Mind Your Clicks

OH YEAH ….if you want to be a guest, or have a recorded discussion…let’s do that since I’m getting tired of the sound of my own voice: mariammanart@icloud.com

The risk of sharing with whoever stumbles down the Le Lapin rabbit hole I ventured into or simply existing in this world has begun to feel more like the Netflix series: You. There have been more than a few encounters with someone’s like Joe, in the show, to which I wish had been aired decades ago. Despite being raised a bit sheltered and focused, and then willfully seeing the world through the frame of the mindset I have seems to have been considered both a character flaw and deficiency. These are social psychology issues that seem to be justified by transactional social policies as of late. I continue wishful thinking for healthier discussions instead of the stymied, blamed filled patriarchy and matriarchy tropes popularized in academia and social media alike. All has become as enticing as moldy bread, and I don’t even eat regular bread, so I can barely tolerate the gritty spores wafting about the hot wind of hate. I often wonder if the molded bread famed for taking people on psychedelic trips, drunk on their own minds, and distorted perceptions contributed to the institutional situation rampant in the street of apathetic sophistry posturing as higher or more elevated than those who care about the healing properties of beauty free from the aggrandizement of covert social policy.

The days of old priests being the esteemed cultural gurus drunk on rotten seed grain as a means to try to access the other realms to return to warn others about, has birthed a social algorithm tripping people out on actual black mirror traps, fantasy turned nightmare or heartbreak, and a population of people strung out on fear. These realms where the mind dissolves into a sort of debaucherous stew seems to be the absolute opposite of enlightenment and the very definition of madness through a slow immolation of that which creates life: the ability to create healthy relationships. This requires vulnerability and interdependence which are also socially misappropriated as weakness and codependency. A hefty inner fortitude is needed in a time where filling out a profile and swiping up, left, or right in the search of someone who checks off all your made-up boxes, differs from the beauty of commitment people made even during times of war, to love each other instead of turn against each other. There are all kinds of relationships that are relegated the the banality of a transaction these days: romantic, work, and even friendship which seems to be eating away at the beauty of the connection of values, virtues, philosophies of mind and being….making those who know and embody such ways mystified as modern day elves or shamans.

Not so long ago, common decency, as I had ascribed it, became a rarified find in the sea of mass delusion, agreement on mass hypnosis and molded-tripped out delusion. Please keep in mind here, I’m not reporting as being above such pitfalls, but having incurred and endured several dark nights of the soul only because a few friends cared enough to see me through self isolation…a key marker of these friends is they are all around their 60s, or as my friend of over 20+ years near my age is also a rarified being. This seems to indicate a generational shift is in the works, and the memory of people who have contact with personal responsibility, for caring about the feelings of others, for understanding what human relationships are about, is at risk of being completely lost.

The horrifying aspect of learning about emotions is their ability to inspire the opposite of relating and understanding in pathological creatures. I could have never, before the last decade, imagined someone looking upon sadness with glee, or happiness with envy. The resonance of such ideas remind me of the far left of the piano: low drop of the key. Perhaps I’m a simpleton, but seeing happiness makes me happy, seeing something strange makes me laugh, seeing sadness makes me also feel sad. All of those emotions I can feel and work with. My belief is that we have culturally run into trouble by pathologizing emotions or thinking there is some kind of intellectual or moral benefit from not feeling them. I believe more in the realm of feeling now because of the cost of having overridden my body of feeling with my mind focused on the idea of love or the goal of doing the good or right thing, which is to understand why someone else would harm and forgive them even if they do it over and over.

In this world, the love term, like others, is thrown around, sometimes with care and sometimes not. How can we know what love is, as rock ballads once sang out? I would like to think the difference between love and a transaction is obvious by communication and action- yet the reality of an unrecognized or unwilling insecurity to be shared, surfaced and healed is relegated to the separateness idealized in purely autonomous beings parsed from having any connection to each others emotions at all. This is where Christian morality bridges into Artificial Intelligence algorithm as a perversion of the teaching of life, through the insistence on being anointed, as Sowell uncovers in The Vision of the Anointed. Making mention of such a book has revealed the neoliberalitists’ folly: they are the very thing they proclaim to be fighting against, which in turn happens to be the very fabric of the reality formed on deep-lasting, meaningful connection and reality. The idea that connection has to be entirely localized, totally congruent, similar or dogmatic in perspective only furthers the nich-ification and cultural apathy sometimes called wetiko….the ancients had it right, and the answers are within our hands, in our hearts, and within the ability to do something about these things provided the actions are correct actions and not actions made in the image of appearing correct.

