Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Not Yet Sufficiently Abused to Satisfaction

To understand the violent peak in passivity and inaction, all one need do is look at just what it is that the apparently bookish natives find of literary and/or philosophical value. To sum it up, it sounds more of less like that there MUST be something wrong with the world that MUST be specifically insoluble in any tenable way so that reflection remains mildly painful. It is to remind one of ones’ ability to look like you’re suffering in thought, and that it should be as easy to find as graphitti and broken bottles on the streets of the planet’s continent of Elysium.

Glänta is out to find various missing links, seeking them in short prose, long poems, and essays, treating subjects and objects such as archaeopteryxes, the Higgs particle, borderlands, the physiology of giraffes, Tiktaaliks, the cypher nought and its role in roulette, and colleagues at work.

Conceptualist writer Pär Thörn picked quotes from the blog of a Swedish website for employers and managers, using them as material for a prose-collage with a wailing tone, lamenting over the entire scale of any imaginable misbehaviour on the job and revealing a desperate forlornness: "Could someone please give me a tip on what to 'do'?"
Do? When the improbabilities are endless? Why?

Further to the self-referential hell that European culture lives in, Clarsonimus has made a curious observation:
Extremely high number of young Germans not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder

“We really can’t explain why this is,”
It seems the answer is right here. Blame the oppressive state that isn’t oppressive enough.
Why did they refuse to hand a blank cheque to the state monopoly on the use of force? And why did they want to pit the counter-violence of the downtrodden against oppressive state force?

Did the radical Left have a psychological defect, as some critics think today? Were they fetishists of violence, existentialist dreamers for whom the use of guns and explosives promised an intoxicating intensification of experience?
In other words, in a culture of ubiquitous pointing and suspicion, internal violence for the sake of pacifism is okay, literary lamentation may take the form of minor workplace grumblings, and there isn’t enough trauma worthy of a novel (but not hospital treatment) to go around.

Let me though, put it more simply: life is so boring and managed that they have to cut themselves to feel anything, and the struggles some find in life are too common to be worth reflecting on. It’s the rare, concocted, top-shelf invented suffering that fetches the best price.

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