The end of the beginning
Thursday, 10th June 2010Posted under: life ,
For those of you reading this for the first time, beware... my turgid narrative has reached new lows... I suggest it is best understood in the context of all my previous posts.... then at least you can be entertained by my inexorable decline...
First I shall offer you a few pictures to set the stage for the end of this act.... where the last shred of my sanity was torn from my fumbling grasp and released upon the wind....
the clown
the shed
.......the extreme make over
the kitchen...
..the front yard
back yard
....my installation art, I call it "Turd Cemetery"
So I come to the end of the first 12 months of my journey. The first chapter of my odyssey defined by something as grotesque as the financial year. It makes me ponder... how best to describe this time, for although it was a time of productivity, to create music, it became much more.... a kind of revelation.... as to the utter absurdity of it all.
But let me start with one of those moments when we meet people and they share a story of such pain and love.... of such strength, that it justifies all the fascination that we pile upon ourselves in our narcissistic anthropocentricity.
Imagine yourself as a 13 year old girl, brutally gang raped... the perpetrators never brought to justice... imagine later then having the fortune to meet and marry your soul mate.... to enjoy the bliss of seven beautiful years of happiness... and for it to be tragically torn away by suicide while you are pregnant with your first child.... first your husband... then your best friend.... and then your brother....who you yourself find after weeks of rotting decay.... all within 18 months.
Imagine that through all the turmoil of this pain you still managed to fill your life with an abundance of creative and professional adventures, and enough care and energy to give yourself to a calling in the service of assisting others in need.... all the while raising a daughter on your own with a love and wisdom that could so easily have become a listless resignation..... This is a life that makes you want to celebrate the strength and versatility of the individual to overcome adversity.... how can you not admire what people are capable of.
What a story like that does is make you reflect on your own circumstances, and provokes you into examining how well you have managed this blip of time you possess on this planet, your own strengths and weaknesses, your motivations and ambitions.
And in a most boring and repetitive twist I found myself mimicking the archetypical artist....again... who in a fit of tormented soul searching discovers that the greatest inspiration for survival, for giving, for caring, the inspiration for all our strength needed to overcome adversity during our brief fumbling on this planet, is love.
I mean, what a cliche.
And where did that gem of a revelation come from..... from being slapped in the face with its most beguiling manifestation, romantic love....
Love, how bitter sweet. What a great crashing roller coaster ride it is. It has an intensity I will never forget. The highs, oh so high, the lows dismal. Love.... it totally fucks with your head. And I, what the fuck got into my head....glorious love!... a hope I might just once taste the nectar of the gods!?!
I became obsessed with a beautiful woman, how weak a man am I. There is nothing as blessedly beautiful as love, and nothing as wickedly cruel as love... yet all I was in love with was a fantasy. A few pixels on a screen, backed up by a few encouraging scribbles.... how I wanted to believe.... it seemed as if there was a woman who was made for me, whose sensuality was moulded by the goddess herself, just for me.... and it seemed as if I fit perfectly into the glove she had sown, all those things she was seeking I had........ I made love to her thru my words, moulded out of the passion in my heart.... she responded to me... as if she was touched by me.... as if there just might be the possibility the gods had crafted us for each other.... yet somehow... it all disappeared in one sudden puff of silence.....
Was I cursed... All my ambition, drive, determination... my dreams and aspirations were torn open, exposed as merely a clever ruse.... to be worthy of the perfect love...
Perhaps this was my destiny.... the gods toying with the likes of me... maybe they decided that this pain was what I needed to create my art.... they sit on their heavenly thrones, their laughter rumbling across my weakness like thunder.... it begs the question, what do I get out of any of this, this fool that gets tossed around by the vicissitudes of fate......
Yet my rational brain came to the rescue and reminded me that I am only victim to my raging dopamine levels.... love, the drug..... just say no. Yes, science did a fabulous job of stomping onto the scene like a pissed giraffe holding a magnifying glass, ostentatiously declaring these emotions as a phenomenon evolved to assist in the successful propagation of more little humans.. don't worry, it only ever lasts for about a year, if you have the fortune of spending a year with the object of your desires that is.... then sanity returns.... in all its hungry, screaming, sleepless, demanding, exhaustion....
How useful then, and I hang my head in shame, for as I looked closely in the mirror with that bloody magnifying glass, I only saw a man with the temperance of a monkey in a cage, jumping up and down at the picture of a banana....
Life was never meant to be a path of roses....
So there I was, sitting in the middle of nowhere with the shattered remains of any integrity I had strewn across the ground like vomit after a real boozy night..... a dopamine junky hangover from a potent hit of love. I had to give it to science, it came to the rescue by totally destroying any mystery in it, reducing me to nothing more than a complex cauldron of biochemical reactions. So how do I salvage some integrity from such a banal situation... after all, some of the most exquisite works of art were inspired by love.... how many great things were achieved, inspired by love.... how much sacrifice made , for love.... such accomplished and profound human endeavours, mere artefacts of a few spurts of dopamine...
The annoyingly useful thing with science is that its reductionist, mechanistic evaluation of the human condition exposes the underlying processes that determine our behaviour. When you start to examine these processes and begin to piece together these hidden influences it also brings our moral compass under scrutiny.... you become confronted with the challenge that our decisions about what is "good" and what is "bad", "right" or "wrong" may just be an arbitrary emergent phenomenon from a complex subset of neurological processes designed to differentiate only between what feels good, and that which doesn't, the criteria of which is evolved and determined exclusively by the drive for survival.
So it comes back to dopamine... the only drug of addiction....we seek to pump the levels up to flush away our cares, expose us for a few fleeting moments to that elusive bliss.... and then the homeostatic balancing of our bodies drags us back down to remind us to eat, shit and kill....
The terrifying thing is that our technological culture has evolved far more rapidly than our primitive physiology. So now we have instant access to a plethora of stimulants, physical and social, that give us the opportunity to relentlessly pump up our dopamine time and time again.... from food, internet porn and easy sex, to gambling, drugs, celebrity, consumerism, power....... and wealth.
Yes, wealth, the culturally defined benchmark of personal worth.... those who strive to appropriate personal wealth beyond their needs are only addicted to the dopamine hit they receive from the social status it endows.... increase the feel good factor, just add money and stir... unfortunately, like all addictions, the hit doesn't last and we always find ourselves seeking a stronger fix....where do you think all that monstrous global debt came from.....
They did it with rats, shoved electrodes into their brains and let them push a lever that tickled their dopamine receptors, they didn't eat, or drink, they just pushed that lever until they died....
Indeed, it is not a pleasant thought, to view this current generation of humans as merely a horde of lab rats in a vast unconscious experiment, sophisticated digital signals shoved into our little skulls stimulating those dopamine receptors with surround sound 3D technicoloured promises of wealth, sex and happiness, and us, madly pushing that little lever over and over again.... so obsessed we don't notice we are destroying everything around us in the process... what more confronting example of addiction do you need.
There is what is called the dopaminergic mind hypothesis, which argues that a;
"dopaminergic society" is an extremely goal-oriented, fast-paced, and even manic society, "given that dopamine is known to increase activity levels, speed up our internal clocks and create a preference for novel over unchanging environments." In the same way that high-dopamine individuals lack empathy and exhibit a more masculine behavioral style, dopaminergic societies are "typified by more conquest, competition, and aggression than nurturance and communality."
This extract from wikipedia theorises that the adaption to a carnivorous, high protein diet caused a surge in dopamine production in our distant ancestors, leading to the evolution of civilisation as we now know it. It's description doesn't even take into account the proliferation of dopamine stimulating sources within our modern technological environment.
So take a good look around, we are a manic, insane and destructive civilisation.... and if you listen closely, you can here it constantly chanting its diabolically psychotic mantra... "growth, wealth, growth, wealth......" if you don't believe me, just watch the news.... read a newspaper... watch a few commercials....
All this manic activity undertaken by our insane civilisation is carried out within a conceptual framework that, every financial year, only results in a net loss to the environment. Unless that framework changes to one that only results in a net gain, we are doomed to destruction. Simple, undeniable logic.
But what do you care, with lots of luck, the consequences might be something only your children and grandchildren and every later generation for thousands of years will have to deal with, not you..... if they don't become extinct that is.
So your moral compass is spinning in a dopamine induced neurological whirlpool, how do you get your bearings.... is it possible to pull away from those electrodes and stop pushing that bloody lever. Well.... that brings us back to me sitting in a puddle of my own emotional vomit, contemplating the meaning of love. Because it can be rather embarrassing to consider how pathetic it is to go on such a roller coaster ride just over a few pixels and some squiggles on a computer screen.... fortunately for me I am well versed in denial so my mind got feverishly to work at constructing a feasible justification for such idiocy.... and hey presto... I am hit with a fabulous fix of ecological truism lathered in tangy Jungian metaphysical insight.
I had fallen in love with the goddess.
Yes, the goddess, the manifestation of that profound procreative force that flows through all of nature... from her springs all life... she feeds us with her produce.... she nurtures us through the care of our mothers, she seduces us through our lovers.... she perpetuates life... she embeds herself in our collective mind as a metaphor.... the nurturing source of all life, the perfect woman.... the goddess.
The gods had taken my pathetic loneliness, tossed in a few crumbs of temptation and with their divine skills crafted a path for me to stumble blindly along until my brain was saturated... I wept, I laughed, I roared... they teased me to a point of bliss, then they instructed me to open my eyes... and there I was, alone in the wilderness...... cradled in the arms of the goddess... the object of my desires evaporated..... a mere rainbow, a fleeting vision of beauty that had guided me to a higher state of consciousness.
You see, the beautiful, yet in many ways unremarkable thing about human consciousness, is that it is merely an expansion of our awareness. We have all been endowed with the capacity to extrapolate and recognise that we are, in all our narcissistic perfection, ultimately a direct product of the natural world. That amazing biochemical factory we call nature , that has been pumping out endless life-form products for millions of years, recently released the latest upgraded human model, now with enhanced conscious awareness.... introducing ....you.
The relevance being that we have been exquisitely crafted by nature to love, and through our conscious awareness, recognise and love the hand that crafted us..... Unfortunately that mechanism which opens us to such profound experience has been hijacked and flooded by the neurotic malediction of modern civilisation. We have become hopelessly confused by the many fraudulent paths to bliss....
So love pumps up our dopamine, what makes it any different from the other stimulants that do the same.... there is a qualitative difference, for it is the ultimate survival tool. Love motivates us to protect, to protect our children, our partners, our friendships, and from there it isn't difficult to extrapolate to all the other things that nurture us and keep us alive, like fresh water, healthy food, clean air.... healthy environment.......and the defining quality that differentiates love from all things, is that it achieves this not through taking, but giving....
And in the balance of things, we can only survive if we give more than we take....
Which is why, of all of them, love has evolved as the most powerful stimulant..... it has such a profound positive impact on our survival, for imagine yourself, gifted by the gods of possessing the perfect love, if it were wounded and weak, would you not sacrifice all to protect it against the avarice, hatred and weakness in the world, so it may survive and grow and spread its beauty across all things.....
But real people fart, smell and do stupid, ignorant and destructive things....that is the role of the goddess.... to help us see beyond our fallibility and gather her threads that are woven through all things and weave them into an image of perfection that so inspires us as to rally to her protection.....
But how do we hear, let alone be convinced by a call to arms in a world deafened by an endless sea of neurotic voices. Voices echoing out from billions of struggling little egos, that essential yet dangerously malleable neurological subroutine that through all our formative educational years learnt to define itself through its relationship with others.... carving out the shonky foundations for all our future perceptions of self worth...... only too often driven to dysfunction by the unconscious and malevolent influences at work in our modern society.... yes, take a breath.... ego, the bane of everybody's life.....
This is why I retreat to these beautiful isolated places, to silence the voices of the ego, that-merry go-round infested with crowds of manic monkeys all scrambling over the top of each other screaming for attention as they swing past. An unruly, noisy and inherently self absorbed circus act, exclusively trained to respond to a never ending barrage of evolving social situations....
If you are lucky, you may recognise that one little monkey that stands aside in silence and just watches it all.... she is the gateway to your salvation.
And when that little monkey steps away from all the cacophonous madness, into the stillness of the wilderness.... after that roundabout has slowed to a halt.... and all aboard fall silent... following the gaze of that one silent monkey..... across the forests... and the rivers..... at nothing more than a sunset..... then the beauty of the goddess reaches out to you and captures your heart.....
The one truly defining characteristic of love..... our ability to see beauty... and when you see beauty, how can you in all conscience partake in its destruction....
So my psychoanalytical joy ride came to an end with a profound affirmation of something that countless poets and musicians have been bleating about for generations....
Love
Embrace love and you will only give to the world,
For in its absence, you will only rape it....
Once upon a time the goddess led me into her crumbling temple.... until she is healed, I will forever remain her guardian.
Love, the financial year ends with the absurdity of this cliche.....