Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Easy to be Hard
Something made me think of these words tonight, from the Hair musical. It just seemed to fit.
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
How can people be so heartless
You know I'm hung up on you
Easy to give in
Easy to help out
And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who say they care about social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
How can people be so heartless
You know I'm hung up on you
Easy to give in
Easy to help out
And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who say they care about social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
Monday, November 28, 2011
Shadows and Caves
There's seeing without seeing, hearing without hearing, touching without touching, smelling without smelling, and, worst of all, talking without talking. The face moves. The hands flip, flutter, the eyes pretend to be alive. And all the while I sit there staring one way and the other. As the mouth moves no sound makes its way across the table. I glance down at the candle and lean in closer to feel the heat rising, to sniff the fragrance, vanilla of some sort as the color would indicate. Mint would have been too obvious. Yet there is nothing, no smell, denying, or at least defying the senses, barely enough light.
At that moment I'd rather be in Plato's cave watching shadows dance on the wall. I'd rather feel the ignorance of suppressed reality, chained with real steel, letting the sharp shackle's edge cut into my wrists, ankles, and neck. I would feel the world to be more real with shadows and a distant flame than I do at this moment, again watching the mouth move without the slightest hint of sound. So as I grip the chair I feel all I can do is move pack, float towards the door, finding night and if lucky rain, even a slight mist. Instead, I fall to the ground, hitting the cold cement and continuing downwards through the pores, not knowing when my skin will finish dripping.
At that moment I'd rather be in Plato's cave watching shadows dance on the wall. I'd rather feel the ignorance of suppressed reality, chained with real steel, letting the sharp shackle's edge cut into my wrists, ankles, and neck. I would feel the world to be more real with shadows and a distant flame than I do at this moment, again watching the mouth move without the slightest hint of sound. So as I grip the chair I feel all I can do is move pack, float towards the door, finding night and if lucky rain, even a slight mist. Instead, I fall to the ground, hitting the cold cement and continuing downwards through the pores, not knowing when my skin will finish dripping.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Insanity of the Simulacra
The insanity of the simulacra assures the inevitable fall deep into the abyss on non-reality. When closely assigning different symbols that become in themselves non-symbols, and then taking those same symbols and seeing them as only simulated images, we are left trusting nothing. We are left at the bottom of a chasm for which we ourselves created. Do I really sit at this keyboard and type these useless words, or am I merely simulating an action for which no real validity exists? Do I simulate breathing just because it is all the rage or do I do it out of necessity for survival? And the worst questions of all: Is the pain of solitude truly a pain from the heart or is it only an illness that I have created to simulate the experience of desperation?
It all amounts to nothing, yet it is all I know. In a paradox, it is all I can trust. I trust my existence by remaining skeptical of that very existence I treasure. The latter questions can never be answered, not even through death, because arguably death in itself is nothing more than a hyperreal, simulated experience. So why do I not attempt suicide? Perhaps because my hyper-death would be confused in the cloudiness of the simulacra. I will not be able to tell whether or not I only simulated my own death or if my own death really occurred. And I must think of the simulated occurrence that even brought me to consider any death at all. Am I in need of such compassion, companionship? Does such compatability truly exist? Am I ill from this longing or am I only going through the superficial motions of feeling such?
By example, I picture a moment, a man, people, living in a community of sorts. One day a man awakes to find his life upside down, his partner gone, leaving nothing but a note explaining that she has moved on. The man is forlorn, empty, devastated. His world is no longer his world yet it is the only world he thinks he could possibly know. As the day passes and he finally summons the courage to reach out for support, he learns that others this day have also experienced the same brutal rudeness. He gathers a few like victims and together they all sit, in silence, trying desperately to work through the pieces that led to such an abrupt severance. The vacating partners, at the same time, also sit together, somewhere on the other side of town, laughing and applauding their success in simulating a break-up and are now occasionally wondering when they will end the charade and return home so that the joke can be explained and that the act was nothing more than a mere simulation.
Here lies the quite obvious problem created by these acts. To the victims, this was not a simulation but a reality. To the actors, this was not reality but a simulation. What, then, defines the difference? Simple. The third order simulacra.
What is afforded humanity through this third order simulacra is the representation of a representation of a representation that allows true reality to be cast to the wind and the hyperreal to take control. In other words, it no longer matters whether or not these actors truly fled because the actual event was never really a part of reality to begin with. And for that matter, nothing we ever do, see, smell, taste, or touch will ever be a member of the first order simulacra. We are, in a sense, in the process of canceling ourselves out.
This leads to the more promising aspect of this consideration by finally realizing and appreciating the freedom imposed on us by no longer being a part of a tangible and valid reality. In the Sartrian world, this is perhaps analogous to that sense of freedom when we first experience choice. And with this freedom we are now afforded in the hyperreal the comforts of the absurd. Vertigo will no longer apply. Signs will mean nothing. Differentiating between love and hate will become irrelevant. It all sounds so simple, I grant, but we must all become somehow aware. The futilists will say Baudrillard was right. The nihilists will hail him as a god and the opportunists will keep selling their goods at an increased rate to a society that knows no better. I will doubt everything.
