The life of values

Let's bury the last post and talk about life for a minute, since I'm alive right now and might as well make use of it.

I was reading Jim Kunstler's blog "Clusterfuck Nation" today. His main theme is the immanent collapse of the western world in the wake of peak oil production. He fancies himself a hard-boiled realist, which is why he'll say that the United States is fucked in Iraq and the war has nothing to do with democracy, then he'll turn around and say that Bush is right to spy on Americans (because of the threat of America's enemies, who are obviously pissed off at America's not-so-subtle practice of dominating the world, particularly oil-rich Muslim lands).

And the reason I keep coming back to his blog, despite his odious democrat centrism, is because he IS something of a realist, even if the slimy prick won't come out and say whether or not he actually supports imperialism in the name of oil hegemony.

No, he'll just repeat his skipping record line, his attack on people (and he reserves his most scathing attacks for the war protesters) for being against the oil wars yet living their oil-fueled lifestyles. What I'd like to know is, what part of "no blood for oil" doesn't he understand?

Today, after quoting one of those dumbass head-in-the-sand utopian globalists, he writes:

An arresting fantasy, isn't it? A Beijing that resembles Atlanta, full of strip malls dishing out cheeseburgers and other interesting foreign foods to Chinese soccer moms hurrying back to Toll Brother's starter homes in Chinese knockoffs of the Ford Explorer.

Note to Mr. Reich and the rest of the people he is smoking opiated hashish with: you've got it backwards. Over the next twenty, thirty years America gets to be more and more like Chinese peasant life in 1949. Why? Because neither America nor China (nor anybody else) can continue running industrial economies the way we have been, or even a substantial fraction of that way, in an energy-starved world. Nor will anybody come up with a miracle technological rescue remedy to keep all the motors humming.

And this got me thinking... If we somehow find our way out of this chinese finger trap (and I doubt we'll be able to oil it off our fingers) and into what will most likely be a radically scaled back version of this contemporary clusterfuck (if not a post-apocalyptic wasteland) then perhaps purpose will be had in being forced to kick our novelty addiction and thus, slowly freeing ourselves from the bonds of historical time and the nauseas twisting paradigm slur.

My European descendents used to wonder what it might be like living in a world of magic (South American descendents wouldn't have to wonder, being familiar with mushrooms and ayahuasca). Well now we know. The power brought about by deep understanding of physics and chemistry allowed us to see infinity in a grain of sand. Now we see super strings in a vacuum. Now there are possible loopholes for time travel. Now there are barbarians banging at the gates of the universal light-speed limit. Pretty amazing. But then, why do I feel so blasé? Is it the disparity between what's on the cover of discover magazine, and the frequency with which my computer crashes? Is it the promise of nanotech, in juxtaposition with the fact that seeing one of the latest 3d game engines didn't impress me too much? Or is it the fact that I've already seen ten thousand science fiction films laying it all out for me, THIS utopian/dystopian drama brought to you by INFOGLUT incorporated?

Okay, this is ridiculous. It's like I'm in year 15,645,298 of my paradise retirement package (maybe I AM, and my snooze alarm went off on heaven's night table, and I'm waking up to the bored God cycle yet again, and I'm saying, no goddamnit, gimme another fifteen millennia). But surely this is extrapolation and projection.

And I know the folly of romanticization. The post oil age could be very hard indeed, and where do I get off embracing hard times? I've never known truly hard times, unless my theory is correct, my guestimation that the existential emptiness is fundamentally harder on a mind then the substance I won't name for fear of tainting it, the substance that, for all its pain, would provide the energy/life-force/unnamed-purpose necessary for supreme satisfaction. The amino acids would never taste better, the fifteen second fuck would be endorphintastic. (I've failed to give this much grit or texture, I haven't mentioned tilling the soil, or slaughtering pigs, or raising a barn, have I?) But this can't be the answer, I'm not wrapping up the riddle of consciousness.

Nonetheless, purpose in sustainability - maybe that's the domain consciousness must move in to - mind moved to embrace ecological harmony. How's that for an expansion? Sustainability, cycles restored to their luxury, in the light of modernity-honed mind.

What we've done with the industrial revolution, and then the information age, is jumped headlong through hoops of increasingly tight cycles, a million megahertz and shrinking shelf-life. Information accumulates, patterns aggregate, we become hyper-aware of the cycles, an awareness I (don't know about you) could do without. Too much awareness spoils the broth, I don't want to know that this is the HAPPY PART OF THE CYCLE, it throws a wrench into the gears, my wheels spin in futile thought loops, purpose spoils the party.

Is novelty a renewable resource? McKenna would have thought so, the elf machines seemed to contain enough in a glossolalic thimble full of self-transformation. I have yet to smoke DMT but I've listened to his trip report so many times, I feel like I've been there/done that. The VR people I used to be in such kinship with, like Mark Pesche, would probably assume with enough ingenuity, we could squeeze novelty out of the lunar soil.

I was raised to be a dynamics addict - unless it's in my genes, and then human evolution really is the ultimate dead end, unless I'm just being like that sad-sack who said, in 1900: "everything that can be invented has been" (and maybe he wasn't even sad). The egg laid the twitchy chicken, itching, sketched out and pecking the bedrock for a new rhyme in common time, and I'm just not cut out to be in the same game, no longer the cutting edge of evolution, past my prime with new ideas left to the modern tip of the fractal still pouring out of life's vaginal doorway.

My obsession with novelty, the running out of things to say and do, depleting the resource of novelty like we deplete our material resources, burning out as an individual and a civilization - this is based on being trapped in historical time and having my paradigm dependent on constant re-contextualization. My paradigm itself has been a verb, a paradigm slur. But can re-contextualizing run indefinitely? It's like folding a piece of paper in halves, then quarters, and so on - the first fold is effortless, the next easy, but by the time you get to six or seven folds, it gets to be hard slogging. It gets to be end game.

But if I could escape from historical time... Because I see what McKenna and Joyce and those people meant by "history" now. Escape from history. But rebuilding civilization after a catastrophe would be fairly "historic", wouldn’t it? I'm seeing it as the transitory period to the clearing at the end of history's path - the gateway to Eden...

Yeah, I know, you can't talk about Eden without sounding like a bliss ninny. But I'm not really, because I'm not really talking about a blissful Eden. I'm talking about redefining Eden, redefining bliss, shunning this nervous, twitchy bliss we're searching for and instead, finding the bedrock, the ground of being, the regaining of purpose in losing the same.

The most shocking statement I'll have to make is that this probably eschews a great deal of consciousness. I can't see consciousness as an end anymore, except maybe that the greatest revelation is to come, in profane, linear history. Oh hell, it'll have to surprise me, I mean I'm building up this great vacuum, this chasm of boredom, talking about endgames and the death of the new age. Isn't it obvious I'm setting myself up for - I wish, I wish I was setting myself up, but wishful thinking, doesn't that jinx it? Heh.