The Frustrating Complimentarily of Memory and Fantasy or ‘Huis Clos’

All our world, except the most recent couple of seconds are really memories. Memories from a minute ago mix up with those from earlier today, likewise last year and even our ancient childhoods. Labels on boxes of memories are scanned for relevance and opened; stuff is taken out, put back. And with this temporary collection of thoughts and images, brought to or near consciousness, we make plans as to what to do next, next week, the rest of our lives.

But these plans, fantasies really, become memories almost as soon as we create them. It’s chaos in there. Deterministic, yes, but way too complicated for us to really know what it is that we really want to do, let alone what the as-chaotic rest of the world will do to us. 200 years ago we thought our gods knew, 50 years from now we think our computers will know, but right now we know we will never know.

Metonym: Consciousness is a spotlight not a floodlight. The artist reflects on this by stepping back to see, not just what’s in those tightly focused lights, but the lights themselves. In his garret he sees, and here records, a sketch of his memory boxes and a summary of this moment. long and short term memories, respectively.

Below, at street level, one of the artist’s fantasies is just beginning to turn memory. He is trying to stop time, trying to defeat the frustrating complementarily of memory and fantasy. He’s trying to catch a fantasy with all hooves off the ground.

The garret is as real as it gets and as a consequence it’s both/neither good and evil. Here the artist can close his eyes for a moment and when he opens them, the same boxes, computer, bed are there. He can go away for a couple of days, then coming back find all is the same, too. He can even recall 20 years ago, –the fall of ’91– all was pretty much the same. Except for the older computer and fewer boxes, of course.

The street-level gallery fantasy is as ephemeral as the floor above it is real.  It begins as his art on exhibit at a gallery opening, it and he respected by critics and collectors alike. But the possible quickly gets knocked down by the probable, as memories of rejection intrude. Then there appears the crueler fantasy –the one the pleasant ones always become– where the art and artist are moved to a back room rejected by partying critics and collectors. That fantasy is surely more painful than the one where the art is kept upstairs, never offered, simply withheld.

Synecdoche: Did the artist stop time? Look at the gallery scene. The art on the wall in itself is an abstraction of the consciousness process. It’s a sketch of the upstairs scene, a scene in a scene. It’s being looked at, like the first fantasy. but by whom or what?  The partying critics and collectors here are replaced by empty uniforms, nothing in themselves. They are mere scraps of cloth that can’t see or touch, that can indicate nothing. They are held mysteriously in shapes that lacking flesh, eyes and voice, don’t resemble people as the artist remembers them.

Do they still signify something or someone to the artist? Are they something/one half gone from respecters to rejecters? Does he have indeterminate, superimposed memories of people causing both pleasant and ill feelings? As symbols, this they do and are. By cultural convention LBDs and tuxes replace respecters and rejecters alike. They are social-role specific drapery shaped like the critics and collectors, which his gestalt-bound eyes fill with rejecting flesh. They are, at the same time, harmless, existentially empty shells. Time does not stop for him, it loops. l’enfer, c’est les autres.

NOTES

• ‘complementarity’ —  A quantum physics term I, as many others do, generalize to non-quantum scale events; it means that an event can have pairs of attributes that the more you know about one of them, the less you can know about the other. so is I this mental event I am having a memory or a fantasy?
• ‘Huis Clo’ —  The title of Sartre’s 1943 play usually translated as ‘No Exit.’ but the translation could also be the English of the French legalese of the Latin ‘in camera,’ or in non-legalese English ‘in a [secret] room.’ a vague, polyglot pun/paradox, is that ‘in [a] camera’ now means in public.
• ‘all hooves off the ground’ — Another paradox In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge, in trying to settle a bet about horses running, used ‘moving’ pictures to ‘stop’ the horses gallop long enough to see if ‘all hooves off the ground’ is ever the case.
• ‘good and evil’ — OK, may be happy/sad works better. I did read Freddy’s book years ago, and should read it again before evoking it. I do remember it took a sadistic stab at philosophers, though. So what is this philosophizing post, good or evil?
• ‘indeterminate, superimposed’ –  more quantum terms up-scaled; an unobserved –but thought– event is all of several outcomes at the same time. Can such a thought be declared either a memory or fantasy, or must it remain both and neither?
• l’enfer, c’est les autres. ‘Hell, it’s the others’ Sartre’s set is a room with the one door. In my drawing it’s two rooms and unconnecting stairs instead of a opening door. The quote says the cast is the hell not the set, people not a place. When I saw the play (c. 1968) instead of ending. it began again, repeating a couple of lines before lights dimmed. It looped.

