NO KIDDFUKKER HERE

RADIKAL ISOLATION

My account of survival against the toxic psychological onslaught of high capitalism in 2014 CE.

People tell me I look angry. (I look angry? Yeah well you’re ugly) I’m not angry. I’m just good looking and staunch, serious like a heart attack. I have closed my body to sex. I got the idea from a Madonna lyric, “I’m going to close my body now”. I have had several sexual partners. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy any of it (the f*!king), I did enjoy some of it. But mostly I felt like I couldn’t make a meaningful connection with another person’s body. (Hey there’s always porno) I live alone and I pursue a life of social isolation with no physical intimacy. At times I have tried to be pro-social, and I have been very successful in gratifying my ego. I have soared to new heights and experienced a love for and communion with the brotherhood of man. When I looked around I realised everyone was now jealous of me because I had gone too far and achieved more than they could ever have. So I cut back, humans are fickle. It’s a fine line between chaste and slut. At the moment I am entering a new period in my life. I am dispensing with unnecessary friendships. I have shaved off family and lovers from my life. All that remains is to finely hone my life by removing completely all contact with other people. Like the neohumans in Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island” I am pursuing a life of radical isolation. And I want to go further, I long for solitude in wilderness.

Anyway I have this problem relating to people. Or rather I don’t have a problem. It’s other people who have problems understanding me. So I don’t smile. That’s because I’m not a fool. Only a fool would go around smiling in this world. Do you know the origins of the smile? Our ape ancestors smiled when they saw something ridiculous- stupid, in other words. So when someone gives you that warm smile that validates you, they are really telling you that they think you are ridiculous and stupid. On to love and attraction: I don’t smile when I see someone I find attractive, this would be disrespectful. Smiling= disrespect. Serious= respect. When I was a child I could not understand the way people interacted with each other. I was upset and frustrated by their behaviour. Why do they saw “hello, how are you?” to each other and why must the other respond “good thankyou”? In my preferred reality people would approach each other and exchange lines of poetry instead of sticking to a social script. Like transgender young people I rejected the male-female paradigm. Why should there be boys or girls, why do I have to choose? I was a child of the Age of Aquarius, born out of time, born too late and ahead of my time. I dreamed, as someone wrote, for when “the sea shall fall into the sky, and the trees will hang with fishes”. I was an inversion of normality and a question mark after existence.

“I dreamed for when “the sea shall fall into the sky, and the trees will hang with fishes”.I was an inversion of normality and a question mark after existence”.

Later I found the novels of Clive Barker; Imajica, The Great And Secret Show, Everville, Weaveworld. These were worlds I could relate to and feel safe in. Gradually I have gotten used to the rules of the world. At times I have invoked the spirit of the submission of Islam and the honour of traditional Japanese feudal society to try to worship the god of capitalism. I have tried to overcome Marxian oppression by turning selling my labour into a religion. I have tried to find respect, and humility, and fortitude and swallow my ego and accept my place in the world. I don’t care anymore. Work is a mindfuck, it’s not worth the emotional labour and the psychological damage. I don’t listen to the popular music that people my age do. I listen to music that was made before I was born. I do listen to current music, but I don’t buy it the day the cd is released. I buy the album when I feel like it, when it suits my revolving tastes. In this world we are constantly assaulted by very bad music, on the bus, in the shopping malls. It is a constant barrage of mass market low-art noise. We walk through a cacophony of bad taste, across an anti-intellectual audio wasteland designed by talentless artists, unemployed, promoting alcoholism to pay their bills. For example Sia, from Adelaide, recently reached #1 on the US charts with her song Chandelier which promotes binge drinking. She is an amazing vocalist, but it is a very poor message. So these are the things I think about.

I think about how the epidemic of HIV rages across the earth infecting a person every four minutes, and still no cure. I think of the intractable war between Israel and Palestine which festers while the world looks on and takes no action. I think of uncontrolled global warming inflicting disasters again and again, each one taking a higher death toll than before, each time the government and public donate less in aid. I think of the rise of neoliberalism, the government has legislated a six month wait for job seekers benefits, what will Hobart streets look like when there are homeless people begging for money for food to eat? I think of living in the Middle East, of the desert, of Jerusalem, of prayers to God. I think of the cradle of civilisation in sub-Saharan Africa now burnt to dust and stricken with plague, hunger, and wars. I think of Neanderthal bloodlines, can they save humans from themselves? I think of my own Viking bloodline, what has my blood learnt from the Dark Ages? I think of the fall of the Roman Empire, what would the world look like now if the classical age had never ended? I don’t think about life after death. I don’t think about love and companionship. I don’t try to communicate with any one, I am resigned to my fate. I don’t think about life after 50. I think about today and tomorrow.

“The government has legislated a six month wait for job seekers benefits, what will Hobart streets look like when there are homeless people begging for money for food to eat?”

I pursue radical isolation by choosing celibacy. I have sublimated my base desires to achieve more from my life than a carnal preoccupation with free sex. Tasmanian sociologist Adrian Franklin has researched the epidemic of loneliness in Australian society, and he points to Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island” to describe the social changes which have occurred in recent decades which have caused people to become more isolated from one another, in particular the rise of the internet and social media and the decline in real life interaction. I am also aware of the global context of my celibacy. In Japan people of my generation, born from the 80’s onwards, have “come to be known as satori sedai-- the “enlightened generation” [.] In Buddhist terms: free from material desires, focused on self-awareness, finding essential truths” (Adbusters 2014 #113) I like this quote because I have studied Buddhism, this quote encapsulates the way I (as part of a generation of like-minded young people) strive to improve myself through a clear psychology and intellectualism. At times over the years this has in practice amounted to a strict asceticism and required stern self-will.

I will introduce another concept here which is useful in understanding this commitment. In the weeks after September 11, and again after the Arab Spring protests, my heart went out to the people of the Middle East. Here was another world which contained the possibility of an escape from the cultural imperialism of Western industrial capitalism; to fight back against the pervasive sexualisation promoted by Hollywood and Western media. Here I will quote from a lecture the Imam of Hobart Mosque recently gave at University of Tasmania on the subject of Jihad. The Imam stated that Jihad means “to strive hard”. ‘Juhd’ means effort. ‘Ijtihad’ means “working hard or diligently”. Therefore jihad is the process of “exerting the best efforts involving some form of struggle and resistance to achieve a particular goal”. The Imam stated “the greater jihad is to overcome our own ego”. These concepts parallel the lifestyle and attitude of the satori sedai outlined above. Satori means to see things as they really are. I live in a still life painting. Somewhere outside the world burns and people madly rush. I am in a capsule, I try to preserve a picture of the world as it was at the end of the twentieth century- the last time the world was sane and safe. September 11 2001 marked the end of that world and the start of something new. Images float through my mind like opium dreams. I see pictures of the world before the droughts and floods and before we abandoned that environment. Then I see the garden I lived in turned to dust along the highway, and I know that it is gone. I count the time in decades and I breathe like the trees. Nature will right herself in time.

“Images float through my mind like opium dreams. I see pictures of the world before the droughts and floods…”