https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=a2KUZaBvCXA
So we live in a time of monsters. I announce this to you, but I think all of you already know that. We only need to glance at popular culture to realize this. At the narrative level of our culture and our stories, we’ve become obsessed with monsters, with the strange aliens, with the marginal, with the glorification of the exception of things that don’t fit. Most of us here probably grew up with Sesame Street, where we were told that monsters are our friends. And it’s no longer in fiction by now. The monsters have left the dark spaces under our beds. They have left our nightmares to come out into the open. At a social level, we can feel and see all around us the growing polarization, the acceleration of what we can only call the breakdown, the decomposition of culture, a progressive dissipation of the center which rallies us as a society. And in thinking about this, it’s difficult not to reminisce. It’s difficult not to meditate on the famous poem by Yeats, The Second Coming. And we tend to go back to that poem because it seems, at least in our most frightening moments, we get the feeling that the horrific cycle of the 20th century is on our horizon again. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best, like all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. This poem, of which I’ve quoted the first part, is probably one of the most known in modern poetry, the most cited. I think it’s actually the most anthologized poem there is. And it rings so true because we stand here in that widening gyre at the edge of the world where the wheel is spinning so fast it feels as if it’s going to come off its axis. And it is here on the edge that we find the zombies, wandering aimlessly in a world that’s losing its center. Unlike most of his monstrous brothers, let’s say, the zombie is truly the harbinger of contemporary nihilism. The zombie has no magic. The arrival of the zombie usually has no clear reason, but rather the zombie is couched in a biological accident, a disease, a plague. It’s 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 the 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 demos, the monster of the accidental, of quantitative leveling. The zombie is the atheist insistent on the illusion of free will. It’s an image of nihilism and idiosyncrasy taken all the way to decomposition. In every major city in North America, they have these events. We call them zombie walks, and people dress up as zombies and walk in the thousands down the streets, dressed up and made up to look like corpses, shifting around with dead, empty eyes, pretending to be the walking dead. Some of these are huge. If we were generous, we could say that it is a zombie procession. We could call it, you could say that they’re liturgical zombies, if there’s such a thing. The zombie both typifies the mob while simultaneously the absolute individualism, the absolute isolation of contemporary life. The zombies in a horde only interacts with what they desire, and they never interact with each other. And the trope of cannibalism is very ancient. It’s there in all the ancient stories, all the ancient myths. But the tweak in zombies on that theme of desiring to eat the brain, it’s a very powerful one, because it’s truly the image of the nihilist, because the zombie is a creature without meaning, without intelligence. It misses any form of personhood. And it 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 that clump of cells that we have up in our cranium. The zombie wants to eat your brains because it cannot eat the mind, and it cannot inhabit the mind. But strangely enough, this desire to eat the living is the extreme perversion of our desire for communion. And it’s also a distilled image of all our passions. Our attempt to fill the unquenchable yearning through our passion always transforms other people into commodities that we think will bring us what we need. So 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. But so it is also the breakdown of the person itself into a soulless desiring death machine. There’s a strict analogy between these different levels of the world. The social breakdown and polarization is to the state with the abandonment to the passions is for the person. The zombie is both of those fragmentations at the same time. So as we pull back a bit, as we look around, as the narrative fabric of our world begins to fill in quantities that are barely possible to believe with images of the monstrous, as we feel the world being torn apart by fragmentation and conflict, we are simultaneously as individuals being constantly assaulted by images, images with the purpose of awakening our own desires. And we’ve come to the point where we most of us, so many of us have been accustomed to the constant exposure to the stranger and stranger fringe of desire, whilst being enticed by the siren song to indulge, to give into the waves and the storm and to sink into the mire. Now, as we hear, hopefully, who still hold on to a liturgical world, not the zombie kind, the divine kind, a world which strives out of pattern and purpose, we can both stand in a church where Christ in the dome is the origin of the heavenly hierarchy of beings. And we also know that we can find Ezekiah in our heart, in our center, as a gateway to the divine and as the manager of the passions whirling in the widening gyre. Just like our individual unholy unions with death appear on the edge of our beings where, through an excessive attachment to our senses, we mingle with our passions and produce our own aberrations, the cosmic monster lies on the edge of the world, the edge and the end of the world. Those two things, the edge and the end, they represent the same structure. They’re the same thing in our stories. And so even when he is a zombie, man is a microcosm.