FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- "Wake up, little Susie, wake up!"

FYI:
I'm working on my novel. As respites from it, I'm writing "fragments of a philosophy" similar to those that appeared in "A Look Back to See Ahead." Who knows, such reflections might find their way into the novel. Stay tuned.
JRF


FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY

"WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE, WAKE UP!"

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007

"PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT!"-- Slogan of General Electric in the 1960s


Ever notice how we are obsessed with endings? It is an interesting obsession because we clearly don't believe in endings, or beginnings or middles for that matter. But to camouflage this obsession we insist on making known the purpose of a thing, when clearly most things are purposeless, while locked in purposefulness. We wrap our lives in projects.

The project?

Oh, that can be anything that looks, seems, smells, tastes, and feels good like what is already accepted as "in" or "desirable" or consistent with whatever everyone else is doing or is. Education can't simply be a desire to enlarge our horizons to better enjoy our time on earth. It must have a purpose: to make a living, to do good, to make a name for ourselves, to leave the world a better place for our being here when being here never gets much attention. We are so busy doing and becoming that we don't have enough time to be. Being is not part of the equation.

This is true in work and what is deemed productive effort, or the dynamics of an economy. It is equally true of what is called pleasure or affluence or, alas, purpose. Words become a substitute for action, and forward inertia a substitute for movement. We must escape into some artificial high to find ourselves by losing ourselves. We create diseases by lifestyle choices, and then cure the diseases by artificial or synthetic palliatives. The more things change the more they remain the same.

We fail to see the paradox in promoting health insurance for everyone while neglecting to promote healthful lifestyles. More sensible lifestyles would negate the need for a national health insurance program. It is such little things that mean a lot that we as a peculiar clueless animal repeatedly miss.

There is no originality when the focus is moving away rather than towards a thing. It is the difference between centrifugal and centripetal force. There is something of the "big bang" and "black holes" to this, which I will address in a future missive.

Whatever the activity, it is raw and naked and yes, obscenely so, when it comes to art. We let our subconscious show in art to reveal our confusion while wrapping it in the allure of an extension of what is construed as beautiful, sophisticated, and the touchstone of culture.

Come to think of it music and painting and other expressions of creativity are all about progress, aren't they?

They mask the most prominent condition of our times, the disorder of attention deficit. We can't stand still. We constantly have to be on the move, talking to someone, listening or texting someone. We are slaves to our electronic toys. Show people some new gadget, or show them the old gadget in a new way and they are hooked.

We've left the fresh air and smell of mature and the need to work from sun up to sunset to make chump change, for urban sprawl. We still want the feel of the real without the smell or aggravation. Now we have street art in metropolitan America where ceramic pigs and cows in colorful polka-dot acrylic splendor grace the boulevard of the high-end shops. Not to be outdone, plastinated real dead animals are on display in art galleries and homes of affluent sportsmen.

What this reveals is our sickness, the shadows of our collective mind, the anxieties of our times juxtaposed in point-counterpoint to expose the sarcophagus of "the project." Wake up little, Susie, wake up!

Nobody creates anymore. Look to popular music. It is primarily noise, a lot of gyrations, bastardizing the language, and staying well within the limits of gonad consciousness. Painters don't paint anymore. Daubing canvases with streaks of colors place us back in the ancient caves of primitives who were afraid to come out for fear of being the lunch of some wild animal.

The fear now is not of wild animals but of intimacy. We don't want to know ourselves. When others find out who we are, and they don't like it, they do one of two things: they attempt to change us, or they abandon us. We do the same things to ourselves and with our projects.

When they don't work out or work as they are supposed to within the time constraints that we artificially impose, we panic. We become stressed out.

Mild forms of stress - overworking a problem at work or at home compounds the impact - induce physical reaction to make us stop. We have a pain behind the eyes or in a knee or in some other part of our anatomy that forces us to do so. Extreme forms of stress release the same atavistic mechanism known as "fight or flight" - that burst of energy, which will give us the strength to confront the problem and our adversary or cause us to retreat into ourselves, and say, "no big deal," and suffer the mounting stress for the denial.

We are no longer in the wild, but our urban jungle induces the same reaction. The combined pressure of a heavy workload with distressing details and no clear closure, the death of a parent, the divorce from a mate, the plunge into chaos from a natural disaster, can trigger a permanent adrenalin rush. Blood pressure goes up, weight goes down, and appetite is suppressed. The brain speeds up. Sleep becomes evasive, sex impossible. The body reacts as if the mind has encountered something to be feared. There is sweating, anxiety, rising to panic, followed by memory loss, and obsessive circular thinking as if on a treadmill spinning away and going nowhere in a cage.

We are not operating in a sacred world of high purpose. We are operating in a market economy. Progress is our most important product. Here we are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.

One of a continuing series from Dr. Fisher, whose most recent book is A Look Back to See Ahead (2007).