In the U.S., success is gauged according to how much money one has. How big your home, how sleek and powerful your car, how attractive your wife, how handsome and alpha your husband. It’s a grotesque mythology, a psychology void of weightless transcendence. Everything is pragmatic. It’s a mythology of consumption. People taking selfies at Maccha Picchu.
Meaning isn’t easily packaged. Odysseys are involved. One doesn’t live one’s life so much as engineer it. Components are arranged to promote self-esteem. The idyllic place of consumption is a cruise ship. Everyone is untethered from the bleak anonymity of the landscape. Life is centered around alcohol, food and entertainment. Time is endless, like the ocean. But there are no white whales in these oceans. Just ice skating and surfing simulation. Classes in personal development. “The Story Of You,” a story-telling festival “where guests share their experiences and a video booth where stories can be uploaded to social media.”
What if any average day was like meeting Jack Kerouac on a bus? Would you be gregarious or coy? Would you feel the friction of commerce? Are these questions necessary?
The percentage of people who enjoy reading compared to the percentage of people who prefer playing video games is disturbing. But there’s no harm done if everything is protoplasm. We dwell in kettledrums. We wear ornaments in our ears & tattoos on our arms. Old men doing jigs in jukebox joints. And nobody has a secure job and nobody fully trusts anyone else. And every day is like meeting William S. Burroughs on a bus. A blue bus. Headed west.
Have you noticed how people look lately? Everyone looks lost. Answers are hard to come by. So is the truth. And reality. And other things that aren’t things but hyperrealities whose topographies are easier to navigate when they’re properly seen for what they are: simulations. Jokes. Substitutes. Illusions. Real things are incalculable and therefore codified. Domesticated into easily consumed pixels. Honor. Virtue. Quality. These are the things that seem to disappear first when an empire collapses.
“Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus,” writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic Monthly, “and despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered.”
Hot August afternoon we go walking by an eggplant purple Scion sedan, the front panel just behind the front tire on the driver’s side riddled with bullet holes. He must’ve gone through a bad section of town, says R. We lead such freakish lives these days. When did human life begin to live so detached from nature? Nature isn’t external. Nature is everywhere. It’s another word for life. Where there’s life, there’s nature. And where nature is under assault, life is under assault.
“As Michel Foucault explains in his lecture of February 7, 1979, there is a latent conflict between society and capitalism. This conflict stems from the ‘irrational rationality’ of capitalism. Capitalist reason reveals its irrationality, among other things, in the field of public health: in a model where only the search for profit counts, health is seen as a cost that must be reduced. But this isn’t rational, because the poor health of its workers cannot guarantee a strong economy. Knowing that capitalist logic can destroy society if it attacks education, health, care for the elderly or undermines the environment, the role of the state is to ensure a balance of power.” – Teresa Pullano, “Bienvenue dans l’Europe d’après”
Late stage capitalism is a juggernaut crushing everything in its path of any genuine value while exalting wealth and property and exulting in its ceaseless propaganda.
High-end jeans with fake mud on them. Sterling silver Tiffany and Co ping pong paddles. Moschino dry-cleaning bag dress. Think rich to get rich. Bullshit packaged in luxurious smiles. Rags to riches. Rugged individualism. Fake it till you make it. “Everything is worshiped and nothing has value,” to quote Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) from La La Land.
“The artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine.”
That day in Paris some few years ago (and yet what now feels like an epoch ago, due to the pandemic) while walking down the rue Bonaparte I spotted a window display of letters by luminaries such as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust & Francis Poulenc. There’s an elegance in the written word that has disappeared from the digital age, which has decimated print media & resulted in a society of zombies. The pens are graceful, the dark ink alluring. The paper must be high quality: it’s still white. It’s such a pleasure to be reminded of a time when language & writing were synonymous with thought, visions transferred from absinthe to ink, ink to infinity.
Writing has taken a backseat to the podcast, tweet and YouTube bullhorn. Everyone is big on oral communication networks now. What writing does is allow talking a space to find its revolt. Writing isn’t talking. Writing is redemption. It’s where we redeem our confusion for the wisdom of silence.
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