Writing connects dots—in real time. Small details reveal even smaller rips in the veil and snag, tugging at my consciousness like carpet on calloused heels. I sit down and write to discover the point of intersection. I rarely sit down with something fully formed to share; I sit down to find out what’s worth finding out. So. Care to come along for the ride?
Today in reverse order:
Wheel of Fortune
a shockingly large nail
tarantula
Katya and Harley
Baudrillard (again)
I thought, somehow, early on, that the topic here had something to do with betrayal. Hiking with my dog Abby, something, or an aspect of that something, drilled down to just that: betrayal. On a certain level, betrayal means nothing at all. It’s certainly nothing to do with the betrayee (except perhaps gullibility for whatever reason that is probably personally worth exploring), but in a particularly stark way, betrayal can lay things bare. Finding out things weren’t how you thought they were is a jolt, and after the jolt, maybe there’s a kind of what feels like nothing: when what you thought is not, what IS?
ANSWER: nothing less than a whole new world. Play it as it lays.
(But I’m either prematurely ejaculating or letting the cat out of the bag here, I guess probably both. Sometimes I can’t make up my idiom mind.)
I could go on about betraying ourselves etc. etc. like I might have done a year or less ago (perhaps that’s the “personally worth exploring” part). Come to think of it, I’ve already discussed that in a different stack. So, you lucky dog, I’ll spare you now.
I would like to ask: what happens when a good portion of the world’s population realizes they’ve been betrayed? What happens when many, many people realize at once that the jig is up and much of what they were conditioned to understand as being The Point really isn’t? And perhaps that what you’ve aimed at, toiled your whole life for, simply dissipates into thin air? Or maybe it simply turns out that what you were told was good for you, uh, wasn’t.
Like, REALLY wasn’t.
Is it just me, or have things in general taken a post-modern (or perhaps even post-apocolyptic) turn?
**ASIDE: I honestly don’t think I’m crazy here; in fact, I think this type of discussion might be the sanest thing happening right now.**
Baudrillard references, three days in a row though? Really? Baudrillard.
But ohmygod yes! It all clicks into place. Third time’s, in fact, the charm.
It actually makes so much sense! It all fits: Wheel of Fortune, a cartoonishly outsized nail, the tarantula innocently crossing my path (scoot along there dear, you don’t want to get stepped on), Katya and Harley (not just Katya betrayed, but Harley as well), and of course of course of course, Baudrillard.
Baudrillard, it turns out in fact, is the lynchpin.
I think the first time I read Simulacra and Simulation I knew something big was up. But I didn’t really get it: the map of the map? Yep. Disneyland? Sure. I mean, I GOT it—the whole non-referent thing, but I missed it, too. Because the actual nature of it wasn’t apparent to me yet. I got the concept, but I didn’t see it in front of me, in daily life (I was young, who would have known?). Now though, how can anyone miss it?
Because hyperreality.
How about a Wikipedia (kak—not a fan) definition by way of a John Tiffin:
Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
—Tiffin, John; Terashima, Nobuyoshi (2005). "Paradigm for the third millennium". Hyperreality.
Um. I’m sorry, but that pretty much wraps it up. But alas, my loves, I’ll go on!
The jig, my friends, IS UP. Do you feel it? I do. I do. I do. For reals I hear the coyotes in the distance. So does Abby.
Let’s hit the nail on the head: the hyperreality we all lived in (or thought we did)—has imploded.
In the unnatural eerie blue light, Wheel of Fortune spins on and on, but it’s over, really, isn’t it?
The tarantula is the real and we must protect her; she is us. In the Olympics, no one really cared about whether you lived or died; just entertain, entertain, entertain. The promotion you wanted and maybe got, meant nothing. The cars, the clothes, the drugs, the fame, the fortune, the wheel—it was all a set. It was all a set-up.
Pardon me as I philosophize for a moment and hazard that we weren’t supposed to find out. Or were we? Perhaps this is the moment for many of us. The moment to walk off set, an opportunity to remove the makeup, the costumes, shake out the cobwebs, drop the script. Maybe it’s not a cliff we’re walking over. Maybe it’s not a betrayal. Maybe it’s a lucky thing. The LUCKIEST THING. An awakening. Maybe it’s the moment we all stop sleeping, get off the drugs, follow the sacred tarantula, and veer off of the pre-scripted path of the hyperreal into…the Real. A whole new world (not appropriated by Disney) awaits. Begin, friends, at the end.
Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destruction of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.
INFORMATION=ENTROPY
—Jean Baudrillard
Brilliant! Thank you.
W0W ChRiSTY!
Y0U HAVe SUCh A KnACK
@ DeSCriBinG ThinGsSs WeLL!!
>>>LiKe, ..."tugging at my consciousness like carpet on calloused heels"...
i ReALLY EnJ0YeD ImAGininG ThAT!!!
PUrE P0eTRY T0 mE : )
ThAnK~Y0U!
~wiLL0w~