But in the meantime, I must make sure that I perform in correspondence to the simulacra. I must achieve everything and hope for nothing. In the words of Rimbaud, I must call to the executioners so I might gnaw their rifle-butts while dying. I do this in response to all I have ever come to know. The symbols of love have become just that, symbols. There is no longer anything that stands behind that atrocious word. The iconoclasts defied the symbol of god to prove that nothing existed but a simple image. Love is reared the same way and must be exposed even more cruelly. In bitterness all becomes clear and the defamation of something so obscenely treasured stands as nothing but a testament to the rampant confusions that found life in the industrial age. Blindness would have been such a more preferable state were I to come to understand the importance of simulated insanity. I could have existed peacefully in the simulacra had certain circumstances not presented themselves so forcefully. But I believe I am all the better for my awakening because in the hyperreal, I might still be asleep.
As I sit next to tomorrow in hopes for yesterday I can conclude that no solution will ever be afforded the questions within the questions. When I look out the window I will see the same thing that has existed there for a millennium and wonder why I never saw it before. The shape will be different, of course, than it was in ths inception, but the meaning will remain the same. The regurgitated aftereffects will provide the world with the exact contradictions for which our lives are based. The simulacra will no longer be a simulacra but a void. Under a different pretext, this void will make everything clear and unimaginable. In this void will be a mirror. The reflection from this mirror will be a word, and that word will be regret. On that day I will conclude that this was all against nature and I will damn hyperreality accordingly.
It all amounts to nothing, yet it is all I know. In a paradox, it is all I can trust. I trust my existence by remaining skeptical of that very existence I treasure. The latter questions can never be answered, not even through death, because arguably death in itself is nothing more than a hyperreal, simulated experience. So why do I not attempt suicide? Perhaps because my hyper-death would be confused in the cloudiness of the simulacra. I will not be able to tell whether or not I only simulated my own death or if my own death really occurred. And I must think of the simulated occurrence that even brought me to consider any death at all. Am I in need of such compassion, companionship? Does such compatability truly exist? Am I ill from this longing or am I only going through the superficial motions of feeling such?
By example, I picture a moment, a man, people, living in a community of sorts. One day a man awakes to find his life upside down, his partner gone, leaving nothing but a note explaining that she has moved on. The man is forlorn, empty, devastated. His world is no longer his world yet it is the only world he thinks he could possibly know. As the day passes and he finally summons the courage to reach out for support, he learns that others this day have also experienced the same brutal rudeness. He gathers a few like victims and together they all sit, in silence, trying desperately to work through the pieces that led to such an abrupt severance. The vacating partners, at the same time, also sit together, somewhere on the other side of town, laughing and applauding their success in simulating a break-up and are now occasionally wondering when they will end the charade and return home so that the joke can be explained and that the act was nothing more than a mere simulation.
Here lies the quite obvious problem created by these acts. To the victims, this was not a simulation but a reality. To the actors, this was not reality but a simulation. What, then, defines the difference? Simple. The third order simulacra.
What is afforded humanity through this third order simulacra is the representation of a representation of a representation that allows true reality to be cast to the wind and the hyperreal to take control. In other words, it no longer matters whether or not these actors truly fled because the actual event was never really a part of reality to begin with. And for that matter, nothing we ever do, see, smell, taste, or touch will ever be a member of the first order simulacra. We are, in a sense, in the process of canceling ourselves out.
This leads to the more promising aspect of this consideration by finally realizing and appreciating the freedom imposed on us by no longer being a part of a tangible and valid reality. In the Sartrian world, this is perhaps analogous to that sense of freedom when we first experience choice. And with this freedom we are now afforded in the hyperreal the comforts of the absurd. Vertigo will no longer apply. Signs will mean nothing. Differentiating between love and hate will become irrelevant. It all sounds so simple, I grant, but we must all become somehow aware. The futilists will say Baudrillard was right. The nihilists will hail him as a god and the opportunists will keep selling their goods at an increased rate to a society that knows no better. I will doubt everything.
But in the meantime, I must make sure that I perform in correspondence to the simulacra. I must achieve everything and hope for nothing. In the words of Rimbaud, I must call to the executioners so I might gnaw their rifle-butts while dying. I do this in response to all I have ever come to know. The symbols of love have become just that, symbols. There is no longer anything that stands behind that atrocious word. The iconoclasts defied the symbol of god to prove that nothing existed but a simple image. Love is reared the same way and must be exposed even more cruelly. In bitterness all becomes clear and the defamation of something so obscenely treasured stands as nothing but a testament to the rampant confusions that found life in the industrial age. Blindness would have been such a more preferable state were I to come to understand the importance of simulated insanity. I could have existed peacefully in the simulacra had certain circumstances not presented themselves so forcefully. But I believe I am all the better for my awakening because in the hyperreal, I might still be asleep.
