Containers
That I can now see my previous work habits as production brings me to he direction of this walk. We cannot change our primary and constructed environment, nor can we even see the abandoned environment known as nature. Only what has not been manufactured now appears to us as artificial. Hence, nature is quasi-experienced on vacation or in gardens, both manufactured and artificial, existing in containers. If we experienced the actual natural world, we would panic, for the natural world tautologically can only be natural if absolutely uncontained.
Since cursed by consciousness, humans have lived in containers: their own bodies. Soon, their bodies were contained, whether in houses or concentration camps, etc. Those containers were contained within communities, contained within towns and cities, contained within counties and states and provinces, contained within nations. In the past few decades, we found ourselves in a new container entirely different from all others, for the container cannot be seen yet has a structure of some sort, which we call the Internet, preceded and now joined by the projections of television, which contain us within narratives. Rarely do we sense our containment, for doing so would drive us mad. A container confines its containee no matter its size, shape or form. These containers form our constructed environment, which gradually eliminated the original environment until the constructed environment achieved dictatorship over reality as humans perceive it.
Compare the photo in the top-left corner (left, below) to the original image (right, below):
Of course, neither photo is real, but which is the original photo and which seems more representative of our constructed reality? Did paste in the green sign in the right photo or delete it in the left photo? Whatever your opinion, the image to the right is the original. The image to the left underwent an hour of my trying to make it both more "real" and more appealing. But notice something else: The containers aren't invading nature. Instead, nature is invading the containers. The photo itself contains the image of the containers. Our eyes capture the containers. But a disturbing photo may "capture" us. We call such images "arresting." More about this in Part II.
As the world becomes ever more manufactured and less and less manufactured by workers (replaced by machines or what amounts to "Third World" slave labor), we must dismiss the term "bourgeois," for it denies the fact that those labeled as such remain as confined as the "proletariat." They may possess more money, luxury goods, etc., but they remain confined and perhaps all the more so because of their "rewards," won by jobs no less insecure and humiliating than factory work. They're workers every bit as disposable as day laborers. In a created "recession" that disguises the permanent future of global capitalism, even a revolutionary gesture can only come from the unemployed. All others will await losing everything, as would anyone but adrenaline junkies and psychopaths, for risk taking to the boiling degree is always predicated by having nothing left to lose in the risk.
In such circumstances, the "true proletariat" has no job. The word "bourgeois" becomes meaningless. And in any case, only the "bourgeois" called anyone "bourgeois," for the word did not exist in the vocabulary of those who were not "bourgeois." But we've passed that age. We're "all grows up now."
"Bourgeois" is hereby replaced and eradicated by "pre-unemployed." No one's waiting for Godot; they're waiting to be told to go. To get out. To hit the bricks. Because you are going out.
Fired salesmen will prove the most efficient guerrilla partisans.
*If it seems I've disappeared, I have disappeared, though I remain wrapped and visible like H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. Emotionally, I've also undertaken the role of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Publicly, I'm in the act of portraying a non-acting character. What you see is what you can't get, but you will get it sooner or later, in this order:
- Project 1: A multimedia presentation featuring the masterful material and ideas contributed by the collaborator who invited me to handle production. This piece locates and reveals new insights into a performer who until now exhausted all perspectives.
- Project 2: A documentary intended for mainstream distribution.
- Project 3: The next novel, a hybrid sci-fi/mystery driven by sheer storytelling sheared of my previous works' tics and tremors. While Airplane Novel ranked #4 on USA Today's list of 2011's Best Independent Novels, I cannot surpass its hyper-percussive and exploded-view superstructure. I can only go forward by reversing directions. What seems a retreat will become an advance. In more ways that one.
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