Forget Art, Let's Dance, Part II

I haven't quite tied up yesterday's post so let's have at it again.

What does it mean to have some sort of voluntary socialism on top of a necessary capitalism?

It means that we are going to build a beautiful castle on top of the ruthless and sometimes brutal foundation we've been breaking all these rocks to build. It means that as our economy evolves, people will become sophisticated and 3-D enough that they will no longer be beholden to either money/rationality/the west/the concrete/the mainstream/the right/their left brain/Newtonian physics OR creativity/spirituality/the east/the abstract/the counterculture/the left/their right brain/quantum physics.

In short, we're growing. And we've pretty much exhausted the two dimensional possibilities. We can't be any more extreme--even if your own personal extreme is passivity. And the 3-D is beckoning like a warm, fresh lover.

And we're going to build a very large, massively robust and sustainable, great big ole loving culture right in the middle of everything. In our middle east basically. Exactly where it seems least likely.

When people talk about sustainability, I want to see the numbers. I want to see the walks in the park. I want to see the fragile dendrites getting stronger. I want to see more fun, more faith, and better, more loving love.

I don't want to see more uptightness about leaving one light on. Or nattering about this or that. I want to see people leading by example--and inspiring because they're in step. And enjoying themselves more than the rest of us because of their enlightened position.

I do not want to see someone who has not only denied themselves enjoyment to be a hard worker and just kept going and now denies themselves heat and light to show everyone else that they are ruining the world.

If that's the future, if that's sustainability, then I'm ready to go out with the polar bears.

One of the most important things in my opinion is to reclaim, re-enjoy what we do consume. The left has made consumption a dirty word for so long you'd think it wasn't the primary human activity. A baby doesn't come into this world producing--on the material level anyway. They come in, and we frequently go out, consuming exclusively.

(Although, very importantly, we are massive spiritual producers during these times often.)

There is holy consumption. In fact there is a lot. Pulling what you most care about toward you is a little understood but an entirely sacred act. It literally creates and re-creates the world in your image.

It doesn't do it IF you choose to, or if you opt in--it does it no matter what. No matter how furious, how reluctantly, how stingily, how lovingly, how bravely, how joyfully. And it not only replicates the products, the material item you consumed--theoretically to have another available; but also the feelings and viewpoint behind that, the reasons, the emotions, the intent.

What this world really runs on is our attention. Both the spiritual and the material world are created and re-created around, and in the image of, what we focus on.

And this isn't just what we focus positively on. If we choose to focus negatively on something, we are giving it our power as well. Life is a meditative prayer. And if we insist that we are running out of time and energy, then we will. And we'll have time and energy "savers" on every block whether we choose to shop there or not.

(Having helped create a zeitgeist, the likelihood that our interactive partners--both personal, civic, and business--will want what we've agreed upon is much more likely than that they will want some isolated, solitary product, content or service.)

But consumption has been left out of the sustainability equation for the most part. It is too loaded, to guilt and wince inducing.

But it may be the most important. If we are to get anyplace transcendental, or elevated, or loving or grounded even, it is imperative that we consume the most loving and lovely produce we can find. And we must buy it gleefully, grateful that we have the opportunity to include such wonder in our lives.

Let me first make a quick aside and then return to the physics of consumption.

I imagine that this may seem, for some, an extended marketing plea for my book. And although I know it's unfashionable in certain prominant, incredibly powerful art circles, I will tell you absolutely that I want to sell my book. Many of them.

And I will tell you, although the same caveat applies, that the book is very, very good. That it will provide your soul with feelings and combinations of thoughts that are completely unavailable in any other available book.

I will tell you that, even though you feel like you spend a significant amount of time and energy consuming modern culture, you are starved for the real thing. Even though everything you consume insists and has gone to great lengths to assure you it of its authenticity.

And you have selected it primarily because you agreed.

Now imagine for a moment a 32 year-old slacker. Suffering from acute depression, seeing a shrink, not seeing any women, and living off his family's dime after watching a successful business slide out from under him.

Do you imagine it would be easier or harder for this person to strip himself from the most powerful conventions that his current community--the counterculture, the left, the non-profit world, bohemia--maintains?

Do you think it would be any easier to stand up and be proud, to trumpet your achievement and declare it beautiful and wonderful--to declare it holy--in that community than it would to stage a sit in to champion creativity, long hair, relaxation, doing your own thing, flying your freak flag, youth and sex to white 50s conservatives?

Do you think it would be any easier to be white and male and proud in our current atmosphere of self-hatred than it was to be any other color and proud in atmosphere's past of other hatred?

Do you think it would be any easier for this white male to escape being branded arrogant and elitist than it was for the beats, or black folks even, to escape being branded lazy and stupid? And, assuming you're out there early enough, and that you're closer to van Gogh than Quicksilver on the cultural driver curve, what do you imagine the chances are at having your work taken on its merit--on having it succeed on its own terms in their economy?

I don't know the answers, and I'm not trying to paint white men as victims--AT ALL--but I do think they're interesting questions about effort and what it takes for someone to be not just not underprivledged--but all privledged. For as I understand them, most spiritual traditions--all of which are thousands of years old, back when people really were hard-strapped--speak to making us annointed--making us all happy and powerful--all kings--instead of all peasants.

