pssh, men...

For a while now I've been deeply unsettled by something Terence Mckenna said: intelligence can't be trusted with the monkeys because we're basically scum.  Most of our angelic aspirations are eclipsed by backstabbing, power-grabbing, betrayal, infidelity, you know the list.  We're in possession of this extraordinary imagination and spiritual consciousness or whatever you want to call it but our behavior for the most part is driven by giddy, mischievous self-absorbed pleasure seeking.  I certainly notice this about myself at times when I can honestly reflect on my life.  For all of my idealism and intellectual blah blah blah, deep down I'm basically trying to get laid, tear some shit up and find a free lunch.  Viewing the human race this way has caused a major roadblock to any idea I have of a better future for the planet.

Well, I think I may have figured it out the flaw in my thinking: what if it's not monkeys who are scum but just men?  This morning my wife and I were talking about all the various issues surrounding procreation and our differing opinions about our own future- I want more kids, she doesn't.  I kept expressing that I just wanted my feelings about it to be known; I have no illusion that it is in any way my decision.  In fact, it's not enough to say that having children isn't JUST the man's decision; in fact, I think men should have nothing to do with it whatsoever.  Women should make all the decisions about offspring in council with their mothers, sisters, grandmothers, etc. and just call in a man whenever they need his genetic material.  I basically have this view of male-ness in general, that we are drone workers; all direction and vision of families /  society should be made by women.  

So it is actually appropriate that men are scum; we're not actually scum, we just shouldn't be let anywhere near the controls.  We're like monkeys let loose in the laboratory.  We don't really know what the stakes are or how to work anything, we're just going to tear the place up.  We are too stupid, too simple.  This is how we should be, just don't give us any real power or authority.  Male-ness consists in doing assigned tasks, followed by some nice food and drink; we're also ready to give our genetic material to pretty much anyone who wants it.   This is how I feel about myself as I get older, despite my extreme intellectual bent; give me a moderately difficult task, give me chicken and beer, put me in bed, the end.  For god's sake, don't give me any power, I would destroy the place!  I would cause so much pain to people if I were allowed to run amuck and indulge in my own hare-brained scheming.  Well, look around- this is exactly what is going on in the world.  The whole planet has spiraled into directionless catastrophe under the direction of the brainless male drones.

I'm aware of how brutally I'm just smashing all the rules of progressive thought here- first of all, by giving such defined gender roles.  Well, I don't know what to say about that.  Maybe the reason we are so hesitant to assign gender roles is because we are so profoundly alienated from what they really are, so we rightly exercise extreme caution.  I'm pretty sure that the real nature and weight of feminine power is so suppressed by the long history of patriarchy that even the most de-programmed women are scarcely in possession of 10% of it.  This is an intuition my wife experienced while giving birth- there's a whole world of power and energy under the surface that has been so thoroughly cut off that most women are barely aware of it.  Hey, she said it, not me.  But I think she's right.

I'm also painting a picture of women as being perfect, as if they are in no way motivated by selfish pleasure-seeking.  Well, I don't really have any place to say what it's like to be a woman.  I assume that any self-absorption on the part of women is just an accident of having male-ness grafted onto them by patriarchy, which only persists by suppressing and perverting female wisdom and power.  I assume women are naturally perfect beings… so sue me, hahaha.

What I'm actually suggesting are extreme gender roles.  Woman as lord and master, man as servant... well, let's say well-rewarded servant.  As far as I can work out, that is what would really make everyone happiest.  I'm certainly not talking about equality, which tends to be the general best-case consensus in progressive, eco-feminist conversations- "we don't want female dominance, just balance."    Good lord, no!  Don't let the men have any decision-making power; send them out into the hallway, for good. I'm certainly not saying that men can't be as creative as women or as passionate or as loving or as intellectual; we just can't have our hands on the wheel; we're not cut out for it.    I'm telling you- we don't really want control.  We're perfectly miserable having to run this show, just too ashamed and bull-headed to admit it.  

liberation

What do I want?  I want to be free.  I don't know what that looks like but I know that this ain't it.  Can you be free in this life?  Or is that the fundamental illusion that keeps us pinned to the karmic wheel?  Is the only freedom in death?  That would suggest the best course in life would be an ascetic, yogic style of purification and preparation for final rites.  Cast off from this temporal life, you know, the entire trip of eastern civilization, turning away from all of this Maya.  I don't know, I've spent a lot of time following that idea, half-heartedly of course…. it's hard to stick with it unless you really have death fully in mind, all the time, overshadowing everything.  Otherwise you end up feeling that you are just letting your life slip away, which is exactly what you're doing of course.

