Naked and spectacular

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2010-10-15

Domestic Compulsive Disorder

Sometimes I can stay for too long in an overly comfy domestic situation that does not enrich my life. I know I have to at least go outside for a walk, but this stifling building where all my superficial needs are met is so difficult to leave. I usually wait until I can't stand it anymore and then I hit the road, travelling with my thumb to some gathering in the forest where this sickness can be washed off in the waters of some lake.

Sometimes I will stay so long that I will suddenly notice that my diet has increased in breadth imperceptibly until I can't stop eating bread even though it is making me sick and I am going to bed full every night and having so many dreams. The increase in dreams may actually be my body compensating for my lack of awareness of itself during the waking hours. But a vapid life provides so few pleasures and so when I discover spelt French toast with tahini and honey I will not deprive myself.

I have been here not even two weeks and already I am eating and masturbating compulsively. I have no money and nothing better to do so I scour the dumpsters outside supermarkets for food and masturbate in public toilets looking at dirty graffiti on the walls. I can drink coffee and go manic or I can swim in the ocean and cleanse myself, but at the end of the day I am stuck in a compulsive consumer society and I know the only option is to escape and take the brief and joyous journey to my unmet friends at the Rainbow Gathering near Glen Davis.

I am lucky to be able to eat from bins and travel by hitchhiking but I am not safe from the dementia of the domestic compulsive disorder. I know no matter how many times I ejaculate into the toilet bowl and no matter how many times I pop another couple of pieces of toast into the toaster I will never be satisfied. I am able to survive by focusing on the task of working on the garden. Until this job is done I am safe from becoming completely overwhelmed with my own compulsions. When this job is complete I must leave because there is no purpose for me here. I must go where my mind has focus and my life has meaning and my body and soul have peace. I must go where my friends are, the friends that enrich my life and raise my spirits, the friends who I inspire and delight as much as they do me. I must sit on the earth again, eating raw simple foods that bring happiness to my body and therefore my life.

I am a human being, not a waste disposal unit, and I was not born to process the inevitable waste of a production/consumption society.

Following the most beautiful

Now is the time for me to go to another country in order to find my community. Going overseas by myself into unknown territory was always something I would do in the future and now apparently it is something I am going to do very soon. I am doing this because for the first time in a long time I feel a desire for something I do not have. Maybe this is the "passion" my dad was telling me about, the driving force of my life that will provoke me to get up and do something, go somewhere and be somebody. I live in the country because I feel the need for a community. There is a small human community there, yes, but I often feel more connected to the more immediate community of other animals who live in immediate proximity to me; many different species in various degrees of domesticity. And then I come to the city and it's almost entirely humans and I don't necessarily feel very connected to many of them.

~

I have been to the other side of the planet now and yes, I made so many wonderful friends.  My passion for community and companionship has taken me all over the planet.  I tend to live my life on the philosophy that I go to where the people love me the most.  I receive invitations to people's homes and we enrich each others'  lives for a short or long while.  The most beautiful people draw me in with their eyes and I can't help wanting to feel as close as possible to their lives and their bodies.  Sometimes they even see my beauty and draw me closer; sometimes they revolt and I feel the pain of rejection and move on as quickly as possible.  It amazes me how the most simple guides can lead me to the most beautiful situations.  However, I fluctuate between alienation and communion.  I move from city to country to gathering to lonely wandering.  I look into the eyes of a beautiful human being or touch the trunk of a beautiful tree and then I must leave because permanence is too scary to face.  Nothing is permanent, I tell myself, don't stay too long.

I want to see what happens when I return to the most beautiful person I can think of and allow myself to stay in their presence for as long as it seems necessary, as long as it sustains us both.  Will we upset one another?  Will we abandon one another on some subtle fundamental level?  Will I leave at the critical moment or will I depart at the exact moment when the stars indicate?

I will follow this beauty anywhere and sacrifice everything for it.

2010-10-13

Just chatting about stuff and shit, you know

It joys me to be reminded, over four months out of New Zealand, of the smallness of the cultural discourse.  When I was a small child I did not know that the rest of the world existed.  I knew Australia was a place that people went for holidays sometimes and was startled when some family friends moved to Australia - I didn't realise people actually lived there.  I heard of a place called the United States of America in a song and I visualised it as a large gymnasium.  I knew the mythical Disneyland is in Los Angeles and I imagined this as a very sad place where a poor little girl called Angeles was lost.  Even my awareness of New Zealand was limited to a few hundred kilometres in any direction.  When my sister went to Auckland the place was beyond my powers of imagination.  Now I am 26 years old and have spent a few months on the other side of the planet and I get this funny feeling that New Zealand is a rather strange place - a little attempt at European culture on a couple of little islands deep in the South Pacific Ocean.  It is perhaps understandable that our attempt at cultural discourse is equally little and with any attempt at reaching beyond our little culture we should receive a pat on the head and congratulations. 

In a culture where the norm is to mumble and make a point to not be understood completely because that is embarrassing it is difficult to create a public discourse that is anything but childish.  It seems intensely exciting and subversive to partake in a conversation that really cuts to the heart of the issue in a way that enriches the understanding and maybe even the sensitivity of the interlocutors.  Consequently our understanding of even the most superficial and simple aspects of our own culture are limited.  However it is possible for two people, or even hundreds of people in my experience, to engage verbally on a matter and through this engagement and mutual desire to deepen and diversify understanding actually find a solution that is greater than either party could have even considered alone.  This is of course far beyond the dynamics of arguing a point and attempting to be right, this is a type of communication that uses language as a medium but actually connects to a far more profound and subtle energy.  I hypothesise that this energy is a psychic connection between the two communicants or maybe even to a larger awareness, but I don't know this of course.  I can only speculate on the experiences I have shared.

I know that New Zealand is a beautiful place filled with many intelligent sensitive people who are waiting to be engaged on a deeper level than they are currently being engaged on.  My suggestion is that we stop mumbling and stop pretending our vocabularies are so infantile and really start exploring the possibilities of this language we have developed.  Perhaps we will understand ourselves and our others a bit better and political correctness can be replaced gradually with a respect and admiration for a culture that is more interesting than we realise.

2010-10-12

Baptism by dumpster juice


Last night I found in a dumpster behind the supermarket the exact organic spelt bread that I mentioned yesterday morning I would like, but is too expensive. I cannot eat gluten, so it was very nice to find sitting peacefully on top of this dumpster three loaves of organic spelt and organic kamut bread. Is this merely a coincidence?

When I was in Australia last time, travelling with four Swedish men and dumpster diving everywhere we went, we noticed a lot of these coincidences and started joking about "Dumpster God", who would regularly answer our prayers and provide us with exactly what we needed or wanted; especially when we didn't realise we were praying.

This god is obviously a metaphor for something real that we experience. Does this mean our god exists? Does this mean our god does not exist? We continue to be amazed at the abundance and joy that Dumpster God brings us through her divine dumpsters, or even an average dumpster transformed by her divine presence.

Of course Dumpster God does not exist because we made her up. Every time we reference her it is a joke, though in terms of our own communication as a group, she has entered our language and has become a useful metaphor for communicating something palpably real to us all. It makes me question whether metaphor and myth are as real as anything else we experience. We must create a word to describe it because there is no physical measurable scientifically-proven word to explain this thing that is clearly a daily part of our lives.

If Dumpster God is the only god that we experience, what about all these other gods people talk about? Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Baal, Zeus, etcetera; can these gods really exist in comparison to the true god, Dumpster God, who I know exists because I have experienced her presence and her benevolent effect in my life? Surely Dumpster God is the one true god because she is my name for the infinite inexplicable benevolence of the universe.

I know that in Australia, where so much food is thrown away every day for no reason and usually with no benefactor, I will never be hungry, because Dumpster God is on my side, protecting me and providing for me and my friends. Only, however, the ones who show their belief with a joy and exuberance and shameless confidence that brings us together and brings us into the sticky glory of baptism by dumpster juice.

2010-10-11

What I happen to notice

I suppose I am supposed to follow the guidance of the universe.  This is more simple than it sounds.  When I find myself in a surprising and delightful place, perhaps there is a reason for me being there.  Perhaps it is not accidental that I find myself here.  I do try to think about these things.  Often the most irrational and exciting messages can be much more useful than obvious factual ones.  The causality of our world, we now know, is an infinitely complex collection of influences not at all bound by time and locality, which we consider absolutes.  We can at any moment be affected by an influence far far away that otherwise appears to be unconnected.  We can received influences from the future or the past as easily as we can from the present because modern science and intuition will tell you that the future and the past do not exist; obviously.  When attention is given to the subtle things in life, the irrational things and the possible meaningless things that may in fact be more meaningful than anything logical, I happen to enrich my life immeasurably and I also tend to feel much more well informed.  I am mostly completely ignorant and now that I recognise this I am much more inclined to take information, however unreliable, from a variety of sources, not just the newspapers.  In fact I am much more inclined to believe my dreams than the newspaper; maybe I am an idiot, maybe I simply don't trust the editorial process.  I don't trust censorship and the limits that capitalism places on honesty and expression and sensitivity.  I find that one must choose their level of sensitivity relatively consciously.  We can regulate it easily by the amount of cigarettes smoked and wheat eaten.  The more sensitive one becomes, the more she will notice about the world she finds herself in.  Depending on the environment one chooses to live in, a certain degree of insensitivity, a degree of disconnection from the self and the world, is necessary in order to survive and not be overwhelmed or confined to a mental institution.  Luckily we are relatively free, especially if we stop watching TV, and we can easily choose our environment and regulate our sensitivity to the subtleties of the world to suit that environment and our degree of desire to know what is really going on.  It seems we all have a powerful psychic potential, but I personally don't have a great deal of experience in that area.  I just pay attention to what I notice and try to make sense of it.

2010-10-09

Employment for the accumulation of economic benefits

To get the job you first must learn the language.  We understand that there is a special language associated only with job descriptions and job applications and this language must be mastered.  Despite how you might feel about the strange and confusing nature of this language it actually makes the entire process much more honest.  Nobody speaks this language, although there are many individuals involved in recruitment who are fluent in it.  It is not a language that in any way enables human expression, which almost every other language on the planet it designed for.  What it does make perfectly clear, however, is the first thing required of you if you would like to fit this position; repress your natural flow of expression.  It is not appropriate and it is not acceptable.  What would be truly inhuman is if we provided a warm and friendly interview process and a job description that is lucid and in the native language of the writer and the reader.  This would be inhuman because we then need to proceed to the workplace where this type of warmth and normality is completely unacceptable and the role we are paying you to perform is the only acceptable presence.  We adhere to this recruitment method because we do not want to become swept up in the natural process of the universe in which the right person comes to us at the right time.  Submitting to this process not only undermines our ability to control as much as possible of our business and the people associated with it but it also leaves us open for problematic and unnecessary developments and evolutions in the culture of our company.  It is important that we continue to provide a consistent unchanging service to our shareholders.  We all need money in this world.  One cannot live without money, and so we must do what is required to make this money that we need to remain alive.  We must submit to the will of the employer, who after all is only submitting to the will of her employer.  To be profound for a moment we must in fact submit to the will of employment itself.  We are human and nothing is more human than employment.  It has become the natural way and will now always be the natural way of humanity.  To be initiated as an adult one must seek, submit and adhere to employment for the duration of one's adulthood.  This is responsibility.  This is maturity.  And of course the economy is our secular god though we don't need to talk about that it does not pay to think about these things.  Now is the time, brothers and sisters, to release yourself to employment for the accumulation of economic benefits.

2010-10-07

I am Kristus Kirkko

How do we decide who we are going to be today?  Last night I relaxed into the bath, knowing that when I woke up in the morning I would be a different person.  I have woken up now and my beard is gone and I know I am different, but what this difference will look like has not yet been defined.  I am still free at this early hour to define who I am going to be today.  It is of course easier when I am meeting people who do not know me and therefore do not harbour any expectations of me.  I have spent many years searching within for the Real Me and found nothing.  I know that if I find out who I really am then there will be no more confusion about how to act and what to do because I will simply know my character and understand my morality and act with the integrity of the person I have always been and will always be.  However I have never noticed any evidence that there is a consistent person within me.  All I see is potential and experience and the hope that is the mixing of these two in the present moment.  All I can do in this moment I am experiencing is mix a little bit of experience with a little bit of potential and see what I am capable of.  This seems to change from day to day based on what food I eat and the people I associate with and the environment I expose myself to.  Otherwise I am an open book, a notebook in which anything can be written, from the most banal drivel to the most profound literature with the power to shock the world into catharsis with its novelty.  It seems to me, at least from the outside, that some adults find a persona they enjoy and try to stick with it throughout their life.  Will I too find such a successful and enjoyable persona that I will hold onto it for the duration of this lifetime until a physical death ends my ego and my lifetime and my career?  Or will another kind of death come along every few months or every few days and kill the person I am trying to be, forcing me to look around and build a better version based on the information and resources around me?  It is just a shame that I feel so silly and pretentious changing my name all the time when really it is supremely appropriate because "Chris Kirk" has too many connotations for me to receive too severe a re-imagining.  Do I have the integrity to undermine myself and start introducing myself as Kristus Kirkko and therefore figure out who I can be under that name?  I am the manifestation of my own fantasy.  I am a mythological being inhabiting a physical body and until I leave this body behind I have forced myself to deal with the reality or unreality of this world.  I personally can't tell whether it is reality or unreality.  I am not sure whether the image I use my senses to gather and my mind to correlate and project is in fact reality because it differs significantly from the reality of even those closest to me who I am able to communicate well with.  If my experience of this world is so different from another human being then how different is my experience from that of a tree, another life form, who my communication with is less certain?  I no longer claim that the holographic image of reality that I project onto the world is in any way accurate, but it is what I have to work with here and I am happy to see such a beautiful sky when I wake up in the morning.  It reminds me of the vast limits of even my limited sphere of this universe.