As I sit next to tomorrow in hopes for yesterday I can conclude that no solution will ever be afforded the questions within the questions. When I look out the window I will see the same thing that has existed there for a millennium and wonder why I never saw it before. The shape will be different, of course, than it was in ths inception, but the meaning will remain the same. The regurgitated aftereffects will provide the world with the exact contradictions for which our lives are based. The simulacra will no longer be a simulacra but a void. Under a different pretext, this void will make everything clear and unimaginable. In this void will be a mirror. The reflection from this mirror will be a word, and that word will be regret. On that day I will conclude that this was all against nature and I will damn hyperreality accordingly.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Baudrillard and de Beauvoir
I am not smart enough to know Baudrillard. Not in the literal or philosophical. I know him as an idea. I know his ideas as a start. I've created my own bastardization of Baudrillard. I've taken what I believe to be what he meant, and now make my own understanding of the simulation, the simulacra, which for me is the demise.
All I can do is watch simulations occur around us. I cannot trust the glass on my table, the cat rubbing my foot, the note I've received earlier. I cannot claim to exist when existence has been removed. I can sit and stare and observe. For that at best I am a voyeur, as these simulations have led me to no longer participate, only observe. And always to question. I do not know the people on the other side. Those people do not even know themselves. They exist in their own real which is the farthest state of consciousness. They are not conscious not awake. They simulate their own world. And I watch, desperate to avoid participation. If we stand down now we still stand a chance. I'll not not embrace this hyperreal. I resist. In an out of context (possible mis-)quote from de Beauvoir, "choose to exist, I exist, choose to exist, I exist. There will be a dawn."
All I can do is watch simulations occur around us. I cannot trust the glass on my table, the cat rubbing my foot, the note I've received earlier. I cannot claim to exist when existence has been removed. I can sit and stare and observe. For that at best I am a voyeur, as these simulations have led me to no longer participate, only observe. And always to question. I do not know the people on the other side. Those people do not even know themselves. They exist in their own real which is the farthest state of consciousness. They are not conscious not awake. They simulate their own world. And I watch, desperate to avoid participation. If we stand down now we still stand a chance. I'll not not embrace this hyperreal. I resist. In an out of context (possible mis-)quote from de Beauvoir, "choose to exist, I exist, choose to exist, I exist. There will be a dawn."
Simulations to our Detriment
We communicate today to our detriment, in a way that separates us, takes us further away, further into a simulation. We no longer exist in the real and our ability to function as humans were meant to function is now lost. Or rather, we are losing. We are simulations. Hidden. Dying.
If we meet someone, on the street, face to face, as part of a dance, we function best. We see the face, hear the tones, read signs. We exist. On the phone we fair less well. We cannot gauge gestures but we can still know because if nothing else the ascent and descent of the voice tells stories still in a three dimensional form. By email we remove ourselves once more from reality, but at least we carry words in intelligent depth, unfortunately still losing, but at least having the ability to reach into our own minds to formulate words for as long as it takes.
But a new distance has been created and it's a distance that takes us the furthest we've ever been from the real. We text. In short bursts we text. And in this new world we have truly left the real, we have become nothing but simulations. We create nothing but simulations. The relationships we form are not relationships but a simulation of a relationship. We are no longer responsible, held accountable, ourselves. We are a shade hollow and less than two dimensional. We have completely separated ourselves from utter truth.
A text is but a weak hook to feel close to a humanity we are no longer a part of. We have chosen to exist with so little. Our path is tenuous. Those we draw in or are drawn in by play a game of false perpetuation.
Let us know that we fail today and are drawing our last breath. The short type is nothing but the death of interaction. I'll shun it from here on.
If we meet someone, on the street, face to face, as part of a dance, we function best. We see the face, hear the tones, read signs. We exist. On the phone we fair less well. We cannot gauge gestures but we can still know because if nothing else the ascent and descent of the voice tells stories still in a three dimensional form. By email we remove ourselves once more from reality, but at least we carry words in intelligent depth, unfortunately still losing, but at least having the ability to reach into our own minds to formulate words for as long as it takes.
But a new distance has been created and it's a distance that takes us the furthest we've ever been from the real. We text. In short bursts we text. And in this new world we have truly left the real, we have become nothing but simulations. We create nothing but simulations. The relationships we form are not relationships but a simulation of a relationship. We are no longer responsible, held accountable, ourselves. We are a shade hollow and less than two dimensional. We have completely separated ourselves from utter truth.
A text is but a weak hook to feel close to a humanity we are no longer a part of. We have chosen to exist with so little. Our path is tenuous. Those we draw in or are drawn in by play a game of false perpetuation.
Let us know that we fail today and are drawing our last breath. The short type is nothing but the death of interaction. I'll shun it from here on.
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