Hypnopomp

Some drawings don’t work as well as others. Some wake up fully formed, others don’t and must be educated before they are sent out on their own where the possibilities of success and failure are made actual by a grading on a curve.

This is one of the latter; a hypnopompic drawing of a life of starts and stops. It began as one idea then became another, finally settling for both. A compromise negotiated by a third, together a threesome, but not of a carnal sort, more a confused collage. I’ll post it anyway with this explanation.

The walls of a prison is seen in all three parts. The top left shows a actual attempt at breaking out, begun in ‘dark of night’ but caught by spotlight. It’s a transit to the reality of work (the suit) made to look like art by graffiti, a youthful and anti-social gesture. Perhaps the reason for the incarceration was an earlier attempt to turn work into art.

Top right is just the opposite. Here ‘light of day’ the art object –in an obsolete medium, a canvas on easel– is real, but imprisoned. but the escape –this time to love, the nude– is an illusion.

The [European renaissance view of ] art as what you’d see through a window is history. Art, whether it paints over the vandalism or voyeurs the voyeur, stands still and silent. It’s locked up in book and blog.

And below is ‘objective’ ‘reality,’ as a sum of work and love that is the poshlost life as we know it. Here it is seen from outside the prison wall and sadly seen as another wall just as forbidding, a premature asphodel. The escape attempt from –and oddly, by as well– 40 years of dutiful adulthood, obedience to the social order etc, proved futile, merely opening one wall to face others.

An Uneasy Cohabitation

This posting is about art and alcohol as a saudade. That being a Portuguese word meaning a sadness for the lacking something that you never did or could have. Art and alcohol are both palliatives to, but not cures for this social anxiety which is this feeling that you are not really liked or respected by your peers, coworkers, &c. And to get them to like/respect you, you can pretend do be more like them than you really are. Alcohol makes this accepting of false acceptance easier to pull off, but it costs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You are never really sure which, because you were drunk.

If peer-bonding is difficult enough, pair-bonding is worse by orders of magnitude being by definition, but not so in practice, exclusive and permanent. And the extent to which alcohol appears to help, but actually hinders, is magnified correspondingly. no doubt, since you have your own horrors to recall here, I won’t regale you with mine. Except to say that wearing a mask at a party is one thing, being trapped in a disguise for years is another.

Alcohol is a self medication for that anxiety, the fallout of an unsuccessful adolescence. It’s the failing of the test of acceptance in Freud’s spheres of work and love; a failing and a losing out on the Gemütlichkeit of both peer and pair bondings. The simple facts of this drawing’s life are; no social, no symptom. It’s about giving up what could be good, rewarding, or fun about polite company to avoid revisiting all that’s been not so. Saudade.

The drawing makes concrete a fantasy; the uneasy cohabitation of a desired imaginary and a tolerated actual. The table-for-two scene is the same in the drawing and the painting in the drawing, but the lover is only in the painting, imagined by the imaginary painter. I created him to create her. The paradox of it is for the artist, being with the desired fantasy would require a drink, yet to pour himself that drink he needs to invert, abstract, deny than desired fantasy. Basically neither alcohol nor art, either together or separately will bring this fantasy to life in either the drawing or the real world..

Alcohol works sometimes. With it you can palliate the symptoms (the nausea or the angst, if you are of a philosophical-literary sort) that happens when you try to enjoy the good parts of a memory and/or fantasy at the same time as trying to deny the bad parts. With it you can be social. you can relax over a couple of beers with friends. You can share wine as a ‘romantic’ way to get to better know someone you’d like know better. Friends and a lover can be good to be with. Even I have some good memories, among the bad. Saudade.

Art can, too, function as a socializing mask that can be liked and respected and you with it. But art is a better ‘cure’ than alcohol. Yes, behind that mask, you are still alone; and therefore the person you’ll be relaxing with, getting to know better is just yourself, who are unlike a friend who can leave or a lover who can turn on you. Art is also an intoxicant, but it’s just the opposite of losing yourself in alcohol (or love?) With it, if you are lucky, persevere or both, you can find yourself instead. Art is more a mirror than a mask, more a window than a wall.

Mutter in secret … a sullen joy

“How vainly seek
The selfish for that
happiness denied…
And sigh for pleasure
they refuse to give, -
Madly they frustrate still
their own designs;”

from “Queen Mab”
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I.

Did you notice that the scenario–click to enlarge– is the same as the previous post? Think of the gentlemen’s club as the billboard; both have a naked woman attended to by empty suits as well as cash nearby. Both, too, are well lit in as theatrical/commercial way. In both postings there are exhibitionists.

Shouldn’t the youthful exhibitionist in the previous post be an romantic artist in his studio creating something personal, honest, and original, instead of taking a pseudo-revolutionary stance, merely reacting to someone else’s work in a comic book cliché borrowed for the occasion? More reactionary than revolutionary he postures before an image of an image. Yes, he could fall, tragically young. But he fears more a fall on the street, comic and amusing– at his expense–to the mob there. So safer he feels, up there.

Fast forward 40 yrs; The nude and suits of the billboard “art” have now come to life at a gentlemen’s club where each member of that mob has grown up to be either a plutocrat “…the wearer of a gilded chain That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites they joyfull watch,” or an ecdysiast whose “…features were fixed and meaningless, Yet animal life was there.”

And the youthful exhibitionist has become bitter and old; he has finally read “Queen Mab.” As an undergrad he, solitary on his romantic ledge, paid no more attention to poetry in Eng lit 201 than he did the politics in the street. But things aren’t all bad for our ex-romantic. He’s stepped off  his youthful perch, not by a leap but a cautious descent to the now safe street where he’s neither watched nor judged. Invisible, he gets into the show for free. He watches but can’t touch or take; but he is neither touched nor taken. He feels he’s safe down here now, an exhibitionist still.

II.

“… How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,
Who covet power they know not how to use,
And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give, -
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,
Pining regrets, and vain repentances,
Disease, disgust and lassitude pervade
Their valueless and miserable lives. …”

Or made into prose, sorry Shelley: …How the selfish vainly seek the happiness denied to them by their lack of virtue! They are blind and hardened. They hope for peace amid the storms of personal troubles. They covet power that they don’t know how to use. And they who sigh for pleasure that they refuse to give. Madly they frustrate their own designs; and where they hope to enjoy that quiet which virtue pictures, they find bitterness of soul, pining regrets, vain repentances, disease, disgust and lassitude pervade their valueless and miserable lives….

I read the whole thing quickly and that chunk caught my eye so I parsed it. Shelley, being a poet and all, mixed content up with rhyme and meter. But I, being poetry blind, to get at the content have to break it up again. Sorry again, “substance über form,” I’m just trying to understand what you said.

So who’s who? Who are the “The selfish”? “Who covet power they know not how to use, And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give”? Who “Madly … frustrate still their own designs”? An finally what is “that quiet to enjoy/Which virtue pictures”? These days certainly not the plutocrats Shelley condemns elsewhere in the poem. They don’t covet power, sadly what they covet is more of it, and that power is the pleasure taken, not given. Worse still, it’s the quiet of no morality–that which psychopaths enjoy–that the virtue of power pictures.

No, it’s more the artist who’s selfish &c. it’s the artist who covets power he wouldn’t know what to do with; who wants to be pleased but pleases no one. It’s the artist who neurotically frustrates his own plans; who knows no quiet of the virtuous. Shelley in his notes to the poem says “…employments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulness: the jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art…” Who more useless and ridiculous than an artist, be he young romantic or old cynic?

III.

You wrote this clever rant 200 yrs ago, you were 1/3 my age at the time, so I’m sure you’d understand my problems translating your florid language. Some things have changed. Love, while not free, can now be bought and sold legally by both sexes. Vegetarian options are on every menu. God has retired, laid off actually. But some things haven’t. Yes, the church and monarchies have fallen on hard times. And there have been many revolutions, but all that was changed is back or getting there. Really, only the costumes have changed; secular, self-made plutocrats are sitting where priest and king once did.

“Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,”

“When merciless ambition, or mad zeal,
Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field,
That, blind, they there may dig each other’s graves
And call the sad work glory,”

Artis pro Artista

What is art, let alone art for the artist’s sake? Is it a noun or a verb? I say both. On the left is an art as object, on the right it’s an action.

On the billboard, you no doubt recognize Manet’s ‘Picnic’. It’s a composite scene of several parts, all posed indoors. The figures are out of scale relative to one another, the lighting is all mixed up, even the woman on the left’s head and body aren’t even from the same model. Manet did lots of little things  to be just a little off contemporary standards, making the nude not a goddess or other ancient beauty was just one. The sum of which is what pissed everyone off.

Today, we don’t get it, the painting looks like any other 19th century ‘grand’ nude. We don’t see the subtle yet offending differences between this and Delacroix’ ‘Death of Sardinopolis’ and Ingres’ ‘Le Bain Turc’ not to mention lesser works like Gerome’s ‘Phryne before the Areopagus’ and slave market scenes and Millais’ ‘Knight Errant.’ We see the obvious similarities instead, we note how much these art objects look alike, at least when compared to the variety of objects called art these days.

‘Art is purposiveness without purpose’ –Immanuel Kant

Back to the billboard, that would-be ‘art’ is not on display as an exalted masterpiece carefully preserved and protected in a museum; it’s a cheap copy exposed the elements, it’s just one of many visual diversions one encounters in life. Ars gratia artis, it ain’t. It is no longer an object of beauty and end in itself (Kant). Not that our interest in it was ever disinterested. We’ve let this and other art become a means to an end, where the pleasure we derive is pride (elitist superiority in the appreciation of it,) lust (imagining enjoying the ministrations of the naked hotties,) and gluttony/avarice (owning, buying and selling the things.)

Worse than that it’s become a piece of propaganda telling us that if we buy (insert product name here) we will soon be enjoying such a picnic. but as usual the propagandists have been too cheap and the billboard paste fails, showing us what’s behind the scene. Art is “all about the benjamins.”

‘Art is a human activity consisting in this,
that one man consciously by means of certain signs,
hands on to others feelings he has lived through,
and that others are infected by those feelings
and experience them.’ –Leo Tolstoy

‘It is in the space between inner and outer world,
which is also the space between people
–the transitional space–that intimate relationships
and creativity occur’  –D.W. Winnicott

And at the right is the part of art that is verb, an action, a gesture. A gesture spontaneous (Winnicott) or planned, a gesture recorded, repeatable, and remembered. artists are not disinterested in their art[ing]; Kant’s –as opposed to Tolstoy’s or Winnicott’s– aesthetics is all from the art observer point of view. The latter gents include the artist in aesthetics. Art is existential  not idealistic/essential philosophy-wise I say. When art is a verb, a subject is required and he or she is very interested in what going on.

Crudely put, artists are exhibitionists and, sad to say, are often received as such. Sadder still, because what really obscene is what’s done to the object by others. The artist here, exhibits(expresses?) himself at art (as object,) not with it. He flashes a’ transitional space,’ quite removed from his fellow creatures who go about their business on the streets below. An e-metaphor for this semi-aesthetic exhibitionism would be blogging.

‘It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found’  –D.W.W.

en passant

Chess is like music to me. With music I know what all the notes mean, where to put my fingers as well as how long to keep them there. But I can’t, from a string of them, create a tune. Likewise in chess I know the rules, the moves of each piece. But I can’t win the game. Double click on the drawing to make it bigger.

Being social–working and loving–is like chess and music for me. I know the rules but have never won. This sketch tries to explains. The two gamers are metaphors or stereotypes of work and love. One is a body, a naked animal, without the clothes of society and the other is a suit with no human inside–a corporate sociopath. They flaunt as well as flout the rules. No rules, no game, no society. Pre-lapsarian or post-apocalyptical? Who can know?

The couple(rs) is/are on the far side of the chess board and a solitary piece is on the near. That piece is a ‘promoted’ pawn shown as an inverted rook. The rook, be it chariot or castle, is the only chess piece that is a thing  not a person. A pawn, the least powerful ‘man’ on the board is ironically ‘promoted.’ to inverted [perverted] piece. Now he’s a mere possession, useful for this now-over contest. But it’s back to square one for the next–if there is a next one.

Ok, doc what does this drawing mean? Society’s stereotypical CEO and his mistress or my metaphorical shadow and anima? Psychotherapy, too, is like music and chess. I know the words and–in theory, several theories–what they mean. But I still can’t make sense of  it. It is not a picture of the fantasies and dreams I drew as a kid, when I believed in those things. It is more free associations said aloud, spoken to no one, a blog.

Fishing

The inspiration for this one was an old drawing for an advice to the lovelorn column; a woman on a boat fishing for, then measuring and tossing back little man after little man, as not good enough to keep. Later I redrew it with the man and the woman ‘in the same boat.’ I just found that sketch, maybe I’ll ink and color that one, too.

