DEFENDING GENERALITIES: A REMEDY TO THE FUTILITY OF POLITICAL POETRY
When operating within the realm of specifics we limit the scope of our capabilities - focusing so tightly on our observations (a plural noun intrinsically tied to the past) that we don’t cultivate the tools necessary to integrate ourselves into the present as it rapidly becomes the future. The details bog us in a swamp of symptom solving bialogues that refuses to acknowledge the disagreements at the core of our argument. A core is an abstraction: the center essense where the seedlings of essential truth are born and grow into trees of comprehensive understanding. This is where discussion becomes an honest dialogue about the lenses through which our worlds are viewed, and the difference in those contexts and assumptions holds the secret to unlocking an empathetic comprehension of each other’s beliefs on specifics and generalities.
DUTY VS. JOB: AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND OBLIGATION’S RELATIONSHIP TO EMPLOYMENT
To complete one’s role in society is to commit to finding the cog in the machinery that you can relish the process of becoming. Our obsession with completion has led us to prematurely assigning these cogs to their supposed human counterpart and asking the human to focus on mimicking their cog efficiently. By losing the exploration, we’ve deprived ourselves of discovering our true fits - where self-motivation can naturally inform an effectivity needed for growth. It requires patience, but the payoff for allowing our citizens to be rightfully placed instead of forcing together ill-fitted machinery only to have to replace it when the gears’ teeth are ground to their unusable gums is monumental because our duty would be inspired and infused with divergent thinking.
OBLIGATION AND DEMANDATION: HOW THE MONETARY UNIT HAS CHANGED OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GIVING AND RECEIVING
Worth, as a word, has become chained to coinage - our creation out of a perceived necessity to define objective value. The issue with coinage has become it’s polygamous demands to be universally regarded as a truth teller. Just as it would be difficult to go on a date with a lover and their other lover money has become the bearer of awkward experiences for humans as they rectify their relationship differences with the one they mutually admire/stalk. The result is that those that control more become possessive, feeling entitled to demand more - spending becomes a relinquishing of worth and this act of charity deserves to be repaid with an equivalent respect. Those who are less tied to coinage find themselves guiltily requesting participation - receiving payment comes with an obligatory service to those generous enough to do the bestowing. The indebtedness created undoes any generosity within the transaction itself, leaving us with a stagnant system unable to adapt to the true worth of individuals.
RESISTING THE URGE TO TEST: AN ARTIST’S LIFE IN LESSON
To wander implies an aimlessness that artists understand lives at the threshold of motivation. We reside on this tightrope between useless and shifter of tectonic plates of social change, knowing that within the realm of the seemingly inane is where inspiration bites us and yet the ego that compels our journey forward lives in the dreams contained within this promise of immortal recognition. Our attempt to dwell in continuation finds us defining ourselves as students - not of any categorizable idea, but of life itself. Schooling summons to mind the post-industrial-age institution that centers itself around the test, but, just as in any educational system, this quizzing is a distracting checkpoint whose utility lies in its brag - its proving of lessons learned to a higher authority whose opinion we hold in esteem. In this analogy, the audience becomes the authority of the artist and their completed work: the demonstrative proof of worth. This ego building process is far from unnecessary - it is part of the swinging balance that forces forward our movement, but to require of one’s self a showing of all
dskj work is to test without time for reflective growth. This tightrope is a delicate walk and yet important, as to balance one’s arrogant display of one’s own ideas with the foraging and imbibing of the earth’s fruits is to maintain a morally based motivation.
BEYOND MONOTONY: HOW STANDARDIZATION HAS DESTROYED THE FLOW IT WAS MEANT TO PROTECT
If we continue to hold growth in esteem, we must attempt to understand the variables it is correlated to. We should look not just to correlation, but also the relationships it has defined through causality. Bottlenecking stems from our growth fetish. We can either deal with this by forming tributaries for our new found mass to be distributed between, or we can search for spaces where growth has been absent from the narrative of progress and reassign our additions to where they can be supported. Though the second is the option that involves less materials, we’ve opted for the first out of fear of demanding a change from the involved humans. But our manmade growth cannot keep up with natural growth, and instead we are left with Rush Hour: A frustrating inefficiency that causes resentment of our fellow man - easily avoided if we held on to our arbitrary schedules a little less stubbornly. It’s one of many examples of humanity creating a system in honor of efficiency, but then refusing to relinquish it when it no longer defended that concept.
