Against the Cranky Black Sorrow
What does meaninglessness mean for a generation?
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features David Priest
Many of us are so infected by despair that it’s hard to imagine what would be left without it. A few years ago, the tree in our backyard was infected by Fire Blight. Its new growth was gnarled, blackened as though by flames. The fruit was mummified, and invisibly, the blight reached backward through the limbs of the tree, toward the trunk, seeking the roots. I went to work with a pair of loppers, removing every branch, cutting from the top, until what stood before me was a limbless stick, about chest high—hardly a tree at all.
Deaths of despair, suicide, and self-harm all creep upward. Baffled analysts observe the spread across various populations, through media, social and otherwise; they invent new terms to understand it. Our vibes are off, it’s social contagion, or perhaps we have personal optimism and social pessimism. And after all, everything is getting worse, isn’t it?
This isn’t just some abstract “people,” touched and withering at the extremities, and neither is it all opioid-induced. I’ve watched close friends turn hermetic, nursing the inward bruise. I’ve watched misery take the hand of prosperity, so that those succeeding by every material measure suffer in proportion. My own mind bends toward despair like a flower toward a black sun. The philosopher and author William Gass wrote fifty years ago, “The crazy can garrote themselves with a length of breath, their thoughts are open razors, their eyes go off like guns.” He was writing about the suicidal, but I’m not sure he gives enough credit to the rest of us.
If you think I’m overstating the case, look at the only two movies in 2023 to make more than a billion dollars. The first, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, concludes with a question, spoken directly to the audience by an animated star with a child’s voice, about whether the movie’s ending is as happy as it seems, because “all that’s left is you and the void.” (When I saw the movie with my kids, I heard a boy nearby ask his mother as the credits rolled why the star wanted to die.) The second, and even more profitable billion-dollar movie of 2023 was Barbie, whose inciting incident is a children’s toy thinking for the first time about death.
Despair’s interruption of child-like innocence seems to be an overriding preoccupation for modern storytellers, and that preoccupation has found resonance with tens of millions of viewers.
We tell beautiful (and much more nuanced) stories of despair, too. Furiosa, George Miller’s latest—and I despair, very possibly last—movie in the post-apocalyptic Australia of the Mad Max series, explores the human response to a morally injurious world. The villain Dementus is offended when he sees Furiosa and her would-be love attempting to escape on the eve of a savage resource war: “Where are you going, so full of hope? There is no hope! Not for them, not for you, certainly not for me!”
As is often the case, literal apocalypse is just a souped-up vehicle for philosophical apocalypse. The characters find themselves inhabiting, to quote Alan Moore’s apocalyptic tale, Watchmen, a “makerless mechanism”—that is a material reality where moral meaning has been unmasked as an invention of man. Furiosa’s Dementus, in his own words, dances with Darwin, fears no “loss of bliss in heaven, no retribution in hell.”
This philosophical apocalypse provides the same basis for much of our real-life despair. Our modern epistemology reduces reality to its measurable parts, and as an ethical corollary rejects any meaning beyond the material. As the poet Don Paterson puts it, “The idea that material objects, processes or events can somehow possess immaterial truths is, I suspect, a candidate for mankind’s greatest error.” It should come as no surprise, then, that the virtues of self-denial and self-sacrifice have largely disappeared from our public discourse, supplanted by the virtues of self-care and “follow your joy”—that is, of prioritizing personal joy by way of pleasurable sensation.
And why not? Sensation is real; any attempt to make meaning beyond it is simply a lurch against our chained march toward death—“the flow of value into a blank abyss,” to quote Gass again. Inevitably, whatever we compose will decompose.
The problem, of course, arises when we discover that sensation cannot do what meaning can.
Take sex: liberated from traditional (and meaning-pregnant) constructs like marriage and fidelity, American dating culture has selected as its governing ethic consent. Prioritizing pleasurable sensation, unattached from any but the barest responsibility to others, seems the most materially efficient way to experience sexual bliss. Yet as Christine Emba points out in her 2022 Washington Post article, “Consent is not enough. We need a new sexual ethic,” such an approach has largely led to pain, loneliness, and less sex for a whole generation.
Dementus, to return to Furiosa, “seek[s] any sensation to wash away the cranky black sorrow,” yet sensation isn’t up to the task. What’s more, in the seeking, Dementus passes on the cranky black sorrow to those around him.
Go figure.