Maybe that view is the ultimate deception?  All culture stemming from the 60's would say so.  Live life now, this is all there is, be wild.  That's the freedom of Hunter Thompson and Keith Richards.  You know, I've done that too but also half-heartedly.  I've gotten a lot of good out of it.  Certainly got a lot of misery and headaches too.  Besides, it's terribly expensive, which explains the culture of Lawyers Guns and Money that grew out of the 60's-style freedom.  It also requires a very harsh, atheistic, chaotic cosmology that in no way seems to correspond with what you feel when you are really connected to nature.  It also creates this never-ending need to escape, which is such an obvious male thing that it makes me cringe to think I could participate in it.  My rule tends to be- if it's what men do, it must be wrong!  The 60's acid nihilism is total male-dominator style dressed up as feminism, which makes it all the more appalling.

That Dionysian, no-thought-for-the-future thing is the way of the bottle, of staying up all night and talking, talking, talking, of dissipation and rebellion, of infidelity, of self-absorption.  In Christian terms, it's the devil.  As usual, this makes me feel very conflicted- on the one hand, I feel that all Christian metaphor systems must be basically correct; on the other, the pagan in me feels exactly the opposite.  This is one of the big issues that I can never make heads or tails of.  

I don't know, maybe both views are wrong and there is no freedom to be attained.  There's just…. this.  I don't know what this is but freedom, it ain't.  Freedom from what?  From social constraints?  You could defect, lots of people do but I'm not sure they have achieved a sense of liberation.  The nature of being human seems to mean having some kind of chain around your soul that you can't shrug off by changing your external circumstances; you are just as likely to achieve liberation in a jail cell, a car accident, an ashram, a nudist colony, a convent, a wine bar, or just sitting on a cushion for years and years and years.

Maybe the problem is that both paths tend to become forms of self-absorption, which is the real prison.  If I spend all my time meditating and fasting and purifying, I tend to increase the distance between myself and others, become ungrounded and judgmental.  If I spend all my time reveling and rebelling, I tend to lose sight of the interests of those around me and my goal becomes my own hedonic pleasure, which is a never-ending spiral.  Maybe that's not true of either path…. it's so hard to really see clearly when you are being self-absorbed.  One thing looks like another all the time.  And that is the damned problem with this stupid life, always casting you one way then another, all in ignorance, vanity!  Which makes the case for the acid-nihilism party-on thing.  

No matter what I do or have done in my life, what completely divergent strategies I follow, everything is always half freedom and half slavery, half heaven and half hell.  So then the question is- why get out of bed?  Why leave home?  Why grow as a person?  The ratio of heaven and hell is immutable and you're gonna get both no matter what.  That's what I truly feel; surely it can't be right.  That's what people call "depression".  Of course, when you feel that way, non-depression seems like what people call "self-deception".  

sisyphus, again

As far as I can work out, life is actually a sort of dream written in some hyperspatial dimension outside of time that you can only view in its entirely upon death…. well, my metaphysics may not be perfectly sound there but that's not the point.  The point is that life is not what it seems to be: accidental.  It's all heavily scripted and most of the choices you make are illusory.  I notice that no matter how I struggle and veer, I am always stuck with a very particular set of problems surrounding the relations of certain recurring characters that embody certain moral truths.  The tests are always the same, no matter how they are projected onto others.  And I keep failing the test.  I'm stuck in it as if I'm being punished.

It can go on for years sometimes- the light seemingly just around the corner when suddenly you realize all progress was a delusion and nothing has changed, the situations are just as sticky, the set of problems inside you and around you are immutable.  Lots of work, all in vain.  Sisyphus as the foundational myth of human existence.  Desolation.  Exhaustion.  Hopelesness.  So depressing, I know… what, you never feel these things??  