Those concepts were thought up and drawn years ago, but I still hold the same opinion of the situation. Men and women may be in the same boat, but they have different means and different goals. But in this one, the illustration is the same, but the metaphor is thrown wider, as I tend to do these days. It’s about–once again–the Freudian necessities of happiness, Work and Love.

The empty suit is Work. It’s a role played in public, attempting to get the attention of groups of people, having them to acknowledge and reward you in that role. One meaning of the metaphor is that all these suits kinda look the same, another is that they are functionally empty. But a more important meaning is that you can change clothes, you are not identical with them.

And Love shown as a naked body, a metaphor for sex, of course, but beyond that also as what you really are. you can’t trade your body for another like you can a suit or a job/career. It is what it is. Love is also not a public activity, being naked in public opens you to ridicule, arrest and ill health. But in private, love is still trying to get attention (acknowledgement and rewards,) but from only one person at a time.

I flip things around again, reversing Love (one on one) and Work (a group effort.) The suit–a la Love–pursues, begs for the attention of a single naked ‘person’ and the semi-naked woman seeking the attention of a school–as with Work, a group– of little ‘suits.’ This scene shows how unlikely success will be for either party. Mermaids and suits aren’t gonna hook up–their equipment doesn’t match. Neither are the flashing woman and her fish-men, they are more food than friend to her.

The moral is: Work doesn’t love and Love doesn’t work. But there is Art.

Pet or Pest?

The consumer epoch is over. The plutocrats don’t need us, mere consumers, anymore to briefly fondle their money and make it grow. The technology is here that lets them play their games with themselves. No fuss, no muss, once they finish buying off the ‘government, of the people, blah blah blah’ that is.

Shown: plutocrats playing with themselves. Pre-nups and golden parachutes already lubricate in and out. The plutocrats know better than to think, as we still do–sorta, that voting matters, justice for all exists, and anyone who works hard can be a success. They’ve got it , they’re gonna keep it.

So what will remain for us? Will we become pets or pests? As pets, we’d spin in our little wheels getting nowhere, no closer to the goal that’s held out of our reach but not out of our sight. Thank you big media.

Will our futile squeaking continue to amuse the plutocrats? I think not. They’ll rather see us as pests ‘living’ on their discarded crumbs. They’ll begrudge us even that. The trap is set with the coins of the realm, two side of which are incorporation and dehumanization. Mansions and mistresses, jets and limos for them; layoffs, furloughs, ‘going-darks’ for us.

Technology has served the plutocrats well. It’s promoted them, the savvy/greedy sociopaths, to absolute monarchs. Will technology turn on them, too, as they have turned it on us?

Perhaps the artificially intelligent machines will read in their spare time. But will they read the Buddha and Kant or will they read the Bible and Nietzsche? I hope they read the former and act accordingly.

Afflatus to Acedia and Back

‘Life swings like a pendulum backward
and forward between pain and boredom’

‘…aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists,
to a large extent, in the fact that,
when we enter the state of pure contemplation,
we are raised for the moment above all willing,
above all desires and cares’

–Arthur Schopenhauer

For Schopenhauer, life osculates because of Will, which is an aimless, amorphous necessity that an individual life is a perceptible objectification of. What you personally desire, or think you desire or even think you should desire is but Will acting through you. Sadly though, once you have got what you think you wanted, you don’t want it any more, you want something else that you don’t have . Life, as it’s controlled by the Will, is suffering and ennui in alternation.

‘Pure contemplation’ of art is possible; one can lose oneself in art and be lifted one above ‘all desires and cares’ of the ordinary. But it is not probable. Art is not just contemplated, it is created and consumed as well.

Creating art even if it for your own contemplation–art as an end in itself–is to be fully under the control of Will. Artists suffer the pain of ‘I’ve got this great idea in my head but I can’t get it out there on paper!’ then the ennui of the ‘Now what? It’s done, but it’s not as good as I thought it would be.’ It’s just lust then satiation then lust again and so on. Yes, those are sexual terms, but try psychological ones too; the artist as bi-polar, manic during creation and depressed after.

If the art is a means to an end so much the worse. Now what you desire as well as others’ lust objects matters. You and the others are eye-deep in the muck of the living Will, you all are lustful and greedy. Bad enough, but worse are the self-proclaimed ‘connoisseurs’, falsely thinking of themselves as better than mere consumers, they are in addition jealous and prideful. Working artists must compromise their desires and cares with those of the consumers, the result is that ‘Pure contemplation’ becomes impossible for anyone.

