I was at work and I caught some blip on the television. A typical trash news or entertainment news agency, whichever term you prefer, CNN, was going through the involuntary digestion and expulsion of the latest supposed news-worthy event. Some study came out that documents the rising unhappiness in the general female population that correlates with their rising equality over the past thirty years, I believe -- forgive me for not knowing the exact details. Men, on the other hand, are getting happier.
What does this mean? Why would women become more unhappy as they attain greater levels of social and economic freedom, slowly creeping up to men? It is a foolish and often abused idea stemming from an Enlightenment, rationalists understanding of human psychology that happiness and freedom are somehow related. They are not. Such a thought is dangerously simplistic and frighteningly out of touch with the last hundred years. A relinquishing of responsibility and engagement in the world is what allows for the greatest level of happiness. The dream that forever destroying institutions and beliefs that stand in the way of rationality will bring about a great joy is just that a dream -- utopian notions are as damning as the dogmatic institutions they fight. We've seen the rationalist's psychology fail in various rising and failings of fascist regimes. We've also seen it fail in the complexification and secularization of societies that often leads to, if I may borrow Durkheim's concept, anomie; a general sense of confusion, anxiety and isolation in regard to social expectations and society resulting in levels of sadness and unproductive behavior.
Another study that came out a couple years back, which furthers my point, is that religious persons often report the greatest levels of happiness compared to their secular neighbors. Simply believing in a god significantly reduces your anxiety and depression levels. While some bad theologians would like to build the idea that belief in Christ is actually liberating and allows for a greater level of freedom and responsibility, those with any decency in their psychological assessments will rebuke such a claim. The belief in god allows for an assumption of control and an appearance of patterns in the world that allows for false comfort, it also doubles the world allowing for one to remove themselves from their Earthly responsibilities and focusing on things as means toward a new, unseen world like Heaven.
But before we get too far into that tangent, in sum, the greater level of freedom and personal responsibility one brings upon themselves, the more miserable they will become. Anxiety and dread will be so unbound it will be tangible; this is the condition of modernity, and all of us honest, and not so honest, atheists are usually overcome by intense fits of despair. Touch your pills in the medicine cabinet if you take them, I'm sure if you don't everybody around you does. These are the little formed stalactites growing in our caves. The usage of medicines, illegal and pharmaceutical, are everywhere to relieve the mental anguish.
Why are women so sad? Because women are becoming more free through the growth of their material wealth, the development of their own self-interested identities, and their greater levels of intelligence through education and leisure. The responsibility is incredibly heavy.
They are also becoming more sad because the powers that have slighted women and always made them secondary voiceless, faceless beings to men have slipped away and returned in new forms. No longer is a woman controlled, regulated and manipulated as ruthlessly by the social expectations of fulfilling household work, but instead, many women are endlessly presented with images and displays of what the perfect woman is like. There is not a tough man, a father, a brother or a husband to use his economic and physical power against her, but rather, a social organization through an onslaught of media to show women -- you are free to do whatever you want and be happy! But the best women do these things: where you can list off a thousand expectations of what intelligent, beautiful, free, happy women do. Women are also more miserable now then ever because the things that once controlled them are waning but a new, very nuanced and very psychologically vicious control is taking place in the use of symbols and unspoken expectations. Women are self-regulating more than ever, and slowly driving themselves insane trying to attain all of these new goals that they expect for themselves and society expects for them as well.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Rigor Of Spasticity
What is life? What is abstraction? How do we access pure becoming, pure presence that is not a crystallization and ultimately an alienation from the our real world? Each thought we conceive is one step away from the absolute truth that it was extracted from; how do we access that pure resource of life, of truth.