It's just so disappointing to feel that the franco-existentialist view of life is the most accurate one.  I never see it that way for long- life cranks up again and I march again to the beat of ideals and hope in a better life, an improved self with a more perfect heart learning to love more fully.  But the inevitable sense of feeling trapped inside a tragedy returns, always with a much more devastating sense of clarity than what I felt in the interim.  Am I depressed?  Or is this really how it is?  The question plagues me daily.  I resist it but it feels like the truth.  At least, it feels the same way it feels when you know, deep down, that you are resisting the truth.

the All-Together plunge

From day to day I revise every position I take on every aspect of life.  I must seem as insane from the outside as other people seem to me.  We are standing on the edge... A few nights ago, half asleep in a state of utter intoxication, I mumbled something to my wife to the effect that living in this time is like learning deep sea diving:  there is an utterly strange moment when you first go under the water with a regulator in your mouth when you must inhale, though every part of your conditioning resists what seems to be an existential threat.  I feel now that I am standing on a high ledge and I must jump, but my body is frozen and I have not the courage to take the plunge. 

Am I afraid of losing myself?  Of being cast out?  Of madness?  Am I mad?  No, I only fear the strangeness of what is coming.  To be stripped bare of the safety net of culture and its comforts is appallingly exciting.  Is that what is happening?  Are we wading back to the shore of immediate experience and a pure state of pagan eros and vegetable consciousness as if civilization was a bad dream?  No, of course we will take some kind of insight back with us, but what will it be?  Is there some leap of technology yet to be taken that will give us the One Great Thing to take back into the naked forest ?  Teleportation, time travel, telepathy?  Probably a form of telepathy is what we’re after; it would be the only thing that would be worth 10,000 years of hell.   Perhaps what we really want is to hardwire all of our minds together to become one great big overmind.  Sounds like science fiction horror, but maybe that’s just an expression of ego-fear from the insane civilized western head.  What we truly fear is being alone, so we will engineer ourselves out of it entirely and become All-Together. 

That must be the foundation of the great nervousness of our time.  We are all growing less anonymous to each other through digital connectivity, and we are very uneasy about the implications going forward.  It is unnerving enough to spend a day together, to talk about traumas and fears together, to be naked together.  We tend to cling to our isolation so that we don’t become too vulnerable but this is actually the source of all of our psychosis and despair.  In fact, we really do want total intimacy, and I think we are going to have it.  The moment (and the technology) will come when some of us will summon the courage to jump and become absolutely intimate, totally merged and in full communication- this would equate to liberation from the human tragedy.  We’ll have it, and the implications will make a future that is unimaginable and an experience of multiple-subjectivity that will probably be quite beautiful.

more about media

You see I rant and rave against "the electronic media blitz of the 20th century", implicating the internet in the insanity but I don't really see it as so good vs. evil.  It is what it is, which is an extension of the printing press which is an extension of alphabets…. after all, are books evil?

Of course, I say that as if I'm obviously retracting my venom against media because obviously books are good, right?  Hey, there's lots of books on the internet.  But you know, half the time I do feel that books are not good at all, that ALL mediated experience is keeping us in a kind of virtual prison that's been going on for thousands of years, constructed out of alphabets and linear thinking and symbol systems.  But of course there's no limit once you start trying to look at the situation that way because ALL culture is a virtual reality and in fact ALL experience is mediated experience.  The only direct experience is death, and we don't know a damn thing about that.  

So if mediated experience is alright, then why not sail off into a virtual headspace in the vast halls of the future internet?  Somehow we have to reach a decision about the monkey body.  Is it the neglected shadow that haunts civilized history to which we must return via feral society?  Or is it a troublesome vestige of animal evolution that brought us to the point of imagination and that we've been struggling to shed since civilization began?  I honestly find these two viewpoints to coincide so maddeningly and so often that I don't even know what to say about it at all.  

Of course I tend to vote for the body… just not without my suspicions.  I assume though that these suspicions are the result of being born into a worldview that descended from Christianity.  Suppose I should strip and go live off of wild rabbits for a while.  But you know, we've been there before, for thousands of years before civilization.  I'm not sure it was entirely pleasant; there must have been a reason to want to engineer ourselves into civilization.  I suppose we will return to that feral state but with some value system and/or techological artifact that will make human society less animalistic and more angelic.  

age of triviality

I truly thought that the age of triviality was coming to a close with the demise of boy bands and britney spears in the late 90's.  After 9/11, I thought that we were entering a new cultural age simply because the veneer of pop culture that had dominated the previous 20 (or 30 or 50) years had been utterly stripped away by the trauma of foreign attack.  The age of cellphones and web 2.0 was dawning and it seemed to me that by bypassing the enshrined institutions of shit-brained culture, that we would all create a new culture with our own values, not the consumerist values handed down from on high via cable TV, hollywood, and clear channel.  

