The Power of Negative Thinking. Becoming a Free Artist of The Self

There’s been a kind of vanquishing, an ostracizing, of certain modes of thought these days. We are told to be positive, that every challenge is an opportunity, to be adaptable, to stay hungry, to “Just Do It.” If you’re negative, or critical, or present people with ideas that perhaps they’ve never been presented with before, you might as well be a goddamn skunk spraying your stink all over everybody.

Fuck this.

These attitudes are encouraged because they are what make people good, obedient workers. Massive corporate entities require people who will adapt to whatever shitty situation they’re given, who smile even as someone “pisses in their face” (to steal a rather vivid image from “Glengarry Glen Ross”). Basically, companies want to hire people who will eat shit, who won’t think past the meager little deal they’re given.

You tell this to people, and they are just immediately turned off. Many of you have probably already stopped reading. As soon as you heard “Massive corporate entities” you probably thought, “Here comes some Hippie bullshit.” And so what if it is? I’m going anyway. No one wants to argue. No one likes confrontation. The two things everyone agrees you can’t talk about are “God and Politics”. In short, you should avoid talking about anything you actually care about. No one wants to read the newspaper because it’s full of bad news. No one wants to discuss or converse about anything of real substance because it’s boring. We talk about sports, or television, or the weather. Apathy is encouraged, and cliché infects our thoughts and decays our discourse. Well, goddamnit, people need to argue. We need to disagree. We need to feel. This is how we bond. This is what knits us into the great human community. Communication. Community. Same root. You might be pissing someone off, but you’re not lying to them, and all we do now is lie to each other. We’re so afraid of looking stupid, of feeling something, of revealing a vulnerable part of ourselves, that all we do is smile and lie, because telling the truth is unpredictable, and usually dangerous. But real living cannot go unaccompanied by danger.

We look back on the 1950s and think, my how those people were such conformists. Men in Gray Flannel Suits, kids in crew-cuts and sneakers, bobbysoxers and Buddy Holly. We think since the 60s, since the Beatles grew their hair out and wore colorful shirts that we’re not such conformists. You have a mohawk or mustache or whatever your particular fashion statement of choice is and you think you’re unique. It makes sense, in a way, the last thing anyone wants to be in a world of 7 billion people is exactly like the other 7 billion people, so we meekly try to enforce our own individuality against the great wallpaper of humanity. But individuality is not about style. Individuality requires bravery. Conformity is an attitude, a state of mind. Conformity is being afraid of dancing because everyone will see you and laugh. Conformity is not telling your table with the 3 year old puking cheerios all over the floor to go fuck themselves when they ask for another napkin. Conformity is fear, vanishing into the scenery, obeying the attitudes and customs and will of a social situation. Conformity is doing the things everyone else is doing because you are afraid to do the things you want to do, or that you know are right. Essentially, it is allowing the self to disappear in the great wake of society. It’s got nothing to do with wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Well, I look like a pretty normal guy, but I don’t want to be a conformist. The dilemma is: Usually, rather than face situations with courage, I avoid them. Consequently I’m alone most of the time, with nothing but my opinions keeping me company. I’m often accused of being a grouch, a grump, an old man, a cynic, a pessimist, negative, an all around sour apple. I refuse to accept this. Sure, sometimes I’m negative, sometimes I’m positive, but mostly, I try to be honest, which is not generally how one behaves. Everyone is smiling and confident, even when they are not. We are all just grinning and grinning and bearing and bearing. I’m not gonna be that. I’m gonna bitch and rail until I die, even if it means I remain alone. Labeling someone a cynic, a grouch, tuning out when someone has an opinion, is censorship. You are limiting your own consciousness. This is something of a difficult idea to comprehend, because your consciousness is invisible. If someone steals your television, you’re gonna know about it, but if someone extinguishes a part of your mind, you might not have ever known it was there in the first place. It is much easier for a government, for an industry, to get their citizens, their workers, to barter away their minds than to surrender their lives. If you put a gun in someone’s face and tell them to do their job and shut the fuck up, they will probably resent that, but if you hypnotize them by putting an iPhone in their hand, they’ll probably do their job, even though it is killing their soul.

