Yes true, and perhaps my suggestion is not falling down far enough to get frightened by not remembering that every dream of falling ends when you wake up before hitting the rock bottom. So if I may presume to have you involved with Pilot, I take that liberty,
‘This is a dense, layered piece of writing—something between a philosophical meditation, a private associative journal entry, and a literary-critical reflection. You’ve asked how it squares with Dostoevsky’s Demons (The Possessed) and The Idiot, framed against the opening “To be or not to be” and with Sartre, Reich, and “Hotel California” woven in.
Let me try to pull together an interpretation, then turn to Dostoevsky.
- Interpretation of the core image
What you’ve written circles around a central paradox: a shame so fundamental that it becomes a self-imposed mechanism of enclosure. People are “shut in and out” by their own failure to recognize the “tremendous energy which divides them.” That energy seems to be both psychic and ontological—something like the suppressed vitality, sexuality, or creative force (hence Reich, with his emphasis on the body and the father-son silence around shame) that gets trapped in what you call “the machine they call man.”
The “no exit” (Sartre) here is not Huis Clos’s interpersonal hell, but an interior one: a recursive, obsessive repetition (“that promotion is repeatable time and again”) where the very attempt to escape shame regenerates it. The “sign” that could become the key is always almost grasped, but the process is “tortious”—twisted, torturous—and one can’t stop because stopping would mean facing the void or the rock bottom that is “never touched as in a repeated all familiar dream.”
You’re describing something like: shame as a misrecognition of one’s own creative-divine energy. God is on a “brief recess” from “the game of the continuous flow of images of the imagination within and without consciousness.” That game is the real ground—perhaps what you mean by “the absolute of absolutes”—but people mistake its energy for something shameful, then project it outward (“guns, cannons, missiles”) onto a subliminally naive “silent majority.” The result is a culture that generates “anti-life” while being secretly fueled by the very life-energy it repudiates.
The final image—the “fresh fragrant eruption of early morning air” after the shades of grey—suggests that this process can give way to a different relation: where the energy is no longer felt as shame but as “the best of the best of all weirdly passion,” resting, then seeding new life.
- How this squares with The Possessed (Demons) and The Idiot
Dostoevsky’s two novels approach similar terrain but from opposite poles of the spiritual-aesthetic spectrum.
The Possessed (Demons, 1872)
This novel is almost a direct dramatization of your themes:
· The “machine” of ideology: Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Pyotr Verkhovensky are men who have tried to replace God with rationalist, revolutionary, or self-willed systems. Kirillov’s famous line—“If there is no God, then I am God”—leads him to a suicide that is meant to be an act of absolute will, but instead reveals the shame and emptiness underneath.
· Shame as the hidden engine: Stavrogin is the key figure for your text. His confession in “At Tikhon’s” (the censored chapter) is precisely about a shame so profound that it cannot be confessed without further shame. He violates a child, then lives with the secret, unable to integrate it or let it go. His life becomes a series of self-destructive, coercive acts that oscillate between grand gesture and abjection. He is the “divided” man whose tremendous energy (spiritual, demonic, erotic) he cannot “configure.”
· Fathers and sons: Turgenev’s title Fathers and Sons is echoed here, but Dostoevsky pushes it further: the father-son silence you mention (via Reich) becomes the generational断裂 that allows nihilism to flourish. The old liberal fathers (Stepan Trofimovich) spawn the revolutionary sons (Pyotr), and the shame that neither generation can articulate becomes political violence.
· “No exit” in the provincial town: The novel’s setting is a closed world where every character is trapped in repetition—conspiracies, duels, suicide, arson. The “promotion” you write about (the endless replay of the same structure) maps onto the way Dostoevsky’s characters keep staging the same psychodrama of transgression and confession without transformation.
Yet Demons ends with a kind of desperate, incomplete emergence: Stepan Trofimovich’s deathbed wandering becomes a via dolorosa toward a Gospel he barely understands. He speaks of “the cause of the weak” and dies with a line about serving something beyond himself. It’s ambiguous—does the “fresh fragrant eruption” come? Possibly, but only after everything has been burned down.
The Idiot (1869)
This is the novel of the “absolute of absolutes” that your text gestures toward: the attempt to embody perfect goodness (Prince Myshkin) in a world organized by shame, greed, and corrosive irony.
· Myshkin as the “sign”: Myshkin is exactly the kind of figure who seems to have access to the “continuous flow of images of the imagination without and within.” His epilepsy gives him moments of “the highest synthesis of life”—a glimpse of the total harmony you describe. But in the fallen social world, he is perceived as an idiot, and his very presence triggers the destructive passions of others (Nastasya Filippovna, Rogozhin).
· Shame and the inability to let go: Nastasya Filippovna is a study in the shame you’re writing about. She was made a wealthy man’s mistress as a teenager; her sense of self is so saturated with shame that she cannot accept Myshkin’s pure love. Instead, she repeats her humiliation, running back and forth between Rogozhin (murderous passion) and Myshkin (forgiveness). She cannot let go because letting go would mean confronting that the shame was never hers to begin with—it was imposed.
· The rock bottom never touched: The novel’s famous final scene—Myshkin sitting beside Rogozhin’s body, stroking his hair, having lost his mind—is the “rock bottom” deferred. The absolute of goodness meets the absolute of passion and yields not resurrection but catatonia. The “anti-life form” you mention—the needed, far-and-few who grow straight—might be Myshkin himself, but his straightness destroys him in a crooked world.
- The Hamlet frame (“To be or not to be”)
Your Jupiter123 interlocutor says: “To be or not to be is not the question … because it doesn’t matter that you exist and don’t exist when you don’t possess life.” That’s a pointed gloss on both Dostoevsky and your own text.
In Demons, Kirillov tries to solve the question by willing his own being through suicide—but he ends up possessed by the very void he wanted to master. In The Idiot, Myshkin is (“I exist”) so fully that he seems not to possess his own life but to be possessed by a light that the world cannot hold. Your closing lines (“it doesn’t matter that you exist and don’t exist when you don’t possess life”) suggest that the Hamlet question—to be or not to be—is secondary to a more fundamental one: under what sign do you receive your existence? As shame? As a machine’s misrecognized energy? Or as the “fresh fragrant eruption” that comes when the recess ends and God returns to the game of images?
- Synthesis
Your text, Dostoevsky, and the philosophical fragments you invoke (Sartre, Reich, even the pop-cultural “Hotel California”) all circle a single intuition: human beings are divided by an energy they cannot own, and they organize their lives—their politics, their families, their loves—around the shame of that division. The “machine” is the social form that keeps this shame operational. The way out is not through willpower (that’s Stavrogin’s error) but through a kind of surrender that lets the energy flow without being captured by the machine—a surrender that looks like foolishness (Myshkin) or wandering (Stepan Trofimovich’s last walk) or, in your terms, the moment when “the sign can become the key.”
You’re asking whether the absolute—the total all-encompassed energy—can be transformed without passing through destruction. Dostoevsky suggests, perhaps, that it can only pass through destruction, but that destruction is not the final word. The “weirdly passion” that rests and seeds new life—that’s the elusive third term beyond tragedy and irony.
If I had to name the question your text and these novels together pose, it would be: Can shame be outlived, or must it be suffered through to the point where it ceases to structure the self? And the answer, in both your writing and Dostoevsky’s, seems to be: only by entering so fully into the “tortious process” that the very division becomes the door.
‘Jupiter, in case you missed the reference: Your Jupiter123 interlocutor says: “To be or not to be is not the question … because it doesn’t matter that you exist and don’t exist when you don’t possess life.” That’s a pointed gloss on both Dostoevsky and your own text.
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