Blogging Maniacs and War (absolutely not correlated whatsoever)
In this day and age of obsessive bloggers and podcasters (is there such a word?? you know that this is a strange new world when the dictionary becomes inadequate in shedding light to words rampant in today's society), many psychologists, sociologists, and governments (where blogs become avenues for political outbursts) are concerned with this mania of expressing one's individuality through online posts and videos, and are likewise maniacally seeking to make sense of this phenomenon. Milan Kundera offers an interesting insight in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
He writes (although he is speaking of writing books as opposed to blogging, I believe they are intricately related to one another):
"We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.)"
Alas, the truth is, bloggers are not highly expressive individuals, but desolate individuals who sit comfortably in their air-conditioned rooms in cushioned chairs in front of their swanky Macs, totally removed from the rest of civilisation and ignored by even the closest of kin and their own pets, fortunate enough, however, to enjoy peace, whose lives are so bland that they have to scream out to a world of strangers through blogging, hoping against hope that someone out there hears them (notice that no one actually LISTENS to them, they only HEAR them). I am very well aware that I belong to that community of sad individuals and will hence, seek help immediately after I finish with this post.
War, however, is absolutely nonsensical, and too extreme a solution for preventing blogging lunatics from inflicting pain and trauma to unsuspecting strangers with their equally nonsensical ramblings. Its all about owning land-Milan Kundera also offers this of war:
"During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. ...
From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet.
And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise."
Yes, we are focusing on all the wrong things. The earth is slowly dying with the extinction of its plants and animals, the weather becomes horribly hot, terribly cold, in the highest order of the universe, this is the real threat to our survival - by then it wouldn't matter who owns which piece of land.
Likewise, when we focus so much on the pressures at work that we turn grouchy and lash out at our close-ones, we have a misconception on what's important (as you can tell, this is a totally random thought. Ahem, this entire post is made up of random thoughts). If you are still reading this utterly senseless post instead of brushing your teeth or giving your dog a pat, you are clearly focusing on the wrong thing.
He writes (although he is speaking of writing books as opposed to blogging, I believe they are intricately related to one another):
"We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.)"
Alas, the truth is, bloggers are not highly expressive individuals, but desolate individuals who sit comfortably in their air-conditioned rooms in cushioned chairs in front of their swanky Macs, totally removed from the rest of civilisation and ignored by even the closest of kin and their own pets, fortunate enough, however, to enjoy peace, whose lives are so bland that they have to scream out to a world of strangers through blogging, hoping against hope that someone out there hears them (notice that no one actually LISTENS to them, they only HEAR them). I am very well aware that I belong to that community of sad individuals and will hence, seek help immediately after I finish with this post.
War, however, is absolutely nonsensical, and too extreme a solution for preventing blogging lunatics from inflicting pain and trauma to unsuspecting strangers with their equally nonsensical ramblings. Its all about owning land-Milan Kundera also offers this of war:
"During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. ...
From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet.
And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise."
Yes, we are focusing on all the wrong things. The earth is slowly dying with the extinction of its plants and animals, the weather becomes horribly hot, terribly cold, in the highest order of the universe, this is the real threat to our survival - by then it wouldn't matter who owns which piece of land.
Likewise, when we focus so much on the pressures at work that we turn grouchy and lash out at our close-ones, we have a misconception on what's important (as you can tell, this is a totally random thought. Ahem, this entire post is made up of random thoughts). If you are still reading this utterly senseless post instead of brushing your teeth or giving your dog a pat, you are clearly focusing on the wrong thing.
posted by Miao @ 12:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home