THE NECESSITY OF FINDING MOMENTS OF MEDITATION AS THE POLITICAL PENDULUM SWINGS
As technologicalization sweats through our political and economic systems an awareness must be paid to the speed at which we thrust ourselves back and forth across the spectrum. We are a snowball of change, only achieving growth through the steady accumulation of mass. But just as we can’t allow the speed of the shifts perceived necessary to dystopically distort our truths distancing our world from the reality in which it exists, we must maintain a healthy fear of stagnation that would allow apathy to melt away any possible cultural growth.
THE TOURIST INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: GENTRIFICATION THROUGH STERILIZATION
When traveling to a place we attempt to travel also in time to the vacationland our destination was before our presence was felt - we desire to voyeuristically peek into a space without the inevitable change we implement by visiting. Therefore the employee of the tourist industry focuses his/her efforts on vacuum sealing the most desirable moment of existence. This task, an impossible one, results in a harnessing down of humanity-growth for fear that evolution will refuse economic-growth forgetting that the economic-growth itself manifests a magnetism of monetary moguls that enforces eventual evolution of the humans whose growth you were attempting to stifle. The addition of a currency based oligarch invites a class jealousy that encourages stratification that cyclically invites more class strife while simultaneously destroying the pilgrimage sight the system was meant to protect - the emerging of class-structure being antithetical to the preservation of time previous to the that structure’s existence. Our solution is simply an awareness of the virus-like nature of our presence; complete
lkj with the necessity of being flushed out of the system or succumbing to the natural habitat. This also involves an incumbency upon the industry behind tourism to refuse placation of the foreign body. Comfort should be furthest from its motivational forces, demanding instead a release of the virus’ toxins or a release of the virus from the environment. When the guest is no longer given the false premise of home, we also allow the home to adapt through dialogue with its guest - we are encouraged to find meaning in each other’s being as opposed to the sterile stagnant separation necessary to maintain mutual comfort.
METEOROLOGY: THE IMPETUS OF RURAL DEPRESSION
AM I BEING RUDE? RECOGNIZING RESPONSIBILITIES: REAL AND IMAGINED
Guilt is always a delusion; sometimes healthy. It is a delusion that fills one with a fearful stiffness rife with compulsions of socially uncomfortable fits of self-reflection. In these moments we must take advantage of the guttural vulnerability we’ve discovered and utilize these moments to journey deep into our own motivational forces. In opposition to our instinct of problem solving our way out of the shame spiral that is forcefully nudging us towards its center, we should attempt acceptance and in the attempt mine out the analytic gems uncovered in the subsequent imaginative whirlwind. It isn’t important if there is truth to your mind’s creations, only that your mind has brought you to this space and now you must make the most of your playtime. In the end assume you are responsible because it will inevitably push you further into the depths that are in need of a healthy excavation.
THE ARGUMENT FOR A FOOD SERVICE DRAFT
Guilt defines the relationship the served has with their provider. Guilt, helplessness, unawareness, and frozen awaiting. That guilt offers a needed understanding of one’s ability to be thrust above through no action outside of the lottery of life. To combat the luck inherent within a heredity defined class culture, it’s necessary to force one’s self onto every rung of the caste ladder to remember that the ladder’s rungs are less vertically aligned than we want to think of them. They are a haphazardly jumbled pile of firewood with certain privileges given to specific rungs. It’s only when we don’t demand our societal partners participate across the spectrum of roles that rungs begin getting cast in spotlights of superiority. In order to live in an empathetic society we must force ourselves to have as many chapters in the roles we play as there are rungs available to hang off of.
MENUS, CEREAL AISLES, AND THE DELUSION OF CHOICE
Freedom implies a purity of possibility in which a clarity amongst options that does not exist is needed. We can clamor our way to a stockpiling of choices, but the attempt to accomplish is fruitless as no summits can be reached if your peak is infinitely high. Instead we stand on plateaus pointing downward in eager comparison, illustrating our superior distance from the bottom when we should look skyward and realize we are all equidistant from our non-existent destination. I seek not to claim that any intangible acquisition is hardship without reward - that movement up the mountain is simply wasted effort, but rather to claim the journey is its own destination - that we must savor the process of acquiring new choices instead of heralding these opportunities as fruits of our, all too goal oriented, labor.
