It Walks, It Talks, And Seeks The Herd
And the point of
walking is what? In this primitivist bliss, this amazing feat that cries
out in its simplisticism for a holiday of bowing-and-scraping in the manner
so well achieved by the nuns and monks of the Left... was it fun? Was
it health-creating? Was it entertaining? Was it as good for you
as it was for dead time? Was there any unprovided, role-free authenticity?
What then is so magnificent this mechanism of travel, this process
of delivery of righteous truth? Drums? Uniforms? Monotonic chants? Skinnerian responses to bullhorned hierarchy? Not
so awe-inspiring or new? It would seem that the plod-and-trod
is more a dutiful advertisement for therapy than it is for some elevation
of the spirit, some connection to the totality. So, let's look at the meaning
of inspiration.
It has a priceless and priceful history - freshened not only in enlightenment, but steeped also in the opposite - that uncomfortable shuffle of religiosity: self-sacrifice. Ah, to be connected at long last via vicarious fervor and its voyeuristic moan: "do it for someone else". Shall we revel in it still? Wouldn't that be contrary to the whole point of self-sacrifice? Well then, there's the quantities
that will take notice, that will identify. In what - a continuation
of the same selflessness made common, made law by the social relations of
daily life? Besides, seeking notice finds paradox with the martyr role: unattainable since one must rigorously pursue self-invisibility. Who can notice if you succeed? Perhaps it's time to crawl? After
all, the path of self-denial begets none but the same. Maybe a hairshirt,
tight shoes, two
left shoes seem appropriately "correct", waterlessness - even walking from
point A to point -A? Dismality's call to march? "But I already gave at the office, the unemployment line, the market, the nightclub...." Now that we see the resistance to calls for zealous sacrifice of oneself for anyone
or anything... why the march? The qualities
of the participation are what motivate me: try having the pseudo-participants standing on each
other's shoulders, doing a lengthy "wheelbarrow walk" with but the last
person actually on their feet. Maybe if they could arrive before they left, arrive
everywhere but for their destination? Otherwise the notion of leaving and arriving, of means and ends, has no substance
to fill that which has exited - with characterological complicity - in this
joyless soldier's sacrifice, as just one more sacrifice in a world of buy-and-sell, whose very nurture comes from and by same. Living
by not living, smothering joy for future joy, annihilating dream with nightmare,
dying for others, eliminating the dialectic of affirmation - that's what
this is all about! Being the same. Accepting fate. Joining the herd. Be
droll, banal, drivelous, vapid, useless, boring, the murderer of laughter,
the loser of imagination in the crowd. Sacrifice for the rite of self-sacrifice?
Hail the stopwatch, punchclock, and cash register. Until I hear singing from
and of something done that outdoes what all past self-sacrifice has already achieved - precisely bringing
us to the state of affairs in which we find ourselves and the world today
- I shall remain but mildly amused and less-than-inspired, more so repulsed and definite enemy thereof. Forbid the thought
of a world based on social relations - arousing, exciting, negentropic. An
endless orgasm of experience.... The will to live a fuller, richer life is to be found in fuller, richer
acts and people, and not in the parading of their absence.
The
call for self-sacrifice is but a cry of the self-repressed to end the generalized condition
which makes self-sacrifice and impoverished selves possible - an end to the marching of ghosts - of who we could be and become.
Lust for Life
Adventures in Generalized Growth, Greed, and Gratification
P.O. Box 22466 - Milwaukie, OR. 97269 U.S.A.
http://home.teleport.com/~rasputin
rasputin@teleport.com