Feb 10,11, 2000

CONSCIOUS CULTURE™

By Landon Sealey

Rock n’ Roll is all life and the value of all life. It cannot be a polity because it is the value of polity. The essence of Rock n’ Roll is "take it or leave it".

Rock n’ Roll is the essence of form, sound, and attention, a performance of the literature of soul, of God - it is the very movement of light and sound, of the sensual creatrix of the cosmos. Rock n’ Roll is all life and the value of all life. Rock n’ Roll is the theatre of the soul, a performance of the act of culture, of the freedom of walking, talking, eating, sleeping, living, loving and dying. Rock n’ Roll is the Sabbath of human invention and intention - the sound of "it is done". Rock n’ Roll can be just about anything we assign value to - it is the art of memory, of civilization itself. Rock n’ Roll is holy, a performance of our collective ancestry with the divine and the profane, the heavens and the earth, the cosmic dance.

We are a Gnostic Synthesizer of knowledge, Body and sound. We are, in all our actions and thoughts, shadows walking on the scales of a sleeping Dragon, our hopes and dreams forging the crystal that sits at the cave door, waiting for the sun to rise.

And when the Serpent finally opens its wings, when our shadow rises like the sun, our technological and cultural structures will be cathedrals of light, when we open our wings, we will move from light to light, we will know ourselves as the night. We will know ourselves as the sun to the earth, the sound of soul, we will listen to and drink in the great cosmic iron, the irony that we are one body and that Body is the original polity, the original tyrant that lurks in us even as it repulses us to blind rebellion, rebellion against the soul of vitality and imagination. That every war upon our planet is a war against the imagination and body - it is a sex war more sentient and profane than any that has ever occurred - a war against no entity but its eternal lover, its Inamorata - war and social movement, like the earth itself, has a "climatology" that can be regulated by the sheer force of human imagination and the technologies by which that imagination is stored and shared, its mythology. And when we are one, we will know what irony is again in the dramatic illusion of event that is modern communication media, that humanity is at once the greatest force upon this planet yet can know itself only as the planet upon which it lives, and that its communication technology rivals the biotechnology of the soul itself, a body of water in which we may view our sacred image upon the silver screen of time and call it "us". The irony that the only body on this planet that speaks for everybody on this planet is our creations - Jesus is Ford.

We have re-created the very polity we have feared so much as to forget it, to rationalize it. The more I listen to my Tele-Vision (the experience of the local experience of my life held firmly in time and place and the nonlocal or global experience of media art that creates a temporal shift in consciousness when the body views an "event" outside the horizon of 5 senses, creating a quasi-event or even meta-event, a sense of participation in global climatology by the sheer force of listening or viewing, one eye on the sun of one’s cognitive faculty, a whole body bathing in the black sun of the unconscious or "archetype" that is the art of civilization, of learning and sharing in sympathy with a collective body, be it the body of humanity or the body of cosmos - a psychosexual/ecological unity.) The more I listen to my TV, the more people make sense to me. Technology is sexy. Isn’t it ironic?

For instance, isn’t it ironic that the last great voice of cultural revolution has been consumed by the very body it revolted against, made, even, that body stronger? Is that not a great irony? Is it not an even greater irony that it preserved the democratic principle of the structures of production, distribution, and consumption that regulate that body (the "Establishment"), that regulate, also, global "farming" - the earth itself being, now, the resource base of every culture. The very strictures by which we might have been irrevocably repressed, despite all historical effort to the contrary. Isn’t it ironic that the same system which made the atom bomb created the means by which it would find redemption from social hypocrisy in the last half of the 20^th century? A hypocrisy prophesied since the time of Christ but avoided by the very system (the system and its people) that made that body free? We are a Body, a Body of myth, sound and knowledge; a body of structure, information, and communication; we are a body of light, water, an metaphor; we are a body of art, entertainment and culture, of sympathy. We are a body of sun, earth, and creative intent. WE are the Body of God. We are the gods - gods of entertainment - gods of divine irony, of rock n roll, of tongue, of repetition, of the music of language, body, and soul, of Tele-Vision. Isn’t it ironic that the only revolutionary thing left to say is that there’s nothing wrong with the world today? It’s probably the only stupid thing to say as well(laugh). What I would do to have someone Really laugh at me - then I wold be free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last. Amen. Awomen. Abody. A body of light and shadow. Everybody, now..

