This is the first excerpt from the audio version of my book "How Australia Made Me An Anarchist", soon to be available in full.
The demonic artifice of instrumentality take 4
The original text is also available.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
2012-01-25
Pain and beauty
I can only assume God gave me a human body for a reason. I can only assume that my desires and compulsions serve some purpose. Perhaps I differ from other people in that I decided that everything I do should benefit me in some way, as opposed to destroying or numbing myself. This is a life-long process ending inevitably with death. I have heard theories that the self-fulfilment process continues after death, that after death you transcend these concerns to a higher level or that you cease to exist. I do not know, I only have memory of experience this side of death and I do not pretend to speculate further.
I propose that it is possible to know and respond to a personal truth so complete that I can only assume that it benefits me after death, on inconceivable levels and throughout parallel universes in which I may or may not exist.
You are reading this with a particular mind, a mind that seems to be strongly embedded in a body that is strongly embedded in an environment, this universe. It seems to me that for most people most of the time they have limited their awareness to this double-layered reality of body and universe. We struggle as a species and as individuals to maintain and expand a valuable applicable understanding of this body/universe reality while simultaneously aware of an incomprehensibly larger and more complex reality, experienced most commonly through dreams. We perform many convoluted experiments to understand this body/universe but we primarily get our information through the five senses; taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch. There is also an intricate network of psychic interconnectedness, but for the purposes of this chapter I will maintain focus on the relationship with the body.
It is impossible to separate the body and the mind, but what does promote separation is the consciousness. Unlike the body and the mind, indistinguishable, the consciousness can choose whether or not it listens to the messages of the body. The body communicates with the consciousness in myriad ways, but today I reduce them to pain and beauty.
We all know that when we touch something hot the body will send a message of pain to the exact part of the body that requires conscious attention and thus the consciousness disengages the surface of the body from the excessive heat. Pain is extremely important in knowing how to keep the body alive. Without pain we will never know we are killing ourselves. Pain is designed to be avoided. We don’t want to touch the fire because the pain makes it repulsive.
However, when we combine this natural pain avoidance instinct with the intellectual superiority complex of the human consciousness we come up with the bizarre idea that pain is “bad”. It thus becomes a moral imperative to stop all human pain on this planet. Being a completely hysterical process disguised as logical and with the power of human organisation and technology, this anti-pain campaign causes a lot of pain.
There is a tendency for governments to ordain themselves with the responsibility of ending human pain and so it is the governments who maintain “defence” forces who are constantly searching for a potential enemy to attack. Ironically this process causes a lot of pain and despite the evidence that suggests that this process does not in the long-term create peace, it is important for the survival of the governmental organisations that they maintain the appearance of stopping pain through this incredibly painful process.
The pain of poverty is a pain that seems to span all life-forms and all time. In the same way that a tree in poor soil, lacking the nutrients to sustain life, will slowly and painfully die, a family who can no longer extract food from their environment because the soil is barren or the animals have emigrated following the destruction of their habitat or because they have forgotten the wisdom of their ancestors about how to live with the land and have the land provide will experience the pain of hunger or starvation.
I have never felt the pain of true hunger. This is because I grew up in a culture defined largely by the massive feat of organisation and technology known as Capitalism, a noble effort of humanity to cease the pain of poverty forever. However, it seems Capitalism has a few painful side-effects. Primarily, it requires a massive amount of organisation. It requires the sustained efforts of almost the entire human population from age 18-65 to keep the mechanisms of Capitalism moving.
To maintain this strict regime of working 40 hours a week for 47 years is apparently very exhausting and leads to alienation, depression, stress, cancer, addiction and of course the feeling of the meaninglessness of existence. I have memories of some of these painful experiences and tend to link them back to my own behaviour, rather than blaming the system, but I do not experience them anymore and thus do not feel comfortable talking about them. It seems the above painful symptoms are unavoidable side-effects of those who choose to dedicate their lives to Capitalism in the hope that they never experience the pain of poverty.
From the moment a child is born into this world they begin to learn. They learn about their world and their place in the world. For depictions of a natural, chaotic human education read the novels of Hermann Hesse. This process, known in Australian tradition as Walkabout, involves a confrontation with nature, where Chaos reigns and the individual must rely on the inconsistent support of synchronicity, God and the kindness of strangers. One can never predict what will result from this individuation process, destruction, realisation, simplicity or corruption. It is irremovable from the rhythms of life and the movements of nature and thus fits awkwardly with Civilisation. Thus Civilisation has provided Education.
The purpose of Education is to send every child to an identical structured environment to memorise an identical curriculum and thus iron out, as much as possible, the natural variations and discrepancies in the children’s responses to the world.
It is possible that some children, precocious in their examination but short-sighted in their ignorance, feel some confusion about the state of the world maintained by their culture, seeing the control structures’ apparent anti-human behaviour but not seeing the pain that it alleviates, the equality of thought and behaviour, the alienation from the dangerously chaotic nature of an uncontrolled earth.
A successful education therefore relieves the child from the pain of self-examination and potential confusion by embedding them deeply in the rhythms of Capitalism, repetitive and therefore reliable, smoothing out the defects and deviations of nature. Having completed a successful education a successful child will have successfully managed to find a way to contribute while maintaining an arsenal of logical explanations and entertaining distractions from urges encouraging their spiritual fulfilment outside of the civilised mechanisms of Capitalism.
Just as war can be a painful road to peace, so can Education be a painful process for the child, channelling frustration into bullying, channelling confusion into conformity and self-expression into drug abuse. But this pain is inevitably necessary to maintain the cultural unity necessary to perpetuate Capitalism and obviate other natural forms of pain.
The most commonly accepted form of pain is, of course, physical pain, caused by illness or injury. To alleviate physical pain completely humans have organised the impressively complex Health Industry. Health, in this context, is painlessness, because pain, deep within the fundamental unexamined belief systems of the Health Industry, is “bad”.
Pain is manifest as “symptoms” which can be repressed with the aid of drugs like antihistamines, for the repression of the symptoms of allergy, anti-depressants, for the repression of the symptoms of Civilisation, and of course the epitome of the Health Industry, pain killers such as paracetamol and morphine, all of which help the civilised man continue for as long as possible in an unhealthy environment without pain.
Sometimes it is necessary to target the source of pain by cutting out a cancer or removing an individual from society and placing them in a mental institution or prison and thus tackling the root of the problem and allowing the continuation of an unhealthy environment.
One of the unavoidable side-effects of the Health Industry is the dependence on drugs and experts that alienates the individual from their own body, what it needs to maintain healthy and heal itself, how it responds to its environment and the substances it consumes. The Health Industry, it can be said, is addictive.
The primary intention of the Health Industry in relation to pain is to overcome death, an aim not yet fulfilled. In light of this failure the Health Industry compromises by withholding death for as long as possible, desperately clinging to the last seconds of life, regardless of their quality. It seems death, inevitable though it is, is the shameful failure of our anti-pain culture. Death is the most painful thing of all, the prospect of death, the process of death and the results of death are unbearably painful for a society in so much denial about reality and what it means to be alive. Who could argue with the necessity of stopping death when it confronts us with our temporality, our deep involvement with the processes of nature, loss and loneliness.
My mother’s death was the most powerfully transformative pain of my life, stripping me naked of the supportive nurturing aura of love I had experienced since birth and thrusting me fully equipped with the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood into a world far vaster than I anticipated. My mother killed herself 25 days after my 21st birthday, for which she organised a surprise party for me, designed to lift me out of the depression into which I had sank.
The depression was caused by a new realisation of the personal and social possibilities of the world and a simultaneous lack of change of lifestyle to match my realisations, excessive use of marijuana and obsessive love. My mother’s death, unlike her surprise birthday party, rocked my world to the extent that all my foundations collapsed and I was left alone in a terrestrial environment that I slowly discovered was not as dangerous, chaotic or lonely as I had been warned.
Pain has been one of the guiding forces of my life. Unlike a recurring dream that repeats again and again if not acknowledged I don’t seem to need so much pain to listen and understand and make appropriate changes. But sometimes I need a jolt of pain like a dose of ECT.
Seven years ago I wandered down to the beach one Sunday after work, alone. I met a group of people who excited and fascinated me, I went home with them and they became my friends. One man in particular, Darius, 21, I found particularly fascinating and disgusting the first time I met him. The second time I saw him we realised an intense unspoken connection between the two of us. We were young and stoned and could not have imagined that this intensity between us was years of evolving friendship stretching backwards through time.
