to a large extent I have given up on trying to understand the world, and therefore have given up on trying to explain myself within the world. if I do not understand where the world is, and certainly not where it is heading, then I do not know my own place in it. this is an easy conclusion to come to, and perhaps it's cowardly, but I certainly don't think it's something tired and overused. there is something inherently surreal about the world, and perhaps it is some kind of lazy historicism to call the current age 'the end of history', but it certainly makes sense. Kurt Vonnegut wrote,
I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. the best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. this theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. they are super-sensitive. they keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realise that there is any danger whatsoever.
I think those words now aren't only prescient but quite intelligent. but in its prescience it also has a time-specific quality to it. there are many adventures that mankind have undertaken; some damaged us more than others, and some seemingly tore us apart that we might not heal, but this might be 'the end of adventure'. the idea that we may have had our day—that man reached a pinnacle and thereafter can only fall—is one that every day has more weight. a man must be very careful when he makes these sorts of proclamations; as doomsayers have been proven wrong almost every time they have sprung up, but we also can't lose ourselves in the colourful blur of meaningless optimism that post-modernity promises.
so the picture above showed two tips jars at a coffeeshop. the idea was that you were casting your vote with your change. the coffeeshop sits on the crossroads which ties together four worlds. one way takes you to the East Asian (Chinese, mostly) campus of the university, one way is to the Magistrates Court, one way is to the degraded part of the centre of the city, and the last way is to the arts school. the clientele is therefore quite a comprehensive selection of the modern city society, and yet the change was not evenly distributed. it's harder to tell from the picture, but there was three or four times as much change, and with more valuable coins, in the glass titled "Platitude & Happiness". the glass titled "FREE will", before I put my change into it, was nearly completely empty.
either this says something important and worrying about humanity, or it says something terrifying about humanity. either, it is simply the richer people who want Platitude & Happiness, because they have already made their money, they spend their money well and they tip well. this means that they have more purchasing power, which means that society is damned to go down the road of meaningless consumerism. or, it means that there are simply more people who value Platitude & Happiness than people who value FREE will—that the British penchant for sarcasm has become fully, and with self-awareness, nihilistic—and this means that we're already at the end of that road.
earnestly, Elliot
P.S. on the website that I found this quote (while looking it up for the exact wording), the quote underneath it is "from a withered tree, a flower blooms" - Buddha. so maybe all isn't lost, and all we have to do is make it through the hard times that I see coming.