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky…

--John Lennon

Isn’t it ironic that, after several thousands of years of morality, it is our sense of irony that makes us free? The great tragedies and comedies throughout time have known this. Where is our irony today? People that believe in aliens and auras are writing better books than scholars. Scholars are writing more imaginative fictions than people that "channel" their imagination or muse. The faculty of reason and the faculty of imagination form one body of knowledge and communication. Where, then, is the audience for the art and entertainment of a global culture? That audience is the citizenry of the 21^st century, and they exist in a Republic right now, a Republic whose only power and authority is the human imagination and cosmic sympathy.

For scholarship that ignores the body of imagination and historical irony becomes merely futurism or what we call "New Age", which is synonymous, to me, with "no irony" (not a criticism so much as an observation of religion’s poorly crafted poetry posing as a-cultural entertainment or highly crafted poetry taken too literally -i.e. seen only as its ironic/mythological structure of communication and not also as an image of its creators - taken too seriously, really. In the absence of a broad culture referent for identity such as technology, what for Egyptians would have been the great pyramids, individuals become lost in themselves - that is, a citizen of the 21^st century as a heightened individuality but also a greater responsibility to enact "culture" or the participation in some reality outside the purely utilitarian and thereby, outside the broad cultural understanding of technocracy or the ability for a culture’s technologies of culture and communication to shed light upon humanity’s search for cosmic identity and role, take on their own technology of self or soul, what becomes an amateur amalgamation of cultural icons and philosophies usually set against the backdrop of some cultural ill from politics to "evil" or simply cultural cynicism or malaise, not realizing that the storm going on outside the senses is a good sign that they are participating in a global cultural climatology, a new element or phenomena of the earth called global communication technology. The great irony or The great tragedy of our age, perhaps, being that we may yet possess the knowledge to farm the earth productively for all, but that it is only through the ability to share knowledge though story and myth that we might make it relevant or helpful to the human soul - story and myth is now becoming an invaluable resource to modern man, the ability to simplify and digest forces beyond one’s immediate control in terms of both the human body viewed relative to cosmos or "all time" and relative to perennial value systems such as ownership and human dignity. And global technology, as well as everything else, is turning each person or "nexus" into his or her own polity, responsible for responding to an almost literary dimension of sensuality and cultural persuasion, the irony of this being that the internet has, in essence created a global anarchy/utopia of the soul which grants both increased freedom and limitation, or artistic challenge faced everytime we look at a monitor or converse about the virtual "world" we see mainly through text and electronic images. This is ironic in that an information culture becomes full of people who feel compelled to communicate but don’t know what to say or what they would like to hear, what every citizen of every age listens for - the sound of "everything’s ok", a sound that, more and more, becomes or clearly generated by social artistic "trends" or even archetypes, images processed sympathetically over periods of time - i.e. each global citizen is going "relativistic", performing active social science and artistic response in order to fill in the temporal/ecological and mythology gap created by our species’ over-consumption of resource. More important a note today in a global web depicting so much, it seems at times, of what is not ok. In conclusion, a spiritual wounding is created by our species- wide effect upon the planet, creating an eco-imaginative sympathy traditionally dealt with by re-creating human dignity or social rights and freedoms but, now, for the first time in human history, necessitating, like early structures of cultural communication (i.e. the Bible) and dimensionality (science, telephone), and resource distribution (railroad) as much a revision of the perception/experience of self as a revision of the perception/experience of whole or collective (both the body of humanity and the body of the earth as an organism of sympathetic diversity and unity - conscious Body) A re-perception of the allocation of Body and Boundaries revisions our sense of the phenomenal or objective world as it impinges itself and is formed by our imaginations and has been formed by humanity’s imagination as preserved by cultural/political structures of production, distribution, and consumption - the age of myth or knowledge is equally the age of chaos in which every communication structure form the body of literature to the body of government to the body of formalized knowledge and communication technology becomes as phenomenal a body as the earth itself. And we discover, perhaps, that creation of cultural orders has merely and monumentally expanded Pandora’s box or the chamber of "darkness", at least, the level at which we may consciously or self-reflectively operate within the ever-present "heart of darkness, necessitating from us only that we sympathize that that darkness, like the earth herself, is possessed of a pre-existent order or creative intent which is us. Alas, we are the gods. But in the absence of such cosmological humanism we, ironically, desire ever the more the sympathy of some higher being, whether it be an technologically advanced alien race or God himself, for who else could possibly save us from ourselves - not noting, of course the literary resonance to such a plea - "humanity, know thyself". Not noting also that are technological polity is the ordered response to that same plea made thousands of years ago by our ancestors when we spoke the first words - it is a ritual cry now answered by the world below. Once we surrender ourselves and the "mess" we have made the planet to forces (the gods) more knowledgeable than ourselves, we ironically find ourselves again as well as an increased responsibility to remold the image of mankind - we have, now, the tools to share such a vision. If you are reading a piece of paper or a computer screen right now, that vision, that place, is already in existence.

