(no subject)
TALKING CHINESE INTERNET EARTHQUAKE BLUES
2006 was a schizotypal shitstorm. What happened this year? It revealed itself in peeled back accordion folds of a game of 'exquisite corpse. "2006" is screamed in street Sanskrit by a bleary-eyed man with shit in his teeth. It had something to do with cultivating power through violating taboo, a reversal of processes within bringing about magickal reversals in processes without. We figured that out in 2006, but interior alchemy never really came that far; phosphatidyl choline, niacin, all those fellows are really a phenom of the year before. And what good clean magick was performed on our side's behalf in 2006, excepting a few onanistic rites with a candle and a winsome spidery design bic'd onto a piece of paper, just to make sure that we've still "got it"?
2006 was a pit stop on the highway to the deliverance or eschaton scenario of your choice. Not much to see here; at a stand a few miles back, someone is selling agate rock. The flipside of the toilet seat has a picture of a besneakered jogging Pacman. A wavering hand has chiseled 'smoke dope' into a sign bearing some tidbits about local history. In the gravel lot, someone is drying a towel on the hood of their Bronco. Do you want to stop for a while or should we just keep going? Anyone need to stretch their legs?
I don't have any access to the 'news' right now; I am in a country which other countries like to claim suppresses that kind of data, on the tail end of what theoretically was a significant earthquake (the office reaction to the news that two people had died was, verbatim, 'were they famous?') that has crippled my conceivable ability to get at it if I wanted to. Maybe this makes my reaction to the year 'purer' instead of (or as well as) more misinformed. I spent most of 2006 without a computer anyway. Was 2006 just a year devoted to tightening the screws? Did it feel that way to anyone else?
I spent a lot of the year outside. I lived in an unprecedented and possibly unnecessary variety of places and pulled off homelessness with the typical malevolent flash exercised by a self-conscious practitioner of the discipline. The summer drove everyone crazy, I fled to China. Hello, China. The tired old internal battle between the mammal forces suggesting that it is vital to wander around adventuring and the primate forces suggesting it is vital to be part of a tribe is the teen angst of the freshly minted adult. In 2006 the former constantly won out, but I've been missing being among the kind of friends who have more in common with than temporal-spatial location. It has been a lonely year, lonely enough to leave me with some serious doubts and fears about 'adulthood'. Not that those didn't exist before, just that in 2005 'meditate on the cold veracities of solitude' was still lingering somewhere on the to-do list.
I was hanging out with some friends in a dog park (there are such things!) in Calgary and discussing the behaviour of their retriever; it persistently returned thrown sticks, and minced around in exaggerated anxiety until they were hurled off somewhere again. The dog is not interested in the stick, it is interested in pleasing humans. It has been bred for the unique purpose of returning objects of a certain size and density to humans; after a few millennia of genetic engineering the drive to do so is tattooed into its mind as an absolutely crucial element of functional life. Returning a tossed stick is inescapable inbred pathology.
What does this say about retriever dogs born in the wild? With no human around to please, no socialized notion of how to please one if it could, and thousands of years of RNA heritage and cellular memory bearing down on it carrying this mandate. The dog exists in a state of undiluted animal angst, forever sensing that its life is rent by a yawning void, lacking the capacity to work out through reason or faith just what it is that's missing, mired in 'existential crisis' which has curled its way through its canine body and fused indistinguishable with its mind. This problem cannot be talked out; it must be exacted on the world in a series of barks and sniffs, brooded over with a vocabulary of snarls and yelps, a tale of incalculable misery transcending the "kafkaesque" narratives of any human depresso beat out in binary wags and ourobourous circles traced head-after-tail not out of joy but metaphor. 2006 was quite possibly the year of -that- dog.