Origin in Loss

Jonathan Gillis

8 May 2013

Drowning in an ocean of noise. Completely alone, yet surrounded, by strangers. Psychologically tortured in the auditory madness of this psychopathic imperial world. The humming, buzzing, beeping, vibrating, clanking, clashing, crunching, splashing, thudding, reverberating, commotion, hammering, crashing, clattering, pattering, stomping, creaking, dripping, jangling, ringing, whistling, whispering, talking, screaming, blaring, blasting, exploding,  clapping, laughing, clamoring, motoring, the sirens, the racket…All the sounds. All the noise. None of it, emanates from the real world. We have been made deaf to the sounds of the real world. We are forever drowning in an engineered reality, saturated in the deafening noise of the mega-Technopoly. Pollution to the ears. Poisonous to the already fettered mind. Disastrous to the already shattered heart. We cannot hear ourselves. We cannot hear each other. We cannot hear the earth, nor all the precious beings thereof. We have forgotten what her voice sounds like. We do not recall the language, hundreds of thousands, millions of years older than post-historic humanity. We can only hear, because we are forced to hear, the superficial mechanizations of dominant imperial culture.

It’s amazing how nothing changes, but everything’s different. Because we are forced to, we conform to homogenized mass culture. Subcultures, which do not imply diversity or tolerance thereof, are produced and marketed just like any other consumer goods or identities. In this era of cultural, societal, familial, and identity fragmentation, we’re all connected by what we have lost. We’re all denied influence over the manufactured world we live inside and over the real world around us, excepting insofar as we are able to turn ourselves or others into products and experiences to be exploited and consumed. Like corporation, like citizen. We mimic the inherently bold, aggressive, and competitive corporation which envelops every aspect of our hyper-activated existence. As we struggle in our redundant lives, we keep busy, competing for attention, inside a mega-tech framework, essentially, inside a process, a process which dictates what we can imagine, indeed, computes the very meaning, or lack thereof, of our existence.

The unsilent present is an interval of vanishing attention spans, corrosion of critical thinking, and a severely diminished capability for deeply felt and meaningful experiences and mutual relations. Like darkness, silence is increasingly difficult to sense let alone experience; but mind and spirit need its nourishment. We are emotionally and socially disabled. But in a world of strangers, where we’re unneeded, unwanted, and unnoticed, that we have needs, that they are unmet, like us, doesn’t matter at all. Silence is foremost, beckoning presence to itself; so it’s a link to the dominion of origin. Too often we disturb silence, only to voice some point that blunders an inclusive sense of what we are part of, and how many ways there are to destroy it. Language must continually concede its origin in loss. So too we, modern imperial citizens, who are so insulated from the consequences that our dominant lifestyle, or death-style, necessitates, that we embrace our subjugated dependence to the economy of so-called “progress” until death does us part, who speak the language of technology happily fluently, who are so isolated and deprived of fundamental psychosocial needs, that we spend more time muttering to ourselves by ourselves, interacting with machines than we do other human beings, so to we, must always admit our origin in loss. Well unto you, whose heart has a home. Well unto you, so full of life, and calming beauty.   

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