A Few Notes On Wizards, Wizdom, and Whazzup!!

When considering the source of information and ideas in a postmodern setting there is considerable skepticism--if not outright aversion--to lineages, traditions, and intellectual lines of ancestry. These, from the time of the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard onward have been seen with an increasingly dubious gaze. Power-ploys and power-ploys. Subduing the masses. Propaganda. Cult-like mind control on the order of millions. Narratives are stories. No truth apart from context. The presence of that strange brew of politics and mythology dawns in the minds of post-modernized humans (or is it post-humanized moderns?). For the first time there is a public, mass awareness of the ramifications of those 'meta-narratives' that have come with the heading of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Communist, Materialist, Capitalist, what have you.

In a word, the post-modernized human sees ... real-eyes's... the self-interested nature of most, if not all, forms of discourse.

The selfish mythology is revealed. It is as if stories love their own perspective; their own little narrow view onto the world is taken as whole, as holistic, as total, complete, certain. Like, stories... narratives... myths... are self-reinforcing, seeking the propagation of their own truth above and beyond any sort of allegiance to any Unconditioned Truth.

Postmodernism has burst the bubble. One could say it is as if we were all living in the bubble of our cherished little illusions (some collective and cultural, some personal and psychological). That bubble has been burst, for all intents and purposes. Now, we are left with wondering if we can live in a world where there is no self-contained system of truth. Once the bubble bursts you can't step back in again. Once that seemingly self-supporting system of truth and falsehood is shattered there is no way to re-construct the illusion of a self-contained system that rests and resides as its own safe, precious, little world.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who discovers that behind the scenes of a world of seeming magic, myth, and miracles, there is but a timid, frightened little man. I suspect that we are all coming to see much the same thing regarding our preferred little stories regarding worlds of magic, myth, and miracles: that behind the need to trump up reality, inflate specific portions of existence, create all the cast of heroes and saviours, is little more than... well... I guess I'll say it: fear!

Dorothy didn't need the Wizard of Oz to get back 'Home.' Dorothy had everything she needed. Dorothy didn't need a saviour. All she needed to do was click her heels together. No elaborate story about the mythology of this or that sector of the subterranean earth. No strange tales about mystical feats of rare and stupendous accomplishments. No Virgin Births. None of that is/was necessary. For all of those are just excuses--so many reasons to get people to believe in themselves once again, and have faith in the hidden powers that they always already house and hold.

We don't need the Wizard. After all, he is just a scared, frail, frightened old man anyways... feeding off of other peoples weakness and fear... and nothing more.

Who's Your Daddy? Er... Uhm... I Mean, Who's Your Source?

Damn well nigh unto impossible to know the world, our self, existence, truth, meaning beyond any and all mediation. Even if it weren't for the hyper-media-infested age that we live in we would still experience mediation in the form of stories, parables, and legends passed from generation to generation. No TV? Then one would probably still be sitting on Grandma and Grandpa's lap, listening to the tall-tales, being told the origin myths--discovering right from wrong.

Much of what we come to discover about existence--the Whole Shebang, if you will--is through some form of mediation. In business, one calls it 'word of mouth.' That is how the shit travels fastest--whether good or bad, pro or con, thumbs up or thumbs down.

So if we can't prevent a certain degree of mediation, if we have it for good or for ill, then it seems to me that we need to keep in mind a few select points that will help our mediated existence work for us rather than against us. Foremost, one has to keep in mind an principle that is well known in 12-step groups around the world. Whether AA or NA, Al-anon or Sex Addicts Anonymous there is a constant reminder to 'Know the source.'

Where is the information coming from? Who is the source?

In other words, would you take nutritional advice from someone morbidly obese? Would you take financial advice from someone who just went through bankruptcy proceedings? Is the source of the information legitimate? Is that source trustworthy? Is that source reliable? Is that source someone you can trust to mediate existence for you?

My own personal gut feeling is that a question as to the 'mediated vs. unmediated existence' obscures the larger question of determining the value, integrity, reliability, and sincerity of those sources of mediation that we simply cannot live apart from. We are going to have sources of mediation (schoolteachers, preachers, mentors, parents, grandparents, politicians, journalists, authours, artists), period. Which means that the question surrounding mediation ought to be 'about the nature and motives of what is being mediated, as well as who is meditating,' rather than is there a 'mediation-free zone' we can somehow attain.

So if everyone is, in a way, a media-outlet, then the matter of affiliating and tuning into those media-outlets that we know to have a track-record of trustworthiness, honesty, integrity, truthfulness, and even an ability to report all sides of a story (which is a huge feat for a single person!), becomes a matter of our own well-being. In both a practical sense and a psychological one it is important to know who we are 'tuning in' to. Cause if we tune into crap... then by George that is what we will get, crap.

The Pre-Packaged, Bite-Size, Consumer Ready Life

If only commodities matter anymore, then our existence is not so much lived and experienced as purchased and consumed.

It was Karl Marx who made the initial observation that commodities were really the encapsulated life-stuff of the worker and of the earth. Commodities are life-stuff. Commodities are what the Cosmos in concert with the human worker-bee have poured life into. The purchaser of the commodity--or the possessor/owner--becomes, in a sense, a purchaser of life, of the mediated essence of existence, of what might be called jouissance. Marx made the point that in an increasingly commodified world life itself would be threatened with becoming a commodity that didn't exist any longer in unpackaged, unmediated, non-commodified form. In other words, life would be increasingly a product that could only be purchased.

My disgust is that we are on the verge of just this scenario. Think for a moment about the commodification of experiences that are purchased in commodity-form. Humans are literally buying their life. Life, then, is reduced to being the 'ultimate consumer good.'

Life: the final commodity. After all, what can any longer be commodified when the experience of life itself--our actual living!--has become just another product that one can purchase? What becomes of living when it is just another charge on our credit card? What becomes of living when our life is but a series of items we pluck off the shelf, that we place in our on-line shopping cart? What becomes of living when our life is but the accumulation of pre-packaged bits and bites, each specifically designed and fit for human consumption?

Are we any longer human in such a world? For that, too, was a question Marx was given to comtemplate: what would life be like in a totally commodified world? Perhaps we can whisper back into the past and tell him.

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Commodities

Pardon my disgust for a moment, but have you not also noticed that the majourity of blogs seem to be little more than a collection of ad-campaigns for sharing with others our favourite commodities. I mean, shit, people, whatever happened to those precious little things we call 'ideas?!'

Perhaps we live in such a mediated life-world--which necesssarily includes a totally mediated headspace--that we can't help but point to commodities, and do so even when we are really wanting to reference a specific set of ideas. So, instead of our being able to point to an idea in its naked form, we can't help but refer to it in its mediated form, as a commodity available for purchase and viewing at www.suchandsuch.com. The result is, in my estimation, a loss of ideas in any archetypal sense--that is, any Platonic sense of Ideas as existing in some Pure Form, devoid of being rendered as a commodity perfect for advertising, marketing, and the boatloads of hyperbole that comes with both, is well, a sort of postmodern non-sequitir. Ideas in and of themselves no longer exist. And if they did no one would recognize them!

Package them though. Render ideas as commodites. Create an illusion of a fetish via an idea such as 'integral,' though... and watch out! Look at the ticker-tape roll. Look at the 'hits' accumulate. Look at the blogstats mount to the sky.

Origin of my disgust: Only commodities count.

What A Way To Die!

Somewhere, sometime, there was someone who died with a finger up their nose. Picking a booger on the way out, what a way to go!

No fireworks. No heroic dive into the Ocean to save a drowning child. No blaze of glory. Just a poor man scratching his ass when a massive heart-attack overtakes him. Just a woman with a yeats infection when she has a massive brain aneurysm. Just a man with a boner on the bus when the suicide bomber's backpack obliterates his latest fantasy.

What a way to go! Yet, how fitting. How human to die that way. How human to go out in a pile of shit and a load of piss. How apt for a young feller to be caught with a boner when the Grim Reaper comes a knockin! What could be more precious than that?

All of our heroic illusions about how we would like to die--how we see ourselves going out of this-world. Raging against the light with Dylan Thomas. Prepared to enter the Bardos with our guide the Dalai Lama. All set for Jesus to take us Home. Waiting for Allah and the Muslim equivalent of Hugh Heffner's Playboy mansion (the only difference being that of virginity, or lack thereof in the case of the Playboy mansion!). But who sees themselves dying in a truly human way; meaning, in a way that has its precedents in how we actually live our lives: shitting ourselves, pissing ourselves, scratching our genitalia, picking our noses, fidgeting with a nicely mined load of earwax... and BOOM! There you are in the after-life, caught with your pants down around your ankles before a Gathering of Angels.

Excuse me... uhm... I was just... er.... uhm... scratching... an.... uhm...