We were all stoned and Darius cornered me alone in the kitchen. He picked up a knife and held it towards me and he asked me to lie on the floor so he could cut me open and eat my intestines. I refused, semi-erect and scared of death. From this moment on his presence or lack of presence was my only concern, I was in love, I was obsessed. The deeper I got into this obsessive love the more pain I felt at the slightest rejection, the more impossible it became to tell him how I feel and thus diffuse the situation. My silent intensity increased, along with my marijuana intake and the pain of his absence would cause me to bang my head against the wall and to punch myself in the face. I resolved the situation by finally sending him a desperate intense email about months of repressed feelings that I could not possibly say to his face like a human being. He sent me a short, dismissive callous reply that stabbed my heart figuratively and provoked me to break my relationship with him completely, banish him from my life for a few years until I calm down. His reply seemed exceptionally mean-spirited at the time but it was just what I needed, a shock of pain, because I had built mental structures and lifestyle structures to facilitate the feeling of a lot of low-level pain. For some reason I needed that pain and I found a way of manifesting it. Finally, I felt it intensely enough to change my life, to ease the pain.
Somehow I knew that I would not see him for years and then our friendship would somehow be renewed. He moved in with his mother and girlfriend not far from where I was living on the far north west coast of New Zealand and we reunited, free from the need to experience the pain we had caused ourselves and each other six years earlier.
I fell in love again though, shortly after banishing Darius from my life. My flatmate’s brother came to visit and he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Samuel was 15 years old, with long blonde hair and soft white skin. I wanted to raise him on a pedestal as an artefact of extreme beauty; I wanted to make love to him, fulfil my desire, worship his body and bring him pleasure. I felt desire, admiration, shame and delight and I didn’t know what to do with this bundle of conflicting emotions and so I did nothing, again repressing my love as a shameful object. I hid, I made outbursts, I ran away and I mumbled my desire and of course with such chaotic unstable expressions I created no manifestation of our mutual love.
Three years after the instigation of this internal affair I had only one option left. Samuel was working as a body piercer and so I decided to have him pierce my nipple. I sat on his bench and he pushed his sanitised needle through my nipple. I felt no pain, but a wave of heat passed over my body and I almost fainted. He laid me back and lifted my legs until I returned to normal. I invited him to have a drink with me and we had a nice talk; but I told him I “care about” him when I should have told him that I want to make love with him. This initial meeting became nothing and I made another appointment for my second nipple. I approached my second piercing differently. My brother told me that having his nipple pierced was the most painful thing he had experienced. I wasn’t convinced that my yearning for this beautiful young man was a lesser pain than having a needle shoved through my nipple.
I lay down on the bench, I closed my eyes and I focussed on my breath. I felt no pain, no discomfort, just the intensity of the moment wash over me like a single wave from the cleansing ocean. I stood, thanked him and left. He was surprised by my abrupt behaviour but I had determined to move on with my life, to provide that last dose of pain and then make room for a new love. I got the pain I somehow needed through frustrated love until the pain was sufficient and then I chose for it to end. Why would I cause myself so much pain? I don’t know, all I know is that I created all the necessary variables to experience and prolong that pain until I was finished with it, then I orchestrated a rather convoluted symbolic situation in which to end the process. Three years later I have fallen in love many times since and he is but a memory and my friend on Facebook.
This was 2008, my final year in Auckland. I truly tried my best to live the life I was educated to live. I got my degree, I paid my rent, everything was taken away from me when I lost my mother, my home and my life purpose, I wandered around in confusion, I came back to Auckland to try again. I tried again with Samuel, I hung out with the Hare Krishnas and I wrote and performed poetry. I returned to Auckland for two full years after my depression and lonely wandering manifested nothing tangible. A fulfilling life failed to materialise for me in the city, despite my honest attempts.
I found myself, towards the end of my second year, experiencing the same marijuana-fuelled depression I had run away from last time. There was so much existential pain in my meaningless life and I had no idea why. I didn’t know it at the time, having spent my entire life living in houses, but I was suffering from what I would go on to call Domestic Compulsive Disorder. I didn’t know what I could do differently, all I knew was that my life was meaningless and I had to do something about it. I smoked more marijuana and stayed home more, with the comforts of television, internet, the bath and my bed.
I found myself, late one midweek morning, cowering in a corner of the living room in a foetal position, my last cone of marijuana packed into my bong, unsmoked, the banging of my head no longer providing relief from the unavoidable noise of the pain I had made for myself, non-physical but tangibly palpable. The pain hurt but I can’t say it was bad.
I saw life as a wave of fluctuating ups and downs, rather than the steep climb from unconsciousness to enlightenment and at that moment, in that room, in that foetal position, I saw clearly the exact moment I hit rock bottom, as I had been aiming for months, and thus began the ascent up the other side. I instantly felt my energy come back, so strong I felt indignation at my pathetic position and I channelled this manic energy into immediate life change. I ran around the house smashing my belongings, the useless objects that weighed me down to a life that did not satisfy. The pain had finally reached a sufficient level to provoke action. That night I filled two rubbish sacks with useless objects I had accumulated and that sucked up the space around me. I smashed my bong on the driveway, throwing it from the balcony and unintentionally baptising myself in shit-stinking bong water as it flew from my hand and momentum took the bong and not the water inside.
So quickly and easily I was free and could spend the next few months clearing out the practical considerations before leaving Auckland for my first invitation to paradise.
Living a healthy lifestyle in a nurturing inspiring environment I would lay in bed at night in utter peace, I would feel emotions moving through my body like blood, like water. I tried to understand these feelings, to name them. I felt happiness and sadness overlap until they were indistinguishable. I couldn’t look at my life and decide whether I was failing or succeeding and therefore whether my emotions were happy or sad; my life was a blank slate. I felt confident to do anything, to go anywhere, or to stay put and do nothing. If I felt sick I would fast and go to bed, but I lived under a skylight on a mezannine and it was too hot there during the day. I was always happy to get out of bed in the morning and face the brightness and the vast ocean and the sound of its waves rolling up the hill like an amphitheatre. If I felt depressed or tired I found work to do or I walked the dogs down to the beach and I would return hungry and tired to eat and relax.
Pain would pass through me quickly and easily. The dogs would kindly and lovingly lick my wounds without me having to ask. Every morning I would feel new, every time I dived naked into the ocean I would emerge refreshed. When my hair was cut it would rot back into the earth, along with everything else that could not be recycled or fed to the pigs. I would kneel on the earth to weed the strawberry patch, I would bend down towards the earth to pick my salads, and I would lie down on the earth in the long grass and masturbate looking at the sky. Pain was not an issue.
I had lots of friends, Auckland was a good place to make friends, the social networks were well-defined and interconnected. I described my paradise to them and they told me they would come to visit, but mostly they did not. Nothing was more special than the days when my friends did come to visit and I accommodated them in my bed or on my floor. To bring friends to share paradise with me was all the joy I needed and taught me what the next step in my life was.
The two friends who came to visit me, the only two not trapped by the accumulations and commitments of their lives, inspired me to travel freely with them. I had all the time in the world, but still there was only time for the most beautiful people and so I dedicated my life to them. I followed Bill and Lauren until there was more beauty this side of my horizon. I followed beauty to Australia and returned to paradise to find the dogs dead. I could not maintain paradise and pursue beauty simultaneously, so I chose beauty, dreaming that one day I would return to paradise with a precious friend to share it with.
I met four Swedish men in Australia and travelled with them. We experienced so much joy together, I fell in love with them all and they invited me back to Sweden with them. I flew to Sweden, I saw my friends and I have not 15 months later returned to New Zealand.
In 2007 I was searching for a new home and I was blessed to be able to choose from two delightful prospects. I was shown around one house by a beautiful young man, sexy, friendly, and for this reason only one decision was possible. I never made love to this sexy young man but somehow I knew when I first looked at him that I was being offered something in him. Now, four years later, we are about to be in the same country again, drastically different people both, but a persistent connection, manifest in my experience of his luminous beauty and the continued potential of our friendship.
The world is so open and giving to me. I do not earn money and yet even material objects are abundant. Because of my freedom and joy there is a lot of room in my life to pursue what is meaningful to me, to change my mind and pursue the best option, to not know where my actions will take me.
I marvel at this world’s insistence that pain is bad when it continues to provide me with invaluable information about the world I am living in. Beauty is the most important thing in my life and I pursue beauty relentlessly, though I don’t know what to do with it when I get it. It is painful to be rejected, though only for a moment. When I am accepted the joy can be so overwhelming it could be called pain. When I’m feeling strong I can lie under the stars, lonely but at peace, feeling the pain of my yearning for my absent lover and smiling at this delicious pain. Only when I hold my breath is the pain unbearable, when I breathe well I can be sure that I can go outside and urinate and it will soak into the earth.
When I slash open my thumb or am attacked by Police I can’t help but ask, “Why have I done this to myself?” “I didn’t mean to,” some might say. “It was an accident.” But it is never accidental. When my presence, my actions and my relationship to my environment are entirely in my control I cannot claim that the results of these variables are accidental. When I tell my friend that I would like a good cry because I never cry, and then I forget the comment completely, and then I move on with my life and orchestrate a series of events that results unexpectedly in me crying in the rain in Stockholm alone and then I return to my friend and she reminds me of my comment, I wonder if my dedication to the meaning and purpose of my life is entirely the responsibility of consciousness.