THE UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECT OF CROSS CULTURAL EXCHANGE: A HOMOGENIZATION OF TASTE
As the inevitability of globalization sees fruition we seem to be caught in the midst of a worldwide competition of ideas - our citizens forced to assert best paths at each fork with which our, now unified, world is presented. But by making these choices we are flattening our horizons, relinquishing the opportunity to broaden our landscapes through forced communication based attempts to compromise our incompatibilities. We lose, not only the diversity of ideas, but the diversity of happinesses inspired by disgust, shock, fear, and sadness. By treating our cultural differences like legs on a march madness bracket to be completed by an ever expanding population containing a rainbow of contexts, we sacrifice the obvious: that because worth is relative, stuff needs the spectrum of stuff that surrounds it in order to maintain its value. On a globe that seeks to undergo a makeover at the hand of the rolling pin, it’s necessary to resist comfort. Instead we must opt for a sometimes disconcerting epilepsy of color in fear that our world becomes blanded by reduction.
THE NECESSITY OF IMPOSING STRUCTURES THAT FORCE FAMILIAL BONDS WHEN CREATING SHARED SPACES
Sharing differs from collective ownership in that ownership implies a right to the decision making process, whereas to share only demands that we recognize how necessary consensus is in the creation of our decisions. Therefore a space we share needs to emphasize a form of communication that allows for selfish demands, resentment of emotional outbursts, petty complaints, prolonged arguments motivated entirely by personal insecurities, and complete forgiveness - the trademarks of the consensual process - the trademarks of a family. Creating bonds that hold as tightly as those formed by family without dedicating the time that family implies is an impossibility only defeated by a hegemonic trust that will take generations of cultural shifts towards siblinghood with fellow human. We must start this process now by assuming a radical optimism of the possibility this paradigm adjustment. We must begin by treating each other like family.
STOLEN GOODS: A MEMORANDUM ON THE DECLINE OF CULTIVATING PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH THE CONSUMER PROCESS
The role of customer will be played by us - a character lacking a necessary addition to our personhood, whose objective thrusts our narrative forward knowledgeable of the ease with which it can be fulfilled through forming a human bond. This bond is not sacred, and yet should be revered for its power in the movement of goods and the movement from desire to completed task - a completed task that is a link in our ever-growing chain of human history. It’s only through the growth of the faceless provider of goods that we’ve departed from our role as faithful buyer to the much simpler: stealer - seeking a self-imposed absence from the formerly relationship forming process of purchasing. Even when we don’t take 100%, we no longer find joy in a mutual benefit because we can’t foresee that respect being reciprocated by such an inhuman presence. We opt instead for a battle for personal rewards - separating ourselves from society.
HELD HOSTAGE BY TRADITIONALISM: A TREATISE ON GENERATIONAL DEFAULTISM
Children will forever be tied to our perceptions of the future. The “hope� that we optimistically pine for is a response to our frustrations with the present - an imaginative exercise allowing us to leave behind the failures of the current. With this creation of a successful overtaking of our past mistakes we achieve growth, but in order for this adaptation to maintain its plausibility we cannot chain ourselves to our parents. Instead of placid acceptance of rituals passed down we must take our role as children seriously - actively refusing the advice of our forebearers until our stubborn tantrum finds us treading water lost, alone, and further away from our destination then when we started. At that point we can call out with our tail sheepishly between our legs begging for the assistance of age-worn wisdom. But rushing to the plea for help is harmful to progress, whereas placing unhealthy barriers between you and your ancestral roots leaves you stranded and separated. While neither is a positive solution, erring on the side of self-obsessiveness over selfishness at least
affects only your own being instead of dragging society down with you.
PRIVILEGE IS INCOMPETENCE: RETHINKING VICTIMHOOD
If this were a personal story I would talk about that time I sat still, the only male left on the bus as my Nepali brothers jumped off in search of shovels to re-dirt the road so we could un-halt our travel, because what was I going to do with a shovel?