Our tools, technology must be more exacting; our steps must grow faster and we must attack aggressively, reaching out for this ultimate reality. The great prejudice of our age is that the rigorousness of language, a simpler language that is exactingly total, all encapsulating, is the key to reality; a man-made language like symbolic logic that captures the ultimate forms of human language and thought is the ground of epistemic fertility. The notion that theoretical physicists will write equations, with limited symbols that communicate the absolute truth of physical reality is one of the manifestations of this prejudice. The building blocks of the universe continue to get smaller, and more numerous, endlessly we find that which comprises, which comprises, which comprises, down into the limits of our latest exacting scalpel. We'll find that true, exact word that denotes that exact thing that comprises the entire world. Is it an atom, a neutron, a quark, what is next? Until then, let us blindly continue to let technology blossom like a stainless, serpentine flower, growing, coiling endlessly.
My philosophy is simple. For everything that has been thought and done, never assume that it cannot be done in the exact opposite way -- strike out to do the exact opposite of what is customary. The universe is comprised of energy as best as I can understand as a layperson. The categorization of that plastic, explosive, ubiquitous yet nonexistent energy is, as Nietzsche would term it, human -- all too human.
The universe can be counted endlessly, divided, dissected, added and multiplied, but, the universe is not any of those things. Humans are by their nature the ones that attempt to arrive at a number, a being, a thing in which they can think about, to manipulate and to use. But, looking into evolutionary patterns, we realize the formation of attributes and behaviors in a species has little interest in a definitive truth. Evolving a being into something that efficiently ascertains an external truth about reality with either its mind or body is highly complex and difficult. Evolution starts simple, and therefore, would evolve a being up until a point where its chaotic flailing and gesticulations would ever so often allow them to hit some cosmic truths to make them successful. Evolution did not create efficient beings, but rather, it create something simpler: many, many tiny buck shots, the hundreds of billions of tiny humanoid that have lived, that shoot out into reality and with many different slight variation in each member of the species, eventually allows for gradual trends in certain members of the species. One way in which our very distant ancestors came to be successful was by their mechanical adaptations that arbitrarily thrusted them out into reality, unaware of it, unattached but deeply embedded in it. Their random behaviors, basic mental tools that by successful combination eventually led to a very gradual development of the human mind that perceives the universe in its own highly evolved, yet comically simplistic way.
Mathematics seem as if they are highly complex, necessarily true by the access to reality they give us, but in truth, these mathematics that are locked in the natural structure of our brain are the end products of billions of years of senseless and arbitrary bodily deterministic mechanics being thrusted out into reality, eventually allowing for some of these mechanics to work and latch on to a tiny portion of reality. Our rigorous proofs, our basis for all science and empirical data, for all exacting languages -- is there any more of an exacting language than mathematics -- 1 = 1! -- could this all really be just the relatively successful baggage of highly evolved spastic machines waving their limbs and ideas out in the air of reality hoping to latch on to something to allow them to be successful?
What is that for truth? Is that truth? Could it not be that all we say and do is actually false -- 1 = 1 is not true, but rather, it is some false short cut that works like if a schizophrenic person kills somebody who is about to kill them, but they killed them because the voice in their head told them to, not because they perceived the threat and took care of their well-being. 1 = 1 works not because it is surely true, but rather, it works because it works. It has allowed us to do things, to survive and strike out successfully in the world, but it could be no different than a successful schizophrenic who by accident, induced by other causes in his unbalanced, spastic brain continues to make the right decisions unaware of the real decisions that need to be made. Sounds impossible, but consider if you have billions of year to fail over and over again, until the perfect failed system is able to exist perfectly, blissfully unaware resolving all of its issues by accident through shortcuts -- no =, not the pretty unity of thought and reality, but rather a giant explosive burst of mental excrement that shoots out into the world and hits the few nuances of reality by a luck that took billions of year to achieve.
Dare we do the unthinkable and abandon science for something else? What kind of truth might the language of poetry contain? Is poetry really the abstract medium?
