Dynamism

I have recently come to the conclusion that it is possible to categorise people in our society along three very simple lines: those to whom others flock, those who flock to others, and people who couldn't care less.

As mediocre beings, there is nothing we despise more than mediocre undertakings. Like Sisyphus, we find in mundane toil the roots of our deepest terror, our complete and utter surrender to blankness. We love ourselves to death, and in death we confront the idea that there is no self to love. All that giddy sweetness, that imperishable bond we so cherish between ourselves and the world - a bond we cherish so much we assume it, depend on it - it all rests on a trap door which, in our darkest hour, surely drops us out of our summery cerebral superstructure (the joy of alliteration is but one more little avenue of pleasure leading away from Truth).

In the banal, we see nothingness. We see our Selves. Like those zealots who tried to silence Galileo, we cling stupidly and, if needs be, aggressively, to the fallacy that everything is in a state of flux but us. We assume our own permanence and a majestic, impenetrable beauty about us. So terrifying is the idea of pause that when we find no beauty in the world, we decide to wander about it (this, I insist, is a tradition that has lead us from the tours of Wordsworth and Shelley all the way to those cretins who justify their existence by having spent six months pretending to be poor on the Indian subcontinent).

Allow me to elaborate by crudely condensing 300 years of Western history into a short story, then applying it to humanity as a whole (were I an academic this would be allowed, and I have much more free time to spend thinking about the world than any academic): once upon a time, we decided we were not the most beautiful thing on the planet. We turned our gaze, instead, to nature. Our finest poets sallied forth, tearing words from the depths of their creative souls and throwing them at nature in a benign effort to justify themselves before her awesome power, revelling in the heightened state of appreciation colliding with the impossibility of doing justice to it; their words would spring, they claimed, from their unique observation of the world around them, words which would lap against each other and fecundate every nook, every cranny with meaning - feeding off the gargantuan idolatry afforded their creators, the poets, by a world more in awe of their madness than their method. Thus, 'Nature', gained a capital 'N' and became female, like all other objects hitherto.

The trouble arose when people began to suspect that the poets were not quite as uniquely placed to worship nature (or Nature) as they claimed. They had made of Nature an intellectual barrier, a creature of such harmony and splendour that it could only have ever been created by humanity; men who had felt divided from themselves, from each other and from their emotional link to the world made an enemy of Nature. In order to defeat it, they found themselves with two options: either control it, or obliterate it entirely. Now, obviously it is quite impossible to obliterate something as abstract as Imagination, that is, the allegory of our material relationship with the world, so it was decided that Nature must be dominated.

So, we invented machines. We reduced the world to all that which we could make of it and found that, with machines, we were all poets. Suddenly, we could all encapsulate the beauty of the world in a word, a gesture, a photograph. We all owned it. It was no longer beautiful (if there is one criticism i can throw at the Marxists it is that common ownership of a thing just makes us not want that thing any longer).


We flocked to Nature, and to the poets. Tired and jealous, we flocked to the machines. Bored, we began to flock to ourselves, a phenomenon I like to call Dynamism.

Historians cream themselves over the 'modernist' period as the age of dynamism, when man wedded himself to machine in the pursuit of progress. And it is indeed true that the world 'got faster'. Technology, wars, medicine, weaponry and stupidity all account for that. However, the fact is we already relished the dynamic. The difference was that before we turned to machines, we found it in the mountains, the clouds, the rivers, the oceans! Thus, already obsessed with movement (for as I have said elsewhere, stasis is tantamount to existence, the ultimate form of reality beyond which consciousness is incapable of seeing), we finally began to create the tools with which to use it.

As I said, everybody can be a poet now. All words are capable of is sculpting ideas into forms; it is the individual imagination which gives them expression. We do not flock towards words. Ironically, however, the forms sculpted by centuries of inherited words, those tired old songs about Nature and machines, it is they who have shaped our flocks. We have built beauty, wit, attraction and inspiration into ourselves. People who flock flock towards the heroes of language, towards those exiguous, skulking ideas which trace the very fabric of our consciousness with their insatiable lust for permanence: they are seduced by Calypso or Byron, overwhelmed by Marinetti or Lenin, exhilerated by Darcy and his wealth. Those lucky enough to personify a form, should thy be happy to do it forever and suspend themselves in-character, command the flocks.

As for those who don't wish to take part in flocking, we are content with the bizarre spectacle of the whole thing. Dynamic crowds of flockers flocking towards dynamic inividuals for some form of gratification. It makes me somewhat nauseous to think of a particular crowd flocking towards some beret-wearing, chain-smoking 'thinker' preaching against that very process of instant gratification in modern culture which allows artists to produce a 'spectacle' by shredding a cow or writing an endless stream of gibberish. Yet it is also somehow amusing to wonder whether the act was deliberate. They are post-modern, I suppose. I am post-caring.

I spend every waking hour yearning for sleep. With every ray of sunshine, with every shadow cast upon my existence, the dull ache of tedium slips in between my bones and stings me with every movement as though every twitch of my finger, every slip of my tongue, were taking place beneath the crushing weight of a giant boulder. The more I wrestle with my burden, the more it crushes me. I find that the most beautiful act of pure selfishness that I can perform is to play dead.

My life: a dreadful, monotonous lullaby.