"Fuck reality! Who cares about reality?" (Danny Fields 1967-1971)

(From Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
edited by Legs McNeil,Gillian McCain)

What is reality?
Is it the objective order of things? Is it the world suspended in the web of the natural laws of causation? The way things are? The world as a pure white snow? A virgin not yet polluted by the voracious filthy randiness of the nihilism of imagination and creativity... the unspoiled IT... the Being?

What is its opposite? Its anthitesis? The 'unreality'? Is 'reality' defined by the absence of 'unreality'? Can there even be a reality without it? Really? What is day without a night? Love without hate?

If the real is reduced to what IS, safely quarrantined from all that merely 'appears': from all the contrivance... from chimera and phantasm, then it is logical! Then it is reliable and can be tamed by rationality! Then, however, it is also the escapeologist's worst nightmare... the omnicage... rigid order of things the confinment of which can never be issued... so permanent... hopelessly helpless... helplessly hopeless...

And still we are a mistery to ourselves... a great puzzle with its eternal twists...

Ludicrously hard to second-guess, to call in question and doubt, the objective world of nature stands tall and supreme, mocking our futile attempts to handle it. Whatever we do, say or think, whatever we intend with our conducts and whatever its effects, whatever our conscious or unaware reaction to whatever triggers it – we can never really replicate nor portray what really is. Or at least so it seems. We can never grasp the complexity and immensity of what is. The World is the Being and the Being is, independent of human existence and influence. Human existence is but a sheer moment, a dot denied the privilege of extension that both time and space enjoy in context of the actual eternity of shapes and modes that the Being might or may not take. In the face of eternity the temporality of human existence is ridiculous and absurd... it simply vanishes. Whatever the shape, it is always due to the Beings inner course, its essence, the truth, the technology of its core that we only occasionally get to glimpse at, sense its existence through the mediation of its silhouette, a shadow, an ontology way beyond what boundaries of our epistemology offer to us, reveal for us here and there. We can never map it down and know it. At best, although it is a rather morbid thought, we can defect, stain, pollute, ugly and distort the shadow, the silhouette, the hologramic gaze of the World. Its core, the Being, remains however eternally untouched and untouchable. Love perhaps, one could argue, could be the rare one amongst many of human qualities that could be viewed as a potential or actual contribution to the greatness and beauty of the aptness of the Being. But with the gaze from perspective of the World as solely in and for itself, love surfaces merely as a technology, an accidental coincidence that is more of an occurrence than a product of a human consciously actualized eagerness for whatever. It is then temporality par excellance, a dot of non-space and non-time that is exposed to mankind in order for us to, for whatever reason, find reproduction enjoyable. Or in a word: nonsense. The same goes for hate, pain, joy and whatnot.
This is, at least if we are to view the order of things from what drives us, subjective and cultural humans, to challenge the boundaries of nature. We demand from nature the irrational, crave from it the impossible. In the meanwhile, our time on earth seems to be dedicated to suffering and dealing with the consequences of the reality, the truth so supreme and unmanageable, the revealing of the Being and the dazzling and inflexible light of its core.

Whatever is objectively real is objective only in our subjective world of experience, understanding and action. Any intrusion from an ontology that seriously claims its universal omnipotence independent and above human experiences is doomed to put out the fire of human experience with the gasoline of ignorance towards what it means to be human. Humans and the life as we know it are just a stain on the unbending ray of eternity – and stains don’t last, they fade away. The World exists in and for itself, self-sufficient and non-human. We humans are, in contrast, entirely depending on the World – not as it is, however, but only as we can gaze at it. Due to sheer existence of the Being we exist, though due to its great eternal qualities everything seems to point towards the contradictive notion that it is almost as if we never existed – in the shadow of forever of the Being our brave existence is turned into nothingness. However, we are bound to perceive ourselves as being-in-the-world – our individual consciousness, i.e. our self-awareness and consciousness of the others as well as of objects outside ourselves, unavoidably being caught up with the world that surrounds us, our bodies being the mediators making the consciousness possible by transcending the world for us. With the World left out – we cannot be. Of course, we should be aware of distinction between the consciousness and the things in the world – a point well defended by the fact that we can imagine things that world doesn’t contain, i.e. we can be, and often are, conscious of the ‘unreal’ – hence the round squares and quadratic circles… hence the flying unicorns and, under extraordinary propitious circumstances, the Swan Lake performances by pink elephants. The unreal, in turn, is generated outside the world by the consciousness that stays inside the world – providing human beings with capability to imagine. Nonetheless, we gain self-awareness through the mediation of the Other, i.e. the other people. And that is exactly why we have to turn our back to the Being as eternity, to the World as objective, in spite of its omnipotence. In vastness of the waves of the World, so gracefully thrown around by the strong winds of the Being, we are easily – and doomed – to drown. It is only when our gaze embraces the actuality of our being-as-humans-in-the-world that our existence makes any sense. Whatever the endeavour intended, while staring ourselves blind into the sun of the Being, we are bound to pay attention to what it means to be human, the actual lived experiences, to honour them with nothing less but recognition, be they pain or joy, love or hate, wellbeing or suffering, if we as humans are to earn a meaning for ourselves and among ourselves – to make our short visit in the eternity worthwhile.

Reality? Yeah, who cares about reality? Fuck it!

Until the next time, let following words worth repeating throw some light on the issue:

"I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real"
(Reznor 1994)

"Can a man possessing consciousness ever really respect himself?" (Dostoevsky 2001 [1863]: 12)

A century and a half year old echo of admonition...

Beware of revelation!

... especially through wanting to know...

Beware of the burden!

... perhaps not as much of awareness as of self-awareness... not of consciousness but of self-consciousness...

So how’s it gonna be:

“Beware! “?

or “Be aware!”?

If to know is to suffer and to suffer is to care, then we are caught in the web of particular moral principle... adding to the burden of self-consciousness the burden of responsibility...

“Hello”, inquiringly we greet ourselves. We gaze, we touch, we explore, we adore... blinded by the awe of our ego so immaculate... loooooove... hands so dirty... gaze so dire... unleashed filthy fingertips stain the innocence of virgin skin... forever... calamitous and ruthless gaze infuse the impiety...

You! You... you, you stupid fool... you, the object of your own reverence... you, the devoted devotee... you can’t cage the humming bird no matter how big the cage... you can’t purify the snowflake in the purgatory of your burning hand... you can’t wash the clear spring water with toxic waste... there’s no liberty in freedom... there’s no rescue in the refuge...

So, can a man possessing consciousness ever really respect himself?

The truth is that the truth is not!