The despair and speedy desperation at the center of urban humanity is easily explained, although its explanation is not popular. Humanity’s primary project—the building of the city, with all its arsenal of protections and amusements—is largely built; we live in our dream. But the dream incarnate is far different than its earlier disembodied sibling—not pure and fearless, as we had planned, but full of the same medley of chaos and control as when we lived at the whims of nature (even if this medley manifests itself differently). Considering that we have invested all these centuries of effort, of blood, and nothing within has changed—in fact, it’s gotten worse because what is within now intuits that its nature is far more resilient to change than humanity thought—we resort to romanticizing nature (something no one familiar with nature would ever think of doing) and the sillier among us cling to some kind of future rescue—a disappearance into virtuality, alien visits, new exciting hallucinogenics, a true egalitarian democracy.
The problem is that we have become the god we've 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. The Stones’ song takes on a new prophetic significance, more metaphysical than they imagined. Fortunately, most conform to the machine’s demands, even those who argue against its tyranny, thus the project is sustained and we have something to do that society considers useful.
But the futility of our projects is intuited in humanity’s spiritual subterranes, an intuition we block by throwing as many artifacts, toys, art pieces, ideologies, and images as we 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? They do not commit suicide or participate in revolutions, as suicide and revolution both emerge from riding on the seesaw of hope and despair, and they left that playground some time ago. They neither protest nor hide nor preach but accept what comes and bow outwardly to the rabid building around. Bow because not to bow is to draw attention … and that isn't worth the effort of explanation or defense, which would fall on incomprehending ears.
In effect, i become an eye, become what God became. What the God behind the raging, building, knowing God became. Still, silent, desolate. A black unspeakable center.
The 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.
