Detatchment

I have always had a certain talent for unfeeling. Most of us do. One friend in particular is an asshole. He knows it and it's his mask.. His favorite facade in which he feels most comfortable. When confronted about it, his only reply is "Defense mechanism, fuck off."
Another friend, she's constantly insecure, always looking for affirmation, so be it if it comes from across a country through virtual means...actually...it's better that way. All that you wish it to be it can be, want to forget about it? No problem, it doesn't even exist.
Yet, when reminders of an underlying attachment appear, what can be done? Nothing. Just try to forget.

The Boss

The confused little boy,
unnatural in any environment.

Distance, Difference, Imaginaire

Levels of Detatchment

Cultural Diffusion and Choice

It has long been debated, whether or not culture is created or reflected by the media. However, this type of short-sighted dualism can only be harmful when looking at such a complex and important issue. Media is at once the shaper and refiner of culture as well as the manifestation of culture. The nature of media is reflective and creative, not one or the other. First, in order to understand this dynamic process, we must examine the way in which Humans perceive this dynamic process, we must examine the way in which Humans perceive culture. WE are submerged in culture, we breath, bleed, and sweat culture; in a way, the only “real” identity that we can point to as our won is that mass manifestation of culture, not a personal identity. The images of our future and past (almost never our present) surround us, and through this reflection it is we who are created. Stewart Hall’s theory of Encoding/Decoding explains this complex interaction and the way in which culture is both built, transmitted, redefined (or reinterpreted) and then spread further. The subject reflects upon the cultural identity manifest and transfers their own existence onto the ideological image prepared for it by culture.

Now, as to the assertion that culture creates rather than reflects society, if we follow the logic behind this statement, one begins to see a sort of indeterminism develop which provides the subject with a freedom of creation and self-determination reminiscent of an existential view of life and freedom and choice. In a way, I’m a relativist when it comes to choice. If I choose to believe that culture is merely a reflection of previously determined material, then I am no longer a subject, but rather a passenger with no say over my destination. But this assertion (though I am a relativist) seems to hold little water. Even if we take Hall’s theory of encoding decoding, once can see that the subject plays an integral role in cultural diffusion and transmission; therefore in the creation itself. The idea that an origin of creation is long past; all that remains now is a series of imperfect copies which develop mutations (or novel nuances); these mutations become transmitted and ingrained into the pre-existing flux of culture (baudrillard’s simulacra) Now the bigger picture is beginning to develop; a picture where culture is subject to eternal regeneration and mutation. However, the subject is not left out by this theory. It is within the mutations themselves where the subject can reappear, reshaping its future through choice.

An old story....

Out to Sea

She lay across from me, swaying gently in the colorful hammock. A book lay cracked-open, spine severed, on her rolling stomach. A salty breeze cooled my face as it came softly in off the endless, blue plain. I wiped my brow and sat up, somehow refreshed and somewhat eager to struggle against the dense humidity. In this place, gravity isn’t what keeps you grounded, it’s the humidity. That damn humidity.

My eyes reached out to the cerulean plain, scowering for something, for an image, a beacon. But none came. The land of water just seemed to vanish into the grey horizon, rolling on, and on. I lay back into the womb of my hammock and let my eyes be pulled shut by gravity’s surrogate. I slipped into a dream.

It began, not so much as dreams normally do, but as one of those blurs in reality that can only be brought on by the shear force of heat. I saw coconuts being twisted about in dancing chorus lines, floating up through the sky, higher and higher. Palms and bushes leapt skyward, creating dense jungles of slate sky-scrapers. The white sands shot out over the ocean, setting down four-lane highways of silica. The reality of my surroundings was being pushed and pulled by the pendulous weight of heat. Then I was inside. It was my home; a home that I do not have and maybe never will, but at that moment it was mine. No, it was ours.

She sat in the cushy Lay-Z-Boy, nursing her tea and watching TV. I came around in front of her, turned off the TV, took the mug from her hand and placed it gently on the coffee table next to her. I took her hands into mine, as the questioning look appeared on her face, and pulled her up. Her left hand I put around my neck. Her right, I fit into the palm of my left hand. I grabbed the stereo remote and turned on the burned CD I had made. It was all the songs that we once danced to, long ago, back in the days when we were still young. We waltzed, we salsa’d, we danced for hours around the living room. I twirled her around the furniture and dipped her over chairs. Not a word was said, and we never blinked. She laughed and smiled a coy smile.

Then as the music came to an end and our steps slowed, our motions became more deliberate. The edges of the picture began to blur out. The walls fell. Everything fell. I was standing in the middle of a room that had ceased to be. She was gone, the house was gone; there was nothing but falling color.

I blinked and everything stopped, all was white and then I saw her. Raised above me, shrouded in an ethereal light. She sat there, an unearthly, unbelievable benevolence radiated from her face. Her features had transformed, her being was perfected in the light of my imagination. There she stayed, sitting on her golden cloud, possessed by the winds of time and the light of hope. As the awe struck, she began to ascend. I watched her go and as the figure became a blur, the blur a dot, and the dot a speck I found myself back on the beach. Both hammocks were there, but she was not. I walked around the deserted paradise, looking for memories, clues to what may have happened. I peered out over the endless sea. It looked clearer for some reason. I stepped into one of the tidal pools that lined the beach, feeling the warmth of the sun they had collected travel up my legs. Then something came over me. A feeling to run, to move, to change and I sprinted until I was waist deep in the cool ocean and dove. I cut through the sun heated upper layer and into the dark, cold depths. The bottom of the ocean dropped before my eyes. Endless, bottomless, salient depths. I swam, and swam, deeper and deeper. When my arms began to tire, I just stopped. I rose up through the water, finally free of the humidity’s pull. The lightness of being brought me back to the surface and as my head crested the waves a rush shot through me. I swam back to the beach infused, enthralled with me, with my life, with all that now surrounded me. With the endless possibilities that lay before me on this…new land. I walked up the beach, shaking water from my ears and running my hand through my hair. I walked over to the hammock that was hers. The book with the severed spine lay there. Bathing in the sun, still open to the page on which she had stopped. I picked it up, turned it over. There was only one sentence.

“Wake up.”

Sea of Tears

The door slid open with a pneumatic pssshhh and the stench (for that could be the only word to give the air the proper weight) of people, packed and crammed, the faint aromatic of piss and the sweetening yet sickening smell of sweat mingled into a perfume of delightful humanity. I didn’t have a reservation for the train and most all the seats car, cutting through the acrid air. I slung my hitchhiker bag into the baggage rack and found an open seat. Put down my other bag with all the gadgets and whistles that modern necessity required of me, stripped off the two coats and scarf that had been suffocating my body the whole walk to the train station.

I threw myself down into the seat and quickly became acclimated to that all too familiar but unusually concentrated smell. I stared out the fogged window at a frosty reflection of my own face and I felt the train begin to pull me from behind. The station slowly started moving away from me and I watched it disappear into the night. That’s when it all began to come into me, or rather out of me, out from inside of that ethereal little string that binds me together; it seeped through the cracks, a glowing red of fully oxygenated love.

I was back in her apartment, the first time in her apartment, the only time in this apartment. She was living and studying in Strasbourg at the time. She was there next to me, distant but there…at least she was there, that had been a change; or rather I was there; sitting next to her in her bed from IKEA, starring at the bouncing , morphing screen saver on her lap top.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I feel like I can’t express what I want to express, there’s a wall. You somehow built a wall in between you and me.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I feel like I don’t know you, like I recognize you but I don’t know you, or at least you don’t recognize me.” Her eyes looked at me solidly slowly, intently listening to my words but with an air of detachment that was driving me insane. “It’s like the person I know in here,” I pushed my fore-finger into my forehead and tapped with all my force, “isn’t here in front of me, like I’ve fallen into a gap between two realities…” With that word, all was lost and I sank into the deep dark crevice of suffocating passion. My eyes snapped shut, pushing out gallon upon gallon of water until the abyss began to fill with my tears. The water grew higher and higher and as it came up to my knees, my waist, and finally my shoulders, I noticed that my feet were no longer touching bottom. I began to float upon my tears.

I can still smell the dried salt cling to my face or maybe it’s that smell horrible smell of people, salty, sweet, oppressive, ugly; but without those tears upon which I float, I would have sunk, long ago, to the bottom of that bottomless abyss.

Brussels II

Brussels