Friday, February 19, 2010

Tea Party 1

Gathered around a table at a local restaurant are seated several aging baby boomers. They're all white heterosexual males. They've never experienced the hurtful alienation of racism. They've never been ostracized or victimized for being homosexual. They've never eaten out of a dumpster or slept beneath a highway overpass. They've never experienced the all-consuming obsession of substance abuse and addiction. They've never had to make the decision between a necessary medical procedure or rent. They've never been to prison. They've never made minimum wage. They've never experienced tragedy due to the use of a firearm.

Perhaps they have. Secretly, they may keep truths of themselves closely guarded subjects. They may be willing to take things to the grave, to live under the incredible burden of shame. They don't understand how to deal with their guilt and, consequentially, lash out in the form of watching others suffer and to perpetuate such. They are morally corrupt for they know not how to cope with their true identity.

Perhaps they're just ignorant as shit.

In any case, they're on their way to a local meeting to discuss the current status of the nation. For years they've harbored resentments towards others. Prejudices flow through them like the blood in their veins. Their ideas are not their own but have been forced unto them, by an abusive parent or a herd of fellow spiritual indigents. They are bereft of compassion, except for those cut from their cloth.

After securing several coffees and pastries, they pile into a vehicle and make way down the county route to the meeting being held at the local fire hall. Their seatbelts are buckled, for safety purposes, and the person operating the vehicle takes notice of posted speed limits and other signage. They signal when making turns. The radio is employed during the trip for some pleasant background noise. The singer/songwriter on that radio station is playing a hit. He learned how to play music from a public school music teacher. His 7th grade english teacher introduced him to Shakespeare and set the course for his love of poetry and performance.

The fire hall is at capacity with others, who benefit from the compassion of those alike. They've all gathered to express mutual disdain for the way things are. Perception is the way things are in this place, as in every human place everywhere. The crowd is nearly homogenous, peppered occasionally by the supportive or curious spouse. The result of the nights' discussion is met with thunderous unanimty. All return home in their domestically manufactured vehicles on the various state and county routes. Their homes are well lit and warm.

It's very beautiful country, theirs is. It's gently rolling hills and sultry meadows are filled, year round, with agriculture processes or left to the processes of nature. It once belonged to another people and will be left to another different group of people. Still, people will inhabit their lands and will inherit those lands in the condition it's left to them. When they moved to this place, it was as beautiful as it is today. The world around them happened and this place seemed to be the same. Invisibly, somewhere on the horizon, ominous clouds gathered and obscured their view of the land and other people. Most notably missing were the people from the past, who once belonged to that land.

Tomorrow, they will wake and continue with their lives. They will drive the same county roads. They will visit the post office and send letters to their children away at State U. They will anticipate the arrival of the government checks that will ensure a more comfortable life in their older years. They will go hunting and spend time in the forests. They will consume the bounty of nature with scant care for the effects. They question their ability to sully God's creation. They will proclaim their patriotism.

They will work against all that is sacred and beautiful.

Monday, February 8, 2010

When can I buy an iMe?

Great observations from an outsider can help shed a guiding light on those mired in the stifling interconnectedness of contemporary techno-centric culture. When an insightful observation is cast over seven decades ago, it surely must cause one to stop and try to think, as objectively as possible, about the implications of such a statement. Wirth argues coherently that cities are less a question of quantifiable values and more a question of modes of communication. Surely, one usually doesn’t understand cities to consist of a hermit living miles from the nearest human though wired more thoroughly than a motherboard; a certain requisite density of human and infrastructural objects currently represents the most commonly understood idea of city form. Urbanism, in the current sense, describes the exponentially increased massing of humans coupled with an overall degeneration of evolved communicative relationships.

Seventy years, or so, from the penning of Wirth’s observations, we live in a time of increasingly degenerate interpersonal communication. Fellow humans that we could describe as being the closest to us – family – generally live tens, if not hundreds or thousands, of miles away from us and are seldom seen in the flesh. Our multitude of friends and colleagues number in the range of a small municipality yet we still maintain some level of connection with nearly every last one of them. This amazing ability to interface with so many humans and maintain relationships with them is all facilitated by ever growing object networks. The communication required to found relationships is stripped from the body.