Our tools, technology must be more exacting; our steps must grow faster and we must attack aggressively, reaching out for this ultimate reality. The great prejudice of our age is that the rigorousness of language, a simpler language that is exactingly total, all encapsulating, is the key to reality; a man-made language like symbolic logic that captures the ultimate forms of human language and thought is the ground of epistemic fertility. The notion that theoretical physicists will write equations, with limited symbols that communicate the absolute truth of physical reality is one of the manifestations of this prejudice. The building blocks of the universe continue to get smaller, and more numerous, endlessly we find that which comprises, which comprises, which comprises, down into the limits of our latest exacting scalpel. We'll find that true, exact word that denotes that exact thing that comprises the entire world. Is it an atom, a neutron, a quark, what is next? Until then, let us blindly continue to let technology blossom like a stainless, serpentine flower, growing, coiling endlessly.
My philosophy is simple. For everything that has been thought and done, never assume that it cannot be done in the exact opposite way -- strike out to do the exact opposite of what is customary. The universe is comprised of energy as best as I can understand as a layperson. The categorization of that plastic, explosive, ubiquitous yet nonexistent energy is, as Nietzsche would term it, human -- all too human.
The universe can be counted endlessly, divided, dissected, added and multiplied, but, the universe is not any of those things. Humans are by their nature the ones that attempt to arrive at a number, a being, a thing in which they can think about, to manipulate and to use. But, looking into evolutionary patterns, we realize the formation of attributes and behaviors in a species has little interest in a definitive truth. Evolving a being into something that efficiently ascertains an external truth about reality with either its mind or body is highly complex and difficult. Evolution starts simple, and therefore, would evolve a being up until a point where its chaotic flailing and gesticulations would ever so often allow them to hit some cosmic truths to make them successful. Evolution did not create efficient beings, but rather, it create something simpler: many, many tiny buck shots, the hundreds of billions of tiny humanoid that have lived, that shoot out into reality and with many different slight variation in each member of the species, eventually allows for gradual trends in certain members of the species. One way in which our very distant ancestors came to be successful was by their mechanical adaptations that arbitrarily thrusted them out into reality, unaware of it, unattached but deeply embedded in it. Their random behaviors, basic mental tools that by successful combination eventually led to a very gradual development of the human mind that perceives the universe in its own highly evolved, yet comically simplistic way.
Mathematics seem as if they are highly complex, necessarily true by the access to reality they give us, but in truth, these mathematics that are locked in the natural structure of our brain are the end products of billions of years of senseless and arbitrary bodily deterministic mechanics being thrusted out into reality, eventually allowing for some of these mechanics to work and latch on to a tiny portion of reality. Our rigorous proofs, our basis for all science and empirical data, for all exacting languages -- is there any more of an exacting language than mathematics -- 1 = 1! -- could this all really be just the relatively successful baggage of highly evolved spastic machines waving their limbs and ideas out in the air of reality hoping to latch on to something to allow them to be successful?
What is that for truth? Is that truth? Could it not be that all we say and do is actually false -- 1 = 1 is not true, but rather, it is some false short cut that works like if a schizophrenic person kills somebody who is about to kill them, but they killed them because the voice in their head told them to, not because they perceived the threat and took care of their well-being. 1 = 1 works not because it is surely true, but rather, it works because it works. It has allowed us to do things, to survive and strike out successfully in the world, but it could be no different than a successful schizophrenic who by accident, induced by other causes in his unbalanced, spastic brain continues to make the right decisions unaware of the real decisions that need to be made. Sounds impossible, but consider if you have billions of year to fail over and over again, until the perfect failed system is able to exist perfectly, blissfully unaware resolving all of its issues by accident through shortcuts -- no =, not the pretty unity of thought and reality, but rather a giant explosive burst of mental excrement that shoots out into the world and hits the few nuances of reality by a luck that took billions of year to achieve.
Dare we do the unthinkable and abandon science for something else? What kind of truth might the language of poetry contain? Is poetry really the abstract medium?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Modality of Praxis
I want to develop this idea more, but like everything else I think and write, I'll just start with the cursory. I have rejected ethics and morality. I no longer believe that they are viable, true or beneficial. You can understand this assertion by reading through my blog. Simply, I wish to justify life with life, and never, justify any aspect of life with abstraction or idealization. I want a radical abandonment of metaphysics and any justification that requires a metaphysical framework.