What I neglected to see was that the values handed down from these dead media giants had already become our values.  Now, a decade later, we have all become content producers, but the content we produce has the same stale taste of all the garbage we were brought up with, with the same fictional, one-dimensional, non-human anti-characters, the same easy morality, exploitational sexuality, black and white thinking, absence of dialogue about social problems or any self-awareness about harmful lifestyle excesses, male-dominated relationship patterns, the errancy of cliques and factions, hard-hearted communication styles, easy judgement of people who are different, etc.

The internet is, at the moment, nothing new or revolutionary or even helpful, it's just a massive expansion of the electronic media blitz of 20th century consumer culture that was killing us in the first place.  Actually, the internet is even more effective at robbing us of embodied experience and human connection.  The human body, incarnated in time and space, is where the real learning unfolds, where Being is experienced and understood.  Time is an undulating experience of metabolism, not the cold click of a digital clock.  Sex and consciousness are primary, technology is just so many toys.  At the present, the body is being swept away by techno-fetishism.  We're experiencing an inflated headspace, severed at the neck, cut off from the body. Surely this is a crime against nature, spirit, or whatever god you believe in.   

global alchemical

global alchemical civilization

global- no borders, no lines as the central moral principle.  unity of human group.  Earthers.  No identity other than maybe "human".  No nationality, no ideology.  No religion other than experiential spirituality.

Alchemical- inversion of values- internally sought rather than externally sought.  the opposite of consumer culture.  identity created from internal world.  meditation and shamanic trance as primary forms of culture.  the entire universe beheld in the imagination.  inward exploration.  There must be no such thing as the unconscious.  It must be fully illuminated and brought out in front of us, wild and screaming, alive, erotic.  Outside world re-engineered as a global food forest, no technological residue aside from transportation and communication / internet infrastructure.  all external world must have the holistic health of physical bodies of all species as its only goal.  vast halls of meditation schools and underground chunks of circuitry the size of city blocks.   all religion must become experiential, empirically validated living morality.  

inward exploration always looks like woo within the context of a consumer culture.  it can't go on in any productive way until consumer culture is unravelled.  

it isn't just scripture that is metaphor.  Everything is metaphor.  Reality shouldn't be taken to literally.  

sin of certainty

The most severe "sin" (maybe the only real one, actually) is to draw a line between yourself/your group and the rest of humanity/life.  This sin is committed by most people who adhere to ideology.  Religion is an easy target, but I'm talking about ALL ideology.  We are all swimming in contradictory, confusing experiences.  The whole task of living is to experience this maddening life fully, admit our fear and weakness, and learn to sympathize with each other in our suffering and confusion.  This tender, raw place is the only thing of value in this whole big stupid life.  Most adherents to ideology exempt themelves from this condition of uncertainty.  "We have the REAL truth/scripture/doctrine.  Search is over, just stick to the script.  If only those poor (everyone else) knew about this!"  Listen- there is nothing concrete or literal that can be known about the afterlife or the nature of god or spirit as long as we are bound to this monkey flesh, embedded in time and space.  All religious speculation is, at best, metaphorical.  All literal claims to knowledge of divinity are guilty of the sin of certainty.  

The same is basically true of the secular community.   "Oh those silly religious people, if only they would accept the simple explanation for everything…"  It's the same trembling in the face of overwhelming tragic / ecstatic mystery.  This kind cowardice of isolating your group in a bubble of certainty and pitying all others is deep in the roots of human societies and is the basis for most or all forms of malice and discrimination.  "Us civilized white people understand life and how to live it; if only we can educate all those poor, savage brown people!"  And so the bloodshed goes on and on, always coming down to this basic prejudice of viewing The Others as more ignorant than the group you belong to.  

This prejudice is wrong, not because god said so but because it is incorrect.  No one is any more privileged to truth than anyone else, no human culture is any more ignorant than another.  There is no privileged location in history from which to understand the human condition.  

I see you object to the fact that I'm asserting all of these things as true, while asserting that nothing is true.  Well, I'm certain of uncertainty.  And anyways, I don't believe any of this.  

