![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Light My Fire
Oct. 30th, 2022 11:36 am"... rather be dead than cool."
Finally got around to watching a live performance of "Light My Fire" by The Doors and was kind of struck with awe at Jim Morrison, which of course, went on to remind me of Kurt Cobain, (Club 27), which lead me to re-watch MTV Unplugged "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" Lead Belly cover by Nirvana. And then a mere look at David Bowie's image.
When Kurt ended the last song of the evening, he went down to give his autographs to people. I could almost cry, after a performance like that, and the normalcy of human interaction, and marvel at the very idea that once upon a time, this person was real. He was living, breathing, and his mind was conscious. And I wasn't even born. Not so with David Bowie or Michael Jackson, and others, who have all shared the same world with me. Though the very phrase "shared the world with me" sounds absurd, considering that I feel this world is not mine to share. The phrase is meaningless. But I suppose what I am trying to say is that, greatness and great people seem to exist solely in my mind or in the mists of time, before my mind existed. So it is rather strange to become aware of these very rare, very exclusive times when the existence of one person happened to coincide with my own living, breathing consciousness around the same time, on the same planet.
It's a long-winded way of saying that it fills me with hope, yet also immeasurable sadness. Hope because I know that great souls at all exist, and aren't just in my imagination or the twisted projection of the public. Immeasurable sadness because - when I look at Cobain, or Bowie, or Morrison, or Jackson, and others - I can't help but be filled with this sense of doom, this sense as if the angels have left us, that the great ones are gone and they are never coming back. That this is it, this is the end. Only imitations and caricatures of greatness flood the culture now.
And I want to give in. I want to give in to this sense of doom, that our culture is dying. No, I shouldn't say "our" once again, because I am merely a casual observer of it. The culture. Do I mean western culture? I don't think so. I think global creative culture. I want to weep for this age.
I look at someone like Kurt Cobain and I try to imagine how he'd feel about the current age. I won't put words in his mouth, but, I think social media ruins authenticity and individuality. One must purge oneself from social media algorythmic influence if one wishes to rediscover their soul beneath all that garbage.
Authenticity, true individuality is fucking dead. Invention is dead. It's a cultural wasteland where "authenticity" is synonymous with "consumerism" or something. Youth culture is a pile of eggshells and it's disgusting.
I want to give up - I am ready to give up - because only in giving up can I achieve total liberation from the shackles of collective consciousness of this age. I've already come so far, actually, there's not much else left to go.
There is also a certain tinge of envy I feel for those icons of a bygone era - the artists and the poets and the philosophers. The envy is because part of what made them so great was how well they were able to capture and reflect the spirit of the age. Effortlessly and even unconsciously so. At least, that's how future critics and writers write about these people. They've become vessels, archetypes. Terence McKenna wrote something similar about it... I don't have the notes here with me right now, but he talked about how every now and then a person comes along and they transcend the pre-existing archetypes that most people fall into. They instead become, as if possessed, by an aeon. They seem to be totally in-tune with the collective consciousness, they reflect something back to the masses. Maybe he didn't say it exactly like that, but it was something about how that's what happened to Christ. How the individual identity becomes something mythological because of how society reacts to them.
I feel like there's nothing out there right now, no one to speak for the age. And I feel like it's detrimental for a culture to be able to make sense of itself, to prevent it from plunging into chaos, to have the art world reflect that image back to itself - back to the collective. I feel like social media is an artificial construction whereby multibillion dollar companies with shady groups try to "inject" a culture with their own messengers, their own reflectors "of the world we live in today" which is not at all how the spirit of the age is channeled and revealed at all. That's why nothing feels real, why everything is a soulless trend, why the youth is in a deep state of identity crisis. It's a conspiracy theory of mine that I just made up a minute ago.
What I am saying is that I wish this is something you could volunteer for.
Everyone who becomes a messenger ultimately lives a life of extremes. It's a sacrifice. Peace is traded for truth and liberty.
I want to channel the greats, I want to know what they'd do, if they were young and alive now. I can't help but imagine Kurt Cobain going totally off-grid because of the social media invasion. I think he'd live in a cabin somewhere and play guitar and probably own some rescued animals - and he'd make it as a matter of personal principle to be utterly clueless, to the point where if someone were to mention Twitter he'd say "you mean that sound the birds make? Sorry, I don't speak bird."