Why are you vegetarian then? Does that not build a lifestyle on moral principles?
Yes, vegetarianism, the common-usage of the term, requires a moral framework to allow for it to sensibly exist. The issue that first needs to be clarified is what do I mean when I refer to myself as a vegetarian?
For one to be an individual, a novel thinker and a person that is not alienated from his own ideology, he must be highly idiosyncratic, which creates semantic difficulties when communicating your ideas. I use the term vegetarian loosely as a quick way to reference myself as a person identified with those that are concerned. The primary difference between a vegetarian, and its subgroupings, and those that eat traditional diets is an issue of concern. Vegetarian are motivated by the presence of new awarenesses and new relationships that occur when one becomes concerned. Traditional diets are monolithic, silent ruins that say nothing and simply exist; the transformative power of concern is not present. Alienation from particular realities are highly present in a traditional diet. The attempt to jump this chasm of alienation, brought to you through concerns is an essential feature of vegetarianism. This is why I use vegetarian to describe myself, because I am concerned, and I am made aware.
Language operates in generalities and labels provide simple summaries. For one to have a truly unique idea, to think differently and to be fully creative, one must invent a new language to accurately describe it. Fortunately for you, I am not Heidegger, and I am not going to spend 200 pages redefining numerous words idiosyncratically and explain them in order to just build my new philosophy. Vegetarianism works as a pragmatic term I use to differentiate myself from those that persist on traditional diets.
Ideology and Praxis
What is the nature of my brand of vegetarianism? There are two modes in which one can practice an ideology. I will label them the dogmatic/religious approach and the experimental/scientific (more in line with the broader, weaker Wissenschaft than the hard English term science).
What is the dogmatic approach? It assumes core axioms that are believed to be evident. In vegetarianism, we can arrive at this with the assertion that the consumption of meat causes environmental damage; environmental damage is wrong because it will cause suffering and death; therefore consuming any meat is wrong because it is causing suffering and death. Another one would be, all living beings have some formation of a nervous system which causes pain when killing the entity. Causing pain is wrong because of the Kantian universalization of the principle (i.e. the golden rule, do on to others as you would want on to you.) Therefore killing any living animal is wrong because it causes pain. These are the unfurling of logical arguments with axioms and justified consequences.
We suddenly enter a very structured prison. You can never consume meat ever in the dogmatic position. Your logic requires justifications, and a contradicting action unhinges the entire project. The person becomes rigorous, inflexible and highly insincere. Their behavior must always be justified beforehand by their deterministic logic, that they love as a ferocious shield against detractors, but malign when they feel trapped and hypocritical.
Humans, as humans, do not function well in this sort of system. It is unnatural, as the justification for the behavior seeks out abstraction and logic, when naturally human behavior is highly passionate, capricious and strange. The dogmatic approach demands us to deny the human, to deny the body, to deny life in the pursuit of ideals, metaphysics and logic. Humans do not operate long on mathematics though; numbers do not sustain; the entire project decays in the total denial of the human condition -- something like a vegetarian anorexia nervosa sets in, a paralysis like Christianity. Passion is lost and the world no longer justifies the person's existence. Wasn't that the whole point though, to save the world so we could have it? The dogmatic approach is a great irony, for it asks us to save the world by throwing it out from our hearts, but then why save it?
The experimental approach is how I've chosen to pursue vegetarianism. There are no axioms, no mathematics to build, no metaphysics to justify life. Life is life -- in absolute purity. One ceases to eat meat as a way of sharpening, intensifying life to strengthen it and make it a canvas of potential creativity. To merely choose and act thrusts you into the world, and allows for a host of realities to appear to you. Some choices allow for a greater expression and understand, while other choices are shallow and superficial and lead no where. To try vegetarianism, as a thing you try everyday in experiment, uncovers a world or perhaps creates a world of intense meaning, where one becomes more connected with their primary source of being in the world -- food. Fauna is different, flora is different, the world seems to be alive again because you are merely just more aware of it through concern. Nothing in the world changed though, you just dared to experiment to see the world differently like an unknown artist paints a tree in a way that it has never been painted before. You become directly invested and connected with life.