When I am not making conscious plans, pursuing them and succeeding, am I a failure, am I failing to realise my potential, am I being led nowhere by no one? That cannot be true when I find myself in increasingly surprising and beautiful places with so many exciting and beautiful people. I have never been able to conceive of plans as complex and delightful as the turns my life has taken. I would never dare hope for so much love and beauty and my imagination is not great enough to conceive of the wonders I have seen.
Like Alice following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole I am ready to jump at the right offer and abandon everything I know for the unexpected. I have been warned of danger by people who barricade themselves in houses but my experience consistently contradicts their threats disguised as advice.
When I sleep on the bare earth I am safe from snakes and crocodiles and Police. Even rain usually gives me the night to rest beside the fire. I find beautiful people and I am not scared of them like I used to be. I naturally give the most exciting the most attention. Perhaps I will tell them how I feel, if appropriate, or maybe I will just touch their shoulder and look into their eyes. Even then I have discovered it is difficult to look into both eyes at once.
When I do what I am compelled to do I don’t see how I can fail. My purpose, after all, is to realise myself fully in this world and then dissolve into another world via death. If I notice a beautiful human my conscious mind may tell me I want to make love to them. The truth of my body cannot be translated into language however. Maybe I’m not going to make love to this person, maybe we are simply going to share space with the knowledge that I want to make love and he does not, and maybe this is sufficiently intense and valuable.
I go to temporary Edens where my tribe gathers and the true movements of life, emerging from the earth, emerging from the space between the humans that excite and terrify us the most, emerging from the subtleties of our bodies, become our guiding forces and are intensified in the natural environment and the familiar social structure of the tribe. The concept that some emotions or situations are “good” and others “bad” becomes too ludicrous to entertain. The ups and downs are rich and dynamic, they are my life and I value them.
One day I am feeling lonely and horny and want to make a connection. I walk to the waterhole to swim under the sun with my tribe and my frustration is exasperated by my observation that everyone seems to be ignoring me. I stand amongst the people, interacting with one another, thinking I want their attention but I’m too sad and weak to ask for it. Eventually I storm off up the path alone. Everyone else walks slowly together, but I charge ahead, angry at being ignored. It occurs to me that I obviously want to be alone and thus I walk alone despite my habit of togetherness. It occurs to me that all day I have wanted to be alone and successfully I have manifested this through the pathetic conscious idea that I desperately need someone to validate me with their attention. If my intention was personal space then I am amazed that I manipulated my own consciousness to such an extent that I repelled those around me with desperation. Am I ever not manifesting my intentions when my true will is this powerful and my conscious mind so irrelevant?
I am not alone in this world. When I follow a beauty I can only assume he wants to be followed. We have chosen each other to share this experience. We have chosen each other before our lives began, we chose each other in another dimension or outside of time, we chose each other via the unconscious psychic network that connects us all. I don’t know, but I know that we choose beauty to communicate with each other.
Why am I staring at this child I do not know, how we could be friends I cannot imagine, but your beauty singles you out like a spotlight and rest assured that I have noticed and I am ready to honour or love you the second the opportunity arises.
The more carefully I listen to the messages of my body, the more it tells me. It seems there is always a deeper and richer and more complex understanding to be gained from real communication. Words may be limited in their capacity, but pain and beauty hold an infinite depth of perfect contextualised truth.
I guess if I calmly and confidently pursue this beauty who presents herself to me I will understand what we mean to each other. If I respond to the subtle pains of my body with respect and love then I may not need the gross extremes of pain I have created for myself in the past.
Life is an ever-opening flower of incomprehensible beauty.
I propose that it is possible to know and respond to a personal truth so complete that I can only assume that it benefits me after death, on inconceivable levels and throughout parallel universes in which I may or may not exist.
You are reading this with a particular mind, a mind that seems to be strongly embedded in a body that is strongly embedded in an environment, this universe. It seems to me that for most people most of the time they have limited their awareness to this double-layered reality of body and universe. We struggle as a species and as individuals to maintain and expand a valuable applicable understanding of this body/universe reality while simultaneously aware of an incomprehensibly larger and more complex reality, experienced most commonly through dreams. We perform many convoluted experiments to understand this body/universe but we primarily get our information through the five senses; taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch. There is also an intricate network of psychic interconnectedness, but for the purposes of this chapter I will maintain focus on the relationship with the body.
It is impossible to separate the body and the mind, but what does promote separation is the consciousness. Unlike the body and the mind, indistinguishable, the consciousness can choose whether or not it listens to the messages of the body. The body communicates with the consciousness in myriad ways, but today I reduce them to pain and beauty.
We all know that when we touch something hot the body will send a message of pain to the exact part of the body that requires conscious attention and thus the consciousness disengages the surface of the body from the excessive heat. Pain is extremely important in knowing how to keep the body alive. Without pain we will never know we are killing ourselves. Pain is designed to be avoided. We don’t want to touch the fire because the pain makes it repulsive.
However, when we combine this natural pain avoidance instinct with the intellectual superiority complex of the human consciousness we come up with the bizarre idea that pain is “bad”. It thus becomes a moral imperative to stop all human pain on this planet. Being a completely hysterical process disguised as logical and with the power of human organisation and technology, this anti-pain campaign causes a lot of pain.
There is a tendency for governments to ordain themselves with the responsibility of ending human pain and so it is the governments who maintain “defence” forces who are constantly searching for a potential enemy to attack. Ironically this process causes a lot of pain and despite the evidence that suggests that this process does not in the long-term create peace, it is important for the survival of the governmental organisations that they maintain the appearance of stopping pain through this incredibly painful process.
The pain of poverty is a pain that seems to span all life-forms and all time. In the same way that a tree in poor soil, lacking the nutrients to sustain life, will slowly and painfully die, a family who can no longer extract food from their environment because the soil is barren or the animals have emigrated following the destruction of their habitat or because they have forgotten the wisdom of their ancestors about how to live with the land and have the land provide will experience the pain of hunger or starvation.
I have never felt the pain of true hunger. This is because I grew up in a culture defined largely by the massive feat of organisation and technology known as Capitalism, a noble effort of humanity to cease the pain of poverty forever. However, it seems Capitalism has a few painful side-effects. Primarily, it requires a massive amount of organisation. It requires the sustained efforts of almost the entire human population from age 18-65 to keep the mechanisms of Capitalism moving.
To maintain this strict regime of working 40 hours a week for 47 years is apparently very exhausting and leads to alienation, depression, stress, cancer, addiction and of course the feeling of the meaninglessness of existence. I have memories of some of these painful experiences and tend to link them back to my own behaviour, rather than blaming the system, but I do not experience them anymore and thus do not feel comfortable talking about them. It seems the above painful symptoms are unavoidable side-effects of those who choose to dedicate their lives to Capitalism in the hope that they never experience the pain of poverty.
From the moment a child is born into this world they begin to learn. They learn about their world and their place in the world. For depictions of a natural, chaotic human education read the novels of Hermann Hesse. This process, known in Australian tradition as Walkabout, involves a confrontation with nature, where Chaos reigns and the individual must rely on the inconsistent support of synchronicity, God and the kindness of strangers. One can never predict what will result from this individuation process, destruction, realisation, simplicity or corruption. It is irremovable from the rhythms of life and the movements of nature and thus fits awkwardly with Civilisation. Thus Civilisation has provided Education.
The purpose of Education is to send every child to an identical structured environment to memorise an identical curriculum and thus iron out, as much as possible, the natural variations and discrepancies in the children’s responses to the world.
It is possible that some children, precocious in their examination but short-sighted in their ignorance, feel some confusion about the state of the world maintained by their culture, seeing the control structures’ apparent anti-human behaviour but not seeing the pain that it alleviates, the equality of thought and behaviour, the alienation from the dangerously chaotic nature of an uncontrolled earth.
A successful education therefore relieves the child from the pain of self-examination and potential confusion by embedding them deeply in the rhythms of Capitalism, repetitive and therefore reliable, smoothing out the defects and deviations of nature. Having completed a successful education a successful child will have successfully managed to find a way to contribute while maintaining an arsenal of logical explanations and entertaining distractions from urges encouraging their spiritual fulfilment outside of the civilised mechanisms of Capitalism.
Just as war can be a painful road to peace, so can Education be a painful process for the child, channelling frustration into bullying, channelling confusion into conformity and self-expression into drug abuse. But this pain is inevitably necessary to maintain the cultural unity necessary to perpetuate Capitalism and obviate other natural forms of pain.
The most commonly accepted form of pain is, of course, physical pain, caused by illness or injury. To alleviate physical pain completely humans have organised the impressively complex Health Industry. Health, in this context, is painlessness, because pain, deep within the fundamental unexamined belief systems of the Health Industry, is “bad”.
Pain is manifest as “symptoms” which can be repressed with the aid of drugs like antihistamines, for the repression of the symptoms of allergy, anti-depressants, for the repression of the symptoms of Civilisation, and of course the epitome of the Health Industry, pain killers such as paracetamol and morphine, all of which help the civilised man continue for as long as possible in an unhealthy environment without pain.
