The Self-Licking Ice-Cream Cone

It’s this goddamn heat.  I stumble around my apartment sipping whiskey in only my underpants.  My guitars are all thrown out of tune.  My drunken fingers pluck mellifluous chords as my whiskey voice bellows deep of an unrelenting sorrow.  My pores open up, sweat comes out.  I’m oozing life and there’s nothing or nobody to soak it up.  I stand on my back balcony, hot wind like a lover’s hand, rubs against my crotch. Ahhh yes.  Give it to me.  Give me this.  I’ve been a 3^rd world country, owned by interests outside of myself.  They walk into my life, exploit my natural resources, steal all the wealth, and then leave.  I feel worthless and empty in the arid night air.  I wanted to get out, needed to get out.  With a bottle of tequila and a sleeping bag I headed east into the desert.  It was a turn towards emptiness, abandonment, fleeing society and taking comfort in the self.  Travel into the desert typically connotes solitary spiritual journeys; the zombie god himself even took one.  I just needed to have a vision quest with my inner demons to see where we stood after a long unsettling silence.

The desert is one of the last free zones.  Rattlesnakes and scorpions.  A pirate utopia open for ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism, and scathing self evaluation.  Peter Wilson revered these pirate enclaves; they typified proto-anarchist societies operating beyond laws and governments and, in their stead, embraced unrestricted freedom.  From the 16th to the 18th century pirates ravaged European shipping operations and enslaved many thousands of captives.  However, thousands of Europeans also converted to Islam, forming the “Renegados” and joining the pirate holy war.  Wilson writes that these men and women were not only apostates and traitors, as they were considered in their homelands, but their voluntary betrayal of Christendom can also be thought of as praxis of social resistance.

These were secret islands; William Gibson evolved them into virtual safe havens in the net – the seedy dive bars in the matrix.  For me, here and now, drinking fermented cactus juice by a campfire, playing revolution songs on my guitar, cursing the stars – this was my pirate island, and it was just what I needed.

I had been living too long unquestioningly.  Life was moving too quickly, events slipping into the past unscathed; I couldn’t let that persist, needed to rage.  My life was becoming commoditized.   Work and bills and groceries and gas stations.  Commoditized society is a detriment to human creativity.   My life was being smothered by simply living.  Modern society modifies human behavior so that people will seek to consume goods and services as much as possible.  This modification in turn means that everyone who makes goods or provides services will be able to stay employed.  Thus, the society’s economy will remain stable.  I had been plodding along, blinders on; I put them on, needed to push through difficult times.  This was the consequence, I had been a philosophical coward and now I was suffering the coward’s curse – regret.

The world has become reliant upon commoditization, but such reliance also blunts any attempt at original thought.  Consumption becomes so important to the society that all of a person’s energy and reason is put into activities of work and play that consume goods; these actions in turn keep the economy running.  This is, of course, important for maintaining the structured and controlled environment of modern society, but it also produces human beings who simply do what they have been taught and have no reason to think on their own.

I am starting to see that we largely define freedom through the structures that prevent freedom.  I feel that these constraints most acutely are expressed in the ideas of pleasure, comfort, and leisure.  People would insist that freedom in expressed by having the ability to have as much fun as possible, an adulteration on the principle of ‘pursuit of happiness’.  This also may be an offshoot of the convenience centric lifestyle of the progeny of baby boomers, or a vestige of old social arguments from the cold war.  The thing is that this kind of freedom puts people into a hypnotic state in which they no longer feel as though they should ask questions or defy the structures of society.  Morality of individuals like this becomes fundamentally corrupt.  This kind of freedom is no freedom at all.

My ideal of freedom is the freedom to be an individual apart from the rest of society.  I strive to be free in my own way.  Certain structures in our own modern society work in the same way that addictive drugs do. The use of advertising specifically for the way that it hypnotizes people into wanting and buying the same products can be seen as an extension of this principal. Such things keep people within predefined structures, and it quashes free thought, which ultimately restricts freedom.

