January 4th 2013
Some miscellany for the new year -
Random beauty in the moment. Save it forever... uh huh.
It has come to my attention that the
Library of Congress is archiving all of Twitter – some 400 million
tweets per day. Why? You might very well ask, just as I did, and as
did my wife when I informed her of this. Our mouths hung open, our
perplexity unattractive. We are not young tyros; we have seen our
government do many inexplicable, weird and even randomly horrible
things, because, as we all know, it is not a conscious or even
marginally rational entity, and therefore such actions are
inevitable. If the Library of Congress considers the random,
fleeting thoughts of each and every human that uses this medium to be
worthy of examination by posterity (the article mentioned the
difficulty of welding this mass of words into a searchable, useful
resource of some kind) then I would think the entirety of human
existence, regardless of meaning or quality, is also of inestimable
value and should somehow be recorded and saved forever. To the mind,
our physical world is just a quicksand of change and transformation,
and hence far less solid and real than our thoughts, which exist in a
medium that encompasses, surrounds, creates, the idea of time, and
hence feel eternal to us. Memory, and everything that enhances it or
preserves it, feels more important than the maddeningly elusive,
theoretical single moment of now, when physical and mental worlds
intersect and merge.
Blue chairs! Everlasting grey! Worlds collide!
Later in the same section of the W.
Post there was an article regarding a large cache of Jewish documents
roughly a thousand years old found in a cave in Afghanistan. Written
in several languages and scripts, it testifies to the enduring
addiction we all have to the products of our minds. At least the
ancient Jews had a criterion for saving documents, in that anything
mentioning God in any way was considered too sacred to discard.
Going back much farther in time and in our human psychical
development, we find the first writing, cuneiform, in large
quantities in the Sumerian civilization, and there apparently most of
the writing was used just to facilitate commerce and ordinary life –
laundry lists, bills and receipts and similar mental detritus, which
probably only survived because baked clay is a very stable material,
and tax returns must be kept at least seven years. I've got tax
returns twenty years old mouldering in my basement somewhere, but I
lost last year's altogether when my computers fried in a storm, and I
had been too lazy to back up or print them.
Which reminds me: File, Save As. The
hopeful, pathetic little gesture trying to conjure some sort of
immortality for our thoughts.
Don't forget me.
Liquid Plumber Double Action Snake!
The commercial I just saw was entirely pornographic in style and
intent, lacking only some wildly gyrating genitals and screaming,
spouting orgasms. So what, Pops? Your impertinent question is
valid; one should no longer expect, in our sophisticated modern
milieu, some vapid, sexless cartoon figure to sell household cleaning
products in a way that will not make Auntie Mildred shake with the
vapors. But then I saw a commercial for some auto-repair-and-tire
outfit that must have been written and directed by one of our great
modern absurdist provocateurs; the intent is no longer sexual but
darkly psychotic. A nearly nude bearded fat man embraces a
stone-faced mother figure in a staid outfit, and a masked, nearly
nude midget utters a feral cry and leaps from a tall bookcase upon a
nude fat man (the same one? we don't know.) in a towel, who is
expecting a back massage. The technique, I assume, is to link the
advertiser's name to strange images as a mnemonic, and this effect is
assumed to be stronger if the images are disturbing and repellent,
though lightly smeared with weak humor so as to deflect outraged
criticisms from superannuated, fossilized, fallen Freudians such as
myself. Freud would roll up his sleeves and flail endlessly but
entertainingly, could he but see modern advertising. More and more,
that imp he called the Id is dominating all human consciousness.
Just read those Tweets for as long as you can stand it, if you really
need confirmation. In any case, I can't remember the name of the car
repair outfit, though I've seen the commercial many times, and will
never be able to completely dump those fetid, hyper-banal images from
my brain. What's wrong with me, Doc? Have I fallen down a
metaphorical manhole, or a psychedelic rabbit hole, or a
wormhole-in-the-time/space-continuum? Or has the Zeitgeist just
passed me by like a Ferrari passing a donkey?
Surrealistic Cookie Factory
I see on the web that today is the day
Marty McFly was to arrive at in his headlong drive through time in
the battered DeLorean. A perfect example of the same thing: as cool
as that movie was, it now seems quaint in every way, especially in
its earnest optimism. Nevertheless, we are not required to jump on
the Cynical Juggernaut; if we wish we can stay in a decent mental
space of our own, like the Professor hiding in the past, and perhaps
be happy as our culture crumbles around us.
Ride, Captain, ride, upon your mystery ship...
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