Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Regression Digressions - 3rd draft
~
What constitutes the brain? Why are we such poorly-trained animals? Has our own anthropology not taught us anything? There exists a discrepancy - an inconsistent one at best - between the body and the brain, between the active and the stored, between the conscious and the subconscious. Human beings are actively destroying themselves; and each other. Continually, we deny the reality of our truths: we commit to poor diet, we lack rest and at best, we take in substances so far removed from any semblance of chemical or natural purity. We still don’t lift with our knees. We comment without acting. We allow poverty and homelessness. Our discrepancies engulf us.
Consider footwear. Since Homo erectus’ first hobbling, people adapted to the environment in which they live: they have learned to walk on the land that feeds them and, as such, have become agile. Since some time though, footwear has disassociated the human foot with all things natural. Hard-pressed would be the researcher seeking a North American European descendant who does not wince when barefoot on a lumpy rural road or even on a sunny, August beach.
For an untold and largely undiscussed reason, we accept the purposeful, overt and devious phenomenon of fine print. Well aware that an average product package is labeled with no less than two dozen unpronounceable ingredients, we make an incredible leap of faith and trust. Like perpetually walking with our heads down, the human race trusts that, statistically, one might navigate an entire lifetime before ever encountering the sideways effects of foreign substances in the body, whether directly or indirectly. (Incongruously, when it all boils down, “cancer” has only two syllables). As such, the usefulness of fine print is not only negligible, but is archaic in relevance: either consumers know all or know nothing. Why the informational limbo?
Oddly enough, in our perpetual disengagement from our surrounding environment and the elements therein, the larger part of the Earth’s population sees fit to isolate itself in individually-sanctioned hermetically-sealed, weighty bubbles. With a mere quad of points touching the ground’s surface, we careen along multilane roads, at unsavory speeds, poorly compounded by inversely proportional attention spans and awareness to the detail of our wheeled and pedaled actions.
Similarly, much of the human race has seen fit to relegate itself to the private and largely-detached marvels of suburbia. Far from the warmth of true community, Nature and the innate self, modern castles line the boulevards - each one more aesthetically pleasing that the last. Curiously, littering is somehow still permitted outside the moat.
On the subject of surreal detachments, has the modern era of supreme mediatisation truly convinced us that the hillside nine-lettered Hollywood is Olympus anew? The utter uselessness of sports, modern newscasts and commercial advertisements, to name a few, has metamorphosised television into a neo-Acropolis, spouting oblique values, and twisting cultural myth askew. In the firing of synapses between the body and the brain, A no longer relates to B, but now, somehow re-routes reactions Q and Y to (re-) produce actions F and K.
What poorly-trained animals we are. How many more millennia need to pass before we can understand pets, poets and schizophrenics? Eliminate confusion? Master mind over matter? How many more generations of strangers will remain unnerved when smiled at or told there’s something in their teeth? We are so lax as a species, so reluctant to seek - or even etch - out a common good. We abide by dress codes, willfully believing that a direct correlation of relevance actually exists between the human aesthetic and the instinctive. Seeking to know the fate of our commonalities, our eyes and ears are drawn to watch accidents, death, a scuffle or an argument. We fear systems like Nature and strive to amputate and pave it, while methodically calculating our social agendas with the TV Guide in mind.
On the subject of curiosities, I am curious as to - not so much why, but - how the brain retains the minutiae of each musical note in a song - but only when replayed. What mechanism or filter selects information to be kept, ready at hand, while other knowledge gets tucked away? Recall the last time you said “…I used to be so good at that…” Or how often you notice yourself saying a sentence, triggering a comment, or catching a visual that has been stored in the archives of the mind for five, ten, fifteen years… Pondering the subject, you may ask yourself, “how big is the subconscious vault anyway?”
We can perennially embellish our coats and cages in the zoo but nothing truly changes but the seasons - and we can’t even count on that anymore. In the end, the human race is left with an apparent cranial superstructure of mental office. We benefit from an extremely stable and well-rigged underlying circuitry over-laden with mercurial, unpredictable, nonsensical, destructive sets of loosely-fitted synapses. These are the discrepancies between the subconscious and the conscious. Until when will we endure this gap? If the cockroaches and dolphins deserve better, don’t we? Under analysis, technology’s advances are so thinly-veiled but, as extensions of our weak, conscious selves, we believe them to be the great evolution of democracy and public will. Outward projection has evolved to become the new, labyrinthine human soul. The latter, combined with our obvious lack of priorities for social ambition, would make Darwin very, very ashamed of us.