Which brings me perfectly to the next aspect of consumption: support.

In a non-tribal society, in a free and democratic society where compensation--love and attention--is based on merit and not brute strength, manipulation, birth order, gender or family connections; every financial transaction is a vote of support.

It's a vote of support, a transfer of love and attention--both for what the product is, but also, significantly, HOW the product is: its manufacturing processes, advertisements, the company's management practices, etc.

This is fairly understood today, and may god bless the left for bringing it into sharp focus.

HOWEVER--up until now it has been used primarily negatively! As a reason for a boycott. Good protestants that we are, we protest what we don't like.

We feel comfortable supporting casually what we like a bit more, but are happy to buy what we think, what we "feel" we "can afford" and complain about its quality. Or feel like "everything is so expensive these days" (even though we're passing on with hundreds of thousands in the bank).

If we don't do this ourselves, then at least we keep an eye out for others who seem to be "free spending" or "loose with their money".

Why do we do this? Why don't we support and cherish what we absolutely love and ignore what we don't care for?

Because this requires more vulnerability. For many it is easier to make themselves vulnerable getting in the way of something--stopping something--than it is to create, to care, champion and invest themselves wholy (wholely? Holy?) in something.

This I would argue goes back to the early church's desire to control sex (possibly for good reason--I don't know I wasn't there) and notions of sin. The idea that if you like something, it's bad for you (the converse, of course, being proven--that what you dislike is actually true and proper). A notion that has ruled the Judeo-Christian (and most other) traditions, but that, interestingly, is being swept away currently by all sorts of forces. (Most of them "disapproved", ironically, by those who have already benefitted from the process--sometimes dissaproved most by those who have benefitted most. What's up with that?).

Vulnerability. Corporations avoid it like the plague, people "manage" it. Primarily it is seen as something to be avoided. It denotes weakness and, well, vulnerability.

But Jesus was all vulnerability. Even his protestations, which have been immortalized in movements such as Liberation Theology, contained a radical vulnerability. Full humility. An open hand. He came with the sword, he was also the lion, but the sword was often his tongue. The lion eating its prey only spiritually.

He turned the other cheek. (Though that story may not be exactly what we believe either.)

Let me see if I can put it more simply: On the other side of every purchase is someone elses life. You can believe they are connected to you or not, try to get over if you wish--but your life is entirely dependent on the recipient side as well.

Following this, if we buy with faith and belief--if we understand the creative power of our purchases and choose to LEAD with them, and undertake to create not only the life we want for ourselves, but also create the world we want to live in (the others we want to know and enjoy)--then we create concrete, sustainable proof that love is the nature of the universe. And do so constantly--as a matter of habit.

We create for others--dictate their creation--with our consumption, with our destruction. (And also deny others with our fasting or refusal to consume what pleases and nurishes us!) This is an unavoidable universal law.

I'm not saying that we can consume our way to salvation--but that we create the atmosphere in which we will undertake our growth--and make it easier or more difficult by broadcasting our deepest beliefs into our immediate economy and atmosphere. (This is just as easy to see personally as it is economically).

When we buy in fear and trepidation--when we make any decision with fear and doubt--we create the same environment for another on the other end. I don't know how we came to understand that the middle managers at mid-level companies weren't the exact same as us (who went to school with them)--whether they are selling tobacco (much love MD) or yoga mats.

They are us. And we are them. Maybe we've eeked out a slightly better niche. And maybe that screenplay, we hope, will get us a little farther, but the answer isn't saving our pennies to claw our way up despite our fellow love artists--it's to show them directly, to inspire them straight off the bat.

[Some may be thinking here that I believe indulging each and every whim or appetite is what I'm talking about. It isn't. I don't believe our true appetites go beyond true health when we look closely at what we are consuming and why. Put simply, I'd argue that an affair that damages a true relationship more likely resulted from an initial inability to express onesself--that is, an earlier inability to create what it took to consume or get what you REALLY wanted--than it was "extra" appetite that was dying to be expressed. As proof, I'd offer that an affair never delivers the promised feelings--it can't because it's not looking for them from the essential provider. There may also be some affairs that end up in exactly what was supposed to happen. I'm not in charge--but the closer I look, the more I see that everything lines up. (I'd also mention, for discussion later, that the true source of all attention and satiator of all true appetites is one's self--in relationship to god/the world/one's self possibly.) It's also worth mentioning, to those who thing letting go would wind us all up on a couch with beer and hand down pants, that, all things being equal, we don't really want tubs of coke and endless supplies of hookers, butter cookies, TV, National Enquirers, and pop--even though our appetites may get confused enough to believe that that would be ripping. What we really want is warm intimacy, engaged creative labor, and the feelings we imagine unconsciousness, drunkenness, produces--but that only straight consciousness can produce and maintain. It's when we believe that unavailable, or impossible, or past, that we decide to hedge our bets. This is why it is so important to create and cheer love and possibility with both our creations and consumption.]