Modern therapeutic psychology, recognizing the deleterious effects of feelings of meaninglessness, has offered another solution: rather than sensation alone, you simply must find and pursue whatever happens to be meaningful to you—be it in the form of achievement, identity, or simply friendship with the counselor (I know an astonishing number of adults who speak more to their therapists than to anyone else). This is an evolved form of Logotherapy, which pragmatically suggests we need to invest parts of our lives with meaning to achieve true happiness—an approach which in itself presupposes meaninglessness.
What is strange, through all of this, is how we deny our moral intuitions. For every belief we feel sparking inside us, we fashion a rational explanation to extinguish it: that meaning-making is an evolutionary feature, that it is a coping mechanism, that it is an eccentricity of our lizard brains. Using our intellect thusly, we beat our consciousness into submission.
“God is growing,” wrote the poet Rilke. In the century since he penned those words, we have convinced ourselves that the wasteland, where no God nor growth can be found, is a truer representation of our reality. This insistence, this cultural rehearsal of despair, despite an immeasurable proliferation of material comforts over the past hundred years, has contributed to a collective dysphoria; on all the message boards and social media feeds, we’re talking ourselves the wrong way off a ledge. I am reminded of the writer Malcolm Lowry, who wrote on the way to his own death by despair: “When the doomed are most eloquent in their sinking / It seems that then we are least strong to save.”
Christian Wiman offers another explanation, in personal reflection on his earlier despair over his sister’s drug-fueled death spiral—a spiral that she later escaped: “Sometimes we want a despair to be ultimate because it absolves us of action. Sometimes we simply seek protection from pain that in the past has found us too exposed. I’m sure my detachment included both kinds of cowardice.”
Cowardice seems a strong word, but it echoes the moral weight Marilynne Robinson gives hope in her own writing: “I think there must… be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm” (emphasis mine).
Christians occupy a strange position when assessing the state of the world: we ought to be empirical—we are called to witness, after all, not to invent—but we also acknowledge a wider band of acceptable data to observe. We see beauty; we feel hope; we watch transformation; a few of us hear the voice of God; we all intuit him. And we do not explain away these observations as accidents of an animal mind. We accept them, and by doing so accept ourselves.
There is so much beauty in our world, which is to say, there is so much grace. We’re just so good at looking the other way. It takes courage, truly, to take hope.
Job, in the Old Testament, made a “covenant with his eyes,” and perhaps we must make a covenant with our minds—as the apostle Paul did in his direst circumstances—to think on “what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable.” Paul, like Wiman and Robinson, also adds a moral dimension to hope: “Letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace.”
George Miller is not a man of faith, yet his film gestures toward an ultimate solution beyond the material. Given the opportunity, Furiosa does not kill Dementus, but instead plants in his belly a peach pit—saved from the last fruit she picked in the edenic “green place” Dementus’s men stole her from as a child. The seed, feeding on Dementus, grows into a tree and finally feeds the mothers of a new generation whose children will be free of the tyrant.
It’s a startlingly hopeful end to a story full of cranky black sorrow. And it gives me, in a small way, the courage to have hope, even in the hopeless parts of life—for the friends riddled by addiction, for the family members whose minds have revolted, for myself, despairing of ever becoming anything more than I am now. What a surprise to find more hope in the wasteland of Mad Max than I do in children’s movies or in conversations with many peers today.
A story (or an end to a story, in any case): the tree that I reduced to a stick stood gray and lifeless for a season. I would catch myself staring at it, meditating on its hopelessness. I drenched it periodically in copper fungicide, and my wife would visit it, whisper to it, like the secret encourager given to the excommunicated in Benedictine monasteries.
Then, one morning, I looked outside, “and, behold, the rod of Aaron for the house of Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms.” (Num. 17:8, KJV) Little florets of leaves burst from it, and berries soon followed. Around the budding stick of buds (hear the disbelief!), we built a garden, in which we placed a stone tortoise named Gandalf the Gray, planted strawflowers, gomphrena, and hollyhocks, and laid an iron bench and table.
I read there now under the meager canopy, grateful less for the shade of a tree still recovering than for the glimpse of a God whose grace is still growing.
David Priest
Storyteller & Journalist
David is an award-winning writer and journalist based in Louisville, Kentucky. He writes about everything from technology to nature, spirituality to dinosaurs. In his free time, he plays video and board games with his wife.
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David, it's been a while since I've read anything that has required me to reference my dictionary so many times lol. Halfway through, I'll be honest, I was like "Where is this guy going with this?" By the end, I was welling up. So beautiful. "Hope" has been the cry of my heart – trying to understand it and emulate it and allow it to seep deep into my bones as someone who declares that "death could not hold him." I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. Thank you for writing it. (And I've now added Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" to my reading list, so thank you for that!)
Beautiful! Especially that last line of grace.