Rules are to be used as if rules in a poem form or in a style of artwork; this is what dead ethics can be, where misery is abound and nothingness reigns -- a great art blooms like graffiti on a Church's weathered steeple. The motivation for life reveals itself not as a mathematics, rather, the flux of becoming, the shadowy, black desires that are the vital forces of life and people begin to make their presence available. My vegetarianism was justified by many rational thoughts, but in reality, the rational thoughts were merely justifications for the much more complex and true-to-life passion that I felt for such a lifestyle. I chose to feel and think the way I did before I ever had a truly good justification for it; one seeks justification only after one has been convinced of its vital power in the world by coming in contact with it.
The terror of the nihilism that will onset once values and ethics reveal themselves to be hallow have been a main concern for the last century, but if we do the unthinkable, and dash the whole project and accept morality as hallow, we can suddenly use them again; no longer conceived as universal, necessary truths but rather as creative tools to strengthen our lives through discipline. Our passion and vital energies are no longer lost by the sickening structures of morality's mathematics; our rules are dumbbells that we may use to exercise our lives. We can touch what once belonged to God and manipulate them to rip them from the Heavens to benefit our vital human energies.
In my diet, I choose to eat fish on occasion. I am not a hypocrite because there are no axioms to contradict; only the perpetual experimentation of new ideas and new ways of being. What stays, what fades away? Like good art or an indelible poem there is something that is beyond words to justify why it is great. An experimental practice of something, allows for the eventual creation of something that works, just clearly works well by how it allows for life as life to exist in a meaningful, fulfilling and empowering way. There won't be a quiet abstract equation for life in the future, only a fertile and healthy human body engaged in life.
Why are you vegetarian then? Does that not build a lifestyle on moral principles?
Yes, vegetarianism, the common-usage of the term, requires a moral framework to allow for it to sensibly exist. The issue that first needs to be clarified is what do I mean when I refer to myself as a vegetarian?
For one to be an individual, a novel thinker and a person that is not alienated from his own ideology, he must be highly idiosyncratic, which creates semantic difficulties when communicating your ideas. I use the term vegetarian loosely as a quick way to reference myself as a person identified with those that are concerned. The primary difference between a vegetarian, and its subgroupings, and those that eat traditional diets is an issue of concern. Vegetarian are motivated by the presence of new awarenesses and new relationships that occur when one becomes concerned. Traditional diets are monolithic, silent ruins that say nothing and simply exist; the transformative power of concern is not present. Alienation from particular realities are highly present in a traditional diet. The attempt to jump this chasm of alienation, brought to you through concerns is an essential feature of vegetarianism. This is why I use vegetarian to describe myself, because I am concerned, and I am made aware.
Language operates in generalities and labels provide simple summaries. For one to have a truly unique idea, to think differently and to be fully creative, one must invent a new language to accurately describe it. Fortunately for you, I am not Heidegger, and I am not going to spend 200 pages redefining numerous words idiosyncratically and explain them in order to just build my new philosophy. Vegetarianism works as a pragmatic term I use to differentiate myself from those that persist on traditional diets.
Ideology and Praxis
What is the nature of my brand of vegetarianism? There are two modes in which one can practice an ideology. I will label them the dogmatic/religious approach and the experimental/scientific (more in line with the broader, weaker Wissenschaft than the hard English term science).
What is the dogmatic approach? It assumes core axioms that are believed to be evident. In vegetarianism, we can arrive at this with the assertion that the consumption of meat causes environmental damage; environmental damage is wrong because it will cause suffering and death; therefore consuming any meat is wrong because it is causing suffering and death. Another one would be, all living beings have some formation of a nervous system which causes pain when killing the entity. Causing pain is wrong because of the Kantian universalization of the principle (i.e. the golden rule, do on to others as you would want on to you.) Therefore killing any living animal is wrong because it causes pain. These are the unfurling of logical arguments with axioms and justified consequences.
