I am lost inside the oblivion of modern culture, and I like it here, waiting for the smoke to clear, here in the abyss.
There was a time when I couldn’t give two shits about “cultural decline,” because I had chosen the good life of obscurity, living alone at the coast, pretty much a hermit, which is a long story I’ll keep to myself; however, and forever now, I guess, since I’m putting this online, I’ll have to stand by my words. I have had some thoughts:
Thought 1: Awareness (attention) is the surface of consciousness. In simple terms, awareness is the wallpaper of the mind. But it is a thick wallpaper, as thick as steel on some people, like a kind of shield to protect them from what is really inside, the vulnerable, yukky inside that’s filled with either pus or lemon jelly, or a combination.
Thought 2: Everyone I run across seems enchanted by their own wallpaper, which is painted with political bullshit propaganda, trivial entertainment, or a cluster fuck of worries, doubts, sins, failings, and other ego meandering. They don’t have the inkling or the energy to strip themselves away from their surface moorings. The surface is always busy and noisy, the inner world is always perfectly quiet. They prefer noise.
Thought 3: The wallpaper over consciousness gets stained and worn and dated and infused with the cigarette smoke of existence, and it gets scribbled on with a matrix-sketch of what and who you are as a human being.
Thought 4: You have to tear off the wallpaper to know what free thought, and freedom, really is. Hurts like fucking hell to tear it off because you’re tearing off the self you thought was you, and the new you slips forward in time like an innocent child.
Thought 5: The new child is lost in a blind and foreboding landscape populated by wallpaper people.
Thought 6: Popular culture, ie money, is controlled by wallpaper people.
Thought 7: The freed humans must survive by their wits. The world, as we know it now, the so-called “culture”, is cruel to freed humans, it eats them for lunch.
Thought 8: The world, as we know it now, is populated by a controlling horde of ignorant, unfulfilled humans who struggle in absurd ways to be known for something they are not, because they are not their best selves.
Thought 9: Inequality is a “true myth.” There are those who know themselves deeply, and those who don’t. They will always be in conflict: the controlled humans, and the uncontrolled free ones. Always in conflict in various ways.
Thought 10: There is another culture, a second culture, often hidden from the blind, a culture much larger and far more alive, an underground ocean, where people like me are doing our thing below the surface of popular culture, and finding our way along to a different kind of future.