DWARF RAPES NUN, ESCAPES IN UFO
Out here on the boundaries of conventional reality, a place in which the rules seem to apply until the rules are pursued in a practical manner, upon which the so-called rules are seen to be in reality nothing but ghostly images and imaginations and even mysteries, I have only my body's rules to obey. Eat. Sleep. Defacate.
From there, however, the rules become more complicated, for while I take the usual precautions regarding the maintennance of my body, I also realize I must keep myself clean. I must do this to stave off disease. Beyond that, because cleanliness is one of the first and foremost gateways to the imaginary rules of ghostly images and mysteries, I realize as well that cleanliness touches the world in which I live: Cleanliness, then, is part of my image, the face I present to the world.
Why do I have to buy soap? Isn't soap a product? And what does soap really mean? Is a crucial aspect of my need for cleanliness a necessary function of the greater society inwhich I live? Who really knows?
I live in an urban environment. Because so many of us live in one place, I realize I can no longer depend upon myself as a mere individual to supply my body with soap--or food or shelter or even a place upon which to lay my head. Sure. That's not a really keen place in which to land--considering I really didn't ask to be born here, in this time, during this odd and often disquieting era--but there are distinct tradeoffs here. Instead of wracking my body day after day in the process of raising food for consumption; instead of literally fighting the earth, as if the earth itself were some sort of adversary, I am able to go to the grocery store. This is convenience. In fact, this nation is so overwrought with the idea of convenience that we have become slovenly, slow, spoiled and insipidly shallow. No tanks have ever rolled through our city streets. We don't know what it is to starve. We have no idea what it must have been like for the women--mothers, wives and daughters--of Soviet prison camps, waiting as many often did in campsites just outside the frozen gates of Siberian Hell.
See? I have gone from soap to the Supreme Soviet in only a few paragraphs. Perhaps this is a description of a pre-revolutionary state of mind. Perhaps this is only a description of a frame of reference in which fighting against social morays is the only way to resist a persistent emptiness that will not rest. Perhaps this is a request for real estate.
Be the judge. The jury is always hung.
From there, however, the rules become more complicated, for while I take the usual precautions regarding the maintennance of my body, I also realize I must keep myself clean. I must do this to stave off disease. Beyond that, because cleanliness is one of the first and foremost gateways to the imaginary rules of ghostly images and mysteries, I realize as well that cleanliness touches the world in which I live: Cleanliness, then, is part of my image, the face I present to the world.
Why do I have to buy soap? Isn't soap a product? And what does soap really mean? Is a crucial aspect of my need for cleanliness a necessary function of the greater society inwhich I live? Who really knows?
I live in an urban environment. Because so many of us live in one place, I realize I can no longer depend upon myself as a mere individual to supply my body with soap--or food or shelter or even a place upon which to lay my head. Sure. That's not a really keen place in which to land--considering I really didn't ask to be born here, in this time, during this odd and often disquieting era--but there are distinct tradeoffs here. Instead of wracking my body day after day in the process of raising food for consumption; instead of literally fighting the earth, as if the earth itself were some sort of adversary, I am able to go to the grocery store. This is convenience. In fact, this nation is so overwrought with the idea of convenience that we have become slovenly, slow, spoiled and insipidly shallow. No tanks have ever rolled through our city streets. We don't know what it is to starve. We have no idea what it must have been like for the women--mothers, wives and daughters--of Soviet prison camps, waiting as many often did in campsites just outside the frozen gates of Siberian Hell.
See? I have gone from soap to the Supreme Soviet in only a few paragraphs. Perhaps this is a description of a pre-revolutionary state of mind. Perhaps this is only a description of a frame of reference in which fighting against social morays is the only way to resist a persistent emptiness that will not rest. Perhaps this is a request for real estate.
Be the judge. The jury is always hung.
posted by Faceshaker at 9:14 PM
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