S*
2003.07.22
What constitutes the brain? Why are we such poorly-trained animals? Has our own anthropology not taught us anything? There exists a discrepancy - an inconsistent one at best - between the body and the brain, between the active and the stored, between the conscious and the subconscious. Human beings are actively destroying themselves; and each other. Continually, we deny the reality of our truths: we commit to poor diet, we lack rest and at best, we take in substances so far removed from any semblance of chemical or natural purity. We still don’t lift with our knees. We comment without acting. We allow poverty and homelessness. Our discrepancies engulf us.
Consider footwear. Since Homo erectus’ first hobbling, people adapted to the environment in which they live: they have learned to walk on the land that feeds them and, as such, have become agile. Since some time though, footwear has disassociated the human foot with all things natural. Hard-pressed would be the researcher seeking a North American European descendant who does not wince when barefoot on a lumpy rural road or even on a sunny, August beach.
For an untold and largely undiscussed reason, we accept the purposeful, overt and devious phenomenon of fine print. Well aware that an average product package is labeled with no less than two dozen unpronounceable ingredients, we make an incredible leap of faith and trust. Like perpetually walking with our heads down, the human race trusts that, statistically, one might navigate an entire lifetime before ever encountering the sideways effects of foreign substances in the body, whether directly or indirectly. (Incongruously, when it all boils down, “cancer” has only two syllables). As such, the usefulness of fine print is not only negligible, but is archaic in relevance: either consumers know all or know nothing. Why the informational limbo?
Oddly enough, in our perpetual disengagement from our surrounding environment and the elements therein, the larger part of the Earth’s population sees fit to isolate itself in individually-sanctioned hermetically-sealed, weighty bubbles. With a mere quad of points touching the ground’s surface, we careen along multilane roads, at unsavory speeds, poorly compounded by inversely proportional attention spans and awareness to the detail of our wheeled and pedaled actions.
Similarly, much of the human race has seen fit to relegate itself to the private and largely-detached marvels of suburbia. Far from the warmth of true community, Nature and the innate self, modern castles line the boulevards - each one more aesthetically pleasing that the last. Curiously, littering is somehow still permitted outside the moat.
On the subject of surreal detachments, has the modern era of supreme mediatisation truly convinced us that the hillside nine-lettered Hollywood is Olympus anew? The utter uselessness of sports, modern newscasts and commercial advertisements, to name a few, has metamorphosised television into a neo-Acropolis, spouting oblique values, and twisting cultural myth askew. In the firing of synapses between the body and the brain, A no longer relates to B, but now, somehow re-routes reactions Q and Y to (re-) produce actions F and K.
What poorly-trained animals we are. How many more millennia need to pass before we can understand pets, poets and schizophrenics? Eliminate confusion? Master mind over matter? How many more generations of strangers will remain unnerved when smiled at or told there’s something in their teeth? We are so lax as a species, so reluctant to seek - or even etch - out a common good. We abide by dress codes, willfully believing that a direct correlation of relevance actually exists between the human aesthetic and the instinctive. Seeking to know the fate of our commonalities, our eyes and ears are drawn to watch accidents, death, a scuffle or an argument. We fear systems like Nature and strive to amputate and pave it, while methodically calculating our social agendas with the TV Guide in mind.
On the subject of curiosities, I am curious as to - not so much why, but - how the brain retains the minutiae of each musical note in a song - but only when replayed. What mechanism or filter selects information to be kept, ready at hand, while other knowledge gets tucked away? Recall the last time you said “…I used to be so good at that…” Or how often you notice yourself saying a sentence, triggering a comment, or catching a visual that has been stored in the archives of the mind for five, ten, fifteen years… Pondering the subject, you may ask yourself, “how big is the subconscious vault anyway?”
We can perennially embellish our coats and cages in the zoo but nothing truly changes but the seasons - and we can’t even count on that anymore. In the end, the human race is left with an apparent cranial superstructure of mental office. We benefit from an extremely stable and well-rigged underlying circuitry over-laden with mercurial, unpredictable, nonsensical, destructive sets of loosely-fitted synapses. These are the discrepancies between the subconscious and the conscious. Until when will we endure this gap? If the cockroaches and dolphins deserve better, don’t we? Under analysis, technology’s advances are so thinly-veiled but, as extensions of our weak, conscious selves, we believe them to be the great evolution of democracy and public will. Outward projection has evolved to become the new, labyrinthine human soul. The latter, combined with our obvious lack of priorities for social ambition, would make Darwin very, very ashamed of us.
S*
2003.07.22
