If Not For Hipster Pictures

I suppose I never really thought that Suburbia would teach me a lesson. To learn requires culture, and culture seems to be the one thing that white-flight is vehemently against; NPR and Dave Mathews and public television, fine, but just don’t let those artsy types actually think they’re worth anything to the upwardly (/outwardly) mobile.

But I have learned something, I suppose, although it is more a negation of this ambiance than a summation of it. The one thing Suburbia has taught me:

-Human beings need discomfort in order to be happy.

There is a reason that utopia sits right next to anarchy on a circular political spectrum. The suburbs are a post-war Brook Farm, an exercise in what the white man would have if the white man could have anything. And here’s what he would have:

-sterile, nonexistent design

-blind uniformity

-undercurrents (overcurrents?) of racism and sexism and xenophobia

-amorality based on jock-culture-esque competition and oneupsmanship

-the proliferation of inane religion as an opiate/conformity drug

-an utter indifference to anything but money and the petty socioeconomic status that said currency affords

I believe it was Zinn who characterized the middle class as a buffer, established by the economic ruling class, whose sole purpose was to incentivize and paralyze the rebellious tendencies of the working class with the allure of quasi-richness (but never anything close to an overt richness). I feel as if I have been the front wall of that buffer, constantly being bombarded with all of the worthwhile ventures that await a non-middle-class man, but unable to break free from the wall of my upbringing.

Until now, that it.

That is the problem with Suburbia: it is so utopian that it has stagnated to the point of inanity. There is no disturbance in the life of a suburbanite; and by direct consequence, there is no desire. There is no passion, no burning need to saturate one’s life with something worthwhile or meaningful or useful or (dare the words be used!) beautiful. Without disturbance, without the tumultuous nonuniformity from whence genius arises, Suburbia has become (always has been) chaste.

“Such is the life of a man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.” -J.B.S. Haldane

Such economicopolicial observations always bring up the question of in what sense a place like the suburbs exists. It’s not an impertinent question: if the bars from which I am escaping are not really bars, are only a figment of urban analysis, then in what sense can I claim a genuine relief for being able to fight the shackles of conformity and chasteness with the fires of culture and intellectualism? It’s a question of ontology, no doubt, but it tends to be within the most abstract of endeavors that I find the most pertinent practical issues for life.

It is a legitimate question: in what sense does some abstraction like a lake exist? It can alter weather patters (although this brings up the very interesting question of whether weather exists), lonely seafarers can fall in love with its oscillating, sexual beauty, but a lake seems to be nothing more than a conceptual category in the user’s head. Scientifically, it is merely the collection of water atoms that a certain indentation in the earth’s surface allows to conglomerate, with all of the other organic and inorganic material that arise in relation to said organization. It only becomes a lake once there is an observer there to call it one.

It only becomes something once there is an observer there to call it one. In what sense does the body of one’s lover exist? Thousands of others look upon it on a given day, and yet it produces no emotionally salient response in them (well… one hopes not). And yet, to the correctly tuned brain, that image is the most affectively evocative media that one could wish for. Again, scientifically, we throw all of our love, hopes, dreams, fears, desires onto a conglomeration of carbon and several other third-rate molecules (the noble gases must think the whole of life to be a pungent mess that arises when electron-deprived atoms whore themselves out to each other in orgies of indecent chemical bonding) which we can never be sure truly exists in the same way that we do (the problem of others rears itself again).

Is there any sense above the rational that we can say the ones we love exist?

And does it make any sense that such love is more or less a fluctuation of neurological impulses and badly formed psychological connections? For what it’s worth, I’m convinced that you never really stop loving someone. Relationships end and hearts are broken because the object of such affection is an historically-contingent object.

We fall in love with a personality at a certain time. We then naively assume that such personalities are stable and will never change (or at least won’t change significantly during the course of the relationship, a more sophisticated probabilistic argument that is still flat-out wrong). It then shocks the ignorant human when personalities do change, when people do develop mutually incompatible facets of behavior, and when sociosexual relations fall apart as a result.

At best, our personalities are stories that we tell ourselves (and, crucially, others) that attempt to rationalize our behavior. Neurologically, there is no part of the brain that seems intricately (or even necessary comparatively) devoted to constructing a sense of self. Most of our behavior is processed on massive parallel pathways in the deep recesses of our unconscious (in this sense, a certain amount of determinism is a physiological fact, not a philosophical argument), and it is only after most of our actions that we find ways to rationalize and justify our behavior. Our personalities are flimsy literature, something of Romantic variety no doubt (although the more well-developed may have more Twain in them than Hawthorne), and it is these just-so stories that we attach the whole of our emotions to.

So who would be surprised if these flimsy stories change? Who wouldn’t expect that time would so alter these narratives as to render them completely unintelligible even to someone who fell in love with the literature just a few months or years prior? It is only the stupid antibrevity of the unexamined human being which thinks that such changes are a travesty of the heart and a perplexing puzzle of the mind.

Here we come to a turning of the season/ a witness to the arc towards the sun…

I suppose, like atheism, there is some solace in the knowledge of the utter fictionalism of our personalities. It allows one to focus on changing said personality for the better; after all, if it is only a story we tell, and a story that is changing constantly, why could we not alter its future course and steer it towards more pleasing waters? There is also a certain smug irony that one comes to find once one accepts this fact. Our society places so much weight on personality, yet personality is such a fleeting concept that cannot be removed from experience. It is definitely not the deepest irony of American society, but it adds a certain amount of cynical pleasure to the way one views media.

