Saturday, December 4, 2010

The Void and Shit

Creation myths in most cultures share a common structuring. There is the void, formlessness or chaos that offers itself as space for the creation. From this shared mythological heritage, one could ascertain that such a myth serves to the peculiar structure of the human psyche that, regardless of any context, a similiar story will be expressed. Such a narrative offers an etiology for what exists so humans may comprehend, and also, at the same time parrallels the creative vigor that emerges from the human engrossed in metaphysical engineering of civilization; it deifies and justifies it. The first act of creation is the first act of the human thought.

There is a psychological clockwork that allows for a true world to exist, to be comprehended before the first breath or shock of matter to the senses. The frameworks that allow for human sense and faculty are like the nervous system or circulatory system of the human; they exist as necessary qualities for the animal to be human. The eye exists before the eye, and all its potential sensory data has been fully built in; there is nothing in the universe the human eye has not seen as there are limitation on the number of potential combinations of stimuli. All potential visual realities exist in the eye beforehand. The first act in the creation story is the first act of the psychologically possible world for the human.

The creation story is the primary act of rarefication; rarefication being the process by which consciousness takes initially physical experiences and removes the blood, bone and sinew; something finer, lighter and more theoretically maleable reveals itself -- a concrete to build a metaphysics. The first act is the act of civilization, is the act of rarefication that in the bedlam of a tumultuous cosmos in a myth or a rabble of tribes in history, that initial violence of creation asserts itself. The first act forces humanity to lie to itself to allow itself a presumptuous, forceful knowledge, to begin building, to justify and hide an alarming reality of no utility. It is the act of language, the first articulated word, the gradual formation of a proto-literature in the spoken myths that formulates a culture and builds an overarching ideology that permeates everything. The first act, which is an act locked in our psyche, is the lie that serves the world to us in use, as humans grab, rape and put their seminal ideas into the stuff of the world.

Society spends the rest of its time after the first lie, the myth of creation, to repudiate and further hide that which was covered in the first act. Religious work, the cultivation of civilization, moves on from creation to ethics or the right way of thought, of living. Nonsense, the noise and explosiveness of the human tongue is demonized; to use the emotionality and expressiveness of the mouth in the utterance of noise is witchcraft, demonic possession or psychosis. Civilization wants to hide the animalness of the human mouth, the rawness of the physical body, the fabrication of rarefied language as the highest expression of reality. A society will give up every fiber of its existence to legitimize and deify its first lie, and yet, this rarefication, and its attempt to hide the body and animality of humanity with great works of literature and refinement of action are still boiled to nothing in the red blood of white mollars screaming of a person incensed.