“Just Glitters Like a Morgue”
Or, “Forever, forever, ever, forever, ever?”
Will someone please explain to me this sickly word – “forever?” The concept baffles me. It suggests not a commitment to growth, which naturally implies death, but an embalmed paralysis before the specter of death, which naturally implies the end of growth. It seems to be invoked by those who fear themselves to have peaked, who want to cash out and preserve their winnings.
When Radiohead started ending their concerts with the scrolling visual “Forever….Forever….Forever….Forever….” I knew we no longer shared a sense of life. They were using a moment to assert permanence – an act of futility (though perhaps a fitting one, as futility has become a central theme of their work). They seemed ready to square a frame over their legacy and hang it on the wall. I suspect that fans of the Wu-Tang Clan and the Spice Girls have had similar sad moments. Time is a musician’s canvas; he must maintain a sense of flux. Could you hold an A#7 indefinitely without ruining the musicality of a song? Could a culture revere you forever without ruining itself?
Radiohead is a worthy band, but even their timeless classics would be lucky to survive for 200 years, let alone for all time. For perspective, note that Beethoven’s work has lasted about 250 years so far; J.S. Bach’s, about 300. The life’s work of Henri Ditilleux, Hans Rott, Gilbert Vinter, and countless other composers has been widely forgotten. The temporally cognizant musician at some point asks himself: “Given that my work will be forgotten someday, how long do I really hope for it to last?“ Is there a difference between a reputation that lasts fifteen minutes and one that lasts 150 years, if the end result is still anonymous oblivion? I don’t know the answer. If my songs sound alive, it must be because they’re forgettable… mortal.
By almost every metric – literacy, fertility, per capita income, et cetera - the United States is in decline. Behold! Just as the average citizen can begin to visualize the end of the republic, an insecure government reassures him with this, the Forever stamp:
Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln’s “forever” sentiment from the Gettysburg Address is still considered transcendent, wise, and humanitarian. But what does the phrase quoted above really mean? It would forever condemn mankind to the yoke of an institution called “government.” Abraham Lincoln could not conceive of a peaceful and robust anarchic society, but today, thanks in part to communication technologies that would have utterly shocked him, that may be possible. And who knows what lies beyond anarchy? How will our species organize itself after another 10,000 years of civilized life? I don’t know, but I know it can be better, freer, and cheaper than an endless armed bureaucracy. The question is less, “Will the United States end?” and more, “How will the United States end?” Lincoln could not let it end. Even Millennials only expect 1,000 years of their golden age.
Nothing can or should last forever. The dinosaurs lasted unimaginably long by human standards: they lived about 16,000 times longer than civilized humanity has thus far, and then they disappeared. Thank you, dinosaurs, for dying. We’ve done more with this planet than your walnut minds could have dreamt.
When we say that our peak experience should last “forever,” we are building a ceiling on the future. Even the purest form of social organization that Abraham Lincoln could imagine – a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” – was still a government, with all of the clumsy and repressive traits that implies today. Humanity may yet outgrow the state altogether. And should the species continue to listen to Radiohead, one of the most popular bands on the planet, indefinitely? Not if something better comes along. I would love for even Beethoven to be rendered unlistenably inane by 250 more years of musical evolution. Nothing deserves to last forever. No one can make that claim on the world, even if he repeats those three syllables – “forever” – like a spell, for the rest of his years.
“We’ve Been Had”
In 1947, Sandoz laboratories’ Albert Hoffmann discovered the psychoactive effects of lysergic acid diethylamide. In the 1950′s, the United States military and CIA, through Project MK Ultra and other programs, began testing for possible applications of LSD. In one of these experiments, a sketch artist was dosed with 100ug of the drug and was requested to draw a series of portraits. I consider the following images to be an important metaphor for our culture’s development since World War II:
T+ 20 Minutes
“Condition normal… no effects from the drug yet.”
T+ 85 Minutes
“I can see you so clearly, so clearly. This… you… it’s all… I’m having a little trouble controlling this pencil. It seems to want to keep going.”
T+ 150 Minutes
“Outlines seem normal, but very vivid – everything is changing color. My hand must follow the bold sweep of the lines. If feel as if my consciousness is situated in the part of my body that’s now active – my hand, my elbow… my tongue.”
T+ 152 Minutes
“I’m trying another drawing. The outlines of the model are normal, but now those of my drawing are not. The outline of my hand is going weird, too. It’s not a very good drawing, is it? I give up – I’ll try again…”
T+ 155 Minutes
“I’ll do a drawing in one flourish… without stopping… one line, no break!”
T+ 165 Minutes
“I am… everything is… changed… they’re calling… your face… interwoven… who is…”
T+ 265 Minutes
“This will be the best drawing, like the first one, only better. If I’m not careful I’ll lose control of my movements, but I won’t, because I know. I know. I know.”
T+ 345 Minutes
“I can feel my knees again. I think it’s starting to wear off. This is a pretty good drawing – this pencil is mighty hard to hold.”
T+ 480 Minutes
“I have nothing to say about this last drawing. It is bad and uninteresting. I want to go home now.”
We have been living in an acid trip. Our culture has lost faith in objective reality. Better phrased: our culture has lost sight of the abundant evidence for objective reality. It is liberating to dismantle systems and see what lies beyond. It’s thrilling if you’re the one to witness the disintegration of assumptions, of boundaries, of discipline. But where does it lead?
That is the vision of humanity my generation inherited. That was our starting point. And off we go – seeking “liberation.”
“The Opposite of Wiretapping”
or
Seven Drunk Americans Discuss the Government
One: “…You can only have an open dialogue when it’s economic and when you’re doing it in practice. If you’re just saying to the public, ‘Hey, we’re having an open dialogue ’cause we’re at a barbecue and we’re drinking beer.’ [Adopts Texan accent:] ‘Hello, ‘dem liberals! Bring ‘em on! Come on out to the barbecue!’ Blah, blah, blah. And then they go to their office and they sign away the liberal agenda. They just say, ‘Fuck you.’ And they just build corporations down the highway, as far as you can see. And then they make criminals out of regular people. And then they let illegal aliens come in and work. But they don’t, you know, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t get benefits, they’re treated like criminals. A lot of that stuff goes on, behind the scenes, but then it’s the Alamo, and it’s the barbecue, and this kind of culture that drives this underbelly that’s really nasty because they don’t protect the borders.
“If you get pulled over – You were talking about getting pulled over in North Texas? Never go… I don’t know who told you to go with a bag of weed in that area of Texas!”
Two: “But it was vacuum-sealed, so even if they had dogs, they probably wouldn’t have smelled that shit.”
One: “I got pulled over in Childress, which is North of Dallas, when I was coming back from Portland. And they just pulled me over because my hair was a little long and I was driving an older car. And they just pulled me over and had me take everything out of the car and put it back.”
Three: “They can’t legally do that.”
“My Brain’s Turning into Memory Foam Again”
Can a culture be killed, like a human being? It seems that whenever a people’s way of life comes under open attack, i.e. by an invading army or a rival political clique, the normal response is to circle the wagons, for the group to instinctively honor and defend their culture. So, no, a culture doesn’t disappear when someone tries to “kill” it. It disappears when it’s forgotten.
We live in a media-soaked shitstorm of distraction. There is always a new scandal or gadget that we are told we should know about. I’d like to invert the way we think about these isolated distractions (David Letterman’s affairs, Jay Leno’s Kanye interview, Conan O’Brien’s concussion, etc). The problem is not what they are, but what they cumulatively replace. Economists speak of opportunity cost – the cost to an individual when he pursues one action instead of another. If you feel intruded upon every time that an inane news blurb wastes thirty seconds of your time, if you know that you could have better used that time, say, devising a beet-based recipe or staring at a picture of the Sagrada Família (see previous post), then consider yourself on the front lines of the defense of real culture – you know, the passing of knowledge and values from person to person over generations. If you see that blurb and find yourself getting sucked in, actually caring about some celebrity’s fashion faux pas, I urge you to pause and assess how much you’ve already lost. Think of the richer things you could be doing, and remember that life is short. This fraudulent memory hole “culture” needs us to feel like we’ll live forever, so that we can never calculate the opportunity cost of the time it’s already wasted.
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