Sometimes it is necessary to target the source of pain by cutting out a cancer or removing an individual from society and placing them in a mental institution or prison and thus tackling the root of the problem and allowing the continuation of an unhealthy environment.
One of the unavoidable side-effects of the Health Industry is the dependence on drugs and experts that alienates the individual from their own body, what it needs to maintain healthy and heal itself, how it responds to its environment and the substances it consumes. The Health Industry, it can be said, is addictive.
The primary intention of the Health Industry in relation to pain is to overcome death, an aim not yet fulfilled. In light of this failure the Health Industry compromises by withholding death for as long as possible, desperately clinging to the last seconds of life, regardless of their quality. It seems death, inevitable though it is, is the shameful failure of our anti-pain culture. Death is the most painful thing of all, the prospect of death, the process of death and the results of death are unbearably painful for a society in so much denial about reality and what it means to be alive. Who could argue with the necessity of stopping death when it confronts us with our temporality, our deep involvement with the processes of nature, loss and loneliness.
My mother’s death was the most powerfully transformative pain of my life, stripping me naked of the supportive nurturing aura of love I had experienced since birth and thrusting me fully equipped with the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood into a world far vaster than I anticipated. My mother killed herself 25 days after my 21st birthday, for which she organised a surprise party for me, designed to lift me out of the depression into which I had sank.
The depression was caused by a new realisation of the personal and social possibilities of the world and a simultaneous lack of change of lifestyle to match my realisations, excessive use of marijuana and obsessive love. My mother’s death, unlike her surprise birthday party, rocked my world to the extent that all my foundations collapsed and I was left alone in a terrestrial environment that I slowly discovered was not as dangerous, chaotic or lonely as I had been warned.
Pain has been one of the guiding forces of my life. Unlike a recurring dream that repeats again and again if not acknowledged I don’t seem to need so much pain to listen and understand and make appropriate changes. But sometimes I need a jolt of pain like a dose of ECT.
Seven years ago I wandered down to the beach one Sunday after work, alone. I met a group of people who excited and fascinated me, I went home with them and they became my friends. One man in particular, Darius, 21, I found particularly fascinating and disgusting the first time I met him. The second time I saw him we realised an intense unspoken connection between the two of us. We were young and stoned and could not have imagined that this intensity between us was years of evolving friendship stretching backwards through time.
We were all stoned and Darius cornered me alone in the kitchen. He picked up a knife and held it towards me and he asked me to lie on the floor so he could cut me open and eat my intestines. I refused, semi-erect and scared of death. From this moment on his presence or lack of presence was my only concern, I was in love, I was obsessed. The deeper I got into this obsessive love the more pain I felt at the slightest rejection, the more impossible it became to tell him how I feel and thus diffuse the situation. My silent intensity increased, along with my marijuana intake and the pain of his absence would cause me to bang my head against the wall and to punch myself in the face. I resolved the situation by finally sending him a desperate intense email about months of repressed feelings that I could not possibly say to his face like a human being. He sent me a short, dismissive callous reply that stabbed my heart figuratively and provoked me to break my relationship with him completely, banish him from my life for a few years until I calm down. His reply seemed exceptionally mean-spirited at the time but it was just what I needed, a shock of pain, because I had built mental structures and lifestyle structures to facilitate the feeling of a lot of low-level pain. For some reason I needed that pain and I found a way of manifesting it. Finally, I felt it intensely enough to change my life, to ease the pain.
Somehow I knew that I would not see him for years and then our friendship would somehow be renewed. He moved in with his mother and girlfriend not far from where I was living on the far north west coast of New Zealand and we reunited, free from the need to experience the pain we had caused ourselves and each other six years earlier.
I fell in love again though, shortly after banishing Darius from my life. My flatmate’s brother came to visit and he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Samuel was 15 years old, with long blonde hair and soft white skin. I wanted to raise him on a pedestal as an artefact of extreme beauty; I wanted to make love to him, fulfil my desire, worship his body and bring him pleasure. I felt desire, admiration, shame and delight and I didn’t know what to do with this bundle of conflicting emotions and so I did nothing, again repressing my love as a shameful object. I hid, I made outbursts, I ran away and I mumbled my desire and of course with such chaotic unstable expressions I created no manifestation of our mutual love.
Three years after the instigation of this internal affair I had only one option left. Samuel was working as a body piercer and so I decided to have him pierce my nipple. I sat on his bench and he pushed his sanitised needle through my nipple. I felt no pain, but a wave of heat passed over my body and I almost fainted. He laid me back and lifted my legs until I returned to normal. I invited him to have a drink with me and we had a nice talk; but I told him I “care about” him when I should have told him that I want to make love with him. This initial meeting became nothing and I made another appointment for my second nipple. I approached my second piercing differently. My brother told me that having his nipple pierced was the most painful thing he had experienced. I wasn’t convinced that my yearning for this beautiful young man was a lesser pain than having a needle shoved through my nipple.
I lay down on the bench, I closed my eyes and I focussed on my breath. I felt no pain, no discomfort, just the intensity of the moment wash over me like a single wave from the cleansing ocean. I stood, thanked him and left. He was surprised by my abrupt behaviour but I had determined to move on with my life, to provide that last dose of pain and then make room for a new love. I got the pain I somehow needed through frustrated love until the pain was sufficient and then I chose for it to end. Why would I cause myself so much pain? I don’t know, all I know is that I created all the necessary variables to experience and prolong that pain until I was finished with it, then I orchestrated a rather convoluted symbolic situation in which to end the process. Three years later I have fallen in love many times since and he is but a memory and my friend on Facebook.
This was 2008, my final year in Auckland. I truly tried my best to live the life I was educated to live. I got my degree, I paid my rent, everything was taken away from me when I lost my mother, my home and my life purpose, I wandered around in confusion, I came back to Auckland to try again. I tried again with Samuel, I hung out with the Hare Krishnas and I wrote and performed poetry. I returned to Auckland for two full years after my depression and lonely wandering manifested nothing tangible. A fulfilling life failed to materialise for me in the city, despite my honest attempts.
I found myself, towards the end of my second year, experiencing the same marijuana-fuelled depression I had run away from last time. There was so much existential pain in my meaningless life and I had no idea why. I didn’t know it at the time, having spent my entire life living in houses, but I was suffering from what I would go on to call Domestic Compulsive Disorder. I didn’t know what I could do differently, all I knew was that my life was meaningless and I had to do something about it. I smoked more marijuana and stayed home more, with the comforts of television, internet, the bath and my bed.
I found myself, late one midweek morning, cowering in a corner of the living room in a foetal position, my last cone of marijuana packed into my bong, unsmoked, the banging of my head no longer providing relief from the unavoidable noise of the pain I had made for myself, non-physical but tangibly palpable. The pain hurt but I can’t say it was bad.
I saw life as a wave of fluctuating ups and downs, rather than the steep climb from unconsciousness to enlightenment and at that moment, in that room, in that foetal position, I saw clearly the exact moment I hit rock bottom, as I had been aiming for months, and thus began the ascent up the other side. I instantly felt my energy come back, so strong I felt indignation at my pathetic position and I channelled this manic energy into immediate life change. I ran around the house smashing my belongings, the useless objects that weighed me down to a life that did not satisfy. The pain had finally reached a sufficient level to provoke action. That night I filled two rubbish sacks with useless objects I had accumulated and that sucked up the space around me. I smashed my bong on the driveway, throwing it from the balcony and unintentionally baptising myself in shit-stinking bong water as it flew from my hand and momentum took the bong and not the water inside.
So quickly and easily I was free and could spend the next few months clearing out the practical considerations before leaving Auckland for my first invitation to paradise.
Living a healthy lifestyle in a nurturing inspiring environment I would lay in bed at night in utter peace, I would feel emotions moving through my body like blood, like water. I tried to understand these feelings, to name them. I felt happiness and sadness overlap until they were indistinguishable. I couldn’t look at my life and decide whether I was failing or succeeding and therefore whether my emotions were happy or sad; my life was a blank slate. I felt confident to do anything, to go anywhere, or to stay put and do nothing. If I felt sick I would fast and go to bed, but I lived under a skylight on a mezannine and it was too hot there during the day. I was always happy to get out of bed in the morning and face the brightness and the vast ocean and the sound of its waves rolling up the hill like an amphitheatre. If I felt depressed or tired I found work to do or I walked the dogs down to the beach and I would return hungry and tired to eat and relax.
Pain would pass through me quickly and easily. The dogs would kindly and lovingly lick my wounds without me having to ask. Every morning I would feel new, every time I dived naked into the ocean I would emerge refreshed. When my hair was cut it would rot back into the earth, along with everything else that could not be recycled or fed to the pigs. I would kneel on the earth to weed the strawberry patch, I would bend down towards the earth to pick my salads, and I would lie down on the earth in the long grass and masturbate looking at the sky. Pain was not an issue.
