"We are all product. According to the immutable laws of working life in the Western world, all we have left is what we can sell and all we have to sell is ourselves."
And isn't this a symptom of the sadness, the sickness, the disease (the dis-ease) that inspires malaise? When you can't get out of bed, or shut yourself in your room because you feel that your packaging isn't pretty enough or desirable enough to attract potential buyers? When you feel the need to sell, sell, sell, and not meeting your quota means that you aren't worth the water of life—the water that moves and flows, the water that is you?
If life is a gift, then isn't any particular life a gift too? Not given only to the bearer of life but to be given in the spirit of giving? Unattached and unabashed, unashamed and unafraid, genuine in a world of the fake—simulacra—real in the face of simulation of the real? Unshorn and unpolished: in the rough? As you, as yourself, without trick ponies, without holographic flash, and bells and whistles? Take the rose with the thistles?
Product implies production implies manufacturing, but since when is an individual—a human being—intended to be artifice over authentic? And "immutable"?! Isn't this merely a sell-out, a buying in, a cop-out, a coping, to Frankenstein monster machine out of control? A giving in, a succumbing to system that brings down, that puts down, that crushes with hardened souled jack boots on the neck that carries precious life—oh precious life!—to the mind that pulses with imagination, passion, and feeling? Can there be soul in selling? Or does the soul reside in the giving?
Isn't the wanting in the deceiving—self, other—weaned on desires unfulfilled that arise because eyes have seen one too many advertisements of manufactured beauty, acceptance, and desire?
"Children of the cardboard temple"—trapped in a package of illustrious image, fixed—and fixated—in a wrapper of appalling appeal, worthless or at least decreased in value once removed from the “original” packaging?
But one cannot play if one remains on the shelf, in the box amongst the other boxes, another item on a list of stock!
Let yourself out! Unwrap yourself!
Product, the complement of division, the result indecision about worth and worthless—worth less than whom?
[this rant has been brought to you by MODZILLA enterprises: selling empty boxes because the Western world wants only an image] |
