Catherine (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} renfieldpotato) wrote,@ 2006-12-14 02:39:00 |
|
Takashi's Domesti-cynisism
So it would seem as if we’ve got these rather like racing dogs or horses chomping down at the bit so to speak, waiting for the gates to open as they might go running for the latest rabbit or carrot, bigger brighter more colourful and with greater more succulent drippier sexual eyeparts, it’s a race to the lowest common denominator with no money down (there at the bottom) and at least one thousand varieties to avoid suffering. And there’s the other dogs-or-horses watching the whole thing sometimes even betting on it but really waiting for their own turns to put their pawhooves to the well-worn ruts of Rat-Racing, trademarked for life, no strings attached but to their hands and hearts accordingly.
Hear the anthem?
And if it weren’t for my shameless observations of the specatators above even those racing, that is the very Few who watch and bet (and they are never dogs-or-horses), I might myself be caught up in this canine/equestrian fanaticism all knuckles bleeding and panting for more of the mechanical chewtoy. It is the High spectators’ very distance which accords them the so-called rights of Ownership, the left and leaving, for they are the ones mooring and re-mooring and re-fancying the various bigger-and-better rabbits or carrots, the passionless objects of whichever sort of domesticated animal you might be (re-termed ‘civilised’ and ‘human’ for our more comfortably homeward-bound audiences). For those High Viewers are the Industry leaders, yes, the Entertainers whose rabbits and carrots are made to be lost, broken, worn-out or discarded all too easily so they might provide more more and more and call this ‘cultural production’.
Meanwhile those of us who do seek the gnashing of teeth and the trampling hooves, who in our attempts to (by some mystical and not so new or yet-glamourous Alchemy) distill the sap from the trees of Knowledge, the taproots of yearning and True Suffering experiences to provide some kind of sugary Syrup (for the sick and ailing dogs-or-horses) (now forgotten in their races, having Lost), we Seekers are at our own Loss for not so readily taking the trees and roots to the mill to be pulped and printed Greener and more Numerical. The syrup is unmarketable, drippy yes but Unclean, as in not just Onscreen – ALIVE! – that is the Hoovers and Dirtdevils among us cannot suck it up into invisibility, the indivisible expanse of Same, Clean and Consensual!
Nevertheless we must hit the roads running (that is processing, as we ourselves must now Compute) smarter and faster than before so we might (in our own bouts with Domesticity) keep up with the Viewers-on-High – so we might avoid that suffering of Not-Suffering which the horsedogs in their racing so eagerly reveal. The smoke-belching, sky-cleaving Entertainers with their spotlights and irreverence for fossils and the Ages know not the joys of Yabyum, of Time shared and taken but never spent, the closeness and reckoning, the spiritual communion we Alchemists do seek and suffer which cannot possibly result in or from Lowest Common Denominations. No, the smiling priests of such amusing religions encourage the anti-spiritualists, these spiritless sprites, 3-D but lacking in dimension, roles (not Characters), yes quite good for laughs but not the kind which toughen bellies, the episodic laughing that issues far too serially from the side of the neck like a belt of cheap Blackcats, only half of which explode, the rest waiting for anxious and disappointed children to come close reluctantly and with lighters so they might blow their little fingers off, severing any future opportunity to wield the instruments of a more authentic, more fruitful tragedy.
For it’s no longer the Folk who in their Original Lowness and Common Majority might have laughed and loved dirty and dirt-poor but genuinely; no, we are now said (to accommodate the many of us anymore incapable of Speaking) to belong to the Great Middle Class, the golden-arched waves of grainy night-(en)visioned evidence of love, bent double by the happiness and the laughing in our pants – uninvolved, entertained, reassured. And on either side of us, like the puppet-charicatures of plays we only ever give Thought to living out – the impoverished, the indigent – and the Improved, the Included, all taking disproportionately, though rarely with the thought to give, to Make.
And each of us, all of us laughing hardest at the idealists for being confused and young enough at heart to Believe, hearts with no strings to pull save the parachute-cords draped from the billowy wings which drag such hearts upwards and around the vacuousness, the vacuum into which the airy breath of banality daily expires, feeding the High Viewers’ firey explosions, those lame Fatcat firecrackers like so many U.X.Os strewn across the racetrack, the gladiatorial obstacles by which the waiting horsedogs can find mirth in their comrades’ collage of suffering cut-and-pasted from the Funniest of Home Videos. Passing and passable, the geniuses’ 15 minutes of fame is reduced even further to a three-minute tit-giggling gun-wielding antic posted in celebration like a one-millionth visitor only to be replaced the next day by a short film of somone being hit by a car as two kids fight till bloody in a schoolyard all captured on someone’s cellphone with underage drinking and a porno sountrack continuing offscreen someplace.