And when we buy (or create) what we really, really want--even if we think we can't afford it (or succeed)--maybe especially when we think we can't--when we invest in creating the world we want, then we get it. And ONLY then do we get it.

And this is guaranteed. We've already acted with enough faith to get us to the precipice. Which is why we feel so precarious. We've been living for future generations for so long that we here--the future generation. And with this next step, the world we all dream about, with time, love, energy AND money, will come to pass.

It is inevitable. And ready to go viral as soon as we so choose. And it may get increasingly nuts behind us until we decide as far as I can tell. But as soon as we admit that we are not sold-out and poor but powerful and rich. That we are not deluded and lost but fully aware of the condition of our soul and ready to spring, full-blown, into what we had dismissed as some crazed schoolboy fantasy. Then..

Then..

Then it's on.

The other aspect of this, as I mentioned yesterday, is the creation. If we've had enough faith so far to ensure that this will eventually come to pass, we've also insisted upon our own victimization, poverty, busyness, distraction and confusion long and hard enough to keep it the fuck away.

No easy task when we've been dreaming so hard about it. When we're so magnetized for it. When it's our true nature and the guiding priciple of the universe.

And maybe why we don't buy what we like--because if life really was what we want, if we could really live as we choose, then we'd have to. Be vulnerable. CARE about what we were doing.

Be personally invested.

Completely personally invested.

RISK failure.

Leap..!

Instead of just guaranteeing subsistence. Possibly. And a manegable demise.

And that may be the real fright, not buying a book or the better sofa, but looking ourselves in the mirror and saying you could write that book if you wanted to. You could start that engineering firm. You have that play, that pizza joint, that speech in you.

And why does this scare us so? Why does it take ten years of absolute terror to become what we want? Because we know what we, collectively, hold in store for those who set out to do it.

We know that first they must endure the American Idol tryout. Before they're even ready.

That the wife will scoff at guitar playing, singing, the ukelele. Parents will say "that's nice dear". Because that's what we've done. And that's the place, the ghetto, where we've left our dreams.

Unrealistic. A pipe dream. Something you better have a backup plan for.

A waste of time and money.

And that's just the emotional part. Societially we'll make you tour incessantly just to make money. Even the biggest bands don't make diddly on their albums.

We'll download you for free. We'll hit you with such concentrated disbelief that you want to run and hide. You'll want to take time off. You'll want to ease up a little to make things easier. We'll follow you around and stalk you. Consume you in fluffy magazines and talk about you freely online.

And when you do, when you stop fighting us to love us, you're toast, my friend. That second album SUCKED! We're too busy to see what comes up next. It has to be easy to understand, cheap and mind-blowing. The 18-34 demographic is the only one with time to look for it, and that market is saturated beyond belief. You have two weeks in the studio.

What if every market was subjected to the artificial constraints of the culture market: what if all carrots had to be .79? (Not too hard, but don't expect truly organic or a relaxed farmer; speed-limit non-drug addled trucker; dental for the clerk or those cool organic baby carrots.)

What if all steaks had to be $4.99? All plane seats $278? All cars $15,281? All shoes $39.95?

Don't you think this would lead to s robotic, insane, homogenized market? Don't you think all the bands would start to sound like each other? Don't you think brown, black and blue would become the only colors? Don't you think all magazines would run the same, somewhat shallow stuff.

With a few hold outs run by people with principles until their significant will was drained.

Sure, a few people would bring wonderful things to the market just because, but they would still be predominantly a very certain type: Type A. And maybe uptight. In love with labor.

And you can do it if you're a holy man. If you were Nusurat Fate Ali Khan and just toured here every once in a while. Didn't have to also live here and feel what it meant to take the bus with all of us. Or maybe even the South Side--where property values had been "allowed" to go out of wack.

And eventually, creators, producers will do this. Artists do progress, but we can control the process from either side of the fence. And as of right now there is absolutely NO incentive to make a magazine, a movie, a song, a book, painting or blog even, that transcends the DIVIDE! That is neither mainstream pap nor wrung hand indie. That is neither artificially cheerful nor reluctantly mopey.

That IS warm, loving, real, adult, responsible, relaxed, spiritual, humanist, free, spirited, engaged, honest, funny, and smart. That IS 3-D.

And if you think that people shouldn't do things like that for money--and be honest about what they're worth and up front about what they expect in return--then what the hell got you out of bed this morning?

I didn't do it for the money but I'm sure as fuck not afraid of it either. I'm going to get it, I guarantee, and when I do, not only will I buy the biggest, dopest house I can find (I've got my eye on a brownstone right downtown--huge with real gas lamps), but that will broadcast possibility and hope to a couple million very astute people worldwide. And then it's on.

(Not to mention that the brownstone--compound is more like it--is currently occupied by some capital management fund or wealth advisors or something, and I'll breathe some love and life back into that REAL estate like it hasn't seen in years.)

Let's take back over downtown my brothers and sisters. Lovingly, in full view, with crystal clear ambitions and well-defined goals. With full intent instead of running from the fear that we're going to somehow starve even though we've been eating for generations.

Cause either way, we'll get what we believe in.

Anyone? Anyone?