All this loss of interpersonal communicative ability is both liberating and incredibly dangerous. The very mechanisms that enabled humanity to survive in the wild for thousands of years have already been lost; due largely to extermination of native peoples and the hegemonic oppression of capitalistic forces. Never fear! Such technology is invariably sleekly packaged and marketed so you won’t feel any twinge of remorse for pulling the plug on the hard-wiring that has evolved in your brain thanks to countless generations of ancestors.

Liberation from evolved modes of communication enables us, as humans, to live a more interconnect, de-centered lifestyle. It provides the opportunity for people, as a species, regardless of place (physical, economic or otherwise) to commune – for celebration, for revolution, for entertaining masturbatory activity. Great potential for the human species to evolve beyond our old ways that have created such horrible miseries such as homelessness, poverty and other injustices could be combated on a global scale. Such is a desire held by many people that have a stake in both the technological objects that could facilitate this reality and those that are humanitarian.

True danger resides in the fact that TECHNOLOGY CAN’T/WON’T SAVE US… EVER. Most of the world’s most confounding and dangerous problems are the result of the search for, creation and possession of technological advances. Take the atom bomb, for example. Or, for a less drastic example, remember how your ability to remember phone numbers plummeted after purchasing your first cell phone. Technology is antithetical to the soft, organic, malleable nature of the natural world – animal, plant or mineral. It can’t save us, no matter how we attempt to engender our best characteristics and sensibilities within it.

However, given the fact that technology has the possibility of use for means of manipulation of broad portions of humanity by narrow interests it doesn’t negate the possibility of that same technology to be harnessed for the good of human kind. It can help us connect with one another, to form communities and to learn a sense of place where once the neighborhood or familial unit would have fulfilled that role. In the same breath, it can be used for surveillance, for control, for dominion and destruction. The fact that the most pervasive technological societies are also those responsible for the most tragic crimes against humanity and war should create a sense of disgust and disdain deep within the soul of every human.

A saying states that fiction always precedes reality and the fiction is displaying an antagonistic relationship between technology and humans, regardless of the attempt to make such technologies user friendly (i.e. Robocop, Terminator, Maximum Overdrive, etc.). Technology will never replace human interaction. Sure, it may attempt to supplement human needs but it should never been used to replace interpersonal relationships. In any case, your techno-gadgetry won’t get you into heaven.

Let's go to the mall!

In the valorized object (Stuff), we shall find communion. Let it (Stuff) sanctify our dutiful existence towards its (Stuffs) incessant gathering. With great pomp shall we parade it (Stuff, shiny perhaps) upon our breast, to befall the eyes of others. May it (Stuff) shield our shriveled souls from the many that pass and pry and from those who can only observe, yet never understand, from afar. Finally, upon return to its secure vessel for stowage, we find solace in the Stuff-mandala of the world: boot, trouser, cap, watch, ad infinitum.

Amidst a throng of shrieking tweens, we find the recently exhumed and reanimated corpses of G. Simmel and W. Benjamin strolling rather raucously through the Mall of America, their bodies having long been stripped of their soft tissues. A phantasmagoric scene, undoubtedly, for such a cast of unsuspecting characters. Aghast and disgusted are several nearby tweens: not by the ravages of decomposition or the appearance of two walking skeletons, but by their seriously outdated threads.

“OMG! Those guys are so, like, last century,” proclaims Suzie.

“Totally. Like, how creepy?! Halloween isn’t for like… um, what month is it,” stammers her cohort Jill.

Suzie, unfazed by the morbidity manifest in the motley mega-Stuff-mandala-of-them-all (which she not-so-secretly wants all to herself… well, maybe Jill can partake in the loot) notices Zach, the cute boy from math class, at the vendor just beyond the two teetering theorists. Hurried, the girls brisk past our unfortunate heroes with scant notice that they, our heroes, aren’t crude Halloween props but real life skeletons walking through the mall.

I jest, of course, for I know not the inner workings of the tween mind nor that of the reanimated corpse. An interview with worm may provide insight and, perhaps, a recipe or wine suggestion. Nevertheless, our heroes are reduced to bags of bones – shabby bags at that.