Parking lots like lay bare like forgotten graveyards after Hours (the time only ever Theirs as the windows stay lit and the signs yet gleaming grant the promise of another chance at Possession) (these Denominations so devoutly delineating the space in which our souls or desires might be ridden). And as the ghosts of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord and Martin Luther King Jr. all claw at the underbelly of these vast paved open-air reception areas chanting for our freedom and the real oldstyle Mass Culture the grass grows greener someplace else knowing it is the softer of the two, knowing in its patient ALIVENESS it will outlast the bleak black Blah of the sedate aura-less Spectacle, the Jonses and the Bruckheimers and the Hiltons and every other super-human family happily benefitting from the clean-drippy Cheapthrill money-shot groin kicks and war movies.
And though we must all make a living (well and good that’s every creature’s right to an economy for you) we often now forget to Live while we’re at It, heads hands and hearts bound by such fool’s-gold ripcords to the pretty looping racetrack object daily Reincarnated but nevertheless looped like some half-thawed TV-dinner jingle of a rhythm. Pushing it out to the last drop like the birthing of another Slave plantation from between the last legs of the race which we’re all doomed to Stand on, we neglect the methods by which we’re said to be winning. The slow death of hope in favour of a cynical hedonism, the whine of a plaintive, regretful old machine caught in infinite crescendo, willfully arrogant, yearly topping the insane kind of pitch that baseball players and machinists and rocket scientists know instinctively will kill a man and send said-not-speaking Vast Machine into the depths of a brighter Dark Age.
Yet despite all the warnings and lowest common-sense de-nominated villains (whose poor scripts like missles and mis-guided warlike aeronautic zeal for stardom nevertheless blew up somewhere overseas) (and who could have only come from a society that can actually laugh at Pure Evil) we are each and all of us smarter, wittier, and more accessible than ever before in our strange and skewed Histories (however you re-arrange them). We are impossibly Possible, we are more than ever Now (though poorly remembering), and so invitingly contextual!
I Hope – because I have to if oh so few will (or at least properly); because our madness is in many ways beautiful; because Life is not an apology (and besides I guess we wanted it this way). Because it takes one to know One, and we’re not all ones and zeroes. Because too many tears now salt this Earth already.
And because (even though it might be rare) (and even though I might not profit from it) (and even though it’s a strange and demanding belief)
– it’s far too fun to be ALIVE.
- Takashi J. Hilferink
So it would seem as if we’ve got these rather like racing dogs or horses chomping down at the bit so to speak, waiting for the gates to open as they might go running for the latest rabbit or carrot, bigger brighter more colourful and with greater more succulent drippier sexual eyeparts, it’s a race to the lowest common denominator with no money down (there at the bottom) and at least one thousand varieties to avoid suffering. And there’s the other dogs-or-horses watching the whole thing sometimes even betting on it but really waiting for their own turns to put their pawhooves to the well-worn ruts of Rat-Racing, trademarked for life, no strings attached but to their hands and hearts accordingly.
Hear the anthem?
And if it weren’t for my shameless observations of the specatators above even those racing, that is the very Few who watch and bet (and they are never dogs-or-horses), I might myself be caught up in this canine/equestrian fanaticism all knuckles bleeding and panting for more of the mechanical chewtoy. It is the High spectators’ very distance which accords them the so-called rights of Ownership, the left and leaving, for they are the ones mooring and re-mooring and re-fancying the various bigger-and-better rabbits or carrots, the passionless objects of whichever sort of domesticated animal you might be (re-termed ‘civilised’ and ‘human’ for our more comfortably homeward-bound audiences). For those High Viewers are the Industry leaders, yes, the Entertainers whose rabbits and carrots are made to be lost, broken, worn-out or discarded all too easily so they might provide more more and more and call this ‘cultural production’.
Meanwhile those of us who do seek the gnashing of teeth and the trampling hooves, who in our attempts to (by some mystical and not so new or yet-glamourous Alchemy) distill the sap from the trees of Knowledge, the taproots of yearning and True Suffering experiences to provide some kind of sugary Syrup (for the sick and ailing dogs-or-horses) (now forgotten in their races, having Lost), we Seekers are at our own Loss for not so readily taking the trees and roots to the mill to be pulped and printed Greener and more Numerical. The syrup is unmarketable, drippy yes but Unclean, as in not just Onscreen – ALIVE! – that is the Hoovers and Dirtdevils among us cannot suck it up into invisibility, the indivisible expanse of Same, Clean and Consensual!