We must conclude that technology and media have had as much or more influence upon modern man and woman as did the world embodied by the goddess/woman of ancient Paleolithic. Therefore, we must treat tech/media with the same regard/disregard as one would treat any man or woman. Technology is sexy - it effects every aspect of our being and, therefore, in structure, conveys more information as a psychosexual (and even biological/ecological) phenomena than does the totality of its content. Therefore, the only way to make use of tech and preserve our modern sanity/freedom is to alter the way we respond to media and even our perception of it. This, of course, is the same as saying that we must reinvent the individual.

Midwife, matchmaker,

our grandmother, our grandfather,

Xpiyacoc, Xmucane,

let there be planting, let there be the dawning

of our invocation, our sustenance, our recognition

by the human work, the human design,

the human figure, the human mass.

-The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life

(The one small leaf of divine will the fire didn’t find)

Thank you...

This is a psychotropic response or even a psychedelic response as technology’s effects reach right down to our sexuality, making the 21^st century body and enjoyment of it as ritualistic and sacred an art as cave art was to ancient peoples, especially since psychosexual response to modern/primitive times or the lack thereof has a direct influence on the fate, destiny, morality, sexuality, and mortality of the planetary culture which worldwide communication/entertainment makes possible.

I woke up in a damp dark cave, trembling to the last remains of my will and being, resonating between the end of what seemed now like a dream - a very deadly beautiful dream. The walls were colored an even deeper shade of black, of red ochre. Beyond I heard the breath of some rough beast, and my beatific terror drew me further. Greens and oranges flashed in my eyes as they adjusted to the dim light, my will slowly moving to the end of a fingertip as I touch the wall, which seems to be breathing. It feels as flesh and responded to my touch. A thick damp steam emitted from above me, burning my skin even as the beast receded back into the low ceiling above me. My sheer arousal and terror reached up above me and found an opening and, pushing my way inside I discovered that I wasn’t pushing at all, but being pulled completely by its undulating rhythm from which I could not distinguish my self from the life pulling me in. I felt at home for the first time in my life (and what was that life but everything here now?) as a warm elixir of what must have been this body’s flesh and blood engulfed me. Drinking, hungrily, I too, then, became as a beast, moving forward to the escalating rhythm and writhing of what felt, now, like my body. Transformed before I would be aware, from my tomb to my womb, I raged against my sheer dumbness. The blood and water welcomed my rage, fed it even, as with every breath of my movement I became more, now seeming to envelop my home, this other body, into my own. Nothing could stop me until I met the face of my terror once again, and kissed it on the tongue. All at once, I was inside and out. We warmed and fed each other from above and below, the two being indistinguishable to either of us, two lovers, two bodies of flesh and light rocking back and forth for what seemed like forever - there was nothing else but us... --Sun and Earth.

A spontaneous story of creation, a spontaneous myth/fable of the late 20^th century - the story of my blood - psychotropic artifact.

...history is the plot of every story, whether we like it or not - the history we expand every day with our bodies, self-sacrifice, and the history we finish and create everyday with our hearts and our imaginations. The history that begins when the body rises and ends when the body goes to sleep, day and night are the original polity - the polity and the body that is born free every morning and sets in the dark ocean of the imagination every night, the historically arrogant and archetypally prideful ocean from which the systems of culture might be crated to make you born free before you were born - and every human creation was born from the sound of a sleeping or "sacrificed" body. To be good citizens/artists we must be good listeners. If the purpose of history is the evolution of communication (in all its myriad forms), then we, as in the beginning, must be good listeners to be good repeaters. My name is Landon Sealey, and I only repeat what I hear. If this makes any sense at all, or if it doesn’t, it is because and thanks to the sacrifice of body that each individual performs in and out of time, on and off - line.

Of Light and Love - US