symbol of transcendence, system of mediocrity

I wanted to share this picture. It’s been the stock banner that has accompanied any official or marketing-related messages from the u. of bird rising from the ashes.

He’s a human archetype—a median of racial morphologies--a Jungian phantasm.

His suit is fitting for an open coffin viewing. His face has a smearing of confidence with a heavy helping of mediocrity's bosom thrown in. He’s the last guy you could imagine having wild sex let alone going nuts and stabbing a neighbor. No, he’s a teacher at the university of bird rising from the ashes—the ashes of a now-extinguished cigarette. He’s worked his way up in corporate America by kissing ass. Now he’s ready to share all that he knows about business with students the world round. He’s a teacher at the university of the bird rising from the ashes.

He’s never had a drink. He only had a coffee once when he had to work that long stretch to cover up for his boss’ blunders. He comes home and watches several television shows while eating a meal the recipe for which accompanied the crockpot in which it was cooked. He has a small dog with a skin rash. It’s teeth chatter as it bites at tangle of fur, dried saliva, and the orange paste of its body’s immune response oozing out. When he takes off his suit and puts on a pair of elastic waistband denim jeans, he’s ready to teach for the next 4 hours at the university of bird rising from the ashes of a long-extinguished dream. He's saving the money he's making teaching part time for his own dream--a larger TV and a cozier couch. His 401k safely continues its monetary mitosis, accreting into a larger and larger sum.

And, drowsy from a long day of perfectly contented labor, our protagonist from the banner undresses from his elastic waistband denim jeans, slips into a pair of pajamas that his mother had given to him in a past Christmas. He takes a few pills for ailments that only his doctor could detect, and descends into a dream. The contents of his dream are nothing, a nothing fueled by tonight’s chicken-rice-tomato sauce casserole. He's maintaining a body destined to become the boat's ballast. This guy's no rocker.

Nothing risen, nothing gained, nothing learned our organic intellectual, the man with heaps of practical skills, teaches like his boss bosses him--by the book. There's no room for creativity, no room for real thinking. No, the students perform to carefully pre-determined measures. That's the only hold on education's reality this man has. He teaches according to the class program laid before him, and for that he is duly compensated to the tune of $800 extra dollars every five weeks. He'll have that TV and couch by Christmas.

And so our protagonist from the banner of the university of the bird rising from the ashes continues to plan, to dream about a future with one minor gain. Slowly he accumulates things as part of his conquest of lack.

my cat boojie

I had a cat. Her name was Boojie. She was an orange tabby. She lived to be very old, too old for her own good. This was my aunt’s assessment. I was content to place a chair between her and the sink, so that she could continue to drink from the tap. She was a creature of habit. So was I. And so I kept her alive much longer than her body could permit to maintain that lie that we both perpetrated as creatures of habit. Death is a fairy tail. Let us believe that we go about our routine, continue in our habits, but one day silently we fade into the slumber of death. Not so.

The day my aunt and uncle came to pick me and Boojie up, it was time to send my cat, unwillingly into her long night. I fed her a can of wet food. I fancied her feast a last meal. While she had not chosen it herself, she obligingly gorged it down. It would be the first to come up when the veterinarian gave her a fatal dose of anesthetic.

My aunt accompanied me as we entered the room. My cat, being the grouchy feline she was, hissed and growled. Her hair was matted from her own inability to groom. She was 19 at the time. I was 20. We were two companions, one old, one still young, who shared a lifeline for a long time. I was unwilling to leave her at the fork in the road. My aunt helped me to realize that I had to make that turn and leave Boojie behind. Her rationale was brutally pragmatic. If the cat cannot take care of itself, then it's time; that’s the rationale of automatons. When the clock no longer tells time it must be disposed. There is no chance of making it a relic, a collector’s item, a souvenir—something with historicity. Bodies are best left to rot, to give their elements back to the soil and the air. Decay is the youngest form of life; it is the context for birth. Cat’s aren’t clocks, but I could fit my own mysticism within my aunt’s pragmatic cosmology.