A MATHEMATICAL DEMAND FOR DEPTH IN OUR CONSTRUCTIONS OF ROLES
Constructing the recipe for efficiency will inevitably lead us to the problematic ingredient of defining archetypes. These limiting predictions of a human’s being may be nearly as multidimensional as the muse of which it is attempting reflection, but by sake of being a creation it cannot capture the infinite intricacies of the person. The person is in constant revolution against the now seeking comfort in continuous evolution appeasing oneself with the idea that these adaptations save them from definition. But we worry that resisting stagnation simply deludes us into thinking we have security against our fear of role confinement because the movement itself can be defined. By attempting to capture a more accurate reflection we dig deeper by one dimension and seek to reflect not just the being at its place and time, but the derivative of the being - the shifting that is occurring that insights our future. But this delusion of being undefined is steeped in truth for we won’t fully realize our selves in the now until we investigate the derivative of our derivative and the derivative of that
l;lkjnlsdkj derivative of our derivative and so on until we’ve explored the infinity of evolutions within our self-evolution - only then will we have found the role we are to play, and that investigation is one that can only be accomplished by one’s self because only a self has a view of their own infinity.
PHOTOGRAPHY: THE UNNECESSARY DESIRE TO CAPTURE FLEETING MOMENTS AND REPROCESS THEM AS FOREVER FADING MEMORIES
We seek to achieve the unattainable goal of slowing down the momentum that thrusts us away from being past nostalgia and into forgetting so that we may spend as much time existing in each moment. The trouble lies in the word achieve. With any achievement there is process and completion - there is a goal strived toward and then accomplished. But, like attempting immortality through living longer, your process implies the impossibility of your goal. This lengthening of nows is not simply delusional, but also divides your life into an infinity of infinitely long paths for us to schizophrenically multitask between; leaving us drained and regretful by the time we’ve finally achieved death.
HORNS, EXCLAMATION MARKS, AND THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF TONE THROUGH FORCED COLLECTIVE COMMUNICATION PRACTICES
Communication has the inherent flaw that it is attempting to take a personal thought and manipulate it for transport to the communal consciousness. For efficiency’s sake we condense a series of feelings that share enough traits to be assumed similar across a societal platform into a singular expression, and ask the breadth of humanity that that expression now spans across to accept its meaning as consensual truth. And yet that span has its limits and cannot claim to contain beings as a whole. Instead we are left with exclusivity via culturally designed linguistic barriers that alienates those not bred under the zeitgeist. And, more dangerously, the overuse of these efficient commonalities dulls the expressiveness of the original intention. This blanding of tone is causing an amnesia of color - laming the exuberance that exists at the extremes of our emotional spectrum.
EASE DESTROYS WORTH AND HOW THE CAR RUINED THE PILGRIMAGE
To have a destination is to have a goal separated by distance, and the distance we are most trapped into abiding by is time. The usefulness of a goal comes both from its completion and the process needed to discover its accomplishment. Without the journey the destination becomes irrelevant and, though it may feel like an archaic correlation, a journey’s transformational properties are unfailingly linked to the time spent in the journey’s presence. With time comes focus and exploration - a combination capable of powerful self analysis imposed evolution.
THE INTANGIBILITY OF MONEY AS THE CREATION OF THE BEGGAR STATE
Choices have been conflated into a single abstract object in our unending journey towards the unreachable destination of efficiency. This dream of finding within goals an only fills our heads with dreams as to what that dream can dream, and imagination is not bound by the globe’s creations but rather by the mind’s - a world so infinite it can’t truly exist. Its impossibility presents only the symptom of the pandemic that is rooted in a chilling dystopian motivation: a greed for efficiency. This misunderstanding of efficiency as something an individual can acquire and not as a societal goal to be accomplished by the community as a whole is confusing the placement of our motivational bullseye.
WHY CURRENCY AND RELIGION CANNOT COEXIST
God, in all forms, is an attempt to manifest the illusion of the omni. The creation of money has accomplished, at least, an omni-ability - a stretching of our desire’s tentacles to encompass entirety. But it’s not the war waged between these two behemoths battling for our worship that makes their mutual presence impossible. Nay. War can be a sustainable practice as long as casualties don’t outpace growth, and by their nature of describing infinity their growth can never be outpaced. The problem exists in the effect the battle has on the process of worship. This is a process centered around collective offerings finding a way to redistribute themselves amongst the mass that has participated in the process to begin with. Each person’s offering is personal, and as it becomes collective we begin to hear the symphony of voices that our society yearns to compose. When we stack our offerings - create a collection to give individually, we lose our voices as the orchestra attempts to play as many symphonies as there are instruments, and the music of humanity becomes noise.
