political poetry set to the music of academia
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DEFENDING GENERALITIES: A REMEDY TO
THE FUTILITY OF POLITICAL POETRY
When operating within the realm of
specifics we limit the scope of our
capabilities - focusing so tightly on our
observations (a plural noun intrinsically tied
to the past) that we don’t cultivate the tools
necessary to integrate ourselves into the
present as it rapidly becomes the future. The
details bog us in a swamp of symptom
solving bialogues that refuses to
acknowledge the disagreements at the core
of our argument. A core is an abstraction:
the center essense where the seedlings of
essential truth are born and grow into trees
of comprehensive understanding. This is
where discussion becomes an honest
dialogue about the lenses through which our
worlds are viewed, and the difference in
those contexts and assumptions holds the
secret to unlocking an empathetic
comprehension of each other’s beliefs on
specifics and generalities.
DUTY VS. JOB: AN ATTEMPT TO
UNDERSTAND OBLIGATION’S
RELATIONSHIP TO EMPLOYMENT
To complete one’s role in society is to
commit to finding the cog in the machinery
that you can relish the process of becoming.
Our obsession with completion has led us to
prematurely assigning these cogs to their
supposed human counterpart and asking the
human to focus on mimicking their cog
efficiently. By losing the exploration, we’ve
deprived ourselves of discovering our true
fits - where self-motivation can naturally
inform an effectivity needed for growth. It
requires patience, but the payoff for
allowing our citizens to be rightfully placed
instead of forcing together ill-fitted
machinery only to have to replace it when
the gears’ teeth are ground to their unusable
gums is monumental because our duty
would be inspired and infused with
divergent thinking.
OBLIGATION AND DEMANDATION: HOW
THE MONETARY UNIT HAS CHANGED OUR
RELATIONSHIP TO GIVING AND
RECEIVING
Worth, as a word, has become chained to
coinage - our creation out of a perceived
necessity to define objective value. The issue
with coinage has become it’s polygamous
demands to be universally regarded as a
truth teller. Just as it would be difficult to go
on a date with a lover and their other lover -
money has become the bearer of awkward
experiences for humans as they rectify their
relationship differences with the one they
mutually admire/stalk. The result is that
those that control more become possessive,
feeling entitled to demand more - spending
becomes a relinquishing of worth and this
act of charity deserves to be repaid with an
equivalent respect. Those who are less tied
to coinage find themselves guiltily
requesting participation - receiving payment
comes with an obligatory service to those
generous enough to do the bestowing. The
indebtedness created undoes any generosity
within the transaction itself, leaving us with
a stagnant system unable to adapt to the true
worth of individuals.
RESISTING THE URGE TO TEST: AN
ARTIST’S LIFE IN LESSON
To wander implies an aimlessness that
artists understand lives at the threshold of
motivation. We reside on this tightrope
between useless and shifter of tectonic
plates of social change, knowing that within
the realm of the seemingly inane is where
inspiration bites us and yet the ego that
compels our journey forward lives in the
dreams contained within this promise of
immortal recognition. Our attempt to dwell
in continuation finds us defining ourselves
as students - not of any categorizable idea,
but of life itself. Schooling summons to
mind the post-industrial-age institution that
centers itself around the test, but, just as in
any educational system, this quizzing is a
distracting checkpoint whose utility lies in
its brag - its proving of lessons learned to a
higher authority whose opinion we hold in
esteem. In this analogy, the audience
becomes the authority of the artist and their
completed work: the demonstrative proof of
worth. This ego building process is far from
unnecessary - it is part of the swinging
balance that forces forward our movement,
but to require of one’s self a showing of all
dskj
work is to test without time for reflective
growth. This tightrope is a delicate walk and
yet important, as to balance one’s arrogant
display of one’s own ideas with the foraging
and imbibing of the earth’s fruits is to
maintain a morally based motivation.
BEYOND MONOTONY: HOW
STANDARDIZATION HAS DESTROYED THE
FLOW IT WAS MEANT TO PROTECT
If we continue to hold growth in esteem, we
must attempt to understand the variables it
is correlated to. We should look not just to
correlation, but also the relationships it has
defined through causality. Bottlenecking
stems from our growth fetish. We can either
deal with this by forming tributaries for our
new found mass to be distributed between,
or we can search for spaces where growth
has been absent from the narrative of
progress and reassign our additions to where
they can be supported. Though the second is
the option that involves less materials, we’ve
opted for the first out of fear of demanding a
change from the involved humans. But our
manmade growth cannot keep up with
natural growth, and instead we are left with
Rush Hour: A frustrating inefficiency that
causes resentment of our fellow man - easily
avoided if we held on to our arbitrary
schedules a little less stubbornly. It’s one of
many examples of humanity creating a
system in honor of efficiency, but then
refusing to relinquish it when it no longer
defended that concept.
THE NECESSITY OF FINDING MOMENTS OF
MEDITATION AS THE POLITICAL
PENDULUM SWINGS
As technologicalization sweats through our
political and economic systems an
awareness must be paid to the speed at
which we thrust ourselves back and forth
across the spectrum. We are a snowball of
change, only achieving growth through the
steady accumulation of mass. But just as we
can’t allow the speed of the shifts perceived
necessary to dystopically distort our truths -
distancing our world from the reality in
which it exists, we must maintain a healthy
fear of stagnation that would allow apathy to
melt away any possible cultural growth.
THE TOURIST INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX:
GENTRIFICATION THROUGH
STERILIZATION
When traveling to a place we attempt to
travel also in time to the vacationland our
destination was before our presence was felt
- we desire to voyeuristically peek into a
space without the inevitable change we
implement by visiting. Therefore the
employee of the tourist industry focuses
his/her efforts on vacuum sealing the most
desirable moment of existence. This task, an
impossible one, results in a harnessing down
of humanity-growth for fear that evolution
will refuse economic-growth forgetting that
the economic-growth itself manifests a
magnetism of monetary moguls that
enforces eventual evolution of the humans
whose growth you were attempting to stifle.
The addition of a currency based oligarch
invites a class jealousy that encourages
stratification that cyclically invites more
class strife while simultaneously destroying
the pilgrimage sight the system was meant
to protect - the emerging of class-structure
being antithetical to the preservation of time
previous to the that structure’s existence.
Our solution is simply an awareness of the
virus-like nature of our presence; complete
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with the necessity of being flushed out of the
system or succumbing to the natural habitat.
This also involves an incumbency upon the
industry behind tourism to refuse placation
of the foreign body. Comfort should be
furthest from its motivational forces,
demanding instead a release of the virus’
toxins or a release of the virus from the
environment. When the guest is no longer
given the false premise of home, we also
allow the home to adapt through dialogue
with its guest - we are encouraged to find
meaning in each other’s being as opposed to
the sterile stagnant separation necessary to
maintain mutual comfort.
METEOROLOGY: THE IMPETUS OF RURAL
DEPRESSION
AM I BEING RUDE? RECOGNIZING
RESPONSIBILITIES: REAL AND IMAGINED
Guilt is always a delusion; sometimes
healthy. It is a delusion that fills one with a
fearful stiffness rife with compulsions of
socially uncomfortable fits of self-reflection.
In these moments we must take advantage of
the guttural vulnerability we’ve discovered
and utilize these moments to journey deep
into our own motivational forces. In
opposition to our instinct of problem solving
our way out of the shame spiral that is
forcefully nudging us towards its center, we
should attempt acceptance and in the
attempt mine out the analytic gems
uncovered in the subsequent imaginative
whirlwind. It isn’t important if there is truth
to your mind’s creations, only that your
mind has brought you to this space and now
you must make the most of your playtime. In
the end assume you are responsible because
it will inevitably push you further into the
depths that are in need of a healthy
excavation.
THE ARGUMENT FOR A FOOD SERVICE
DRAFT
Guilt defines the relationship the served has
with their provider. Guilt, helplessness,
unawareness, and frozen awaiting. That guilt
offers a needed understanding of one’s
ability to be thrust above through no action
outside of the lottery of life. To combat the
luck inherent within a heredity defined class
culture, it’s necessary to force one’s self
onto every rung of the caste ladder to
remember that the ladder’s rungs are less
vertically aligned than we want to think of
them. They are a haphazardly jumbled pile of
firewood with certain privileges given to
specific rungs. It’s only when we don’t
demand our societal partners participate
across the spectrum of roles that rungs
begin getting cast in spotlights of
superiority. In order to live in an empathetic
society we must force ourselves to have as
many chapters in the roles we play as there
are rungs available to hang off of.
MENUS, CEREAL AISLES, AND THE
DELUSION OF CHOICE
Freedom implies a purity of possibility in
which a clarity amongst options that does
not exist is needed. We can clamor our way
to a stockpiling of choices, but the attempt to
accomplish is fruitless as no summits can be
reached if your peak is infinitely high.
Instead we stand on plateaus pointing
downward in eager comparison, illustrating
our superior distance from the bottom when
we should look skyward and realize we are
all equidistant from our non-existent
destination. I seek not to claim that any
intangible acquisition is hardship without
reward - that movement up the mountain is
simply wasted effort, but rather to claim the
journey is its own destination - that we must
savor the process of acquiring new choices
instead of heralding these opportunities as
fruits of our, all too goal oriented, labor.
THE UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECT OF
CROSS CULTURAL EXCHANGE: A
HOMOGENIZATION OF TASTE
As the inevitability of globalization sees
fruition we seem to be caught in the midst of
a worldwide competition of ideas - our
citizens forced to assert best paths at each
fork with which our, now unified, world is
presented. But by making these choices we
are flattening our horizons, relinquishing
the opportunity to broaden our landscapes
through forced communication based
attempts to compromise our
incompatibilities. We lose, not only the
diversity of ideas, but the diversity of
happinesses inspired by disgust, shock, fear,
and sadness. By treating our cultural
differences like legs on a march madness
bracket to be completed by an ever
expanding population containing a rainbow
of contexts, we sacrifice the obvious: that
because worth is relative, stuff needs the
spectrum of stuff that surrounds it in order
to maintain its value. On a globe that seeks to
undergo a makeover at the hand of the
rolling pin, it’s necessary to resist comfort.
Instead we must opt for a sometimes
disconcerting epilepsy of color in fear that
our world becomes blanded by reduction.
THE NECESSITY OF IMPOSING
STRUCTURES THAT FORCE FAMILIAL
BONDS WHEN CREATING SHARED SPACES
Sharing differs from collective ownership in
that ownership implies a right to the
decision making process, whereas to share
only demands that we recognize how
necessary consensus is in the creation of our
decisions. Therefore a space we share needs
to emphasize a form of communication that
allows for selfish demands, resentment of
emotional outbursts, petty complaints,
prolonged arguments motivated entirely by
personal insecurities, and complete
forgiveness - the trademarks of the
consensual process - the trademarks of a
family. Creating bonds that hold as tightly as
those formed by family without dedicating
the time that family implies is an
impossibility only defeated by a hegemonic
trust that will take generations of cultural
shifts towards siblinghood with fellow
human. We must start this process now by
assuming a radical optimism of the
possibility this paradigm adjustment. We
must begin by treating each other like
family.
STOLEN GOODS: A MEMORANDUM ON THE
DECLINE OF CULTIVATING PERSONAL
RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH THE
CONSUMER PROCESS
The role of customer will be played by us - a
character lacking a necessary addition to our
personhood, whose objective thrusts our
narrative forward knowledgeable of the ease
with which it can be fulfilled through
forming a human bond. This bond is not
sacred, and yet should be revered for its
power in the movement of goods and the
movement from desire to completed task - a
completed task that is a link in our
ever-growing chain of human history. It’s
only through the growth of the faceless
provider of goods that we’ve departed from
our role as faithful buyer to the much
simpler: stealer - seeking a self-imposed
absence from the formerly relationship
forming process of purchasing. Even when
we don’t take 100%, we no longer find joy in
a mutual benefit because we can’t foresee
that respect being reciprocated by such an
inhuman presence. We opt instead for a
battle for personal rewards - separating
ourselves from society.
HELD HOSTAGE BY TRADITIONALISM: A
TREATISE ON GENERATIONAL
DEFAULTISM
Children will forever be tied to our
perceptions of the future. The “hope” that
we optimistically pine for is a response to
our frustrations with the present - an
imaginative exercise allowing us to leave
behind the failures of the current. With this
creation of a successful overtaking of our
past mistakes we achieve growth, but in
order for this adaptation to maintain its
plausibility we cannot chain ourselves to our
parents. Instead of placid acceptance of
rituals passed down we must take our role as
children seriously - actively refusing the
advice of our forebearers until our stubborn
tantrum finds us treading water lost, alone,
and further away from our destination then
when we started. At that point we can call
out with our tail sheepishly between our legs
begging for the assistance of age-worn
wisdom. But rushing to the plea for help is
harmful to progress, whereas placing
unhealthy barriers between you and your
ancestral roots leaves you stranded and
separated. While neither is a positive
solution, erring on the side of
self-obsessiveness over selfishness at least
affects only your own being instead of
dragging society down with you.
PRIVILEGE IS INCOMPETENCE:
RETHINKING VICTIMHOOD
If this were a personal story I would talk
about that time I sat still, the only male left
on the bus as my Nepali brothers jumped off
in search of shovels to re-dirt the road so we
could un-halt our travel, because what was I
going to do with a shovel?
A MATHEMATICAL DEMAND FOR DEPTH
IN OUR CONSTRUCTIONS OF ROLES
Constructing the recipe for efficiency will
inevitably lead us to the problematic
ingredient of defining archetypes. These
limiting predictions of a human’s being may
be nearly as multidimensional as the muse
of which it is attempting reflection, but by
sake of being a creation it cannot capture the
infinite intricacies of the person. The person
is in constant revolution against the now -
seeking comfort in continuous evolution -
appeasing oneself with the idea that these
adaptations save them from definition. But
we worry that resisting stagnation simply
deludes us into thinking we have security
against our fear of role confinement because
the movement itself can be defined. By
attempting to capture a more accurate
reflection we dig deeper by one dimension
and seek to reflect not just the being at its
place and time, but the derivative of the
being - the shifting that is occurring that
insights our future. But this delusion of
being undefined is steeped in truth for we
won’t fully realize our selves in the now until
we investigate the derivative of our
derivative and the derivative of that
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derivative of our derivative and so on until
we’ve explored the infinity of evolutions
within our self-evolution - only then will we
have found the role we are to play, and that
investigation is one that can only be
accomplished by one’s self because only a
self has a view of their own infinity.
PHOTOGRAPHY: THE UNNECESSARY
DESIRE TO CAPTURE FLEETING MOMENTS
AND REPROCESS THEM AS FOREVER
FADING MEMORIES
We seek to achieve the unattainable goal of
slowing down the momentum that thrusts
us away from being past nostalgia and into
forgetting so that we may spend as much
time existing in each moment. The trouble
lies in the word achieve. With any
achievement there is process and
completion - there is a goal strived toward
and then accomplished. But, like attempting
immortality through living longer, your
process implies the impossibility of your
goal. This lengthening of nows is not simply
delusional, but also divides your life into an
infinity of infinitely long paths for us to
schizophrenically multitask between; leaving
us drained and regretful by the time we’ve
finally achieved death.
HORNS, EXCLAMATION MARKS, AND THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF TONE THROUGH FORCED COLLECTIVE COMMUNICATION
PRACTICES
Communication has the inherent flaw that it
is attempting to take a personal thought and
manipulate it for transport to the communal
consciousness. For efficiency’s sake we
condense a series of feelings that share
enough traits to be assumed similar across a
societal platform into a singular expression,
and ask the breadth of humanity that that
expression now spans across to accept its
meaning as consensual truth. And yet that
span has its limits and cannot claim to
contain beings as a whole. Instead we are left
with exclusivity via culturally designed
linguistic barriers that alienates those not
bred under the zeitgeist. And, more
dangerously, the overuse of these efficient
commonalities dulls the expressiveness of
the original intention. This blanding of tone
is causing an amnesia of color - laming the
exuberance that exists at the extremes of our
emotional spectrum.
EASE DESTROYS WORTH AND HOW THE
CAR RUINED THE PILGRIMAGE
To have a destination is to have a goal
separated by distance, and the distance we
are most trapped into abiding by is time. The
usefulness of a goal comes both from its
completion and the process needed to
discover its accomplishment. Without the
journey the destination becomes irrelevant
and, though it may feel like an archaic
correlation, a journey’s transformational
properties are unfailingly linked to the time
spent in the journey’s presence. With time
comes focus and exploration - a combination
capable of powerful self analysis imposed
evolution.
THE INTANGIBILITY OF MONEY AS THE
CREATION OF THE BEGGAR STATE
Choices have been conflated into a single
abstract object in our unending journey
towards the unreachable destination of
efficiency. This dream of finding within
goals an only fills our heads with dreams as
to what that dream can dream, and
imagination is not bound by the globe’s
creations but rather by the mind’s - a world
so infinite it can’t truly exist. Its
impossibility presents only the symptom of
the pandemic that is rooted in a chilling
dystopian motivation: a greed for efficiency.
This misunderstanding of efficiency as
something an individual can acquire and not
as a societal goal to be accomplished by the
community as a whole is confusing the
placement of our motivational bullseye.
WHY CURRENCY AND RELIGION CANNOT
COEXIST
God, in all forms, is an attempt to manifest
the illusion of the omni. The creation of
money has accomplished, at least, an
omni-ability - a stretching of our desire’s
tentacles to encompass entirety. But it’s not
the war waged between these two
behemoths battling for our worship that
makes their mutual presence impossible.
Nay. War can be a sustainable practice as
long as casualties don’t outpace growth, and
by their nature of describing infinity their
growth can never be outpaced. The problem
exists in the effect the battle has on the
process of worship. This is a process
centered around collective offerings finding
a way to redistribute themselves amongst
the mass that has participated in the process
to begin with. Each person’s offering is
personal, and as it becomes collective we
begin to hear the symphony of voices that
our society yearns to compose. When we
stack our offerings - create a collection to
give individually, we lose our voices as the
orchestra attempts to play as many
symphonies as there are instruments, and
the music of humanity becomes noise.
CELEBRITY WITHIN A CONTAINER: HOW
SMALLER BOUNDARIES CAN INTENSIFY
WORSHIP
Popularity is in the eye of its cliques
beholder. Cliques are but naturally forming
cults - culture defining itself through an
efficiency motivated categorization, and as
with any faith-formed group a hierarchical
model becomes difficult to resist. The leader
is created as a necessary reaction to
directionless followers - the courted has no
aim until a courtship has begun - a cliff has
no purpose until lemmings find their way off
it. This organic occurrence demands of its
hero a responsible caring for it’s minions,
and of its followers a patriotic evangelism of
their leader’s exploits. The fewer aware, the
more fervent the propagation must be
because the cult’s growth becomes dire -
extinction: a fear always worthy of
contemplation. Reciting the praises of
another has a brainwashing effect -
convincing the reciter of the words
themselves as the repetition imbues the
statements with a subjective truth. This is
not to say that the enthusiasm is false, but
rather the result of a search for enthusiasm -
the words behind the feeling meaningless
for the feeling is the meaning. The main
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reason a book gets finished is that it gets
started.
THE TALENT SHOW’S ROLE IN OUR
MISUNDERSTANDING OF ARTISTIC MERIT
If we are to believe that art is a joke played
on its audience to trick them into a state of
intellectual and emotional vulnerability, as I
implore us to do, its value cannot be tied to
its inability to be created again anymore
than it can be tied to its moment of being
imbibed. An ability to challenge norms is not
an ability at all - it is a desire - it is a passion
and thoughtfulness coming together to
create a demand for cultural reinvention.
But this, importantly, is unrelated to skill or
talent. Art is not cultivated through practice
- unless that practice is of the process of
expanding boundaries. You cannot get better
at art, only be deeper. Art does not see you as
a contestant: pushing to the top through a
clamoring rush up the pile of competitors. It
sees you as a its muse: collaborating with the
infinitely large group of muses that Art hires
to collectively create its vision.
A talent show should be about people who
can make w’s out of their tongue or can
identify soap flavors by smell. It should stay
as far away from Art as possible.
COLD WARS ARE ART? THE SPACE NEEDED
TO INSPIRE BOUNDARY EXPANSION
Competition cultivates meaningless
expressions of better than thou, me, us,
them. In those attempts to milk reality out of
our bragadociousness we discover the edges
of our creative existence. When the
competition is maintained between two
opposing forces equally singleminded in
their search for victory over answers, the
drive becomes narrower - the pinpoint
pressure urging the surroundings of the
possible to encompass a larger area. The idea
that through our own self
obsession/analysis/actualization we force
the world to fathom redefinition is also Art.
DEFYING DEFINITION: A REFUSAL OF THE
STAGNANT NATURE OF TRUTH
A PESSIMISM IN HUMAN NATURE AS A
REMEDY FOR SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION
The individual and society are at odds
insomuch as individuals are defined by their
variety whereas society, by its encompassing
nature, has no variance - one cannot have
variability from one’s self. Therefore to
govern the individual by the same process
with which we observe and regulate society
is a ludicrous proposition - lazy by impetus,
villain-creating by practice. To place faith in
humans to push positively forward is an
optimism valid a majority of the time, but to
lie complacent with a majority success rate
is to refuse the option of viewing a majority
as pure by finding faith in society itself.
Society’s progress is net positive if the
average citizen of said society is good, which
also implies that probably a significant piece
of the human puzzle is not good - evil, bad,
contextually ruined through
political/economic constructs, etc… So to
govern a group one must have a pessimism
in the group’s members - for its members
may or may not take advantage of a system
for personal gain, whereas if the whole
undermines its laws in favor of itself we are
still treated to a societal win. Psychopathy
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exists, but fear of a psychopathic society
stems from a myth invented and propagated
by those eager to maintain their loopholes.
Assume a group will do good, but and
individual cannot - either out of a malicious,
self-serving intent, or out of an inability to
understand a world outside of one’s self.
A PLEA TO RECREATE THE UNIVERSAL
COMMUNALITY OF FIRE
We have all stared wordlessly at fallen
branches as they breathe their final gasps,
blessing us with a loving warmth and the
accompanying emotional outburst of light
that illustrates their sacrifice for our
comfort. We’ve all held our hands close not
wanting this woody martyr’s beautiful
destruction to pass in vain, as the colors for
rivers against gravity’s tug and transform
into a final vengeful attack on our lungs and
eyes leaving us with only its discarded scent
to remember it. We’ve all watched as our
poking and prodding extracted use and
beauty from the formerly dormant and then
kept watching as our efforts completed the
cycle - the extraction leaving our dormant
pile at an even deeper state of dormancy.
And never once has anyone said: “Hey man,
get your own fire.”
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