The veterinarian did a simple check and determined that Boojie’s kidneys were small and atrophied. Likely my cat’s inability to filter her blood would lead to a slower and perhaps more macabre demise. The anesthetic would be a swift and humane departure. The veterinarian injected Boojie. Immediately she fought back. Since I was holding her, she did what any vicious feline does when disturbed. With all her might she dug into my arm with her front paws and used her back paws to kick and dig into my arm. Growling, scratching, and biting she registered her discontent in the flesh of my arm. Then the anesthetic took effect.

She growled slowly and began to violently empty the contents of her stomach. The reverse peristaltic reaction rendered her lithe cat frame a visible example of digestion. Over and over, her body undulated to the wave of peristaltic spasm and her last meal came forth. Then she began to quiver and shake violently with vomit smeared across her face. At that point Boojie was no longer my cat.

To see a cat in its final throws of life is shocking and violent. My once graceful companion teetered on oblivion and acted as if she were a mannequin with a few of its strings tangled up. Its movements were base, less orchestrated. In this state I knew that life wasn’t fragile. No, life is a monstrosity. Its desire to live extends so far as to kill in order to survive. My cat, after all, was a predator. I probably had eaten some meat, the product of an industry of genocide that slaughters and processes millions of living organisms hourly. My cat’s body at that point was an obscenity; it rendered that poetic vision of life a farce. It revealed the moody and rank interior of life’s violent force. The graceful ballet of a cat in play was stripped away, first slowly by infirmity, and stripped altogether more violently by the vet’s needle. I realize that dying is hard for all of us. What’s even harder is to see the body of a loved one become an inarticulate mass of decay, a writhing spasm of muscle twitching and nervous activity. The final sparks of life are much like a clock that is losing time. What once made the living organism sensible was its carefully choreographed routine, a life in the dance of survival. Removing its ability to perform that dance renders the body a less sensible and perverse version of its former self. Our minds must adjust, but the initial encounter is shocking, utterly shocking. I killed my cat.

Boojie held on after her strings were cut. She lay there, almost as if asleep. The veterinarian probed her body with her stethoscope. “Her little heart won’t give up.” The monster still pulsed. Life sparked on indifferent to the blow the organism had received. With gross motor activity ended and a brain perhaps slowly being starved of oxygen, her weak pulse, a creature of its own habit, continued on. The vet injected more anesthetic into her, and brought all life to an end.

relics

Our bodies are relics from a long-forgotten past. There's an ocean inside us all. We've trained ourselves to listen to that inner voice, but a language older than words motivates our bodies. The neuron is a new-comer onto the scene. Its reflexive orchestration is even newer. Consciousness, situated in a self is even newer than this. Yet we continue to chase the voice, our god, do its bidding. It's the riddle of steel. The bidding of ideas is stronger than any metal. People sacrifice for an abstract agglomeration of colors and shapes. If it's a flag it signifies ideas grander in scope than we could ever possibly experience. Yet we continue to believe that we're free. We continue to believe that our destinies lie before us as a rational goal.

The logic of mass is stronger. The logic of bodies is longer. The logic of the ocean is older. It waves crash upon our inner sea its contents are a slow achievement of eons of molecular arrangements. To consider how exterior we are to ourselves is alienating. Yet we are but a shoal, a coral reef upon this ocean of time. The logic of life which belongs to us isn't divine. It's an alchemy of luck and the persistence of chemical bonds. They find the short distance. They find the path of least resistance. Yet there's no motive to the chemical. There's no motive to the atom. It has properties that function within and in accordance to our physical universe. Purely alien in all regards are the constituent elements of our bodies, of all things, to our ideas. Yet we follow the inner voice, not the crash of waves from the inner ocean upon our reef. We continue to live out a logic that is alien to itself. Simulation is a sine qua non of our reality. It is an inescapable logic of using symbolic representation. Words are but an outgrowth of our inner world picture.

We are, as I said, relics from a long forgotten time. While the years separate us from our moment of departure we are still here at the departure gate. We have not left that time. Our bodies have a historicity much older than any human culture. Our bodies speak of a world of purely exterior relations. Nothing is defined by anything else. That's a fiction that we must rely upon to use our vocabulary. It's our concession to simulation. The real is but a constrained truth that we maintain to recognize the purely happenstance way that our speech and our symbols, our inner world, relates to its exterior.

As I said we are relics from a long forgotten time. There's an ocean inside us all.