But what about the drawing? The scene, from an 19th century photo, is a crowded room, there are men in suits and a naked woman. The men are making idols of her. The scene is surreal, a real woman (plus copies of her) and real men together, yet separate.

The scene is not like the Eakins paintings of a real sculptor and a real model. It is more like the ‘Slave Markets’ of Gerome and his ilk; voyeuristic, soft-porn pretending to be art. I don’t have the details but I think the slave markets were wildly commercially and (at the time) critically successful, and the sculptor/model pictures were not.

The Geromes are art as a means more than an end; the paintings are objects of Will, exoticism hiding eroticism (lust and satiation in alternation, again) and therefore to be consumed not contemplated. The photo, likewise, shows a market, where instead of a group of centuries-old near-eastern stereotypes bidding to buy a naked, fleshy slave girl, we see only somewhat less antique identically smocked, coifed and mustachioed ‘artists’ visually consuming a naked, fleshy model.

In the drawing the real woman is gone and replaced, not by an image of a obedient slave girl, but block of plaster; the sexy parts remain, but they’d be cold and unresponsive to the touch. And the occidental creator stereotypes are also gone and not replaced by Gerome’s oriental consumers. what’s left of them are their empty, dehumanized uniforms, updated to 21st century dress-for-success suits to mirror the cast torso, a copy of an ancient original. And the brushes suspended, impotent, perhaps drugged, between what could have been artists and what’s yet to be art.

Is there art here? Is this drawing in and of itself, art ? is there a picture of art in it? is any one ‘raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares’ by it? It doesn’t matter. Will is, of course, necessary; if you don’t get hungry you don’t eat. So art as will is not necessarily a bad thing…and there are those weightless moments between the suffering and the boredom.

With an Apology to Rats

As a visual artist I’m limited in my methods, I must communicate a concept or situation via a syllogism to my chosen/wished-for audience. I’ll say: Rats do A and “suits” do A, therefore: suits are rats, rats in suits.

The metaphor’s back-story is thus: Rats live in a world parallel to ours but generally out of sight; they enter ours to steal our food, bite us, and give us disease. Suits do this too. We are aware of them both, not because we see them but that we are hungry, bitten and sick. But an apology to rats is due, they don’t know better, they are amoral not immoral. No rat would sink a ship and drown the crew just to steal the cargo.

—–

I could go on with google and wikipedia, searching ‘ethics’ then cutting and pasting quotes ad nauseum here. But I won’t. It would be wrong, not very wrong–not much suffering would be added to the world–but it’d still wrong as it would be both a still be theft of intellectual property and a headache for those who would be readers.

Some thinkers say only if I intend to add suffering to the world am I bad, and am bad even before I do anything. Some say I’m bad if what I do is bad no matter what I planned. Some quantify suffering by say a little bad here is worth it, if there is a greater good there. And some others think one should not care about the world at large but only oneself. That if everybody did this the world would have less total suffering. Hard to say which is right, but probably not the last one. Look around, does not general suffering increase when selfishness gets out of hand?

—–

Marx said that capital is dead labor. That doesn’t seem quite right, seems it’s more like stored labor, like a battery stores energy. Batteries and machines work together to produce more batteries and machines. Likewise capital and labor work together to make more capital for the capitalists and more labor for the laborer.

Not that there is a hard and fast divide between capital and labor these days. But there is still a divide, now it’s between the producers, capital and labor lumped together, and the takers, back to the rat image, the suits. Our food and houses are gained by labor and stored as capital. Rats can steal our food and live in  our houses for free. Do do, metaphorically, the suits.

In this economy, neither the workers nor the stockholders (labor and capital) are gaining anything but more suffering. Only the suits, via self-granted bonuses, thrive. Another point for the metaphor.

—–

So why the mechanical women?  As a counterpoint to animals in one kind of suit, the ‘escorts’ are machines in another. neither are human, yet both pretend to be such. They are chimera and cyborg wearing human costumes.

The suits don’t like being humans. Acting like animals, ‘red in tooth and claw’ they can destroy and discard humans without thinking of the consequences beyond their personal, selfish momentary needs. But it’s still messy, when mistreated humans make such a fuss.  Interacting with machines is preferred; machines can be destroyed or discarded, too, but without a whimper. The solution? Treat humans like machines. Metaphor complete.