Man Meets Himself

The despair and speedy desperation at the center of urban man is easily explained, although its explanation is not popular.  Man’s primary project—the building of the city, with all its arsenal of protections and amusements—is largely built; he lives in his dream.  But the dream incarnate is far different than its earlier disembodied sibling—not pure and fearless, as he had planned, but full of the same medley of chaos and control as when he lived at the whims of nature (even if this medley manifests itself differently).  Considering that he has invested all these centuries of effort, of blood, and nothing within has changed—in fact, it’s got worse because what is within now intuits that its nature is far more resilient to change than man thought—he resorts to romanticizing nature (something no one familiar with nature would ever think of doing) and the sillier among him cling to some kind of future rescue—a disappearance into virtuality, alien visits, new exciting hallucinogenics, a true egalitarian democracy.

The problem is that man has become the god he’s always wanted to be.  The creator.  The arbiter of good and evil.  The writer of the text of knowledge, the one who eats that text and is not ashamed.  The confounder of language.  The fashioner and remover of fig leaves.

Except to the one who has become a machine—driven by its dictates of productivity and repeatability—all these grand accomplishments seem rather unsatisfying.  To this one who refuses the heady drugs of romanticism, no satisfaction is available to him.  The Stones’ famous song takes on a new prophetic significance, more metaphysical than they likely imagined.  Fortunately, most conform to the machine’s demands, even those who argue against its tyranny, thus the project is sustained and man has something to do that society considers useful.

But the futility of our projects is intuited in man’s spiritual subterranes, an intuition he blocks by throwing as many artifacts, toys, art pieces, ideologies, and images as he can afford into that growing vortex.  The gushing new is absolutely, tyrannically necessary … it’s the force that keeps society intact.  Although the consumer frenzy may destroy us, giving it up would also destroy us, a paradox that is—if possible—more horrifying than the futility of our efforts.

And what does the one of no-satisfaction do?  He does not commit suicide or participate in revolutions, as suicide and revolution both emerge from riding on the seesaw of hope and despair, and he left that playground some time ago.  He neither protests nor hides nor preaches.  He accepts what comes and bows outwardly to the rabid building around him.  He bows because not to bow is to draw attention to himself … and that is not worth the effort of explanation or defense, which would fall on incomprehending ears.

In effect, he becomes an eye.  He becomes what God became.  What the God behind the raging, building, knowing God became.  Still, silent, desolate.  A black unspeakable center.

The discerning reader may well ask—what then, to the visible eye, is the difference between the one who conforms to the machine and the one who bows but whose bowing is an act?  This is the irony—in the realm of flesh, there is no difference, and as only the realm of flesh, of quantity and things, matters to machine’s children, life can go merrily along and only those who have swung from hope to despair and can’t get back have to be punished.  That other realm—the realm of spirit—only matters to those who are acting, for they require its strange energy to build and sustain their masks.