We suddenly enter a very structured prison. You can never consume meat ever in the dogmatic position. Your logic requires justifications, and a contradicting action unhinges the entire project. The person becomes rigorous, inflexible and highly insincere. Their behavior must always be justified beforehand by their deterministic logic, that they love as a ferocious shield against detractors, but malign when they feel trapped and hypocritical.
Humans, as humans, do not function well in this sort of system. It is unnatural, as the justification for the behavior seeks out abstraction and logic, when naturally human behavior is highly passionate, capricious and strange. The dogmatic approach demands us to deny the human, to deny the body, to deny life in the pursuit of ideals, metaphysics and logic. Humans do not operate long on mathematics though; numbers do not sustain; the entire project decays in the total denial of the human condition -- something like a vegetarian anorexia nervosa sets in, a paralysis like Christianity. Passion is lost and the world no longer justifies the person's existence. Wasn't that the whole point though, to save the world so we could have it? The dogmatic approach is a great irony, for it asks us to save the world by throwing it out from our hearts, but then why save it?
The experimental approach is how I've chosen to pursue vegetarianism. There are no axioms, no mathematics to build, no metaphysics to justify life. Life is life -- in absolute purity. One ceases to eat meat as a way of sharpening, intensifying life to strengthen it and make it a canvas of potential creativity. To merely choose and act thrusts you into the world, and allows for a host of realities to appear to you. Some choices allow for a greater expression and understand, while other choices are shallow and superficial and lead no where. To try vegetarianism, as a thing you try everyday in experiment, uncovers a world or perhaps creates a world of intense meaning, where one becomes more connected with their primary source of being in the world -- food. Fauna is different, flora is different, the world seems to be alive again because you are merely just more aware of it through concern. Nothing in the world changed though, you just dared to experiment to see the world differently like an unknown artist paints a tree in a way that it has never been painted before. You become directly invested and connected with life.
Rules are to be used as if rules in a poem form or in a style of artwork; this is what dead ethics can be, where misery is abound and nothingness reigns -- a great art blooms like graffiti on a Church's weathered steeple. The motivation for life reveals itself not as a mathematics, rather, the flux of becoming, the shadowy, black desires that are the vital forces of life and people begin to make their presence available. My vegetarianism was justified by many rational thoughts, but in reality, the rational thoughts were merely justifications for the much more complex and true-to-life passion that I felt for such a lifestyle. I chose to feel and think the way I did before I ever had a truly good justification for it; one seeks justification only after one has been convinced of its vital power in the world by coming in contact with it.
The terror of the nihilism that will onset once values and ethics reveal themselves to be hallow have been a main concern for the last century, but if we do the unthinkable, and dash the whole project and accept morality as hallow, we can suddenly use them again; no longer conceived as universal, necessary truths but rather as creative tools to strengthen our lives through discipline. Our passion and vital energies are no longer lost by the sickening structures of morality's mathematics; our rules are dumbbells that we may use to exercise our lives. We can touch what once belonged to God and manipulate them to rip them from the Heavens to benefit our vital human energies.
In my diet, I choose to eat fish on occasion. I am not a hypocrite because there are no axioms to contradict; only the perpetual experimentation of new ideas and new ways of being. What stays, what fades away? Like good art or an indelible poem there is something that is beyond words to justify why it is great. An experimental practice of something, allows for the eventual creation of something that works, just clearly works well by how it allows for life as life to exist in a meaningful, fulfilling and empowering way. There won't be a quiet abstract equation for life in the future, only a fertile and healthy human body engaged in life.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Jesus Will Return One Day: Nameless, Faceless, Nonexistent -- Who is Jesus?
