Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Non-Paradox of the Missed Phone Calls

Unfortunate how often we miss each other; how—even in an age of hyper connectivity, of a dependence upon machines so fetisistic its edging every closer toward the cybernetic—we still manage to leave the house in time to miss that one phone call…particularly if, like me, you have no desire or use for the cellular phone. Not to mention the fact that we both Stephen King is exactly right: one day, every single one of the battery-powered, bacteria ridden, life sucking noise machines will ring, all over the world, at exactly the same time. Everyone who answers will be driven hopelessly insane and then where the hell will the rest of us be? I ask you.

When the Stem Cell Wars are over and done and Alzheimer’s is to the children of the First World’s Future what…say…polio is to us now…then the Christo-facists will just have to find a new innovation to demonize as “an offence against God.” I’m better cybernetics will become the Next Big Thing, especially once it becomes commercially viable and all those Pre-Meds with Art Minors start dreaming of manufacturing new limbs.

(Not that I’m naive enough to believe that the not-so-Right Wing will ever give up the Stem Cell Wars, or the larger war against a woman’s free choice to kill her own resource-depleting babies…but its fun to dream. After all that we’ve seen, all that we’ve been through, I take comfort in the fact that on occasion it’s still fun to dream.)

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Music on the Wall

At times like this, I wish I could write songs. When my head is full of vindictive morass the honestly expressed emotion of a good, angry song seems to me a much more honest expression of human emotion than the dry, clinical detachment of more traditional prose. Think of it as the difference between laying the bricks of a wall and spray-painting the graffiti that covers them…that will get you started on the road to what I mean, though (in an only-half conscious further illustration) this is a description so far flung as to be totally inaccurate. At best this is only a metaphor for the roiling sea of ideas that I (at the moment) have no idea how to properly express.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Joyce Stick

There’s never enough time in the day. But, of course, how could we ever have time if we never make time? Isn’t that what the devil said?
So I’m making the time to read James Joyce, and finding myself fascinated by the extended sermon on Hell that takes up a vast portion of chapter three. The hero of the novel, Stephen Deadelus (the author’s semi-autobiographical avatar) spends most of said chapter embroiled in guilt over the nightly bouts of in-and-out he’s indulged in since the end of chapter two. Poking and prodding him toward repentance is the sermon on Hell delivered
It’s a particularly Catholic vision of Hell—five hundred years of over-thinking and categorical sub-dividing. The sheer uniformity of it leaves a down right institutional aftertaste in my mind. The way every sense of body and soul is assigned its special torment, the unflinching, ponderously serious detail of it, strikes me down and tries my patience, much as the book itself tries my patience. There’s none of Dante’s Twilight Zone-brand of justice in James Joyce’s Irish Catholic Hell. None of John Milton’s haughty, fuck-you-I’m-English rebellion. Certainly none of Richard Matheson’s good ol’ America melodrama. It’s (if you’ll pardon the phrase, which I know you won’t) on Hell of a depressing pit of eternal damnation, devoid of even the Inferno’s saving grace: its manifold variance. The depraved imagination of a single politically-minded fourteenth Century Italian has a lot on the institutional imagination of the Holy Mother Church.
I shouldn’t be surprised, given the amount of energy wasted on pondering the after life. Visions of it fill volumes, and spill out across the world. Stacked together they’d reach the moon and fall on that plaque with Nixon’s name on it.
Would that human beings put more energy into examining their own lives, and the neglected world that they inhabit. We might all be better off.