May notes to self

The dreamtime of youth is short and interesting but ultimately a deception because you aren't actually going to take anything out of it for the community of the aged; there is nothing you can tell us about it that hasn't been well known for 10,000 years.  Hit songs and dance crazes aside.  

White wine and French camp and baking pavement dribbling along sweating and dreaming of zinc bars with white widows marching and infidelity on summer streaked streets and coffee under lamps and honey smelling necks and napes, blackout drapes.

Campaigns always begin this way, with something to say.  Without that first step you are pissing in the wind.  Beating a dead horse.  Shitting the mains.  Blowing the big top.  Topping off the lunch table.  Tying up the tripwire.  Spitting on grandma.  Coming and going into a coma.  Flipping your lid.  Slipping on hobos.  Eating the loaf.  

A commemoration for the humans, a once noble race swallowed whole by its own vices, unable to pry itself out of toxic greed and laziness, given over fully to willful ignorance.  Weak flesh constrained promising spirit, pulled ever downward into the hellmaze or trivial pursuits, unbending toward the white light that called ahead into transcendence.  No thank you, no thanks, we're all good here, going to load up and enjoy the plunge.  

techno pagan parade

As I braced against the wind blowing my hair to the east the full moonlight poured bright and silver across the field over the single row of evergreens, I could faintly feel distant shimmering chords from a spirit-ukelele comforting me with the sense that life carries on and on amen and that everything will be just fine despite the discomforts and pains and toil and hungers and morbidity of life.  The Techno Pagan Parade Through The End of Time went on and on amen that night and it was all the best and worst parts of living stripped bare all alone telling themselves to me and through me forcing me to summon up all the strength I had to make peace with death and work and always the loneliness.  I had two friends that night- a bottle of wine and a very large scarf that my mother knit me for Christmas that reminded me of something a Norseman or some other ruddy Northerner might have worn in the dead of winter a thousand years ago.  I felt that I belonged to such an ancient time but that I also belonged to unimaginable futures of blinking and buzzing and living.  Some part of me also belonged to that present moment, New Years Eve 2011.  The paradoxes and pains of my unhinged location in space and time were maddening to the limit of my ability to cope but also they were life-affirming and magical and beautiful and the magic was pouring out of my hands and eyes into the world and everything was going to be just fine despite the discomfort and pains and travail and hungers and morbidity of Life.  And always, always the loneliness, on and on and on amen.  

Narrating all of this madness was a large spirit whale who happily and without mercy or guilt devoured scores of plankton with every twitch of his tail and recanted the nature of eating and being eaten; all too clearly I was aware that I too would be swallowed whole one day without thought or remorse and I would be dead and gone and buried and dead as a doornail and probably much sooner than I could imagine or hope for but this was perfectly alright and in fact was the fate of all living things who gladly accept the price for being alive and who all, without guilt or mercy, gleefully consume scores and scores of their fellow sentient beings so that they can wake once again in the clear and wonderful morning and smell the fresh dew and reflect on the beauty of the new day and shit out the useless remains of a once noble and beautiful living creature.  Whale told me that life is 49.5% shit and compost and trouble and problems and 50.5% finery and beauty and magic and that the 1% difference between them makes it all worthwhile and so life goes on and on amen but only on the slimmest of margins and you better believe that you are gonna be dead and buried and your children will eat you and the world will swallow you whole no matter what and even while you are alive and well you will be halfway submerged in shit, work and stress my god but always you will get that 1% margin to make it worthwhile.  Nothing can change this figure and you are damned lucky to exist in a universe that permits it.

Later on I was incredibly lonely and the pain lingered for days that there was simply no one to talk to, no way to make your entire self known to another no matter how closely connected.  But then, talk is cheap and that's ok and really most of what comes out of your mouth on a daily basis is not only useless but sinful in its veiled attempt to stave off the loneliness that we must all truly face.  You will get your beautiful mornings and moments of profound insight and your share of good food and drink and sometimes there will be fun parties that you never forget and people and friends and children and sometimes you will have very real and lasting connections and you will be able to articulate some of the loneliness and comfort each other wonderfully but it will all cost you 49.5% of your time and energy spent toiling and sinking into utter shit and misery and work and pain and you better believe you will be dead and fucking gone but the equation is always in your favor on the slimmest of margins on and on amen.