The desire for equality is lecherous and self-destructive. The notion of equality is the affirmation of another's power, the establishing of yourself as the other to an absolute measure. If you are to be free, do not seek equality, fairness or justice. Seek an absolute individuation, a narration of self, become reclusive, refuse a dialectic that defines you relative to anything other than yourself. Eradicate language, create new languages through art, become joyfully mad, exactingly hysterical. New concepts, new modes of being paved by the un-thought words that appeared from nothingness into a naturalized, essentialized fact like Abraham's god. There is no God part of the human brain, no God gene, perhaps there is a predisposition for mysticism; all cultures have developed mystical thoughts, but only one main cultural source formulated a monotheistic notion of those primal feelings that developed into an metaphysical plague that ensnares every word and therefore everything thing. Ideas are alive by our unknowing and unwilling participation in their absolute permeating quality in every aspect of life. What if gods and passions reappeared to us one day by the force of a person madder than Abraham, as they float down from unknown worlds and sweep us into a cultural development that free us of our sickening, Christian (Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Platonic) relationships to the material world, to our bodies, to the primal, absolute realities of the complexes and dynamics of true life. A new metaphysics, a new mathematics, a new epistemology, a new ethics; it is bound to happen in our age of nothingness and meaninglessness. Everything is an empty cliche that has been coined by a slavish, vengeful, petty ghost from some Near East slum that the earth had rightfully quashed underneath its sands. These brittle, crystalline structures of language and meaning that shine unabashed, hide their empty caverns, and blind us from the reality that they will all cave in on themselves and new signs and symbols will be formulated again.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Texts and Oceans
The body is a text? Perhaps, but texts are written upon blank pages -- a tabula rasa. If we were to write upon the body as a text, suddenly there are signs, there is meaning bleeding through the pages. "I did not write this, I must erase it," thinks the theoretician, but upon erasing the inconsistency, the glaring and marring blood, new stains begin to seep through. We write incessantly, transforming the body, adorning the body, seemingly creating the body, but we keep losing what we have written in the pooling blood. The body speaks before we write, perhaps we should listen to it? It may be too hard to read the bloody runes of our body because once understood, once brought into a dialectic with our minds, it is like hearing the voice of God and being annihilated by the sheer power of his presence; one must accept the truth of mortality, of the runic blood and organs, the shit and sweat "penned" by billions of years of incessant, mouthless forces. The power of our wielded pen is made meaningless by the endless flux of constant becoming of billions of imperceptible, undefinable forces that hit an amusingly small lottery -- like a win of 5 dollars on a 2 dollar scratch ticket that allowed the imperfection of humanity to arise.
Every sign we adorn to the body, we think is a definitive mark and relegates the being and its behavior, but really, the mark is a romantic notion, and its study is the business of the romantic and painfully all-too-human philosopher. The mark is scrawled on a piece of parchment that floats on top of a ocean with unknowable depth and size. The waves move the piece of paper accordingly, the sign is washed away or remains by the force of the ocean, a rather trivial event if it stays or remains.
Every sign we adorn to the body, we think is a definitive mark and relegates the being and its behavior, but really, the mark is a romantic notion, and its study is the business of the romantic and painfully all-too-human philosopher. The mark is scrawled on a piece of parchment that floats on top of a ocean with unknowable depth and size. The waves move the piece of paper accordingly, the sign is washed away or remains by the force of the ocean, a rather trivial event if it stays or remains.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
ClickclickClickClickclickClick = Beatles
What the hell was everybody celebrating a week or so ago? Beatles-mania was being foisted on to us by the media. It was the anniversary of something. I can't recall, nor would it matter because I just can't bring myself to give a shit.
Everybody loves the Beatles. Everybody pays homage to the Beatles. Everybody is indebted to the Beatles. It's all quite joyous and wonderful to be connected to the sire of popular music as we know it. The apex of two guitarists, one bass and a set of drums with its perfectly crafted verses and its undeniable chorus. Matching our jackets and hair, and putting forth an image that was designed to sell records. Our culture is secure. The harbingers of our highest cultural ascent made their way by selling themselves as the first boy band to diseased "little girls" that are incapable of a real sexuality because of the latent Victorian mores on sexuality that permeate. From the same population, young girls and women, that the cocaine-addled (perhaps rock star?) Sigmund Freud made his career and entered into our pop-cultural lexicon and thought patterns, so too did the Beatles -- perhaps the most well known band in the world. Where the impositions of human culture breed hostile, sterile and controlled lands, there's a black market of indecencies that become highly prized. The Beatles were like a bottle of cheap moonshine that makes you deaf, dumb and blind, but highly prized in the stifling air of prohibition. Everything human becomes pornographic -- the voyeurism of psychoanalysis and the relationship between the analyst and patient, alcoholism as an obsession and physical elation from the destruction of the senses, and the Beatles as an artificial sexual partner, something near a prostitute (always available, emotionally and relationally unresponsive, and a vessel for fetishistic fantasies, for pubescent girls that very often have no physical, cultural or symbolic modes of libidinal energy. The Beatles started their career as pornography.
So when I hear assholes talk about the Beatles, all I see is a bunch of servile cowards kissing their chains for providing such a convenient self-definition where musical expression is mechanically undertaken by the simple plucking of vibrations that form the specter of a chord progression that haunts our species eternally.
The Beatles are not musicians and are not artists. Maybe they were at one point, that's debatable, but it is irrefutable now that their works and image retain no likeness to that of legitimate artists. I fail to see the difference between Barbie and The Beatles at this point. They are highly marketed, vastly accessible, and quickly disposable commodities that ask no questions other than "how can I amuse you?" The lame attempt at spreading a sense of urgency or importance in regard to the Beatles was done seemingly so Guitar Hero could sell their new Beatles themed Guitar Hero pack. Now you too can play the "music" that you love so dearly by removing yourself from the creation of music into the mechanical, meaningless pursuit of adroit finger fondling to the sounds that has subjected us to a life of glorified elevator music.
Everybody loves the Beatles. Everybody pays homage to the Beatles. Everybody is indebted to the Beatles. It's all quite joyous and wonderful to be connected to the sire of popular music as we know it. The apex of two guitarists, one bass and a set of drums with its perfectly crafted verses and its undeniable chorus. Matching our jackets and hair, and putting forth an image that was designed to sell records. Our culture is secure. The harbingers of our highest cultural ascent made their way by selling themselves as the first boy band to diseased "little girls" that are incapable of a real sexuality because of the latent Victorian mores on sexuality that permeate. From the same population, young girls and women, that the cocaine-addled (perhaps rock star?) Sigmund Freud made his career and entered into our pop-cultural lexicon and thought patterns, so too did the Beatles -- perhaps the most well known band in the world. Where the impositions of human culture breed hostile, sterile and controlled lands, there's a black market of indecencies that become highly prized. The Beatles were like a bottle of cheap moonshine that makes you deaf, dumb and blind, but highly prized in the stifling air of prohibition. Everything human becomes pornographic -- the voyeurism of psychoanalysis and the relationship between the analyst and patient, alcoholism as an obsession and physical elation from the destruction of the senses, and the Beatles as an artificial sexual partner, something near a prostitute (always available, emotionally and relationally unresponsive, and a vessel for fetishistic fantasies, for pubescent girls that very often have no physical, cultural or symbolic modes of libidinal energy. The Beatles started their career as pornography.
So when I hear assholes talk about the Beatles, all I see is a bunch of servile cowards kissing their chains for providing such a convenient self-definition where musical expression is mechanically undertaken by the simple plucking of vibrations that form the specter of a chord progression that haunts our species eternally.
The Beatles are not musicians and are not artists. Maybe they were at one point, that's debatable, but it is irrefutable now that their works and image retain no likeness to that of legitimate artists. I fail to see the difference between Barbie and The Beatles at this point. They are highly marketed, vastly accessible, and quickly disposable commodities that ask no questions other than "how can I amuse you?" The lame attempt at spreading a sense of urgency or importance in regard to the Beatles was done seemingly so Guitar Hero could sell their new Beatles themed Guitar Hero pack. Now you too can play the "music" that you love so dearly by removing yourself from the creation of music into the mechanical, meaningless pursuit of adroit finger fondling to the sounds that has subjected us to a life of glorified elevator music.
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