I had lots of friends, Auckland was a good place to make friends, the social networks were well-defined and interconnected. I described my paradise to them and they told me they would come to visit, but mostly they did not. Nothing was more special than the days when my friends did come to visit and I accommodated them in my bed or on my floor. To bring friends to share paradise with me was all the joy I needed and taught me what the next step in my life was.
The two friends who came to visit me, the only two not trapped by the accumulations and commitments of their lives, inspired me to travel freely with them. I had all the time in the world, but still there was only time for the most beautiful people and so I dedicated my life to them. I followed Bill and Lauren until there was more beauty this side of my horizon. I followed beauty to Australia and returned to paradise to find the dogs dead. I could not maintain paradise and pursue beauty simultaneously, so I chose beauty, dreaming that one day I would return to paradise with a precious friend to share it with.
I met four Swedish men in Australia and travelled with them. We experienced so much joy together, I fell in love with them all and they invited me back to Sweden with them. I flew to Sweden, I saw my friends and I have not 15 months later returned to New Zealand.
In 2007 I was searching for a new home and I was blessed to be able to choose from two delightful prospects. I was shown around one house by a beautiful young man, sexy, friendly, and for this reason only one decision was possible. I never made love to this sexy young man but somehow I knew when I first looked at him that I was being offered something in him. Now, four years later, we are about to be in the same country again, drastically different people both, but a persistent connection, manifest in my experience of his luminous beauty and the continued potential of our friendship.
The world is so open and giving to me. I do not earn money and yet even material objects are abundant. Because of my freedom and joy there is a lot of room in my life to pursue what is meaningful to me, to change my mind and pursue the best option, to not know where my actions will take me.
I marvel at this world’s insistence that pain is bad when it continues to provide me with invaluable information about the world I am living in. Beauty is the most important thing in my life and I pursue beauty relentlessly, though I don’t know what to do with it when I get it. It is painful to be rejected, though only for a moment. When I am accepted the joy can be so overwhelming it could be called pain. When I’m feeling strong I can lie under the stars, lonely but at peace, feeling the pain of my yearning for my absent lover and smiling at this delicious pain. Only when I hold my breath is the pain unbearable, when I breathe well I can be sure that I can go outside and urinate and it will soak into the earth.
When I slash open my thumb or am attacked by Police I can’t help but ask, “Why have I done this to myself?” “I didn’t mean to,” some might say. “It was an accident.” But it is never accidental. When my presence, my actions and my relationship to my environment are entirely in my control I cannot claim that the results of these variables are accidental. When I tell my friend that I would like a good cry because I never cry, and then I forget the comment completely, and then I move on with my life and orchestrate a series of events that results unexpectedly in me crying in the rain in Stockholm alone and then I return to my friend and she reminds me of my comment, I wonder if my dedication to the meaning and purpose of my life is entirely the responsibility of consciousness.
When I am not making conscious plans, pursuing them and succeeding, am I a failure, am I failing to realise my potential, am I being led nowhere by no one? That cannot be true when I find myself in increasingly surprising and beautiful places with so many exciting and beautiful people. I have never been able to conceive of plans as complex and delightful as the turns my life has taken. I would never dare hope for so much love and beauty and my imagination is not great enough to conceive of the wonders I have seen.
Like Alice following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole I am ready to jump at the right offer and abandon everything I know for the unexpected. I have been warned of danger by people who barricade themselves in houses but my experience consistently contradicts their threats disguised as advice.
When I sleep on the bare earth I am safe from snakes and crocodiles and Police. Even rain usually gives me the night to rest beside the fire. I find beautiful people and I am not scared of them like I used to be. I naturally give the most exciting the most attention. Perhaps I will tell them how I feel, if appropriate, or maybe I will just touch their shoulder and look into their eyes. Even then I have discovered it is difficult to look into both eyes at once.
When I do what I am compelled to do I don’t see how I can fail. My purpose, after all, is to realise myself fully in this world and then dissolve into another world via death. If I notice a beautiful human my conscious mind may tell me I want to make love to them. The truth of my body cannot be translated into language however. Maybe I’m not going to make love to this person, maybe we are simply going to share space with the knowledge that I want to make love and he does not, and maybe this is sufficiently intense and valuable.
I go to temporary Edens where my tribe gathers and the true movements of life, emerging from the earth, emerging from the space between the humans that excite and terrify us the most, emerging from the subtleties of our bodies, become our guiding forces and are intensified in the natural environment and the familiar social structure of the tribe. The concept that some emotions or situations are “good” and others “bad” becomes too ludicrous to entertain. The ups and downs are rich and dynamic, they are my life and I value them.
One day I am feeling lonely and horny and want to make a connection. I walk to the waterhole to swim under the sun with my tribe and my frustration is exasperated by my observation that everyone seems to be ignoring me. I stand amongst the people, interacting with one another, thinking I want their attention but I’m too sad and weak to ask for it. Eventually I storm off up the path alone. Everyone else walks slowly together, but I charge ahead, angry at being ignored. It occurs to me that I obviously want to be alone and thus I walk alone despite my habit of togetherness. It occurs to me that all day I have wanted to be alone and successfully I have manifested this through the pathetic conscious idea that I desperately need someone to validate me with their attention. If my intention was personal space then I am amazed that I manipulated my own consciousness to such an extent that I repelled those around me with desperation. Am I ever not manifesting my intentions when my true will is this powerful and my conscious mind so irrelevant?
I am not alone in this world. When I follow a beauty I can only assume he wants to be followed. We have chosen each other to share this experience. We have chosen each other before our lives began, we chose each other in another dimension or outside of time, we chose each other via the unconscious psychic network that connects us all. I don’t know, but I know that we choose beauty to communicate with each other.
Why am I staring at this child I do not know, how we could be friends I cannot imagine, but your beauty singles you out like a spotlight and rest assured that I have noticed and I am ready to honour or love you the second the opportunity arises.
The more carefully I listen to the messages of my body, the more it tells me. It seems there is always a deeper and richer and more complex understanding to be gained from real communication. Words may be limited in their capacity, but pain and beauty hold an infinite depth of perfect contextualised truth.
I guess if I calmly and confidently pursue this beauty who presents herself to me I will understand what we mean to each other. If I respond to the subtle pains of my body with respect and love then I may not need the gross extremes of pain I have created for myself in the past.
Life is an ever-opening flower of incomprehensible beauty.
2011-08-02
The demonic artifice of instrumentality
We discuss it in jest with healthy minds but it is happening to us, has been happening and will happen. We have been blinded by the doctrines of Universal Education as a common good and the First World as the epitome of terrestrial life. Our culture is our blind spot because it prevents us, everywhere it is present, from correctly perceiving reality. We are at unconscious odds with our own creation and we do not recognise our predicament, bound as we are by the illusion of good versus evil and the consequential arbitrary distinctions of what belongs to which category. When we wake up from our self-imposed psychotic delusion through the healing pain of massive trauma we will perceive an environment in constant change but with fundamental unchangeables, such as the portal of death and the process of decay.
A war is being fought behind our eyes, so close we cannot see it, between humanity, the terrestrial creature of breath and water, and the extra-terrestrial, a linguistic creation that does not exist in the traditional sense but none-the-less exerts a great influence on our mutagenic lives. This extra-terrestrial has been worshipped as Jahweh, condemned as Satan, but each attempt to name, and therefore destroy, the influence of the creation has been culturally assimilated by the creation itself and today it flaunts every futile attempt to disempower it as "cultural diversity" or "freedom of religion" or the tragic loss of what has become "art" to cultural assimilation.
Within every human soul there is a desire to destroy the artifice of our creation, a desire to reach through the non-existent veil of human superiority and touch beauty. A daring few step beyond the veil, experience beauty and try to communicate it or share it with their lovers. Those amongst these precious few who manage to get their message out, who may or may not have been crucified in their own day, are today being mass-produced by Penguin and are available everywhere for $9.95. Those who were once burned at the stake and condemned as heretics or witches, a practice we now condemn as "inhuman", are now being hailed as "artists" and "scientists" and are burned on the slow fire of material wealth and the perverse attention of fame.
The smart use the trenches dug by the alien to send messages to sympathetic heretics across the world and around the corner; the desperate destroy themselves in public, screaming obscenities and slogans. Some find love and decide to share their love with only one in private in a secure kingdom, but even love has been culturally assimilated as heterosexual monogamy and this behaviour soon results in children who must be sacrificed to the greater good of Human Superiority and at the age of six they are handed over to the State and the extra-terrestrial influence, having relied on the tenuous grip of television and materialism, proceeds to systematically destroy their ability to process sensory data autonomously and ridicules their intuitive connection to the earth, to each other, and to their own body, until it can easily be labelled "superstition", "paganism", "psychic powers" or "mental illness".
At every step of the process we give our consent for it to continue. Rather than shed ourselves of its obvious poisons, such as alcohol and nicotine, and therefore begin the process of examining its relatively non-existent poisons, such as ideology and shame, we become addicted to everything that temporarily removes us from the illusion and thus cling to the veil like a helpless baby, having glimpsed the vast expanse of reality on the other side, rather than tearing it down easily with our own weight.