Plus, I would think that it would intensify the romantic emotions that one feels, if anything. This is the personality that I’ve chosen, and it won’t stay this way for long, so any abandon I may have had before thus dissolves in front of the acidity of the truths that I now possess. Theoretically, anyway…

I think you’d remember
When you were so locked down
If you were a burden in a previous life

Sleeping alone at the foot of your bed
Would you give me a reason to worry at night?

I wasn’t sure that all of my words
Could even try to hold the weight

Well, here we’ve come to that turning of the season, anyway. For what it’s worth, I’m ready to get out of Herzen’s pregnant window and dive in to the new social order. Whatever that may be.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have created a second blog, on which I explore some of the same ideas I do here in a more in-depth, analytical style. I also plan on doing review of literature, music, art, philosophy, cognitive science, and anything else tangentially related.

For those interested:

http://polyaesthete.tumblr.com

neuroimages:

Ashwin Vishwanathan, Guo-Qiang Bi and Henry C. Zeringue / University of Pittsburgh

And it is paradoxically in the moments of intimacy that I feel the most alone.

Although, I don’t understand exactly why the word [paradox] should be included in the previous sentence. One would think that, in a world in which oxymoron seems to define the whole of existence, it would be self-evident [or at least self-effacing] that any comment on the human condition must be abhorrently contradictory and paradoxical.

In fact, if one desired a fool-proof method for determining whether some comment truly represented the experience of the human condition, one need only ask a single question: “Is it contradictory?”

From this single statement, all truths [and falsehoods] about the neuropsychosocioeconoreligiointellectual nature of the human being can be deduced.

It is perhaps this widened scope of being that gives rise to such a paradox. We are incredibly multifaceted creatures; we are, at once:

- the incessant babbling of primitive nerve cells

- a highly-pressurized autoimmune vessel

- a conflicting conglomeration of desires, thoughts, ideas, drives

- a infinitesimal cog in an imperceptible social wheel

- vulnerable to vast delusions of religious grandeur

- Adam Smith’s rational man

- Arnold Schopenhauer’s irrational man

- a reservoir of trivial, banal emotions

- a creatures needlessly driven by these emotions

THESIS: The human being is an incessant heap of biological secretions, emotional ejaculations, intellectual aspirations, religious desperations, social connotations, and transcendental beautification.

-Notice how no parameter was ever set that the definers of experience had to be true. One of them [religion] is observable and undoubtedly false; another [the proposed transcendence of the human consciousness] stands on rather shaky philosophical ground with little empirical evidence. Beings of truth, we definitely are not.

But beings we are. This is where the [gruesome, grotesque, abhorring] beauty of the human condition shines through to me with crystal clarity: no matter how deluded, petty, emotional, or abjectly stupid we are, we still are. For a pathetically short amount of time, we exist. We live. We know. We know that we know. The reflexivity of the conscious mind presents a beautiful narrative about this short breadth of sentient expanse that we call existence.

No matter how disgusting our lives our, they still are. What a beautiful fact this is.

COROLLARY: The confusion that has defined almost the whole of human history can be understood [but not, not, not, not excused].

How this all relates to the aloneness I occasionally feel doesn’t seem obvious [especially to me]. Perhaps [conjecture 1] it is the fact that I am in contact with the true nature of reality, and very few others are; the populace floats by, content with their soap opera social lives, fleeting gods, political grievances; while the artists, the scientists, the philosophers, the intellectuals penetrate what it truly means to be. Perhaps [conjecture 1, corollary] it is just a Nietzschean isolation brought on by the intellect.

Or, perhaps [conjecture 2] there is some sense in which humans are destined to be alone.

This is why we grapple so hard for relationships, for acquaintances with whom we share nothing but superficiality and a deep desire to interact, for acceptance of a group where all each member seeks is an emergent property of their collective desire.

Perhaps we grasp violently, angrily for these ties because we have an intuitive understanding that we will always be alone. We will always be ourselves, separated from others by the unbreakable barrier known as existence.

Our existence gives us beauty, as well as isolation.

[contradictorium est, ergo est verum]

I kept waiting for the female protagonist from every indie rock narrative to appear.

A whore of Picasso caliber, perhaps, or the chain-smoking philosopher disguised as a subplot in a dubbed French indie flick.

Or how about Lucy in that Messersmith song? Certainly Iron & Wine was not lying in “Naked as We Came;” [one of us will die inside these arms]?

Kept waiting for the “we” in Modest Mouse’s “Bukowski” to materialize, transform from some metaphysical/intellectual abstraction into something real.

Which eventually lead me here: these girls do not exist. The indie world has created a female archetype without any grounding in reality. These characters are elaborate, intellectual, seductive, almost mystifyingly interesting figments of the tortured, white, middle-class collective unconscious.

The beautiful current that created the creative class also created a hollow shell of a stereotype [seductive or otherwise].

And no sustinence has ever been found in baseless metaphysical abstraction.

So I settled in with the other I had. And against an indifferent sky, we made the case for the disgustingly glorious fate that is the human condition.

Til nihilism, ma’am, or til death.

Disgusting is simultaneously beautiful.

It is a pleasant heat.

One that seems to sit on the landscape like an unobtrusive visitor.

It has a temperate personality, diffident, contemplative, a quasi-stranger who the inattentive individual would pay no attention to.

And yet this guest serves as a conductor of thoughts, a catalyst for emotion.

It is on this quiet heat that the whole of human emotion is laid bare.

It would be wrong to say that I want to be a writer.

It is more like the desire to write is consuming my entire being.