Nevertheless we must hit the roads running (that is processing, as we ourselves must now Compute) smarter and faster than before so we might (in our own bouts with Domesticity) keep up with the Viewers-on-High – so we might avoid that suffering of Not-Suffering which the horsedogs in their racing so eagerly reveal. The smoke-belching, sky-cleaving Entertainers with their spotlights and irreverence for fossils and the Ages know not the joys of Yabyum, of Time shared and taken but never spent, the closeness and reckoning, the spiritual communion we Alchemists do seek and suffer which cannot possibly result in or from Lowest Common Denominations. No, the smiling priests of such amusing religions encourage the anti-spiritualists, these spiritless sprites, 3-D but lacking in dimension, roles (not Characters), yes quite good for laughs but not the kind which toughen bellies, the episodic laughing that issues far too serially from the side of the neck like a belt of cheap Blackcats, only half of which explode, the rest waiting for anxious and disappointed children to come close reluctantly and with lighters so they might blow their little fingers off, severing any future opportunity to wield the instruments of a more authentic, more fruitful tragedy.
For it’s no longer the Folk who in their Original Lowness and Common Majority might have laughed and loved dirty and dirt-poor but genuinely; no, we are now said (to accommodate the many of us anymore incapable of Speaking) to belong to the Great Middle Class, the golden-arched waves of grainy night-(en)visioned evidence of love, bent double by the happiness and the laughing in our pants – uninvolved, entertained, reassured. And on either side of us, like the puppet-charicatures of plays we only ever give Thought to living out – the impoverished, the indigent – and the Improved, the Included, all taking disproportionately, though rarely with the thought to give, to Make.
And each of us, all of us laughing hardest at the idealists for being confused and young enough at heart to Believe, hearts with no strings to pull save the parachute-cords draped from the billowy wings which drag such hearts upwards and around the vacuousness, the vacuum into which the airy breath of banality daily expires, feeding the High Viewers’ firey explosions, those lame Fatcat firecrackers like so many U.X.Os strewn across the racetrack, the gladiatorial obstacles by which the waiting horsedogs can find mirth in their comrades’ collage of suffering cut-and-pasted from the Funniest of Home Videos. Passing and passable, the geniuses’ 15 minutes of fame is reduced even further to a three-minute tit-giggling gun-wielding antic posted in celebration like a one-millionth visitor only to be replaced the next day by a short film of somone being hit by a car as two kids fight till bloody in a schoolyard all captured on someone’s cellphone with underage drinking and a porno sountrack continuing offscreen someplace.
Parking lots like lay bare like forgotten graveyards after Hours (the time only ever Theirs as the windows stay lit and the signs yet gleaming grant the promise of another chance at Possession) (these Denominations so devoutly delineating the space in which our souls or desires might be ridden). And as the ghosts of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord and Martin Luther King Jr. all claw at the underbelly of these vast paved open-air reception areas chanting for our freedom and the real oldstyle Mass Culture the grass grows greener someplace else knowing it is the softer of the two, knowing in its patient ALIVENESS it will outlast the bleak black Blah of the sedate aura-less Spectacle, the Jonses and the Bruckheimers and the Hiltons and every other super-human family happily benefitting from the clean-drippy Cheapthrill money-shot groin kicks and war movies.
And though we must all make a living (well and good that’s every creature’s right to an economy for you) we often now forget to Live while we’re at It, heads hands and hearts bound by such fool’s-gold ripcords to the pretty looping racetrack object daily Reincarnated but nevertheless looped like some half-thawed TV-dinner jingle of a rhythm. Pushing it out to the last drop like the birthing of another Slave plantation from between the last legs of the race which we’re all doomed to Stand on, we neglect the methods by which we’re said to be winning. The slow death of hope in favour of a cynical hedonism, the whine of a plaintive, regretful old machine caught in infinite crescendo, willfully arrogant, yearly topping the insane kind of pitch that baseball players and machinists and rocket scientists know instinctively will kill a man and send said-not-speaking Vast Machine into the depths of a brighter Dark Age.
Yet despite all the warnings and lowest common-sense de-nominated villains (whose poor scripts like missles and mis-guided warlike aeronautic zeal for stardom nevertheless blew up somewhere overseas) (and who could have only come from a society that can actually laugh at Pure Evil) we are each and all of us smarter, wittier, and more accessible than ever before in our strange and skewed Histories (however you re-arrange them). We are impossibly Possible, we are more than ever Now (though poorly remembering), and so invitingly contextual!
I Hope – because I have to if oh so few will (or at least properly); because our madness is in many ways beautiful; because Life is not an apology (and besides I guess we wanted it this way). Because it takes one to know One, and we’re not all ones and zeroes. Because too many tears now salt this Earth already.
And because (even though it might be rare) (and even though I might not profit from it) (and even though it’s a strange and demanding belief)
– it’s far too fun to be ALIVE.
- Takashi J. Hilferink
