Vendetta to the Watchmen TV show — has marked him in the public imagination as a reclusive curmudgeon, not worthy of much attention at all.
But as I treaded water above the abyss, Moore’s reputation as a crank had to be set next to another undeniable fact: whenever one of his planks floated by, I not only could cling to it, but I wanted to cling to it, because everything I read or heard from Moore was not only interesting, it made me want to be alive.
Here is just one example: In 2014, I moved with my then-fiancee to New Jersey. We did this for her career — she’d grown up here, and I was getting enough freelance writing work where I figured I could support us while she got her career in state politics moving.
I fucking hated it. New Jersey is, in itself, a lovely and deeply maligned state, but I had moved from the city to the suburbs, and they were suburbs where I didn’t know anybody and where my job never took me out of the house. I struggled to make friends, I struggled to exercise, and I struggled to stop blotting out my feelings of emptiness with alcohol. Before long, I was severely depressed, and the nihilistic thoughts would not, could not stop flooding in.
And then, one day, I listened to podcaster Will Menaker (of Chapo Trap House) interview Alan Moore. Moore grew up in the city of Northampton in England. Northampton is generally thought of as one of the shabbier English cities, a blighted industrial town with a rich history but a bleak future. Moore has tirelessly advocated for his hometown. He told Menaker:
The landscapes that we exist in, we're going to internalize them, aren't we? So if you're living in a place that appears to you to be a kind of rat trap, then inevitably, you're going to come to the conclusion that you're probably some kind of rat.
Whereas if you know anything about the place in which you're living, if you can invest all that brick and mortar with some history, some mythology, whatever, then you can transform the place that you're living in to somewhere out of the Arabian Nights, into a fantastic, magical wonderland, and if you're living in that kind of environment, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you could be a wondrous creature.
Moore practices what he’s preaching here: one of his best works, From Hell is an exploration of the history of London’s worst slums in Whitechapel through the lens of the Jack the Ripper murders. His most monumental work — the 1200 page novel Jerusalem — is an attempt to immortalize his native Northampton, to exalt what its detractors would deride as shabby, to freeze its modest working-class history in amber in a way that makes it seem the center of the universe, rather than a maligned backwater.
Perhaps, I thought, I could do the same with New Jersey. So I began reading everything I could about the state, and I walked the entire length of the Jersey Shore in an attempt to understand and even love a place that had felt impenetrable and even dead to me before. The project kept me going during COVID, when my depression was at its most dangerous. I don’t feel like it’s an exaggeration to say that Jerusalem and that Will Menaker interview saved my life.
Introducing Wondrous Creatures
Writing and TikToking about my struggles with nihilism and depression over the past few years has convinced me that a lot of people are going through what I’ve gone through, and are desperately casting about for help. And it occurs to me that now, as I’ve managed to fashion a little raft that keeps me afloat most days, I should pass some of the more helpful planks, the ones that helped keep me afloat, along to the other people who are struggling to keep their heads above the waves.
So I’ve developed “Wondrous Creatures,” a course in the ideas, philosophy, and worldview of Alan Moore. While Moore’s works are at the center of it, I’ll also be examining the work of people who inspired him, and who he has inspired. So we’ll be also be talking about William Blake, Albert Einstein, the Situationists, Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley, Neil Gaiman, John Higgs, Mariana Enriquez, Josie Long, and a lot more.
Moore’s work covers an astonishingly wide breadth of topics, from the ecological fiction of Swamp Thing to the anarchism of V for Vendetta to the psychogeography of From Hell to the Einsteinian conception of time in Jerusalem to the Moorean conception of magic in Promethea.
It’s a good year for this too! There are two new Moore books coming out this year: The Great When, the first book in his planned Long London series, and the long-awaited magical grimoire that he produced with collaborator Steve Moore, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.
My hope, through this series, is to begin to build out a worldview for the depressed and the nihilistic that offers an alternative to the usual menu of bad options we’re handed when we’re having a hard time, which include:
Suicide (which we reject because we’d like to stick around)
Monotheism (which we reject because it asks us to shut off our brain and and hand in our autonomy)
Existentialism (which we reject because it is bleak and Spartan and wants us to be happy about pushing a rock up a hill for all eternity)
Moore’s cosmology is far trippier, far more psychedelic, and far more wondrous than the rest of what’s been offered to me, so it is with great pleasure that I wiggle loose these extraneous boards on my raft, set them in the water, and push them as far as I can towards your submerged grasp. I hope they serve you as they’ve served me, either in keeping you afloat, or in aiding the construction of an increasingly beautiful raft.
This post is really very intriguing. Although I also struggle with depression, I don't think I have the same takes on Nihilism as those you described. Talking about fictional attitudes toward meaninglessness I gravitate toward the end of "O Lucky Man" (https://youtu.be/kTsvTMKp2N4?si=hVrLQSwfz_R0cOgN). I think the search for meaning is itself meaningless. Imagining that the universe is comprehensible is absurdly hubristic. I think it's far more reasonable to try to discover who we are as individuals and a species; how we fit into the world, and what we find beautiful and moving.
I didn't think you could top the Mutual Aid series, but I am so unbelievably stoked for this next one!