I don't know why I don't just publish the blog posts the day that I write them. Perhaps I figured that I'll do some editing. Alas there is rarely time for that. The mind moves on, and you can never step in the same river twice. This was a couple of days ago. It's almost been raining every single night.
I don't know why but I seem to write better when there is a thunderstorm on the horizon. Perhaps the weather is appropriating my mood. Or perhaps the prospect of rain in this superheated city has cooled down my body temperature and thus my brain enough for a steady stream of coherence through the voltage storm between these ears. Whatever it is I should waste the feeling.
Reading a narrative fiction which wanders about and rambles on and on, if you do fall in love with the writer's voice then you're sold. It brings a lot of things into perspective with a coherence of vision that is much in lacking in this century of cut-off time. The pause button will be the motif of this generation. We're always in the middle, in between a thing and another while live grows more passive and passive each day. The spectacles are all around, and unbinding me, my thoughts, my dreams, and desire from the simulacra is puzzling. Constantly I am asking myself this: how did I become so fragmented? How did a life once whole, honest, and straight become so twisted in false dichotomies and complications? For my weapons I have my instincts, which in a pure past perspective has guided me better than future projections of failure and disaster of fear of instincts. For one, it has guided me to just the right books that I need to be reading now. And now that I'm reading them I begin to understand that what modern society had fundamentally broken was: life.
I did not understand it fully at first when I read the Elementary Particles, but I got the sense at the end that the author had made us question the possibility of a human existence as we know it (or perhaps a humane existence) at the turn of the 21st century. What do I mean by this? The characters showed fragmentary humans, attempting to find that whole. As if that whole could make their life more complete in a society which had categorized them, marked them, tagged them, and projected their futures all on a time line. All of them could be a statistic. That hollow feeling of fate closing upon the characters felt so inhuman and alien that one wanted to rebel against the character's impending fate. Yet, I the reader derived a satisfaction from witnessing the characters succumb to their fates. I judged it proper, and would have felt cheated if they didn't. That gave the writing a quality of verisimilitude which modern commercial writing so dearly lacks. The characters were driven into the pit of doom by their own hand, their own devices. Their fundamental flaws, despite all abstraction, lead them to their fall. They were not merely foil for the main character to chop away, shoot, or blast with a special effects explosion. There is a logic to them that elevated them from mere puppets on a puppet theater to living, breathing human-beings for moments, more real than social reality. For those of us that live in cities, walking down the glam street (or glam streets as the case may be) we do not live anymore in a human reality but in the belly of a machine. You can feel the edges of this machine on the outskirts, churning away, non-stop, but to be in the middle of it, to see each interaction as income, exchange, output, commodity fetish, etc. to see abstract rational economics conducted by a human hand, a human face, a human voice devalues that of the breathing man and adds to that of abstraction man. But the worst of all is the sense, when watching from the outside, that absolutely nothing of worth is going on in shopping. For the shoppie, dominated in minds, possibilities, dreams, the brain is kept alive on the static glow of remembered advertisements and TV screens. Pictures of products never touched never smelled, never taken in by other sense than the ears and the eyes become… real? The minor of ah-ah of witnessing the phasmagoria in the flesh. But I who does not watch TV, having only perceived this piece for the first time, know it is there, not knowing its qualities and its labels, not understanding why this or that design looks better than this or that see small, same looking bottles, and not understand the difference until I try them. Yet even when I try them there are just things… in others I see their lives have been taken over by the Thing. Everything needs to resolve itself around The Thing. All constructed human conflicts; belonging, lifestyle, choice of mate, presidents all revolve around the acquisition of The Thing. And if we are all just objects swirling around the phallic symbol of The Thing, the indeed the abstraction of it has taken over Life. Hence I finally understand the title of Minimum Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.
If life, an eventual abstract thing to come into existence can be said to be human then the definition of that, the asking of 'how' questions, and finally and importantly the limits of what constitutes human. A good definition should be; sufficient, and necessary. Therefore, what is the necessary for a life to be human? What sufficiently can we call a human life? These were the questions addressed.
Have we built a life complete for human existence? Have we even built a life sufficient and necessary for ourselves, our individuality?
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