Human impulses play a complicated role in modern society.  We seek pleasure and retract from pain.  Human impulses can both stabilize and destabilize society.  Society demands at times opposite and even contradictory practices in regards to impulses like sexuality and promiscuity, perhaps the epitome of pleasure.  Celebrated and encouraged is the idea for all humans to sleep with as many other people as often as they can, yet revered and respected are institutions such as monogamy and marriage.   Such institutions work to control these impulses, while glamour and publicity make celebrity of the unrestricted impulse.  With the increasing complexity of human sexuality and promiscuity traditional institutions are becoming entropic, and may ultimately unravel.  The immediate reaction is so the better, the less restriction the more freedom.  In essence, the freedom of these impulses actually undermines humanity’s creativity.  Complete freedom to have unrestricted pleasure has made each person like an infant, incapable of adult thought and creativity.

Society itself is evolving, and modern society is seemingly moving towards utilitarianism; a society that aims to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.  Within the paradigm of these ideas, this particular good is ‘happiness’, and government, industry, and all other social apparatuses exist in order to maximize the happiness of all members of society.  I personally rebel against the notion of utilitarian happiness.  Humanity must also know how to be unhappy in order to create and appreciate beauty.  Because people refuse to experience unhappiness they are excommunicated from wonder and the appreciation of beauty.  When faced with devastation people only see a horribly frightening scene that they want to avoid, blind to the magnificence of a vast and destructive universe.

There are some things that get better with use, but for the most part things degrade.  The things that last are precious, have emotional value, and have an emotional relationship that is more valuable over time.  It is an object that wears in instead of wearing out.  My guitar; it has a wooden core with black paint on the outside.  It gets dinged or dropped, and a bit of paint flakes off and you see some of the wood showing through.  It gets scratched from use, my fingers wear dull spots into the neck, and there are even places where sweat and blood has dried into the cracks.  Somehow you feel better because of this.  The object becomes more real; the more worn it becomes the more life it embodies.

We have been programmed not to live.  The world is all around us, invisible.  Like a wireless network, you need only the right device to interact with it.  You pick it up, a clunky piece of plastic and metal.  You use it.  Within a few moments you are forgetting about its physical design, realizing that everything that you’re really interested in was happening in your relationship between yourself and what was happening behind the screen.  You are sucked into the machine.  You are now having a completely cerebral, intimate, interaction between yourself and the device-world.

Think of all the interactions we have with programming every day.  ATM, cell phone, computer, iPod, car, GPS, wrist watch, stationary bike, camera, X-box, television.  The number and extensiveness of these interactions is increasing.  How does this affect the thinking process, the expectations for relationships, human communication?  We are being increasingly programmed.

We are constantly fidgeting.  The pure and singular actions of earlier ages have been buried under a brimming landfill of fumbling.  The edges of our modern world inexorably cause the fingers to want to touch it, feel the texture, play with it in their hands.  The kind of actions you are unconscious of until someone points out that you are doing it, but you can’t help it.  You don’t think about the pen when you write with it, you’re thinking about the writing.  In fact, the less you are conscious of it the better it is, the more naturally it can be held.  This is a hidden world, made only of actions that human beings make subconsciously, without thought.  How many things take place in this unconscious netherworld, in the gap of the zeno paradox?  This is how subtle the control is, this is the depth of nuance in the programming.

We have this unquestioning belief in progress and technology yet this too is rationed.  At a carefully controlled timetable technology is allowed to plod forward.  Too much progress could create the potential to destabilize society.  To maximize profit means making light bulbs to burn out and engines to die within a calculable lifetime.  There are no quantum leaps forward, merely a thousand minuscule steps each with its own price tag.  In this way science itself is being restrained, bridled by a system that demands perseverance over progress.

The tequila is burning deep in my bloodstream now.  I can’t see the lights of the highway over the far ridge, but I know it’s alive with cars.  I pull a book of poetry out of my sleeping bag and curl up.  Society and its workings have become a consensual hallucination, a drug, a delusion.  I do not wish to be a part of this malevolent dream.  The fire starts to die down, I’m too drunk and tired now to get more wood out of my truck.  The dying light flickers across the sage brush in every direction, throwing shadows that form a hundred black daggers aimed at the center where I lie.  The daggers slowly close in on me.  I fall asleep, alone in the desert, as the coyotes howl.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Related posts:

1. Art of the Asshole
2. Nadaam, Nietzsche, New World Order
3. Writhing In My Insect Fear
4. Men Without Eyes Multiply Like Flies
5. Hissing Cockroach