Magnitudinal Messiahs

and pariah celebrities

Mari Amman

Mar 28, 2023

We live in a place that measures value and merit in some very strange ways sometimes.

How many seconds are in a day? Quick, but don’t worry; I already searched up the answer for you: 86,400 seconds. As the information goblin within tends to desire more of a mechanic form of knowing:

A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

Data likely forgotten if not applied or written as a task for an A.I.

What else can be forgotten when the appearance of trash poses as art? What happens to humans capability to know and think when the action is abdicated to another entity? Seems like an inevitable outcome and yet, here I am posing the question about why we need to remember what trash is? Stinky; that’s for sure. Hoarding trash might be an illness, and storing it and lighting to fire in the streets might be a comparable pinnacle to the hubris in taking violent action.

Is trash transfixingly interesting? I did’t think so, but when I had asked others what they thought, it was suggested people would be interested to see the mess. So, I went out on the Parisian streets the other night to expose some precious HP5 film on the waste, and came back with a smattering of images I would rather had not even had on my iPhone (let alone the film in the middle of a stilt-tree photo project to develop later). A few hours, I woke up sweating, spinning, and feeling ill. The kind of chaotic and grief striking madness of this scene was too much for me. I’m usually one to try to toughen myself up because I’m told I should have thicker skin, or that I am tough already based on the things I’ve lived through, but this perspective I want to share is not mine alone and that’s why these are questions. Is it grandiose to ascertain that the emperor is not wearing any clothes?

1,513,900,800 seconds, ago Farrar, Straus & Giroux published Tom Wolfe’s, The Painted Word (April 1975). A book far from the post-modern grad school I attended. The style of Adorno cultural criticism revered as intelligence eventually shown itself as intellectual arrogance based on the assumption middle or working class people are less than, not capable of knowledge, or should be systematically withheld from the truth.

The horrific part of the age of the Internet has not been the ease at which truth can be found but the ease at which Popularity or Celebrity itself is the marker of who to listen to. Add that if someone is outraged, sad, upset, then what kind of devices are people going to resort to? In the absense of deep listening, and the presense of solipsitic thought: who dare say the truth? GARBAGE IS AWFUL. It’s bad for our nervous systems, we’ve tried to pretend we are solving the consequence by punishing ourselves with virtue signalling or shaming behaviours…but to see garbage on fire and in person is to smell all that what was or is wretched and held back, released into the air. A place few would likely like to go, and yet people do and have to.

So the thing about anything created that I’ve long implored people in the Visual Literacy course I advocate for sharing, is that people SPEAK HOW YOU SEE. If you are being forced to perform compelled speech, you are doing not only yourself but all of us a disservice. Being able to speak how one sees allows for what DaVinci called mental turbulence, as well as input from peers and the ideas to change and mature.

SAY WHAT YOU SEE means sharing your mind and also making up your mind; an act of divinity really.

Disservice and apatahy, leads to foul stinking rot. Then there were the sirens, shouts, and bangs. In many ways, humans impress me with their ability to inflict and endure so much strife and pain. So the difference between the streets and the galleries has grown profanely slim in varied degrees of grandeur and abjection. Aside effect of privilege shaming culture has reminded me of the crisis of the spirit that can occur in someone’s lived experience of Maslow’s hierarchy. When Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen had made couture (11 years ago) of what people who sleep in the streets wear- a kind of attitudinal position of focus on the designs for people to wear because we don’t care signalled a kind of awareness of a particular strategic mentality on the structure of capitalism.

Thankfully, I know people sincerely working to change fast fashion (Tone Tobiasson) and bring value to the art of garment making; raising the value sometimes will raise the price tag, and the conversation I had with a man running several financially successful clothing stands at Furu Shopping Senter did have me question those ideals. The idea that capitalism is to blame seems to make everyone either a servant, martyr, messiah, or some other Biblical archetype trapped in the chaotic stew of life. Since I missed out on living through the 70’s, I’m living through right now and seeing things are quite similar, but I am not promoting spiritual bypassing drugs to help calm us all down. I’m saying we can regulate our pulses with our breath, the ancient wisdom was never not true but made false as a way to create insanity and make certain people be wrong, so others could be right. And now we are in a place where the congruence of abject and grandeur are crossing the line from fantasy into reality.

What happens when indifference or the coerced implication of accepting trash as art happens? and no one dare say a thing? I would like to draw out this ancient fart because it seems to smell better than the garbage I’ve witnessed recently:

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” -PLATO

The point of critique is not to tear apart, burn, cancel, hate, but to describe something for what it is or seems to be. And the duty of an artist is not merely self expression, which is part of being a human being really. This is not to say it’s an easy task, I often choke on words when I try to speak, sweat when I write, stutter and get flustered- but I practice. English isn’t even my first language, dance is! (and yours probably too).

