Dear diary,
One must learn to listen with one’s entire body. People say: You are hearing the sound of my voice, but you’re not listening to what I’m singing. Likewise we should listen not only with our ears, but with our eyes, with our skin, with our breath and tongue. Don’t just see things: listen to what you’re viewing, by firing up your mind. Isn’t that what listening is, after all?—allowing your mind to work jointly with all your senses. Or maybe we should put it like this: instead of your mind passively receiving sensory input, one should mentally fondle all stimuli: turn each one over, consider it from all angles, let it beguile about your skull. Let it become you.
One thing that frustrates me is that a lot of people rank the moment of sexual clinch as the apex of spacetime. I don’t wish to disparage this proposition, but I say that everything should attain that same top shelf, every possible interaction with one’s environs should equal, in its own way, the sexual climax. I think that a lot of drug addicts and alcoholics understand this; for you see them waive off sex for dope and booze. They’ve discovered the wild blue yonder of intoxication. But that’s the easiest translation: What I propose is that, say, smelling the scent of freshly cut birch should be as whelming as sex. Even the act of chopping the wood should be bliss.
Everywhere I go, I’m brimming with pleasure, because I listen with my whole being.
Let’s imagine a worker. Her name is Clara. Now Clara’s boss enters the room and yells “Stop lollygagging. Get to work in the bauxite mine.” However, instead of weeping & shuffling off to the mine, Clara approaches & touches the sleeve of Zipporah’s blouse. She listens, thru the fabric, to the shape of the forearm beneath it, with her fingertips. Now, fast-forward a little, and there is nearly a sensory overload when a fresh-baked cauliflower steak is served by the butler: it is placed on the desk, with Champagne in the morning. Just listen to that aroma. Also note the clinks of the silverware.
Why can’t it be like this? Why can’t people live the Good Life, instead of laboring in the mine? I blame the system. It’s like a tedious game we all play. But when, in the days of our youth, with our neighborhood friends, we engage in, say, a dice game, or a card game, or a board game, as soon as the game gets dull, we overturn it. We stand up & flip over the table in a rage, & stop the charade.
So I’ve never understood why we deign to continue appeasing this awful system, which leaves us all sweating from hard work; & then there’s not enough money to pay for our basic necessities; yet when we look outside our front window, we see bigwigs in their castles living it up: the amount of riches that they discard each day as waste could support the population of the planet. Why aren’t we flipping the table & saying: “I quit. This game is boring.” Then the table would fall on its side, and all the dice would roll to the ground, and the cards would fly everywhere, and all the real fun could begin:
First we’d clean up our mess, and then we’d indulge in fresh playacting; which is what we’d all been wanting to do all along, even the super-wealthy winners desired this change: they’re not sad that the game got stopped, cuz they would rather pretend to be nurses and patients – that’s the playact we’re rehearsing; we wrote this piece where a nurse enters a room at the hospital, and there’s a healthy patient lying on the bed, and eventually the actors seduce each other. It’s a pretty good show.
Yeah but the whole “right-left” thing stops us cold. Nobody can get beyond “right-wing” and “left-wing”. And the saddest thing of all is that nobody even recalls what these terms refer to. They’re just like jerseys that we wear, to signify which team we’re willing to argue for.
Why must we argue? That’s another tedious pastime that we should retire. The facts show that 99% of us are unfree and frustrated, while the remaining 1% controls the show. Nevertheless we fools of the 99% spend every day arguing right-versus-left, and the six or seven members that comprise the 1% (that is: the world-owners) watch our ongoing argument like it’s a televised cockfight.
I bet everyone has her own definition of those political poles, right-wing & left-wing. I’m glad that I vowed never to use the terms again. Here let me break my vow:
Let’s say that you demand of me that I describe where I fall on this political scale, this spectrum. I’d answer: I’m so far LEFT that, if you attempt to measure my position, it will break your direction·o·meter.
& stubbornly I think I’m correct for being super-left. Cuz here’s what I take the terms to signify. (Keep in mind that I’m probably wrong, or at least way off, and yet why should I care!) A leftist is someone whose priority is people, relationships, opportunity, freedom, health, culture, art, environment, harmony, life. A rightist is someone whose priority is $$$, business, the management of employees, the control of the people. So you see why I say that I’m the LEFTMOST. I can’t imagine any circumstance, any hypothetical plateau in futurity, where acting in accordance with the right-wing would appear even intelligent, let alone compassionate. I think the right wing should simply fade away, on its own, when its adherents grasp that it’s an embarrassingly obsolete stance.
Why EVER choose money over people? It’s patently ridiculous. For people invented money. Look at the animals: they don’t have money.
So if you’re worried that, by shifting the money around to whoever actually needs it, you’ll end up ruining the system and we’ll all fall into poverty – I say: Look at the current world, we’re already there (all but six or seven so-called owners); and we got there by taking our own silly game too serious. Loosen up, live a little. Why don’t we try lifting everyone out of the mud, just for fun; instead of bombing them, via remote, in paranoid fear.