The parallels of Simmel and Benjamin, not in their less-than-stunning appearance decades post mortem, is in the evidence and/or conclusion of spectacle based in objects of the magnitude of human proportion (the garment, the vehicle, the building, the city). Each order of magnitude connotes another layer of stimuli, growing from within the psyche of the individual and spreading beyond the boundaries of flesh to adjacencies and beyond. These truly meaningless orders – they are abstractions of sustenance – pervade the conscious mind of our subject and create a false sense of value. This abstraction of value based monetarily has enabled the mind-numbing cacophony of human conglomeration presented as the city. Wherever the city may provide emancipation, it enslaves exponentially and eschews lucidity.

Space = Me (or you)

Space does not exist but in the context of the mind.

When asked to describe what space is, many have trouble describing, in words, what their understanding of space is. It is easily conjured by the imagination, yet difficult to verbalize. Most commonly agreed upon definitions of space all deal with dimensions of one sort or another, be they time or distance. These dimensions can be singular or multiple, linear or volumetric. Space is both a problem of esoteric proportion and rudimentary physicality. To discover the true meaning of space, one may best seek answers in the shade of a mighty tree, atop a craggy precipice or at the shore of a tranquil mountain pond. Utterance of an answer to a question so simply profound as, “what is the meaning of space?”, ought to bring even the most clever student a smack in the back of the head.

Questions in league with that of the concept of space are easily found in childhood riddles. For example, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course, one could argue that, in fact, it does make a sound, and a thunderous one at that! Still, how is one able to prove such a conclusion? Experience would lead one to assume that the falling tree makes a noise. It’s this same feature that allows an individual to understand space. If all the senses are blotted out, does the space about us still exist? Experience would lead us to believe that once the senses are restored we would find that the spaces about us still exist.

Still, this does not pin down what the meaning of space is. Its tangibility, olfactory or auditory features do not describe its state. These sensory stimuli contribute to the construct of space but the location for the assembly of these stimuli, along with associated memories of said stimuli, is in the mind. Aspects of spaces, when filtered through memories, can help ascribe meaning to space and foster comprehension of that space. Linguistic cues, of all manner of form – sounds, sights, smells… especially smells – trigger emotive responses and rememberances that lead us to assume the meaning of a particular space. Through evolution and the course of living our own lives, spatial meanings are programmed to assist in survival functions. Conjuring the meaning of space is inseparable from the core functions of the human organism.

The true meanings of space will differ from person to person, perhaps minutely, and from culture to culture, possibly greatly. Change one of the seemingly endless aspects of space and there too goes its meaning. Space is a state of mind – a forum for the imagination to posit objects, a laboratory to test theories, even a place to call home. It is eveything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, all at once, for ever and ever.

“In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agnoy and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me.” – Krishnamurti

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Why blog?

It is of critical importance to find an outlet for deep seated thoughts and emotions. Without a form of expression, such ideas can fester and lead to explosive, unpredictable behaviors. Writing is a form of catharsis that can help document ideas and allow a moment for review before acting upon them. A moment's reflection, if nothing more, can serve to reinforce the value of such ideas and bolster confidence that said ideas should be documented, published and shared with an audience. Such is the purpose of my blog.

I also hope that my blog can entertain and cause the reader to identify with particular sentiments in an extremely personal and private way. The reader is free to have any emotive response to the contents of the blog with no associated fee. If such emotive responses foster a response, then those too can be entertained free of charge. This dialogic space shall forever be open and accessible, though donations are strongly encouraged.

I also intend to use commentary posited by myself and that of any others as material for future publications and performances. You are, by posting to this blog, agreeing to become the butt of a possible joke... along with myself. I do not claim to be unworthy of puns. I have been advised by numerous authorities on cultural artifacts that I absolutely must write. My perspectives, regardless of how skewed they may seem, are genuine and valuable enough that they should be recorded and collected in a manner that reaps no financial benefit. I doubt I will be offered pennies for my thoughts but it would be ideal. Again, donations are strongly encouraged.

Please stay tuned for further textual dribblings from a self-described enlightened being and be excellent to each other.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Welcome to JERSHMODE

My Humble Followers:
Welcome to my blog. It is a place where anything goes with but one rule... and I haven't thought of it yet. Feel free to share any thoughts, stories, pics or anything your heart desires! Do remember, the Voice of Reason is what is ultimately sought after in the contents of these posts - be they humorous anecdotes, enthusiastic rants or truths disguised in nonsense. More importantly, it's a forum to share and a clearinghouse of any textual dribblings seeping electronically through the ether. Enjoy!

-Jershmode