CELEBRITY WITHIN A CONTAINER: HOW SMALLER BOUNDARIES CAN INTENSIFY WORSHIP
Popularity is in the eye of its cliques beholder. Cliques are but naturally forming cults - culture defining itself through an efficiency motivated categorization, and as with any faith-formed group a hierarchical model becomes difficult to resist. The leader is created as a necessary reaction to directionless followers - the courted has no aim until a courtship has begun - a cliff has no purpose until lemmings find their way off it. This organic occurrence demands of its hero a responsible caring for it’s minions, and of its followers a patriotic evangelism of their leader’s exploits. The fewer aware, the more fervent the propagation must be because the cult’s growth becomes dire extinction: a fear always worthy of contemplation. Reciting the praises of another has a brainwashing effect convincing the reciter of the words themselves as the repetition imbues the statements with a subjective truth. This is not to say that the enthusiasm is false, but rather the result of a search for enthusiasm the words behind the feeling meaningless for the feeling is the meaning. The main
lsdkfj reason a book gets finished is that it gets started.
THE TALENT SHOW’S ROLE IN OUR MISUNDERSTANDING OF ARTISTIC MERIT
If we are to believe that art is a joke played on its audience to trick them into a state of intellectual and emotional vulnerability, as I implore us to do, its value cannot be tied to its inability to be created again anymore than it can be tied to its moment of being imbibed. An ability to challenge norms is not an ability at all - it is a desire - it is a passion and thoughtfulness coming together to create a demand for cultural reinvention. But this, importantly, is unrelated to skill or talent. Art is not cultivated through practice - unless that practice is of the process of expanding boundaries. You cannot get better at art, only be deeper. Art does not see you as a contestant: pushing to the top through a clamoring rush up the pile of competitors. It sees you as a its muse: collaborating with the infinitely large group of muses that Art hires to collectively create its vision. A talent show should be about people who can make w’s out of their tongue or can identify soap flavors by smell. It should stay as far away from Art as possible.
COLD WARS ARE ART? THE SPACE NEEDED TO INSPIRE BOUNDARY EXPANSION
Competition cultivates meaningless expressions of better than thou, me, us, them. In those attempts to milk reality out of our bragadociousness we discover the edges of our creative existence. When the competition is maintained between two opposing forces equally singleminded in their search for victory over answers, the drive becomes narrower - the pinpoint pressure urging the surroundings of the possible to encompass a larger area. The idea that through our own self obsession/analysis/actualization we force the world to fathom redefinition is also Art.
DEFYING DEFINITION: A REFUSAL OF THE STAGNANT NATURE OF TRUTH
A PESSIMISM IN HUMAN NATURE AS A REMEDY FOR SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION
The individual and society are at odds insomuch as individuals are defined by their variety whereas society, by its encompassing nature, has no variance - one cannot have variability from one’s self. Therefore to govern the individual by the same process with which we observe and regulate society is a ludicrous proposition - lazy by impetus, villain-creating by practice. To place faith in humans to push positively forward is an optimism valid a majority of the time, but to lie complacent with a majority success rate is to refuse the option of viewing a majority as pure by finding faith in society itself. Society’s progress is net positive if the average citizen of said society is good, which also implies that probably a significant piece of the human puzzle is not good - evil, bad, contextually ruined through political/economic constructs, etc… So to govern a group one must have a pessimism in the group’s members - for its members may or may not take advantage of a system for personal gain, whereas if the whole undermines its laws in favor of itself we are still treated to a societal win. Psychopathy
sdlkf exists, but fear of a psychopathic society stems from a myth invented and propagated by those eager to maintain their loopholes. Assume a group will do good, but and individual cannot - either out of a malicious, self-serving intent, or out of an inability to understand a world outside of one’s self.
A PLEA TO RECREATE THE UNIVERSAL COMMUNALITY OF FIRE
We have all stared wordlessly at fallen branches as they breathe their final gasps, blessing us with a loving warmth and the accompanying emotional outburst of light that illustrates their sacrifice for our comfort. We’ve all held our hands close not wanting this woody martyr’s beautiful destruction to pass in vain, as the colors for rivers against gravity’s tug and transform into a final vengeful attack on our lungs and eyes leaving us with only its discarded scent to remember it. We’ve all watched as our poking and prodding extracted use and beauty from the formerly dormant and then kept watching as our efforts completed the cycle - the extraction leaving our dormant pile at an even deeper state of dormancy. And never once has anyone said: “Hey man, get your own fire.”