We are fundamentally perverse, our perversions have taken us here and our perversions can break us out. We find love or beauty or truth and we greedily drink it all up and cling to the empty plastic bottle as it begins the slow process of decaying in the sun over thousands of years. We stumble upon a lover and we suffocate them to death with the perversity of our love and then we fuck their corpse until their bodies break and then we consume their rotten flesh until we're violently ill; this we call romantic love.
There is also the love of the mother, who gives us life and lets us go into the chaos and freedom of the world and whose form then falls back naturally and selflessly and becomes the topsoil from which our own children sprout; but we place the mother who gave us life into hospitals and nursing homes, where she is attached to machines and institutions which artificially and tortuously prolong a spent life in a decomposing body. We then cruelly exhibit her to our children like some sort of demented artifact.
We are under the influence of an extra-terrestrial force of our own creation that we fail to recognise as our own. We believe that extra-terrestrials come out of the sky in flying discs and we even see these creatures and call them angels and gods and reptilians.
We do not consider why we feel pain or see beauty, we simply label one "bad", the other "good", and satisfied we continue to perpetuate our own entrapment, lamenting the strain and envying the free and turning a blind eye when the unlocked shackles fall open and the policeman taps us gently on the head with his baton and pushes them closed.
"The demonic artifice of instrumentality" (Terence McKenna)
A war is being fought behind our eyes, so close we cannot see it, between humanity, the terrestrial creature of breath and water, and the extra-terrestrial, a linguistic creation that does not exist in the traditional sense but none-the-less exerts a great influence on our mutagenic lives. This extra-terrestrial has been worshipped as Jahweh, condemned as Satan, but each attempt to name, and therefore destroy, the influence of the creation has been culturally assimilated by the creation itself and today it flaunts every futile attempt to disempower it as "cultural diversity" or "freedom of religion" or the tragic loss of what has become "art" to cultural assimilation.
Within every human soul there is a desire to destroy the artifice of our creation, a desire to reach through the non-existent veil of human superiority and touch beauty. A daring few step beyond the veil, experience beauty and try to communicate it or share it with their lovers. Those amongst these precious few who manage to get their message out, who may or may not have been crucified in their own day, are today being mass-produced by Penguin and are available everywhere for $9.95. Those who were once burned at the stake and condemned as heretics or witches, a practice we now condemn as "inhuman", are now being hailed as "artists" and "scientists" and are burned on the slow fire of material wealth and the perverse attention of fame.
The smart use the trenches dug by the alien to send messages to sympathetic heretics across the world and around the corner; the desperate destroy themselves in public, screaming obscenities and slogans. Some find love and decide to share their love with only one in private in a secure kingdom, but even love has been culturally assimilated as heterosexual monogamy and this behaviour soon results in children who must be sacrificed to the greater good of Human Superiority and at the age of six they are handed over to the State and the extra-terrestrial influence, having relied on the tenuous grip of television and materialism, proceeds to systematically destroy their ability to process sensory data autonomously and ridicules their intuitive connection to the earth, to each other, and to their own body, until it can easily be labelled "superstition", "paganism", "psychic powers" or "mental illness".
At every step of the process we give our consent for it to continue. Rather than shed ourselves of its obvious poisons, such as alcohol and nicotine, and therefore begin the process of examining its relatively non-existent poisons, such as ideology and shame, we become addicted to everything that temporarily removes us from the illusion and thus cling to the veil like a helpless baby, having glimpsed the vast expanse of reality on the other side, rather than tearing it down easily with our own weight.
We are fundamentally perverse, our perversions have taken us here and our perversions can break us out. We find love or beauty or truth and we greedily drink it all up and cling to the empty plastic bottle as it begins the slow process of decaying in the sun over thousands of years. We stumble upon a lover and we suffocate them to death with the perversity of our love and then we fuck their corpse until their bodies break and then we consume their rotten flesh until we're violently ill; this we call romantic love.
There is also the love of the mother, who gives us life and lets us go into the chaos and freedom of the world and whose form then falls back naturally and selflessly and becomes the topsoil from which our own children sprout; but we place the mother who gave us life into hospitals and nursing homes, where she is attached to machines and institutions which artificially and tortuously prolong a spent life in a decomposing body. We then cruelly exhibit her to our children like some sort of demented artifact.
We are under the influence of an extra-terrestrial force of our own creation that we fail to recognise as our own. We believe that extra-terrestrials come out of the sky in flying discs and we even see these creatures and call them angels and gods and reptilians.
We do not consider why we feel pain or see beauty, we simply label one "bad", the other "good", and satisfied we continue to perpetuate our own entrapment, lamenting the strain and envying the free and turning a blind eye when the unlocked shackles fall open and the policeman taps us gently on the head with his baton and pushes them closed.
"The demonic artifice of instrumentality" (Terence McKenna)
2011-03-08
Chris Kirk is a hypocrite who writes beautifully
I realise that nothing I say has any truth. I realise that whenever I state a fact I am proving myself a hypocrite. But this does not bother me, I never claimed to be objective or correct and I never claimed to have any morals. Morality is for the weak. Morality is for those who are not connected to the natural intelligence of their own body. There is no need to believe in abstract linguistic constructs when there is a truth made of flesh that is the entirety of our experience in this strange universe. My body is my beacon, I have everything I need. It leads me to green pastures where there is food and rushing water and where the people are waiting for me with kind welcoming eyes.
Recently it has brought me to the city where I am forced to develop extra-sensory skills of a very strange nature. The ability to wear a mask, to cover my body and my voice with shame and inhumanity. The ability to not only write a CV, but to believe I am that CV and I am nothing more than the banal life-denying skills which I weakly have to offer for a job that does not utilise any of the natural and powerful talents that would really make this company come alive. Because in the city we deny life like we deny death. We cover the earth in concrete and we cover our flesh in clothes and make-up; we spray to kill insects and opportunistic plants; we cook our food to make sure it's dead and we criminalise any public displays of the loving act that brings life into the world. We are indeed a strange species and if you haven't noticed then you're not looking, you must be looking down your own pants to make sure your genitals haven't been bitten off yet (by your boss or your girlfriend or your landlord or your prime minister).
Who's going to bail you out when you slavish parents finally grow old and die and leave you weak and unable to cope into the world they co-created while you were growing up and presented you with on your 18th birthday? Is it too late to develop the skills that will provide you autonomy in a world that apparently will not protect you unless you can afford to pay for it? Are you too old at the age of 19 to change your belief systems? You know, the belief system that says that the world is dangerous and does not like me and I have to speak in the same language as the job descriptions I am sent in the mail every time I sleep in past 09.00.
So I stepped out into the world and I keep walking and so far I have not died though I assume I will one day. I am told that everyone dies eventually but the amazing thing is I've been going for 26 years now and still no death. I walk along the side of the road and I am told this is highly dangerous but no car has hit me yet, in fact sometimes they stop to offer me a ride. I get in and turn to my right and there sits another human being, in the driving seat of their huge metallic machine. They have invited me not only into their most expensive and precious toy, they have invited me into their lives and I do not underestimate the trust involved.
I stare straight ahead at where the road is taking us and they do the same, guiding our metal monster safely through this high-speed high-danger environment. Through the exploration of the power of eyeless conversation we find our connection point in the world, we both there is one, for no other purpose than pleasure and curiosity. We have no desire to own each other once a connection has been made because we both know that as soon as the most superficial division comes into our lives my new friend will stop the car and let me out and I will wave goodbye and thank their kindness and again I am exposed to the weather and the concrete and the dangers of being alone in a world that may or may not want to kill me.
If there was any truth in the warnings heaped onto my back by those evil people who think they are good because they have dry vaginas and circumcised penises I would be cowering in the corner of some room I knew I could afford to pay for and I would be low on some drug and wearing my winter clothes and hiding from the light in a cardboard box that will conveniently warp to the shape of the twitches in my anxiety-ridden body. I must be unique in this response because everyone else seems to function relatively well under such pressure, merely developing one of myriad new cancers when it's really time to have a break from work longer than four weeks per annum.
I bathe under waterfalls sometimes and other times I am not even allowed to walk barefoot even if I am doing exactly what everybody else is doing and just watching without the sin of participation. Sometimes I feel an opening in the social haze and I'm not the only one, my friends feel it too, and we can get naked and dance as if we are happy to be alive because we are happy to be alive, rather than in denial about being dead. I would love to see you without clothes. I would love to see you enjoying your body in the sun and the glistening rushing water of the stream. I would love to look into your eyes and see joy shining out like a light and the skin of your entire body radiating divine solar light. I would love for us to roll around on the earth as if we loved her and cover ourselves in her pure damp flesh, and smear it all over our bodies. I would love to take a handful of her drippy brown mud-flesh and cover the area of your back that your arms can't reach and make sure, like me, you are covered for a little while in something that enriches your organism, rather than something which stops perspiration or strips your natural oils.