This hypothetical, projected image of a dead musician is how I'd like to see myself also, in an ideal scenario.
And like I said, I've come far, because my social media presence is almost subterranean. I use it even less than my grandmother. But it's not good enough, I'm not as ignorant as I wish I was.
What is it that made the greats great? Why were they unable to control themselves, to be lowkey, to pretend to be normal, why didn't they even try to fit in? The pressure to fit in now is more suffocating than it ever was, which is the ultimate irony, considering that everywhere you look people are preaching "inviduality" and "realness" and everywhere you look they're just clones of each other. Part of it has to do with the way the new internet is designed, it truly does limit people's expression. I remember about fifteen years ago when even your personal YouTube page could be customized like a blog, with colours and themes and pictures - anything you want.
Maybe I've got the wrong idea.
Maybe the idea isn't to channel or embody the spirit of the age, but rather wake it up. And the only way that I can see in which it can be waken up is by rebelling against it - going against the tide. That's how it's always been.
I sound so grandiose, don't I? I am swept up by these ideas of greatness, because that is all I ever wanted, all I ever dreamed of. But I've only been able to move backward, never forward. Yet I feel a calling. I feel these men and women of the past as kindred spirits. In fact, I feel all the dead as kindred spirits. I feel the dead speaking to me. Not in words or dreams or images. But in feelings, which move me like a leaf in the wind.
No great artist can be made without great suffering, complexity, intensity in their personal lives. It's almost a prerequisite to have an unorthodox family or unstable childhood or anything that makes you the outsider. All of those boxes are ticked in red for me. And yet I feel too old. The people I look up to, they followed their hearts at a young age. They rolled with it and became great. I didn't - I kept trying again and again to be normal, to do what's expected of me. I wasn't brave enough, I wasn't angry enough. I rejected who I was because the truth really scared me. Because when I confront myself about who I really am, I am hit with a powerful, overwhelming force of loneliness. Just writing this right now is very difficult for me, because loneliness is something I am able to keep locked away very, very deep within my psyche. It's the one thing I hide from myself, the one thing I fear. In any other case, about any other subject or aspect of myself or my life or my fears, I have no problem delving to the deepest depths. Analyzing myself, my thoughts, my feelings - like I am now - is therapy for me. It's a hobby. It's absolutely vital to my sanity to spend a lot of time making sense of myself.
And the one thing I can't talk to myself about is my loneliness.
Loneliness not in a sense that I haven't been able to connect to anyone I have ever met. Any connection I've made has always felt one-sided, in that I go out of my way to empathize, to feel the other person. To love them, to come into their world and spend some time there. But whenever other people have tried to connect to me, I was simply profoundly disturbed and felt even more alien and alone than when I am actually alone. Other people make me lonely - or rather, bring the pre-existing loneliness into my constant waking consciousness where I cannot ignore it and I cannot do anything about it and life becomes a waking nightmare. When I am alone (have no human contact) is the only time I am not alone. I feel comforted by nature, and deeply cherish the company of animals. But to people I have always felt deeply alien.
That all being said, it has never actually bothered me until social media took over the culture.
Before all that, I held the hope in my heart that I will meet "my people" and I recognized myself as a deep, imaginative soul - a creative person - and creative types are often picky about their company. The internet offers that opportunity and then dashes it, as I have experienced it. Now I feel like I will never, ever have meaningful relationships with anyone. Which in itself doesn't scare me. What scares me is that I'll always feel fundamentally alien.
Which is where Gnosticism comes in to rescue me.
I admire how the greats were able to transform their passion, obsession, pain, fascination etc. into art. Something personal turned into entertainment, projected into the objective world. A conjunction of other works into a unique singularity. I see it like an exorcism, except that you're not expelling something demonic, but something divine, from another world. I'm thinking about Alexander McQueen now.
Anyway, I want to follow this impulse - to do what makes me feel pure, free, far away from this time and place. I want to go oldschool. I'm making changes. I want my heavenly parents to be proud of me. I want to activate that psychic telepathic connection, light that beacon, send the signal, let them hear me and feel me. Let them come. The real ones. My spiritual brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and lovers and children. I can't be the only alien in this alien world. There must be someone from the same Kingdom as me. How do I call them? How do I hear them? Everyone I know is dead.