No, I take it all back. Yuck I hate when I get into this preachy mood. I need to remember: I only created the world, I have no clue how to fix it. So, be my guest: lower taxes for big businesses & billionaires. Let people starve and die homeless in the streets; step over them in order to enter the Holy Stock Market. Rule with airtight control; arm your mercenaries to the teeth. – I only hope I’m not re-born here. If all I have to do is put up with this money-mad earthly mess for one generation, which is roughly 70 years, and then I can die like a ripe old goat in my gloomy prison cell, I’ll forgive possibility – just don’t make me return.
That’s why I think it’s probably better to be cremated than to be buried. Cuz when your body is placed in a coffin and then lowered into the earth, what happens is that your flesh decomposes, and all your atoms go scurrying about the surrounding atmosphere, and some are eaten by squirrels, and some become worm-food, and some take a ride on the water droplets thru the dirt and eventually end up in a nearby lake, and so maybe a fish will eat you… the point is that, one way or another, you become other things in your vicinity. That’s if you’re buried: your material can’t really escape very far. So if your grave is in a land of toxic masculinity, then you’re doomed to join that party after death; you’ll probably find yourself contributing to a number of the weakest creatures: thus you’ll endure countless cycles of abuse.
On the other hand, if you get yourself cremated, that is to say, if you can finagle a contraption that will automatically engulf your corpse in flames after your death, or, better yet, if you can simply die by fire, like Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno, then most of your atoms go up into the atmosphere, in the form of smoke molecules, which drift up into the outer spaces. This is the better path, because you get to become alien creatures, which are friendlier than humans and have a more developed language. Also your soul, when ejected by flame, gets to visit local stars and converse with black holes. There’s little difference between the sight of a soul swimming inside of the sun, and the image under a microscope of a spermatozoon fertilizing an egg.
The reason my thots tend to retreat towards the extremes of existence – life, death; macrophysics, microphysics; freedom, prison – is that I dislike all the stuff that’s in the middle. That’s a shame, because the middle should be the part of life that we wish to prolong, and the extremes of birth and death should be things we’d rather block from our mind.
It’s my understanding that the Big Religions that brood moodily over the afterlife all sprang up shortly after the invention of metal coins. It’s as if money has caused us to be miserable and suffer nightmares from the get-go.
I say, now that we’re capable of producing abundant luxury (in the sense that we have learned to make the most of natural resources, which fulfill our basic needs), let’s just stop the current game, spread the wealth around to everyone, and begin to enjoy the middle parts of life. Start savoring the familiar repetitions, start thinking cyclically again, become connoisseurs of recurrence. That’s how eternity and clocktime consummate their love.
But, unfortunately, as it has been lately, under this money-system of global corporate capitalism, instead of embracing seasonal myths, we all obsess about THE END, everything’s a deadline writ large, because we focus only on this pinpoint of present-self; and all our friendships & families are small, tight-knit; we worry about borders & separation, control – all right-wing concerns. I wanna expand the concept of family so that it radiates past the walls of each house, past the borders of the nations, and even beyond the globe – why not? Why can’t we see ourselves as relatives of energy?
If we keep ourselves closed up, on guard—as tho money & business arrangements are adamant, unchangeable, even MORAL—then we all grow to hate the actual daily grind: we drag our feet to work and must be whipped down into the cavern, where we swing our pickaxe alongside our sombre sisters. YET if we learn to listen with our tongue, and to read with creative interest the bodily curves of upper management, there’s no way they’re gonna want us to leave the conference room. We’ll have basically landed a light-duty office job. That’s a huge step up. When the time comes, we can even give birth in the reception area. Keep the kids in the break room – or, no: the printer room, in the corner by the xerox machine. We can make that a basic playtime area; and pay the Spartans to come and babysit. Ten bucks per hour, four hours per day; that’s a steal. And there can be portholes in all the cubicle dividers, so that you can watch your neighbors; because they’re usually pretty frisky. And they can drape over the portholes if they want privacy, but most people leave them open: it’s a bit of a turn-on. (Why does this company have so many secretaries, anyway? It’s like that instructional video we made for the Tredway Corporation.)
In closing, I argue that my debate opponent, Capitalism, is like Loren Shaw from the movie Executive Suite (1954): a shortsighted bean counter (played by Fredric March). Yet, on the contrary, I, Bry-Rayism (named after its popularizer Bryan Ray), also known as the Economic System of Improved Sensual Enjoyment (I’m now referencing William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 14, which says “For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas now it appears finite & corrupt — this will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment); I say, as my opponent is Shaw, I myself am Don Walling in that same film (played by William Holden): the genius engineer. So please give me your vote. Seriously, how could you NOT vote for me, after I stood out here in the freezing cold, in this blizzard, to make this speech, and got snow in my hair.
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