The thing about the truth is it’s not saying this is how it is forever, but that it observes the tendencies for certain principles to create actions, reliably over time. Since science is supposedly our revered dogma now, we are past due for the application of the method. And since either Covid or our collective nervous system overwhelm seems to have harmed our random access memory feature, the internet was somewhat reliable, but already from the The American Museum of Natural History they are missing the part about questioning the conclusions drawn and making sure you did not get the answer to the question asked. Mind you, this whole process isn’t as well established you might believe; just a little over 100 years old.

The Scientific Method:

1. Define a Question to Investigate
2. Make Predictions
3. Gather Data
4. Analyze the Data
5. Draw Conclusions
6. QUESTION THE CONCLUSIONS
7. And repeat the process over and over, this is how we reform and discover epistemology

The thing about the method and the internet is, we need reliable sources, which brings me to the biggest lie repeated until it was a belief: experts have your best interest at heart. This one was a doozy, but the phrase “it takes a village” rings true. When it comes to knowing, I have to reveal my bias as an empiricist, meaning, I rely on my own senses. This does not mean I rely on my individual subjectivity alone. That would easily turn anyone into a tyrant or idiot. The state of the world today has given me over 13 years of aware witness of the pariahs as the center stage in humanity. This was a debate a mentor and I went through often about the way Hitler’s mental infection permeates the rotting attitude evident in the apathy today. Having enough care to speak up, let alone stand up, is considered real when signaled in violence, but what about the beauty of Being There for someone. Being reliable and sturdy with boundaries. Thankfully, something within Richard Grossinger and Ruslana Remennikova inspired them to come to me, as well as friends whose names often want to remain anonymous. I can understand that a lot. Because an angry riot is not something anyone wants directed at them. That level of fear seeps dangerously as the fumes from burning garbage, and it is not something I think anyone wants to actually live in.

So when it comes to knowing something is off, amiss, and you’re being silenced for saying it, take notice and ask yourself if you want realness or if you are willing to settle for phoney? Because if you’ve noticed through our portable computer devices (phones) that’s what lot of so-called connection happens through. And is it connection with another person? or connection with a concept of who that person is and what they can do for you?

Have you noticed transactionality has permeated every aspect of life? And then heard that vilified as if the bees did not pollinate? or that the alternative to exchange could be living in a bubble? solipsism? or potential group -masterbatory aspect of the ouroboros? That in and of itself is not good or bad, to lament or celebrate. This state of flux or trans (mutability, sexuality, formation) means the chaos is not a probability but among us all the time. The weight and angle of that perception is of concern, for there was a time people felt the chaos and instead of looking toward themselves and each other, looked toward someone who promised to deliver order. In that WWII went devastatingly unwell, I was reminded to really remember how awfully horrible this garbage stench has been.

So let us not forget the value of art related to the soul, please. That’s the big ask of you here is to pause long enough to embrace agency instead of the popularized victim mentality. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, go off grid, escape, or do anything prescribed by anyone else. We do have say, and I would say I like trash handled properly, and that I don’t think I was ever promised retirement by anyone. And even if someone had promised me a fund, that meant that something someone tells me now is going to remain true in 70 years? I think not; and I have not anxiety from that. These are harsh facts of reality.

The way I see things is we have a lot of agency and creative power within each of us already. Maybe love is not all we need, but honesty with some principles. The knowledge of knowing what is enough that comes through discernment, tempered by a method we can test through living. Positive thinking only can be its own prison; one I know well, and yet the tendency of the nature of mind is that cynicism can quickly become more painful than faith. But this is not a sermon on the mount, this a nugget in a borough within the ground of the now that no art or idea or savior is coming.

Imagination did not have to reach far from science fiction 38 years ago to realize today, and so if the culture we consume grows certain things, then culture creators have not only the duty they often take very seriously, but a value in the society. IE vote with your dollars, sure. Because we are overdue for a cultural movement, and this seems like the perfect moment to end throw away culture, hustle, game, manipulation and deceit. Those are all exhausting, malaise making moves. More tends to be more, and then often too much.

<3 We are plenty and not all one.

<3 One person to love is enough.

<3 We are our own best saviour and contributor to cleaning up where we live.

<3 This obsession with the invisible machine or imaginary wizard of Oz, has welcomed the pariahs into leadership position.

<3 We do not need a wall or an expert when we come to our senses, and as I was suggested when I needed some good advice to ask ourselves: