fjords

Beauty is Truth beyond Time.

Have you ever noticed that most models in photographs look like they spend their entire lives posing in front of a camera, modelling? That the kind of beauty we worship is the kind that is willing to stop and pose in front of a camera and fake a smile? That, in other words, beauty and prettiness and general aesthetic value are kind of performed, and that our ideas of them are all too often defined by these posing images? This, I submit to you, is the true appeal of television and all other kinds of visual media: that we don’t notice; that we are instantly captivated, that we willingly believe in a world where people are always smiling and looking dazzling, with a camera incidentally hanging around; that in fact all we see are these glimpses when film is captured and then edited; that this epistemological gap is ignored; that for us there is no camera but the supposedly unjudging one of the mind’s eye in confrontation with true, genuine (if simulated, acted) signs of human living. And this we submit to, as willing participants.

We can’t know what we want. All we can know is what we think we want through various epistemological systems: linguistic, social, biological, etc. In other words, our wants exist in a vacuous unconscious state, and we must negotiate through our various approaches to estimate what they are.

All literature engages in the game of what language can and cannot tell us about anything outside of their text.

All of human life is just one big linguistic game. The game is to learn the rules of the game.

This is why poets are great: they make words more meaningful than they have any right to be. This is also how to tell poetry apart from so-called ordinary language. The beauty of poetry is all around is; it sustains the seas of language in which we find ourselves immersed.

Here is the problem of the twentieth century and on: we believe that we have absolute control over what meaning we ascribe to things, and yet we do not want to cling onto things that give us an illusive or shallow meaning in them. If our values are criticized, reduced to absurdity, we revolt against opinion and construct meaning for us, at least. But, even here, isn’t there something to be desired, for so fragile a system? It’s possible, yes, but when we are capable of something more, is there not something for us? What if, instead of hanging onto our values as if capital, we discovered them out of the most irreducible, sensible, practical, human principles? Maybe it is philosophical naïveté, but there is always hope for mankind.

Let me tell you what makes human beings special: it’s not a big deal to feel pleasure, to live life, to generate offpsring; it’s human beings who are born with the innate capacity to ascribe value onto all the phenomena in the world, and who are bound in the consciousness of their own interactions with them. In short, human beings can care, and reflect on what they care about.

Let me tell you what’s so great about the age of media and information: simulation. Anything we could do physically, engaging ourselves, we can emulate through various media. We can live out our lives through television and movies. We can make choices life doesn’t let us have through video games. We can interact with people we would otherwise be uncomfortable with through the anonymity of the internet. Additionally with most of these, we often have the pleasure of watching. The passive act of engaging with something without any real action on your part. Think about movies—you can fall asleep, or get distracted, for much of a movie, but still have “watched” it. You can look at attractive people without shame. You can just let your senses and mind be run over by the river of information, without much responsibility. This is what it’s all about, engaging the faculties of your mind without participation. Why does this matter? Well, you can simulate experience all you want, but there’s always a body to drag you down. Why can’t we be purely immersed in some kind of cyber, passive world? Because we can never replace the pleasure of food, the subjectivity of smell, the health maintenance of exercise and activity, the feeling of running out of breath. Sure, we can always simulate these, pretend like these things are going on, eventually. But we can never replace the physical interactions of the body through simulation, if only for our own health. Even if we could keep the body in some kind of maintained state of inaction, there is something far removed from experience in these bodily functions that strikes us. Something about only imagining the feeling of sweat, or pain, or sex—something strikes us as wrong, as if there is a blatant gap between virtual and real. But maybe the gap has always been there, in tv, in film, in music, in advertisements; maybe we just can’t recognize what changes reality since it’s been the same since we were born, since the simulation becomes our reality.

We all construct the world out of stimuli and responses, sensation and perception, events and observation. And out of these, we build systems to organize information, to classify, to differentiate, to make meaning. We target an Object, and wrap it around with metaphors, with similar Things, with different perspectives, with different schema, with different particulars, with new names, with associations, with connotations; the complexity of the systems we construct is indefinite. However, the trick is not to avoid systems, but rather to know when we refer to Objects or Ideas in the world, and when we rely purely on the system. Or, perhaps, to consider whether there is anything but systems, and once we lose the unifying center, we are left only with “abandoned meanings,” as Don DeLillo puts it.