Patches of Sun

For Jasmine

I vacillate between dark and defeated, a general ennui, inured to the violence of the indifference and rejection I face every day and amused and excited by people i find dear, endearing and inspiring.

I have always been a painfully sensitive person. A callous has grown over that sensitivity with the passing years. I still feel the pain of others deeply. I take notice on the street when i see suffering especially when I see another sensitive soul, young or old, in pain just from trying to navigate this difficult word.

It is strange to me how my younger self feels like another person, someone who died long ago. I sometimes sit and mourn his death. He was a slight boy with a lisp he had from teeth made crooked by sucking his fingers as he slept. He had few friends as he was not the kind of boy that boys were supposed to be. He liked warm patches of sun where he could find them, on the floor of his bedroom under the window, in a little meadow in the woods behind the house. He looked for those patches of sun in the street on the way home from school where he could close his eyes with his face pointed toward the light and feel the warmth caress him.

Now as I grow older and another layer of rejection is added as middle age settles in on my face and body, I feel most beautiful as lay on the beach with my eyes closed forgetting the gaze of others just feeling the breeze of the wind off the water and the summer sun on my bare skin.

Sometimes I meet people who feel like those patches of sun to me and they radiate a warmth I rarely see. For a moment when they are close and we connect I feel beautiful and warm looking into their familiar eyes.

I feel as if I have been searching for my tribe all my life. We were separated long ago in prehistoric times and we are all different shapes sizes and colors and sexualities and we are warm loving people, little patches of sun, floating around lost in this cold world, a lifetime spent looking for each other.

Here is a piece of poem is being rehabilitated but none the less pertinent:

I have fought with my and legs long enough

Prayed my face was good enough for a pair of bare arms around my waist.

Now I pray for bleached bones and green glass worn lonely and content

Their hourglass figures long broken,

No trash bins or fingernails tapping at their necks,

A new life as impotent beachcombers trading the nightclubs for hot sand and cool water.

I have been like them all along

Wrong places wrong body

I will trade all my starvation for tender fingers for this

I will lay face down in the surf rushing toward the sand

As long as it takes to be like them

Smooth and glistening

Taken hard every day by the waves, washed asleep for hours.

Branding your Soul

So back into the work of talking about human Identity.. this could get a little dry and boring but anyway..

dig it!

The formation of individual Identity based around social structure, economic circumstances, religious doctrine and ethnic background is not a new phenomena. What has changed dramatically in recent history is how that indoctrination is carried out, the efficacy with which social movements that thwart conformity are absorbed by corporations redirected and commercialized.

In modern times the drive for ratification of ones identity through the acquisition and or use of signifiers that radiate success, beauty and sexual potency has become deeply commercially codified. The efficiency of this mass indoctrination has begun to resemble a type of brainwashing that could be having catastrophic effects on individuation, social innovation and creative thinking in the human animal.

With impunity and regularity, the controllers of wealth, political power, media and information colonize radical identities found in the underground for the purpose of self aggrandizement, commodification and to render the originators of these identities impotent within society. Among the controllers of wealth and power is is a tactical response meant preserve the concentration of resources, control the innovators and co-opt those innovations.

Independent thought is dangerous. The formation of individual identity that is not linked to commercially approved ideas of beauty and success is seen as a threat to powerful multi national corporations that control much of the planets wealth. Homogeneity and the exploitation of human insecurities surrounding physical beauty and desirability are key to maintaining power and control over the enormous commerce in human desire. Ads and information designed to control the populous, by enslaving them to products and services that promise relief from their malformed and "inferior" bodies and faces and lives, flood our senses every day.

From a very young age I became aware of the influence film, television, popular entertainment and commercial advertising was having on the development of human identity. I watched as my contemporaries, more or less within five years of my age, were adopting behaviors, in fact what seemed like entire identities, they had seen on TV or in the movies or how their favorite musicians dressed and acted. It is of course natural in the process of individuation to look for role models especially those outside your family. What stuck me was the inorganic quality, the artifice of these social masks that people were wearing. Body language and facial expressions as well as vernacular all seemed to be based on codes adopted from what TV characters and magazines instructed as cool and my contemporaries seemed so unaware of how affected and inauthentic these social masks were.

I can appreciate it when someone is honest about being in love with an idea of how to be and behave based on some a personal hero found in pop culture. What disturbs me is the lack of introspection and desire to explore beyond the boundaries of popular identities not only among conformist social sets but even in supposedly non conformist social sub sets. In other words your average goth kid isn't exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of individuation.

It is clear to me that Noam Chomsky is on point in his essay "The Manufacturing of Consent" as it applies to ideas about physical beauty and individual value in the context of group acceptance and corporate control over those social standards. People are looking for ratification of their identities through modalities and frame works that are no longer developed in a tribal system but manufactured on a corporate level for profit and control.

Long before Hollywood was corporatist the barons of that industry quickly understood the power of that medium over individual and group psychology. With the advent of the moving image, with the creation of the starlet and the matinee idol, people flocked to Hollywood because they knew, if they were lucky, they would find wealth, adulation and immortality. The riches that were once primarily the province of aristocracy and the privileged classes were now attainable as they never had been before. The chance to be desired on a level never imagined for common working class people was quite an amazing sea change in human history and there was something truly egalitarian about that idea. It was kind of like winning a lottery. The cultural price of this dream and the propaganda created by that industry around what signified beauty and happiness was, in many ways, catastrophic.

The fantasy of fame became the ultimate drug and people imagined themselves as living the glamorous lives played out on screen and on the streets of Hollywood with all the drama and tragedy so beautifully staged. Don't get me wrong, I love film and as an artistic tool its been used to astounding affect. What concerns me is how images of human identity have been represented, molded with the intent of manipulating, indoctrinating and subjugating the general public. It strikes me that the early barons of Hollywood whether they new it or not were creating a textbook for corporate giants and power brokers on how to control the masses on how to sell an idea of how to be and feel and what to aspire to.

At the same time wherever there is this intense commodification there is, transversely, the artists and innovators, those who work in the mediums of film and music and art who challenge ideas about human identity, social tyranny and power structures within our societies. These artists are a force for great social change and we need them desperately. I will talk about a few of them and their work in another post. I have tired myself with my own verbosity.

Peace

zzzzzzzzzz