the title says it all really. I’d love to say its because of an hiatus or that i’d been politically exiled by the current ruling junta, due to my popularity and consequent political power…..but the fact is I have just been a lazy cunt.
While my apathy was at legendary levels previously (see earlier posts for evidence), it was still enough to drive my ragebone enough to vent my turgid spleen via various mediums including this pseudo-matic interface I call an ablog. (that is a shortening of anti-blog, but I have pre-empted all the cunty mediatypes coming up with a trendy punctuation/abbreviation/nickname by doing it myself. so fuck you. i dont want it to catch on)
However my rage has basically forced me into almost complete Apathoplexic Indifferentia (AI), a condition so severe that it reduces the sufferer into an almost complete state of social paralysis.
I have been having to treat this condition with a mixture of alcohol, cannabis addiction, social isolation, and 3rd-stage developmental paranoia. I have also punished myself by developing a mild deficiency in my right eye’s motor function, and by also financially, & some would argue physically, crippling myself by feeding an addiction to the modern wonder-drug for the poor that is fast food. This also allows me to supplement the unnaturally high levels of self-loathing associated with AI, should they drop for any reason (i got a decent job, girlfriend etc), as I can then hate myself for continuing to sustain the corporate vagina that is the fast food industry, which peddles re-constituted pigeon cocks to the poor, ignorant and lonely.
So thats the excuses out of the way.
Now on to the post.
Here are some thoughts on China and more, from my trip there in 2006, and it is an insight into what a 20 hour train journey through the chinese countryside, with no sleep and nothing but a card game with 3 non-english-speaking-underpant-wearing-chinese-engineers as respite can do to you…….
China, the dark ages & the bastard that is linear time……..
As the train pulls slowly out of Beijing and the red sun blazes over the horizon lighting the hutong, the trainyards and the industrial wasteland that is Mao’s legacy, my thoughts, (which at lucid moments like these usually return to home), feel transported to this strange fairytale land of storytelling and honour, where history, whether it is completely factual or not, has created a wonderful heritage of romantic pride coupled with dramatic hyperbole and rich texture.
The slow melodious muzak being piped through the loudspeaker in my cabin, summons this invigorating feeling of journey and purpose, much like the fables of Aesop; A mysticality fused with honesty and meaning which our western moral fairytales , overworked & undermined, now lack.
Our cultures may differ greatly and our histories may be out of synch in terms of industrial, technological and sociological development (for china is an old world, which has been asked to discard the old for the new in a matter of decades, a process that took the west centuries), but the people seem to believe in the same thing.
You can see it in the eyes of all the women, and the loss of it in the eyes of men. It has many names, several of which we have forgotten back in the UK.
Call it love, hope, call it the belief in beauty.
This place has had a history that has had as much bloodshed, greed, betrayal and corruption as any other, but the repressive and isolationist approaches of the leaders has meant that so much of that history has been enforced, destroyed or embellished to the point where even its own people do not know anything past their personal, regionalised physical realities, even though it is the distilled, universally accepted versions of national identity that are the major trade in modern politics & sociology.
In the west we have a belief in an ideal, but that ideal has been sullied, tarnished, altered, bastardised, raped, sodomised, crucified and dragged face down through the mud until its people, its subjects (never its leaders, for time is a ruler of men too) no longer respect or recognise it for what it is.
Like a soured marriage, the two parties look at each other and all they can see is the shared intertwined past, the history of the abuse and it fuels the guilt and the anger until the rage consumes the last of the light like a veil. The love is till there, but is pale and ghost like, a familiar face that is withered and aged.
We cannot grasp that our history is as arbitrary as any culture or race. The way the western civilisations have conquered and undermined the eastern and 3rd World cultures, not just miltarily, but in every sense, is a criminal act that is judged and answerable to noone……a war criminal that never comes to trial or spends his last few years moving from hotel to hotel, from hearing to hearing, ending his days in a plush hotel airport, waiting to be extradited at the age of 82, when the fear and respect he once garnered is replaced with pity and a skewed sympathy…….a serial murderer or child rapist that is never discovered and continues to live his life freely, revelling daily in the abuse he has inflicted and is free to inflict again should he wish.
An injustice of the eternal, infinite kind.
If you follow the adage: “who will police the police” to the extreme, if the people responsible for the fate of human beings start to abuse that power, not jst at their enemies expense but at their races expense…even at their own species expense, the question hangs in the air like a thick all-enveloping blanket of polluted air:
“who are we ultimately answerable to?”
GOD? ……..no.
God as a belief system I understand. I see what it gives to people and I am jealous of that. It gives people structure & understanding with which they can interpret life on their own terms, whether you or I agree with it or not.
But know what God is….God is not a reality, it is an unreality created in the name of hope. For want of a better phrase, it is a security blanket/a crutch. Like the soft reassuring words from father to son in an impossible and inevitably fatal and finite situation; the father does not give his child the harsh reality of the true outcome. He provides a utopian fairytale of happy endings, last minute rescues and the eventual return to safe familiarity…..
“It’ll be alright son……”
THAT is god, in those four words right there, the feeling that is captured in those simple symbols. And if that is true, who can we truly look to? The answer is as old as the the question itself, but an answer that provides no rational solution:
Ourselves.
If we are to look within for validation of a seemingly unalterable situation, how can the validation be acted on if found?
Put in simpler terms, if we have to look to ourselves for a way to act or to be, how can we influence a world where thousands of millions of others have been taught NOT to look at themselves?
The George Bush’s & Mao Zedongs (yes they are one and the same) of this world do not know that what they are doing is wrong, and in essence it isnt, for they are following the logical progression of history that one man alone cannot stand against..
If it comes down solely to personal responsibility, the outcome of the fate of human beings will be no different, as for every person that takes charge of their own consciousness, there will be scores of others who do not.
The question is not about rebellion or a mass rising against the powers that be, but of a realisation of emotional honesty. How can we learn to be honest when lying, deception and trickeryhas made us what we are today. Deceit will always carry the stigma of negativity and sin, but if it is used in the name of good, it IS a good thing.
When Scott’s colleague, Captain Oates, said the words: “i’m going out for a walk, i may be some time”, he confirmed a world where lying is not always wrong. It can be as noble and virtuous as it can be destructive and damaging, despite its connotations and historical baggage.
Our lives are punctuated with lying in the name of good; so total and unmitigating honesty is not only unachievable, it is unnecessary.
Therefore, if emotional honesty and accountability are our goal, but total emotional honesty except with ourselves and our internal dialogue, is impossible and also undesirable…..how can we unravel the layers upon layers of our history to find a solution that is not only feasible but is realistic and plausible as well.
Do we go out into the street and start protesting?
No, because the people that as their belief system and life choice/solution are as blinkered to the real problem as the devout christian minister of the xenophobic redneck.
They are defining themselves by putting themselves in deference to their opposites, or what they perceive as their opposites, the problem.
But to do this compounds the problem itself, as not only does it distract themselves from the true problem at hand , it also gives credence to the Bush’s & Mao’s, whilst also crystallizing further their existence in the first place.
If these “reactionaries” (in the true sense of the word) are not able to find the answer through their politics and fighting. What route then, can the normal person, who has come to this conclusion, independently take?
I wonder where we go now, as I imagine the people that sat in their bedrooms or on late night trains, ten years ago, twenty years ago….were the eighties not as bleak as this? wer there not periods where thousands of people felt paralysed by the crushing weight of history on them?
Are these feelings irrational, and if so, why is it irrational to question the rationality of life?
[At this point the author went for a walk to clarify his thoughts, only to get locked into a loud card game with some chinese engineers, that involved a lot of shouting, unfortunately these thoughts were never concluded much like the animated Ralph Bakshi version of Lord Of The Rings…….it may be concluded one day]
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