Appearances can and quite often are deceiving. The first impression is not always correct, but sometimes it is. The forever decision can sometimes be altered or rescinded. The freedom to both make up ones mind and change it must be allowed for both the sake of human sanity and the future of the species.

I have come to understand the suspicion and virtue the conception of love as being everything under the sun based on the cosmic philosophy of all matter as a form of God. The vilification of the night, or that which is under the moon seems to be emerging through the use of the internet and AI as a projection of the subconscious -particularly when it comes to human relationships and imagery playing a kind of spiritual warfare on the vilification of desire and nature’s impulse to take its course.

The already daunting notion of getting to know someone and all their layers to form relationships that withstand time is one of the several well documented erosion of our time. While people are protesting about the environment, I often wonder if this is a side effect of the things within their lives they wish they had more of a handle on. And so when one cannot resolve the tumult within themselves, they project it upon the world instead of seeing, feeling, smelling and being with what is there. One of the most peculiar things I have heard is to never trust your senses for they lie to you. This is one of the many reasons why I have renounced much of the westerns uptake of yoga; the tendency to pervert understandings, or turn meanings upon themselves was well written about in Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. This means, you are making up the meaning based on your subjective interpretation of the words. These sign forms, I, as a writer, or therefore as an artist, have no responsibility to forming…but for the fully aware person, will understand the plural possibilities to which they can be read, digested, misunderstood and understood based on the etymology and eptigentic history of the reader or viewer. Over time, patterns will emerge, and people will call that Pattern Recognition, and at a certain point, people will want autonomy over the formation of those patterns which may be called revolutions or revelations.

I hope you can see: The world will be fine, with or without us in it. The care about the world, is about our relationship with it. Building a loving and reverent relationship with nature has been my pathway to God. I want to make that word less taboo, and I want to examine the excessive use of the word Universe. Uni (one) verse…sure we can all sing in harmony, though right now I hear a lot of celebration that’s falsetto, out of tune or auto-tuned, which really isn’t’ the same as genuine attuning. My voice is indeed just one voice, but you need not agree with everything to make us one: the world benefits from diversity after all, and I believe that if you disagree then I should not try to change your mind but let you.

And while I understand the popularization rejecting he notion of God and determination to swipe Sacred and Faith into the lump sum of bad things religions have driven people to do, I wonder about the formation of understanding of God as Good and bringing some support into understanding what is Good is within the realm of human choice…that these big bad figureheads imagined by the victim mentality pushers usually called Marxists, or sometimes called anti-capitalists, or eat the rich witch hunters want…is the power that was slowly given away can be quietly and diligently earned or swiftly embodied back.

Inasmuch as I have feared and rejected the desire to have power, I and everyone around me has witnessed the detrimental…and I mean detri-mental effects of that fear. The slow erosion of cognitive ability through distraction, stress, emotional and physical pain all stems from allowing access between myself and the world: which on one hand is needed and on another can be dangerous.

If one were to look at the minutiae of cellular function from the bottom-up instead of the top-down, there is a pretty interesting view. The top-down looks like a cork, which reminds me of a kind of bottle stopper, whereas the bubbling up without any bounds looks a bit like a hippy LSD party on steroids: not pretty. The way I see to healing the ails of our society is a humble little sway that looks nothing like communes, nothing like revolts, and a lot like freedom to choose and organize with the structures our ancestors worked so hard to do. It can look a lot like integrating the values of peoples who were dominated and are still being dominated by billionaires…but if we calm down and listen, observe…and remember: perhaps all is not lost yet. And the sometimes hard truth is simply just living within it and not allowing the projections and gesticulations get the better of you.

But what do I know; apparently nothing. For after all these decades of hard work to be allowed to do privileged activities like try to make art, the things that cost me the most and took the most time are the things others value the least. It was the paintings I made out of instinct that seemed to resonate most with others. I suppose that’s the risk and reward of following this impulse to create…it really will bring anyone who dares through an endless abyss and see how one will manage to make their way through life with it. As long as the heart keeps beating that seems OK; and even if it did not, the other side doesn’t seem so scary anymore: not after reading Barthes and surviving life offered. Absolving the fear of death can be an immensely terrifying proposition given the evidence of violence people who fear not death can perpetrate. So I want to clarify my position here which is the curiosity and acceptance of death has given me profound gratitude and desire to protect a form of idealism that allows people to work for their own merits and share those with others. Instead of lawlessness, and reckless hedonism- sometimes it is the idea of having done something wrong that makes people take that extra step back before making the same mistake over and over again. Even still, when a naive woman who gets duped might be surrounded by a culture and choice that has enabled the worst in men instead of holding them accountable for their actions, still ends up living with the consequences of taking the risk to love.