Bodies

When I walk around the marketplace, I find it to be the greatest call to have children. As this brain sharpens, my mind bears witness, the cloth of presence is torn open to reveal truly the unbearable. I look out into the marketplace, and I realize how tremendous the psychosis of humanity is. To have children would be the most selfish act, to force any being to live in the age of unspeakable spiritual decay where carcinogenic poison and idolatrous fetishism for buzzing plastics has replaced all sustenance and the exemplar of a god would be immoral.

But the birth of a child even in the asphyxiating web of pointless wires is one of the last acts of beauty humanity is capable of doing; there are moments where beauty must usurp morality, as we would allow thousands to die to save a beloved or kill ourselves in the name of an ideal. It is the last act, the last engagement with the transcendence of the uncovering of the other, the you; from such a baseness, such primordial energies something truly presuppositionless and wonderful can come -- you. And it shits on the Church of progression that is really a church of death that annihilates the vitality of the body while pointing to the specious grace of its omnipotence of rotten grain and omniscience of mass media.

I hear it. How can you throw it all out? Look at our ability to accumulate knowledge, to transmit such a knowledge, and from this knowledge, manipulate and construct reality toward a more ideal environment for humanity; is this not all progress and is it not good?

Knowledge serves the purpose of action in a world. All knowledge finds itself as a blueprint for power, for energy in a subject to unveil itself like a splintering lightning strike. True, the knowledge acquired through technological advancements has allowed for an unprecedented celerity in growth. Decade after decade computer capabilities explode with new potentials, the genetic structures of things are being mapped and beginning to be manipulated. The sciences root deeper than ever before and have seemingly near-atomistic structures to work with. But growth cannot be confused with progress; the growth witnessed in our time reflects the new body of humanity -- the polluted body.

Technology, fragmented scientific knowledge, the biologists, the physicists, the chemists, the psychiatrists are growing in numbers and societal significance at an astonishing rate, and many believe that this is reflective of their usefulness to humanity and the inevitability of the progress and success of Western thought. The growth is not progress, however, but rather, a cancerous tumor that is draining and exhausting the vital energies of society. Genetically modified food has the potential to cause significant damage to the human body, especially in the manipulation of food items natural formulation, depriving them of all necessary nutrients that sustains the human body. The modern body is tainted with the specter of sustenance. The exhaust, runoff and noise pollution of the carousel gears of modern industry increases the prevalence of asthma, destroys the immune system, causes you to ingest toxins and poisons in the drinking water and air. The modern body is alive, burning with the latent tumors ringing out to the carcinogens that float like an apocalyptic dander through everything. Consider the parallels of the limited notion of cancer in the biological view: a cancerous cell turns on the body, begins to grow off the resources of the host, and then sends out cancerous cells through the blood stream that can cause malignancy. Everywhere there is pollution, and this pollution is growing at an alarming rate. Our bodies are riddled with hundreds of man-made substances from the sole act of existing -- is that not metaphysically significant!?

The sinuous, knotty, gnarled mass of industry sits somehow inconspicuously as part of this world, breathing a death we know we are all connected to. Progress? Knowledge? A cancerous cell's genes are a form of information, and it is a basic type of knowledge from which like a lighting strike, a tumor can unveil itself.

If it were progress, we could say most definitely, as claimed earlier that a depth and breadth of knowledge is increasing. But, let us return to the idea that knowledge is only knowledge in its ability to allow a subject to act in a world. The knowledge that would be most vital to us is a knowledge that would allow us to act in this world, this given reality. One could have an extensive knowledge that allows them to act, but if this knowledge is divergent from the world one wishes to act in, that knowledge would be illusory. The question needs to be asked, is the knowledge that technology, the harbingers of a supposed progress, of the fragmented sciences and its new mass media, a knowledge that allows for true action in this world? It absolutely is not. These aspects of our society are cancerous growths that have leeched our strength to act in this reality. They contain knowledge, but a knowledge like the cancer cell's genes that allows for a dual world to be created that absorbs the first. What aspect of industrialized agriculture has allowed humanity to act beyond what they were originally capable of doing? Industry's endless pollution? The ever shrinking, broken worlds of rigorous science that can do nothing but obsesses over fabricated points in their cartography and can give the average man nothing from which to act upon, to move towards.

Humanity has never been fatter, weaker and more culturally insignificant than it is today. Morbid obesity is not just a societal issue, the failing of a State's health departments, individual laziness or some other provincial view of the matter at hand. Morbid obesity is an absolute metaphysical crisis. Humanity finds itself less and less in this world as its body is robbed of its physical meaning and capabilities it begins to crumble and disintegrate. More and more technology and science are becoming insular worlds where the knowledge derived from such tasks serves the purpose of the technology itself rather than action in the real world. News is more about news than reality, the internet becomes more about the internet than anything else. Reality television presents an artifice of the real world that is actually just the appropriation of the real world by television. For anything to claim knowledge and thus progress it has to give a subject an enhanced ability to act in the world; being that the human body is the original, primary and presuppositionless way for humanity to exist in the real, material world, anything that degrades the body and reduces the body's ability to act in the world is not a thing of knowledge and not a thing of progress.

And as the creatures who were once humans ontologically deconstruct with their bulbous, functionless bodies breathing in tune with their personalized pieces of industry, slowing melting into, being absorbed by and giving birth to the lecherous tumors of technology producing a culture of buffalo wings and ranch dressing, I will mediate upon the body. The real world waits in the form of knowledge only available to the body, the most primary mode of being in the world. Only by the most base acts of our body do we engage in the truest aspects of the purest world that birthed the ontology of the human body; for a little while, though our bodies are still polluted some form of health arrives to us when we are mindful in our breathing, our eating, our fucking and our shitting; we are in the world. And faintly the bleeding in of other bodies in touch and presence arrive to us, and we find the transcendence of the you -- the child, the lover, the friend -- that remains so far beyond the insular sciences and the dissecting technology of a cancerous growth.