Tuesday, April 05, 2005
In our society, in various different ways, there is a large emphasis on the idea that doing things naturally is somehow superior to doing things artificially. Today I was thinking about this in the context of getting ready to go out. Men tend to do very little before going out but women are expected to go through quite a litany of things. It seems to me that men are presenting closer to the natural while women's decoration is concealing and artificial, however, very few people would argue that a woman is best out in her "natural" state. I think this has its basis in patriarchal society in which man is assumed to be the centre of the universe around which everything else must evolve and revolve. It still does not, to me, explain the seemingly contradictory concept. If anything, what it says to me is that as we are raised with various ideas we build our knowledge structure to take in the ideas that we are presented with in an irrational way. If contradictions such as these can be accepted without any obvious compartmentalization or dissonance or even awareness of the existence of the contradiction, then the brain simply cannot be analyzing all of it as abstract logical entities and is storing the information as isolated linguistic ideas. I think that over time some of it gets systematized into abstract concepts in order to provide for constant, contextual reconstruction of subjective reality and memory, however I wonder to what degree this various in quantity, quality, and topics in different people. I think that the modern world is inhibiting this abstract conversion through its commercial emphasis. It markets products which are merely eggshells of the idea they represent. People buy mockups of era products or foreign products thinking they are bringing into their sphere this other piece of reality but most cannot see that what they are getting lacks the essence. Without the essence, these mockeries are defiling to the original because in people's minds the concepts are limited in scope by the mockeries blocking appreciation for the true objects/meanings. We build our world out of the eggshells and so it looks from a distance like an ivory tower complete with deep and beautiful colours imbued on its surface and we stand and point at our tower and proclaim the magnificence that we have built and glory in ourselves for accomplishing it. When I or one like me sees this tower from the distance we revel and think "Behold, I have found wonder of the ages" and race with excitement mixed with fear toward the edifice. We meet along the way various people, many of whom are good and noble with a few faults mixed in and we dig this thinking it gives humanity to this place and we continue on. When at last we reach the door to the tower and the blindness of our fervor has worn down we look up at it and see it for what it is... cheap, plastic imitation colors.... brittle walls with nothing inside.... sand below as a foundation with the thousands of grains as ideas proposed by this civilization but each lacking in any kind of real stabilizing value. Can we do nothing but sit and weep upon the stairway? Others who have made this journey buy into the religions and notions of the surrounding populace, many of whom are as disenchanted as the foreigner, and try to find in themselves and in ideas of the next world a fantasy that will give them balm. I just stand and walk away toward the next town. I come across other places which have the essence of past, that is to say, they have gained their essence through their history and the human work put into them. These places are littered across Europe and Asia and the ruins of the Americas. Are these places really any better than the eggshell tower? I don't know, but they have a more real feel to them. There is life in them that is lacking in the disillusion of the eggshell world. Even in these places, however, there are limits in the mind of the populace. While in some sense I could move to these places and forever feel some deeper satisfaction than I get from the eggshells, there would always be something missing, and for that reason I must keep walking and searching for it. Any that think that they have found the edge and entirety are merely inventing the wall to justify their end of searching.