"The Alien from without comes to him who is alien in the world."
Finally got around to watching a live performance of "Light My Fire" by The Doors and was kind of struck with awe at Jim Morrison, which of course, went on to remind me of Kurt Cobain, (Club 27), which lead me to re-watch MTV Unplugged "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" Lead Belly cover by Nirvana. And then a mere look at David Bowie's image.
When Kurt ended the last song of the evening, he went down to give his autographs to people. I could almost cry, after a performance like that, and the normalcy of human interaction, and marvel at the very idea that once upon a time, this person was real. He was living, breathing, and his mind was conscious. And I wasn't even born. Not so with David Bowie or Michael Jackson, and others, who have all shared the same world with me. Though the very phrase "shared the world with me" sounds absurd, considering that I feel this world is not mine to share. The phrase is meaningless. But I suppose what I am trying to say is that, greatness and great people seem to exist solely in my mind or in the mists of time, before my mind existed. So it is rather strange to become aware of these very rare, very exclusive times when the existence of one person happened to coincide with my own living, breathing consciousness around the same time, on the same planet.
It's a long-winded way of saying that it fills me with hope, yet also immeasurable sadness. Hope because I know that great souls at all exist, and aren't just in my imagination or the twisted projection of the public. Immeasurable sadness because - when I look at Cobain, or Bowie, or Morrison, or Jackson, and others - I can't help but be filled with this sense of doom, this sense as if the angels have left us, that the great ones are gone and they are never coming back. That this is it, this is the end. Only imitations and caricatures of greatness flood the culture now.
And I want to give in. I want to give in to this sense of doom, that our culture is dying. No, I shouldn't say "our" once again, because I am merely a casual observer of it. The culture. Do I mean western culture? I don't think so. I think global creative culture. I want to weep for this age.
I look at someone like Kurt Cobain and I try to imagine how he'd feel about the current age. I won't put words in his mouth, but, I think social media ruins authenticity and individuality. One must purge oneself from social media algorythmic influence if one wishes to rediscover their soul beneath all that garbage.
Authenticity, true individuality is fucking dead. Invention is dead. It's a cultural wasteland where "authenticity" is synonymous with "consumerism" or something. Youth culture is a pile of eggshells and it's disgusting.
I want to give up - I am ready to give up - because only in giving up can I achieve total liberation from the shackles of collective consciousness of this age. I've already come so far, actually, there's not much else left to go.
There is also a certain tinge of envy I feel for those icons of a bygone era - the artists and the poets and the philosophers. The envy is because part of what made them so great was how well they were able to capture and reflect the spirit of the age. Effortlessly and even unconsciously so. At least, that's how future critics and writers write about these people. They've become vessels, archetypes. Terence McKenna wrote something similar about it... I don't have the notes here with me right now, but he talked about how every now and then a person comes along and they transcend the pre-existing archetypes that most people fall into. They instead become, as if possessed, by an aeon. They seem to be totally in-tune with the collective consciousness, they reflect something back to the masses. Maybe he didn't say it exactly like that, but it was something about how that's what happened to Christ. How the individual identity becomes something mythological because of how society reacts to them.
I feel like there's nothing out there right now, no one to speak for the age. And I feel like it's detrimental for a culture to be able to make sense of itself, to prevent it from plunging into chaos, to have the art world reflect that image back to itself - back to the collective. I feel like social media is an artificial construction whereby multibillion dollar companies with shady groups try to "inject" a culture with their own messengers, their own reflectors "of the world we live in today" which is not at all how the spirit of the age is channeled and revealed at all. That's why nothing feels real, why everything is a soulless trend, why the youth is in a deep state of identity crisis. It's a conspiracy theory of mine that I just made up a minute ago.
What I am saying is that I wish this is something you could volunteer for.
Everyone who becomes a messenger ultimately lives a life of extremes. It's a sacrifice. Peace is traded for truth and liberty.
I want to channel the greats, I want to know what they'd do, if they were young and alive now. I can't help but imagine Kurt Cobain going totally off-grid because of the social media invasion. I think he'd live in a cabin somewhere and play guitar and probably own some rescued animals - and he'd make it as a matter of personal principle to be utterly clueless, to the point where if someone were to mention Twitter he'd say "you mean that sound the birds make? Sorry, I don't speak bird."
This hypothetical, projected image of a dead musician is how I'd like to see myself also, in an ideal scenario.
And like I said, I've come far, because my social media presence is almost subterranean. I use it even less than my grandmother. But it's not good enough, I'm not as ignorant as I wish I was.
What is it that made the greats great? Why were they unable to control themselves, to be lowkey, to pretend to be normal, why didn't they even try to fit in? The pressure to fit in now is more suffocating than it ever was, which is the ultimate irony, considering that everywhere you look people are preaching "inviduality" and "realness" and everywhere you look they're just clones of each other. Part of it has to do with the way the new internet is designed, it truly does limit people's expression. I remember about fifteen years ago when even your personal YouTube page could be customized like a blog, with colours and themes and pictures - anything you want.
Maybe I've got the wrong idea.
Maybe the idea isn't to channel or embody the spirit of the age, but rather wake it up. And the only way that I can see in which it can be waken up is by rebelling against it - going against the tide. That's how it's always been.
I sound so grandiose, don't I? I am swept up by these ideas of greatness, because that is all I ever wanted, all I ever dreamed of. But I've only been able to move backward, never forward. Yet I feel a calling. I feel these men and women of the past as kindred spirits. In fact, I feel all the dead as kindred spirits. I feel the dead speaking to me. Not in words or dreams or images. But in feelings, which move me like a leaf in the wind.
No great artist can be made without great suffering, complexity, intensity in their personal lives. It's almost a prerequisite to have an unorthodox family or unstable childhood or anything that makes you the outsider. All of those boxes are ticked in red for me. And yet I feel too old. The people I look up to, they followed their hearts at a young age. They rolled with it and became great. I didn't - I kept trying again and again to be normal, to do what's expected of me. I wasn't brave enough, I wasn't angry enough. I rejected who I was because the truth really scared me. Because when I confront myself about who I really am, I am hit with a powerful, overwhelming force of loneliness. Just writing this right now is very difficult for me, because loneliness is something I am able to keep locked away very, very deep within my psyche. It's the one thing I hide from myself, the one thing I fear. In any other case, about any other subject or aspect of myself or my life or my fears, I have no problem delving to the deepest depths. Analyzing myself, my thoughts, my feelings - like I am now - is therapy for me. It's a hobby. It's absolutely vital to my sanity to spend a lot of time making sense of myself.
And the one thing I can't talk to myself about is my loneliness.
Loneliness not in a sense that I haven't been able to connect to anyone I have ever met. Any connection I've made has always felt one-sided, in that I go out of my way to empathize, to feel the other person. To love them, to come into their world and spend some time there. But whenever other people have tried to connect to me, I was simply profoundly disturbed and felt even more alien and alone than when I am actually alone. Other people make me lonely - or rather, bring the pre-existing loneliness into my constant waking consciousness where I cannot ignore it and I cannot do anything about it and life becomes a waking nightmare. When I am alone (have no human contact) is the only time I am not alone. I feel comforted by nature, and deeply cherish the company of animals. But to people I have always felt deeply alien.
That all being said, it has never actually bothered me until social media took over the culture.
Before all that, I held the hope in my heart that I will meet "my people" and I recognized myself as a deep, imaginative soul - a creative person - and creative types are often picky about their company. The internet offers that opportunity and then dashes it, as I have experienced it. Now I feel like I will never, ever have meaningful relationships with anyone. Which in itself doesn't scare me. What scares me is that I'll always feel fundamentally alien.
Which is where Gnosticism comes in to rescue me.
I admire how the greats were able to transform their passion, obsession, pain, fascination etc. into art. Something personal turned into entertainment, projected into the objective world. A conjunction of other works into a unique singularity. I see it like an exorcism, except that you're not expelling something demonic, but something divine, from another world. I'm thinking about Alexander McQueen now.
Anyway, I want to follow this impulse - to do what makes me feel pure, free, far away from this time and place. I want to go oldschool. I'm making changes. I want my heavenly parents to be proud of me. I want to activate that psychic telepathic connection, light that beacon, send the signal, let them hear me and feel me. Let them come. The real ones. My spiritual brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and lovers and children. I can't be the only alien in this alien world. There must be someone from the same Kingdom as me. How do I call them? How do I hear them? Everyone I know is dead.
"The Alien from without comes to him who is alien in the world."
Tags:
