John Wise

Photo Credit: John Minihan

I’m not Dix nor Bacon. Burroughs Kant help me find my niche. Nitsch was no philosopher nor Nietzsche, an artist, though he explored tragedy with the best of them. Artaud might alight my sense of the absurd but the stupidity of power exploiting the power of the crowd might be the worst theater that goes on with form. Our Will is shattered by a fear of scarcity that doesn’t exist but is forever threatened. Fear neutralizes our outrage, robbing us of the fire used to carve space out of the mind. Anger doesn’t arise from the gut but is now a learned behavior adopted through mimicry of how it’s supposed to be performed by those in front of the lens. This stage of the obscene and surreal is no longer a canvas in the gallery as we’ve moved into the roles of idiots performed by ourselves. We are without bodies and our organs sacrificed on the pyre of quick communication without meaning. Context is decontextualized to make room for consumption without direction, divorcing the idea that you own the brand that owns you.

The mutilated limb of the ape grips a cigarette with nobody certain if it had ever been part of something else because Schrodinger hadn’t opened the box, but Bacon did. Deleuze wanted to follow these antics while Žižek became the twitching embodiment of this uncertainty, but we won’t know without our eyes if it’s simulation or simulacra. When LaTour speaks of the ANT and questions our modernity, he couldn’t have done so without the foundation laid by Algirdas Julien Greimas, but who cares about semiotics or ontologies as long as mindlessness is a hot commodity? Not to say any of this is easy, but with Object-Oriented Ontology on its way, I might glean a little something from Mr. Harman that the Enfant terrible Žižek missed. Maybe had Bela Tarr made a movie dealing with OOOs and ANTs, it would have all been laid out in one long black-and-white shot that explains all, but that hasn’t happened, though I did see a nice documentary about Bacon recently.

For 83 days, I’ve pretty much stayed within 3 miles of home, and over one 8-day period, I didn’t venture more than a mile from home. What I’m learning about this decreased mobility is that my imagination is starting to have profoundly quiet moments where I’m not feeling very motivated to delve into thinking. I’m beginning to wonder what the impact of experiencing the larger world outside of the overly familiar is for feeding my creativity. This then triggers the question: how do poverty and not having the means to explore further than your own neighborhood impact our critical and creative minds? Or, how does illness that limits mobility negatively impact our recovery and mental health?

I guess this is what others call boredom. Seriously, privileged me can honestly say I’ve not been bored in decades, but after this extended need to remove myself from the public, I’m starting to suffer the effects of not changing up my routine and getting out to gather new experiences. I can appreciate that there was enough momentum in my life that it’s taken me this long until these hints of boredom have started making themselves known, and I can’t say I want to be too quick to put it behind me. With all experiences, there are lessons to be discovered, and while there are fleeting moments of urgency to stem this creeping unease, I also feel obliged to see where it goes.

If my brain continues to draw blanks and I fail to find inspiration or motivation, does this defeat that part of my optimism that propels me to want to grasp in all directions? Hmm, this starts to sound like depression on the horizon, and that’s no Bueno.

Well, enough was enough, and so I ventured out. Went as far as Mekong Plaza nearly 30 miles away. I took my notebook along with the idea that if I found a relatively secluded place, I might try sitting down to work on this blog entry, but instead found the place crowded and experiencing a minor bout of agoraphobia. So, I grabbed a few things in the market, which was a challenge, too, due to how many people were shopping, and then headed over to In-N-Out Burger for some junk food therapy before going home. All of a sudden, home isn’t so boring, well maybe it is, but at least I’m happy to be back.

Back to this idea about mobility and the brain. I’d posit that when we move away from the familiar, inspiration strikes. If you are growing up in the inner city and your life is school and home, going to a club awakens your dreams. If you are in the countryside and visit a city, your perspective may be so shifted that upon returning home, your rural existence will have lost some of its charm. On the other hand, if you discover drugs and alcohol along the way, you could become lost in the numbness of complacency as you opt to stay home or at the bar, where your routine is dulled by the fog of inebriation.

So it would seem that if the stars align just right and you have access to a requisite amount of disposable income, along with the wherewithal to push yourself into new experiences, you may find yourself craving the novelty and making efforts to ensure you can continue to discover the part of life that inspires people to accomplish something extraordinary. But why is this the way I think it is? We are pattern recognition machines meant to wander through life trying to understand how things work, but when on a treadmill of a simple routine existence without much variation, our humanity is dulled, and we become addicted to our habits. In that addiction, we grow intolerant of those threatening to move us out of our comfort zone.

We have to move, we have to go places, and when we do, our mind goes with us and then wants more. But there’s a danger with this idea, as much of our culture is based on repetition that brings society to complacency. We are conditioned to watch the same sports, the same themes in movies, iterations on a theme regarding television and music, and frequent visits to our favorite restaurants. These habits are the filler for those times when we can’t go out to the lake, to France, or up the mountain. When we fully embrace our intellectual and physical mobility, strange things occur in us humans, our tolerance expands, our desire to try new things grows, and our need to seek out others who are also on a path of discovery becomes more important.

I’d venture to say that I want to believe that this is part of the spark of life, meaning we have an inherent need to get out. If we reach that station in life in which age or illness hamper our desire, we start to move towards giving up the ghost. If we are excited by what tomorrow might bring, a kind of zest drives us into that day, but if we dread the misery it could bring, we kill a little bit of ourselves.

This isn’t good enough to recognize this possible situation, what could a solution be? Obviously, we cannot all get on a plane and head into the many corners of the earth, nor can we all simultaneously set up camp in the national parks and hope to have a pleasant experience if we are surrounded by 1oos of thousands of people. We can sign up for a cooking class, try a new restaurant, go to a concert by a band from outside our country, join a book reading club, visit a guild to learn a craft or commit to doing any number of many things we’ve never done. Maybe there should be a self-help book for adding novelty to our lives on a regular basis. A one-year plan where the reader must choose from multiple choices of the things they’ll seek out over the course of the year and then commit to experiencing it.

Photo credit: unknown from a streaming video clip.

A counter-protest in Los Angeles brought out two idiots who thought themselves brave enough to dive into the sea of protesters to stand tall for MAGA. The look of fear of the man in the Trump 2020 hat and the officer who understands that this situation might go somewhere horrific shows me they are in a place I wouldn’t want to be. The other man seemed oblivious and almost carefree at times as he was being shoved around, as though a “Caped Super-Trumpman” was going to fly in to save the brethren. There were a number of black and white protesters who were doing their best to shield these two rubes, and then the camera cut, and I can’t find the outcome of how this played out. The bigger point that should be made is that this is the face of MAGA, scared white people thinking they need to fear the foreign horde. But the horde they fear is simply other Americans and people who don’t look like them. The face of racism is the face of cowardice to confront one’s own fears and biases they’ve CHOSEN and adopted!

With Trump and Barr calling protesters “Antifa and Far-Left Criminals,” they will only fuel the situation as it demonstrates to reasonable people the total disregard and lack of understanding of how tired black Americans are of being targets of social, legal, and economic injustice. Our national leadership, as it is, continues to perpetuate the idiocy of labeling and sorting in the effort to polarize a country where the only real interest is the accumulation of wealth. I don’t mean to imply that I eschew financial security, but I’m aware that most of everyone around me is living in catastrophic financial insecurity with a crippled education without the means to do anything to fix it. Empathy from the right would be a good starting point, except that human emotions are not found in the definition of a sociopath who strictly believes in the survival of the fittest.

Photo credit: Slate.

Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein wrote the following on Twitter about the headline above:

“This headline a) attributes agency for the violence and b) attributes it correctly, to police. Agency: violence is, by definition, intentional. We rarely describe certain things that are destructive on a wide scale (e.g., wildfires, earthquakes, epidemics) as “violent” — we generally understand that those kinds of things don’t have agency & can’t be held responsible. Police responsibility: power differentials tend to mean that police, *not* protesters, really set the tone of protests. Especially important to highlight the role police are playing in escalating violence right now since the protests are in response to police violence. That is – police violence is the ultimate cause in any case. Obligatory bad headline example: the AP’s top headline right now: “‘We’re sick of it’: Anger over police killings shatters U.S.” In this take, the ANGER is to blame — not the violence that led to the anger. Imagine, instead: “‘We’re sick of it’: Police killings shatter U.S.”

Photo credit: Chris Brann

I was anxious as America started self-isolating due to COVID-19, but the sense of urgency that arrives with the protests over the brutality of what it means to be black in America makes the virus seem a whole lot less threatening and urgent. At least with a virus, there is hope that spending billions of dollars will create the incentive to earn even more if a vaccine can be found. Trying to contain the hatred of white Americans has no financial upside, so why should the country spend billions to take the target off black Americans? It appears that sooner or later, people are going to have to remove the knee from the necks of the oppressed, just as Americans had to do with the British oppressors a couple of hundred years ago.

And then news of spreading curfews, staged pallets of bricks that could facilitate looting, mysteriously parked old police cars in hot zones that can be torched, and possible agent provocateurs working to inflame the entire situation have me thinking we are all becoming the victims of some incredibly strange gas-lighting designed for an outcome that for the moment is beyond my level of comprehension. Are we being consumed by madness?