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Thoughts as they come
Apr. 5th, 2008 06:15 amI've said, at various times, that I finally embraced Christianity as a result of the culture of death - the evil I was seeing around me didn't cohere with what I sensed was true about the world, and Catholicism (especially Augustine) was the thing that allowed me to reconcile good and evil.
It's only recently though (and before those of you who were there say anything - no, it's not just because of The Ruins, but it honestly was terrible) that I've realized that it wasn't just society doing violence to people. It seems that people are sufficiently sick as to not only not produce good things but to actively undermine those things which were once good. Which leads me to wonder whether there was anything good or holy that humans produced. Perhaps I'm a fool for thinking art was sublime, poetry affected people's lives, and that culture mattered in past generations. It does radical damage to my value set to believe that it's never mattered, and that the ivory tower is completely cut off from the reality in which people live, but that's rapidly my conclusion.
And right now, I want to get out of this unnatural and stinking life fueled by caffeine and lust and voluntary stupidity and run to the silent escape of the cloisters. If I must be bathed in blood, let it be the blood of the lamb and not the blood of my friends. I can't watch them kill themselves with varying degrees of slowness anymore, and I can't stop them, and the only solution is to wrap myself in the Church and do what spiritual good I can for them from a distance that won't tear away at me.
We aren't being preyed on by external evils, we're preying on ourselves, and until I know how not to do that to others within society, I feel like I should leave it, and devote myself to whatever quiet pursuits remain open to me. I'm a pacifist in a society at war, and I don't know how to get on without causing the damage and pain that I want to escape.
This, perhaps, is the final iconoclasm, the one which will finally end our meaningful cultural output. Sitting under fluorescent lights so we can't see the sun, allowing our art to become digitized or to collapse, refusing to consume even what is worthwhile in the new media for the sake of their refuse, and drunkenly and complacently ignoring Rome while she burns, having forgotten how to fiddle: is this how it ends for us? Not even the dignity of an execution or a collapse, just a dark age of our own devising - the era when the more information is available, the less of it anyone actually utilizes. These banalities are perhaps the cruelest torment that could be inflicted on us.
And I want to drop out, and find a nice cell, and die little-regarded other than for someone to say, "At least he prayed that we would come to our senses."
That's all I've got, as I watch the sun rise through the pink and sickly sky of this city.
It's only recently though (and before those of you who were there say anything - no, it's not just because of The Ruins, but it honestly was terrible) that I've realized that it wasn't just society doing violence to people. It seems that people are sufficiently sick as to not only not produce good things but to actively undermine those things which were once good. Which leads me to wonder whether there was anything good or holy that humans produced. Perhaps I'm a fool for thinking art was sublime, poetry affected people's lives, and that culture mattered in past generations. It does radical damage to my value set to believe that it's never mattered, and that the ivory tower is completely cut off from the reality in which people live, but that's rapidly my conclusion.
And right now, I want to get out of this unnatural and stinking life fueled by caffeine and lust and voluntary stupidity and run to the silent escape of the cloisters. If I must be bathed in blood, let it be the blood of the lamb and not the blood of my friends. I can't watch them kill themselves with varying degrees of slowness anymore, and I can't stop them, and the only solution is to wrap myself in the Church and do what spiritual good I can for them from a distance that won't tear away at me.
We aren't being preyed on by external evils, we're preying on ourselves, and until I know how not to do that to others within society, I feel like I should leave it, and devote myself to whatever quiet pursuits remain open to me. I'm a pacifist in a society at war, and I don't know how to get on without causing the damage and pain that I want to escape.
This, perhaps, is the final iconoclasm, the one which will finally end our meaningful cultural output. Sitting under fluorescent lights so we can't see the sun, allowing our art to become digitized or to collapse, refusing to consume even what is worthwhile in the new media for the sake of their refuse, and drunkenly and complacently ignoring Rome while she burns, having forgotten how to fiddle: is this how it ends for us? Not even the dignity of an execution or a collapse, just a dark age of our own devising - the era when the more information is available, the less of it anyone actually utilizes. These banalities are perhaps the cruelest torment that could be inflicted on us.
And I want to drop out, and find a nice cell, and die little-regarded other than for someone to say, "At least he prayed that we would come to our senses."
That's all I've got, as I watch the sun rise through the pink and sickly sky of this city.
