Labels and Images (Part II): New and Improved Oppression

Is this "real"or real?

 Walking Essays: A Definition

Back to our walk. The second half of this walking essay, like any good walk, requires digression but also definition.

The walking essay can be defined as nothing more than the conscious pursuit of diversions from the essay's central plan: "Let's start on Fifth Avenue and head north." Every diversion renders every walk a unique tone, mood, recogoniton, and conclusion.

The walking essay is the essay in every case except academia and those who cannot shake the academic infection.

Imagined vertically, the walking essay simulates the act of climbing a tree. Rather than choosing a single tree trunk for trajectory, the walking essay concerns itself with the tree's branches. This magnifies the trees spatial possibilities. The same tree can be climbed hundreds of times, every climb creating variations on a theme. In this way, a child climbs one tree again and again, each climb different from all preceding climbs.

If constrained to the trunk itself, any child would soon find other trees or objects to climb, take a horizontal route, or engage in the infinite possibilities of play, which remain infinite until a child is told or realizes the absolutely predictable and final limitation of death. Play spits in the eye of death's certainty, refuses its relevance to right now. Every child is a happy nihilist until the justified fears wrought by the unnecessary and invented hell of status, respect and all the other conniving code words sentence that child to one of two lives, the pursuit of those pathetic "worldly" goals or the means to survive denying them. Either path is a trap.

The wandering essay adds an organic variable to death by suggesting that the conclusion of our lives may be both inevitable and the ultimate betrayal of our "journeys," "mindfulness," "hero's quest," and psychiatric "treatment," but what takes place beforehand remains undetermined so long as we recognize the ways in which our supposed lords and masters determine our future, cursing us to lives as bland and cheap as their products: Dollar Store existentialism.

Writing essays with academically-arthritic hands conveys information and only information. The "gold standard" of "objective" information creates only lies. Such essays equate the kind of thinking with which conspiracy theorists "explain" their ridiculous speculations: The overabundance of information provides the costume one wears whenever engaged in "objectivity's" guise. "I believe whatever makes me happy," someone once told me. I thought, "Don't leap on that kind of faith or you're going to crack your head on the riverbed's rocks."

Consider the opening two sentences in Montaigne' Chapter LI: Of the Vanity of Words: "A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great was his profession. This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for a little foot." From this beginning, Montaigne walks to a distant statement:

'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech. The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model without miracle, without extravagance.

Death forbids all from reaching a summa summarum of their many walks: walks of life; walking walks; walking essays; walks that walked the talk. Those writers possessing strong enough immunity systems of the imagination resist academic infection. However, they never reach a conclusion sans contradiction because death interrupts. Does a contradiction-proof conclusion exist despite the impossibility of anyone living long enough to find it?

No. Contradiction is the truth's steam engine and the reason why so many spurn the unavoidable position of the relativist: If a tree seems to change every time a child climbs it, then it has changed for that child. What seems true to each person is considered and acted upon to an extent that requires relativism. Life is like family: Encountering the dreaded relative ensures that relative's presence. But death breaks its sorry promise when we recognize all the constructed "absurdities" as the basis of "life," not life. In this way, death gives us an erotic and euphoric return to childhood's happy nihilism. 

Quality: The Ever-Expanding Oppression by Illusion

I shall now take another detour to arrive at the main idea this two-part walk must convey. Many and better writers have identified the intentional, reactionary and profitable image (or representation) of reality as a means of denying us reality. My point differs. If the results of our being exposed to the quantity of images cannot be denied as a constructed means of erasing realty, leaving us helplessly high and dry and filled with the false conclusion that the world is "absurd," the process reaches full bloom via the never-ending "improvements" of imagery.

Example: Blu-Ray DVD's not only appear more real than what they depict, exaggerating our sense of this deflated and "absurd" world, but they also cause an almost instinctual need to purchase what it takes to play the next "improved" format. Sheared of reality, we seek the ever-strengthening illusion of reality.

Now comes the return of the 3D DVD, slightly enhanced but not too different from the first 3D films. This forms a capitalist loop in which those essentially trained into obsession with sound and vision quality regularly buy new copies of movies or records they already own. The most shameful and transparent tactic is the sale of records and films "remastered" until they bear no relation to their original form. For instance, today's "remastered" Vertigo never existed until now. It's a different film, for all intents and purposes painted, better-looking in the sense of a whore or the many celebrities mutated by plastic surgery into slightly less-aged Frankensteins.

From Tech Republic:

The movie industry and movie theaters try to force us to only be able to watch some of their top movies in 3D (and pay extra for it). TV makers are forcing 3D into all of their new top-of-the-line LED TVs (and trying to make us to pay extra for it). Content companies are now making their Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy bundles include 3D discs (and trying to make us pay extra for it). Game companies such as Nintendo are integrating gimmicky 3D into their new systems. Mobile computing vendors such as HTC and LG are even trying to put 3D into their smartphones and tablets.

I propose that with the approach of infinite computer memory, something similar to the process described in the above excerpt will continue unabated until everyone becomes schizophrenic, lacking any break whatsoever from a contrived "superior" environment that will overwhelm our current delusion that nature still exists. Technology long ago replaced nature. When you find a little supposed "nature" in, say, Central Park, do you ever realize it's as constructed as the subway system, a technical achievement of projection no different from larger-than-life screens featuring the "news"? Have you ever realized, as have I, that a semi-close-up of a person's head on a large screen monitor is bigger than your own skull?

The best way to recognize all of this is to watch high definition color documentaries regarding World War II. While of course no one saw the world in black and white, then or ever, we can't help but believe they did. Computer-enhanced footage of that war does dispel that delusion but creates another. A World War II veteran would say, "It never looked like this, either."

Hyperrealism as art always left me with mixed feelings, and perhaps it should. To look at something "as real as the real" revealed the disappearance -- the conquering and colonization -- of reality by representation more real than real. Still, it also served those who created the necessity of that recognition. Even if recognized, few of us -- I'm not one -- can continue adapting to ever-better illusions of reality. We're drowning in the dreams of aristocrats, nightmares for us, from which we can only escape by accepting terminal bafflement.

Put it this way: If The Wizard of Oz were remade today by a perceptive director, Dorothy would without hesitation proclaim the wizard as far better than life in Kansas, especially without the overlaying high definition "Kansas" to which she would compare the wizard now.

This is the Age of Quotation Marks. Nothing is real, nothing permitted, and yet we're told and believe we're "free." Free to do what? We can think and imagine anything we like. We're doppelgangers of our contrived hyper-reality. This simultaneously is and isn't a Blu-Ray and/or 3D version of The Matrix.

We walk the plains of flat imagery, audio surrounding us, and neither our "reality" nor our "lives" can withstand the lack of quotation marks. We're all junkies now. Get your fix on Route 66; no matter that it ceased to exist. You can always watch "restored" footage that depicts the same road as it never existed when it did exist.