I love to touch and be touched because I have been incarnated into a physical body in this lifetime and weather or not I am some sort of spiritual entity who will survive this life and go on to better things that I can believe in but not conceive of it makes no difference to the fact that I am here with my body and the feelings it produces and there is a beautiful intensity when we move close to one another and when we exist in love this intense proximity effect is empowering and when we exist in hate we have nothing but muscles and pain and that gets us nowhere and when we deny ourselves with drugs like alcohol and religion we feel nothing and like it (but hate ourselves).
I don't hate God enough to deny the reality he dropped me into for the sake of something which may indeed be as true as the authority-figure tells me it is. It may indeed me true that abstraction is a better way to live than experience, but I choose to experience experience and merely take abstractions into consideration. They have no physical reality I can place in relation to my body, so how can I live my life by these principles?
God told me once that it's okay to be gay, cos this was a concern of mine at the time. I didn't hear his voice, I wasn't lead to some authoritative text or person, it was just obvious to my otherwise confused and horny teenage body. I was just 17 years old when I realised that I couldn't conceive of God denying me, I couldn't conceive of a world without God's love and despite the paranoid anxiety of my mind and the instructive mind of the institutions I allowed to shape me, nothing could change the self-evident reality that I was okay. It later became obvious that the world itself is also okay, despite all propaganda to the contrary.
I casually chose sixth-form classical studies as another one of the subjects that was supposed to brainwash me into being a productive and uncomplaining member of free-market capitalism but this subject and the beautiful teacher who shared it with me introduced us all to another society that was different from ours but one of the primary influences for what we now call Western Civilisation. We were introduced, specifically, to Socrates, who not only loved and appreciated the beauty of young men, but questioned the society into which he was born. He naively questioned the holiest man in Athens about what this holiness abstraction really is and they couldn't figure it out. Some oracle said he was the wisest man around and he said, "Maybe because I realise I'm ignorant," and I said "Ah!"
I think maybe if I don't feel unsafe walking down the street then maybe I am not unsafe and so I can stick out my thumb. And if I don't feel unsafe hitchhiking then maybe hitchhiking isn't dangerous. And if I hitchhike for ten years and meet only wonderful people then maybe people aren't out to get me and maybe the world is not a dangerous place and maybe I can go anywhere and do anything I want, or at least try. I have no desire now or any other time to live in a box so I don't get wet when it rains. I don't need to save for my retirement because I am not planning to spend forty years working and building up a lifestyle in which I need to spend hundreds of dollars a week to maintain the status quo. When I run I scare myself at how fast I can go and how far away I can find myself; it seems when you run you're just keeping yourself stocked with coffee and underwear.
Maybe I'm just a hypocrite, but at least I am free. I don't want to judge you cos I know you're free too and it's okay if you don't want to travel with me, I'll just be a bit lonely without you. I tried living with you in your concrete world and found it profoundly lonely. Your presence was the only light in a dark and confusing world and I would merely bump into things uselessly waiting for you to get home from work at the end of the day. I have no purpose in a place where my instinct is to take off my clothes and there is no context in which I can do this without causing banal conflict and police confrontation. I tried searching the gutter for coins to buy me a ticket to some aspect of this society that I tried to belong to but all I found were half-empty plastic drink bottles and I wasn't sure whether anyone had spat in them before throwing them away or whether the sun had already fermented the fruit juice.
When I am older and my gifts are legitimised I will return and hold your hand for another little while and speak to the people you share your world with, but now I am here, on the beach, breathing in as much of a balance of salty sea-breeze and exhaust fumes I can handle. I am a hypocrite, I don't believe any of this, but I will say it with as much conviction as my moment and my body can personify. I will stand up in front of as many people as want to hear, three or a billion, and speak with all the utter truth I can muster. I will change my mind the next day, but again I am willing to stand up and speak for those willing to listen. I live the best of my abstractions and otherwise rely on the food, water, air and love the planet provide me with. I don't know anything, but I write beautifully.
Recently it has brought me to the city where I am forced to develop extra-sensory skills of a very strange nature. The ability to wear a mask, to cover my body and my voice with shame and inhumanity. The ability to not only write a CV, but to believe I am that CV and I am nothing more than the banal life-denying skills which I weakly have to offer for a job that does not utilise any of the natural and powerful talents that would really make this company come alive. Because in the city we deny life like we deny death. We cover the earth in concrete and we cover our flesh in clothes and make-up; we spray to kill insects and opportunistic plants; we cook our food to make sure it's dead and we criminalise any public displays of the loving act that brings life into the world. We are indeed a strange species and if you haven't noticed then you're not looking, you must be looking down your own pants to make sure your genitals haven't been bitten off yet (by your boss or your girlfriend or your landlord or your prime minister).
Who's going to bail you out when you slavish parents finally grow old and die and leave you weak and unable to cope into the world they co-created while you were growing up and presented you with on your 18th birthday? Is it too late to develop the skills that will provide you autonomy in a world that apparently will not protect you unless you can afford to pay for it? Are you too old at the age of 19 to change your belief systems? You know, the belief system that says that the world is dangerous and does not like me and I have to speak in the same language as the job descriptions I am sent in the mail every time I sleep in past 09.00.
So I stepped out into the world and I keep walking and so far I have not died though I assume I will one day. I am told that everyone dies eventually but the amazing thing is I've been going for 26 years now and still no death. I walk along the side of the road and I am told this is highly dangerous but no car has hit me yet, in fact sometimes they stop to offer me a ride. I get in and turn to my right and there sits another human being, in the driving seat of their huge metallic machine. They have invited me not only into their most expensive and precious toy, they have invited me into their lives and I do not underestimate the trust involved.
I stare straight ahead at where the road is taking us and they do the same, guiding our metal monster safely through this high-speed high-danger environment. Through the exploration of the power of eyeless conversation we find our connection point in the world, we both there is one, for no other purpose than pleasure and curiosity. We have no desire to own each other once a connection has been made because we both know that as soon as the most superficial division comes into our lives my new friend will stop the car and let me out and I will wave goodbye and thank their kindness and again I am exposed to the weather and the concrete and the dangers of being alone in a world that may or may not want to kill me.
If there was any truth in the warnings heaped onto my back by those evil people who think they are good because they have dry vaginas and circumcised penises I would be cowering in the corner of some room I knew I could afford to pay for and I would be low on some drug and wearing my winter clothes and hiding from the light in a cardboard box that will conveniently warp to the shape of the twitches in my anxiety-ridden body. I must be unique in this response because everyone else seems to function relatively well under such pressure, merely developing one of myriad new cancers when it's really time to have a break from work longer than four weeks per annum.
I bathe under waterfalls sometimes and other times I am not even allowed to walk barefoot even if I am doing exactly what everybody else is doing and just watching without the sin of participation. Sometimes I feel an opening in the social haze and I'm not the only one, my friends feel it too, and we can get naked and dance as if we are happy to be alive because we are happy to be alive, rather than in denial about being dead. I would love to see you without clothes. I would love to see you enjoying your body in the sun and the glistening rushing water of the stream. I would love to look into your eyes and see joy shining out like a light and the skin of your entire body radiating divine solar light. I would love for us to roll around on the earth as if we loved her and cover ourselves in her pure damp flesh, and smear it all over our bodies. I would love to take a handful of her drippy brown mud-flesh and cover the area of your back that your arms can't reach and make sure, like me, you are covered for a little while in something that enriches your organism, rather than something which stops perspiration or strips your natural oils.
I love to touch and be touched because I have been incarnated into a physical body in this lifetime and weather or not I am some sort of spiritual entity who will survive this life and go on to better things that I can believe in but not conceive of it makes no difference to the fact that I am here with my body and the feelings it produces and there is a beautiful intensity when we move close to one another and when we exist in love this intense proximity effect is empowering and when we exist in hate we have nothing but muscles and pain and that gets us nowhere and when we deny ourselves with drugs like alcohol and religion we feel nothing and like it (but hate ourselves).
I don't hate God enough to deny the reality he dropped me into for the sake of something which may indeed be as true as the authority-figure tells me it is. It may indeed me true that abstraction is a better way to live than experience, but I choose to experience experience and merely take abstractions into consideration. They have no physical reality I can place in relation to my body, so how can I live my life by these principles?
God told me once that it's okay to be gay, cos this was a concern of mine at the time. I didn't hear his voice, I wasn't lead to some authoritative text or person, it was just obvious to my otherwise confused and horny teenage body. I was just 17 years old when I realised that I couldn't conceive of God denying me, I couldn't conceive of a world without God's love and despite the paranoid anxiety of my mind and the instructive mind of the institutions I allowed to shape me, nothing could change the self-evident reality that I was okay. It later became obvious that the world itself is also okay, despite all propaganda to the contrary.
I casually chose sixth-form classical studies as another one of the subjects that was supposed to brainwash me into being a productive and uncomplaining member of free-market capitalism but this subject and the beautiful teacher who shared it with me introduced us all to another society that was different from ours but one of the primary influences for what we now call Western Civilisation. We were introduced, specifically, to Socrates, who not only loved and appreciated the beauty of young men, but questioned the society into which he was born. He naively questioned the holiest man in Athens about what this holiness abstraction really is and they couldn't figure it out. Some oracle said he was the wisest man around and he said, "Maybe because I realise I'm ignorant," and I said "Ah!"
I think maybe if I don't feel unsafe walking down the street then maybe I am not unsafe and so I can stick out my thumb. And if I don't feel unsafe hitchhiking then maybe hitchhiking isn't dangerous. And if I hitchhike for ten years and meet only wonderful people then maybe people aren't out to get me and maybe the world is not a dangerous place and maybe I can go anywhere and do anything I want, or at least try. I have no desire now or any other time to live in a box so I don't get wet when it rains. I don't need to save for my retirement because I am not planning to spend forty years working and building up a lifestyle in which I need to spend hundreds of dollars a week to maintain the status quo. When I run I scare myself at how fast I can go and how far away I can find myself; it seems when you run you're just keeping yourself stocked with coffee and underwear.
Maybe I'm just a hypocrite, but at least I am free. I don't want to judge you cos I know you're free too and it's okay if you don't want to travel with me, I'll just be a bit lonely without you. I tried living with you in your concrete world and found it profoundly lonely. Your presence was the only light in a dark and confusing world and I would merely bump into things uselessly waiting for you to get home from work at the end of the day. I have no purpose in a place where my instinct is to take off my clothes and there is no context in which I can do this without causing banal conflict and police confrontation. I tried searching the gutter for coins to buy me a ticket to some aspect of this society that I tried to belong to but all I found were half-empty plastic drink bottles and I wasn't sure whether anyone had spat in them before throwing them away or whether the sun had already fermented the fruit juice.
When I am older and my gifts are legitimised I will return and hold your hand for another little while and speak to the people you share your world with, but now I am here, on the beach, breathing in as much of a balance of salty sea-breeze and exhaust fumes I can handle. I am a hypocrite, I don't believe any of this, but I will say it with as much conviction as my moment and my body can personify. I will stand up in front of as many people as want to hear, three or a billion, and speak with all the utter truth I can muster. I will change my mind the next day, but again I am willing to stand up and speak for those willing to listen. I live the best of my abstractions and otherwise rely on the food, water, air and love the planet provide me with. I don't know anything, but I write beautifully.
2010-12-01
More free
It doesn't matter anymore. I am not anyone that I thought I was. I'm just not. Although I know I'm better than they are. I know I'm more free.
We both walk the same streets, yes, but their feet are bound by shoes that damage their body and cause them pain. My feet are free and the skin underneath has hardened and serves me well. I wear the wounds on my feet with pride because they are the result of my freedom and I know they will heal. I don't need to spend money on shoes that do nothing but damage and bind me.
In fact I don't need to spend money on anything. Unlike these poor trapped souls, trapped in the concepts of their minds, I am free from the idiotic ideology of Capitalism. Yes, I walk the same streets and carry the same green shopping bag, but I do not pay for my food. Only the ignorant and the trapped pay for their food when every day every supermarket in the country throws away masses of perfectly good food. All I need is access to their dumpsters. And failing this I merely go into the store, place the items in my bag and walk out. Why pay this corporation to bind my brothers and sisters into corporate slavery and food addiction?
Of course I am not addicted to bread and meat like they are. I am a vegetarian and I am not under the illusion that wheat is a viable option for a healthy body and mind. I am more free than them. Instead of paying for cheap industrial wheat bread I enjoy expensive spelt bread for free. I am more smart than them, I know that spelt is an ancient form of wheat that hasn't been industrialised over the years to make it indigestible to the human body. It is also organic and wholegrain. How they feed themselves on this barely edible food-like item called wheat I do not know. They are addicted and despite eating and searching for my organic whole spelt bread compulsively, I am not addicted like them. I can stop anytime I like.
I don't have a car like they do. I don't pollute the planet. I don't support oil companies raping Iraq. I don't send my brothers and sisters hurtling through windscreens so I can arrive a minute earlier than necessary. I'm better than them. I will never own a car. I hitchhike instead. I am more free than they are because I don't believe the propaganda saying that hitchhiking is dangerous and you will be murdered if you participate in it. This is obviously not true and only the ignorant and the slaves to television believe it. I can go anywhere I like because I am free.
I can sleep in the park because I have a tent in my bag. I don't need money to pay for accommodation. I can sleep in a cave on the beach if it rains. I can stay up as late as I want eating huge mouthfuls of expensive food that the most hard-working wage-slaves can't even afford. They can't afford it because a refrigerator on hire purchase is a priority over the food that sustains their body. They can't afford it because they choose to not be free, like me.
Sometimes I sit under my temporary shelter with my warm cheap sleeping bag looking at their cars driving past and I pity them and their ignorance. They don't even know they're not free. They can't bear the silence; I'm guessing they all have their radios on inside those expensive air-conditioned cars. They're listening to that music that they're supposed to like and eventually decide they do like, just because they listen to it so often they may as well like it. They're pretending to not pay attention to the advertising but of course they can't help it.
I can't stop thinking about these people and how much more free I am than they are. It is fair? Why am I so free and they are so not? What catalyst broke me awake from this over-fed indigestible sleep of an entire childhood of religious capitalistic authoritarian weakening education? I want to burn the schools that enslave my brothers and sisters but I can't be bothered. I ate too much avocado and rye bread. If I could bomb every school in the world maybe there would be another person sitting here beside me in this park in the rain in the night looking at cars and silently judging them. This moral superiority doesn't feel as good as it used to. I know I need to read some more books and expand my mind further and find other ways of judging people. I am bound in my own world of limits and I carry on my back everything I own and it is only a single kilogram too heavy.
If only I was free enough to throw away that extra kilogram. If only I was free enough to know exactly which items are superfluous. If only I was better than I am, like I'm better than them.
In fact I don't need to spend money on anything. Unlike these poor trapped souls, trapped in the concepts of their minds, I am free from the idiotic ideology of Capitalism. Yes, I walk the same streets and carry the same green shopping bag, but I do not pay for my food. Only the ignorant and the trapped pay for their food when every day every supermarket in the country throws away masses of perfectly good food. All I need is access to their dumpsters. And failing this I merely go into the store, place the items in my bag and walk out. Why pay this corporation to bind my brothers and sisters into corporate slavery and food addiction?
Of course I am not addicted to bread and meat like they are. I am a vegetarian and I am not under the illusion that wheat is a viable option for a healthy body and mind. I am more free than them. Instead of paying for cheap industrial wheat bread I enjoy expensive spelt bread for free. I am more smart than them, I know that spelt is an ancient form of wheat that hasn't been industrialised over the years to make it indigestible to the human body. It is also organic and wholegrain. How they feed themselves on this barely edible food-like item called wheat I do not know. They are addicted and despite eating and searching for my organic whole spelt bread compulsively, I am not addicted like them. I can stop anytime I like.
I don't have a car like they do. I don't pollute the planet. I don't support oil companies raping Iraq. I don't send my brothers and sisters hurtling through windscreens so I can arrive a minute earlier than necessary. I'm better than them. I will never own a car. I hitchhike instead. I am more free than they are because I don't believe the propaganda saying that hitchhiking is dangerous and you will be murdered if you participate in it. This is obviously not true and only the ignorant and the slaves to television believe it. I can go anywhere I like because I am free.
I can sleep in the park because I have a tent in my bag. I don't need money to pay for accommodation. I can sleep in a cave on the beach if it rains. I can stay up as late as I want eating huge mouthfuls of expensive food that the most hard-working wage-slaves can't even afford. They can't afford it because a refrigerator on hire purchase is a priority over the food that sustains their body. They can't afford it because they choose to not be free, like me.
Sometimes I sit under my temporary shelter with my warm cheap sleeping bag looking at their cars driving past and I pity them and their ignorance. They don't even know they're not free. They can't bear the silence; I'm guessing they all have their radios on inside those expensive air-conditioned cars. They're listening to that music that they're supposed to like and eventually decide they do like, just because they listen to it so often they may as well like it. They're pretending to not pay attention to the advertising but of course they can't help it.
I can't stop thinking about these people and how much more free I am than they are. It is fair? Why am I so free and they are so not? What catalyst broke me awake from this over-fed indigestible sleep of an entire childhood of religious capitalistic authoritarian weakening education? I want to burn the schools that enslave my brothers and sisters but I can't be bothered. I ate too much avocado and rye bread. If I could bomb every school in the world maybe there would be another person sitting here beside me in this park in the rain in the night looking at cars and silently judging them. This moral superiority doesn't feel as good as it used to. I know I need to read some more books and expand my mind further and find other ways of judging people. I am bound in my own world of limits and I carry on my back everything I own and it is only a single kilogram too heavy.
If only I was free enough to throw away that extra kilogram. If only I was free enough to know exactly which items are superfluous. If only I was better than I am, like I'm better than them.
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