Often you’ll use a word like “Consciousness” and people will automatically think, “What a pretentious asshole,” or they’ll make a comment about “Wow, big word you used there.” Social custom has made it unattractive and unusual to speak well, but, honestly, people don’t know what the word “pretentious” means. To most, to be pretentious is essentially to “talk like a fag” (to pinch a line from Idiocracy), to go to those dark places in the mind that we have been discouraged from exploring. This is not what pretentious means. The root of the word implies that one is pretending to be something they’re not. Pretend=Pretentious. Well, I am not pretending to be anything. I am pissed off that people are voluntarily limiting their awareness, and consequently living a life of fear and isolation, of “quiet desperation”. I am optimistic, if anything, in that I believe there doesn’t have to be this utter deficiency of joy and courage and dignity in our lives.

So how does one turn this complaint into something appealing, something beautiful, something constructive? Putting a flower into a gun-barrel would not be a bad start. But there are no gun barrels pointed at us anymore, only great wrecking balls bashing the mind and spirit. Busting people from their shells and getting them to celebrate life is what needs to happen. Being an anarchist of joy, an artist of life, reactivating humanity, this is the notion. Excavating the soul from the rubble. Shocking people from the trance and reconstructing their compassion for one another. People really do want to live. They really do. That’s why they drink. People want to dance. They want to get down on their knees and kiss the hands of the beautiful women that pass them by on the street. But we can’t. We are paralyzed by insecurity. Some people refer to alcohol as “Liquid Courage”. Alcohol does not make you courageous, it makes you semi-retarded, a side effect of which is that you forget your inhibitions. Alcohol, unlike marijuana (which, for the record, I don’t smoke, though I probably sound like I do), doesn’t inspire people to think and perceive in new ways. It deadens the senses. In effect, it puts you into a deeper sleep. I have a vague idea about how to wake people up. It is terrifying, and a little bit of a hippie idea. I’ve been trying to write a movie for the better part of a year about a girl who is a “Professional Conveyor of Beauty and Life Artist.” She does things like call people randomly on the phone and, if they'll let her, read them Wordsworth. The main crux of the movie was that she writes these little messages and ties them to balloons and sends the balloons up into the sky in the hopes that they will fall on the right people and inspire them to change their lives. The problem has been that trying to put these ideas into a movie, trying to portray these problems and solutions through characterization and action and drama has always rang a little bit false. So, I’ve decided I’m just going to do the goddamn experiments myself. Last week I sent up my first two balloons, my e-mail address was written on both of them. One of them had a line from Joseph Campbell: “One lives in the midst of a silent sermon all the time,” and the other had a some lines from Walt Whitman, which I don’t remember right now. I haven’t heard anything back from either balloon. I had another one, with a note that simply said “LIVE,” but by the time I was ready to send it out the balloon had deflated. It is sort of a cowardly way to reach out to people, a kind of carpet bombing, sending missiles of air and color and poetry in the hopes that they might cause life to bloom somewhere rather than destroy it.

Now, sending these balloons up was frightening for me. I was worried if someone on my block would see me and think, “What the fuck is this about?” and as soon as I sent them I worried, Well God what if I get a ticket for littering? or what if one of them falls onto the freeway and causes a traffic accident and kills 27 people? I thought about sending them up without my e-mail, so I couldn't be found out, but I realized that would defeat the purpose. They are these amazingly elegant machines. I’m really quite proud of them, even though they’ll probably land in the middle of a cornfield somewhere and no one will find them. I originally got the idea from Shelley, who used to send his poems and political treatise up in balloons and down rivers in bottles. I have yet to receive a response, but I plan to send more up, and devise more “social experiments” in the near future, posting the results on this blog. I realize this is an incredibly precious, twee idea, but I don’t give a fuck. If I can bring something into someone’s life this way, I will be quite proud.

The same day I sent the balloons up I first read about “Burning Man”, which was quite a revelation for me. This guy, Larry Harvey, is some kind of genius. And when you first hear about Burning Man it sounds like this awful Hippie festival in the desert where they’re all naked and smelly and doing peyote. But, I tell you, I think Larry Harvey has really cracked it. He’s really found a way, a practical, implementable way to refashion community. The thing is, for so long I’ve been trying to sneak my ideas and thoughts through people's minds in the Trojan Horse of art. But the more art becomes commodified, the less effective it is. Art is not art anymore. Rock and roll is a spectator sport, and the last thing we need are more spectators. Even theatre, which is one of the oldest oral-participatory forms has become either sensationalized-franchised-DisneyPorn or Self-indulgent Self-Important Shouting-into-the-void. Going to the theatre is the entertainment equivalent of eating your vegetables. You do it cause it’s supposed to be good for you. Real art is spontaneous and engrossing and kinetic. It is the wind puffing the sail of your soul. It is an exchange of life energy, to get really fucking New-Age-y about it. But it is not a two-way exchange anymore. Artists are obedient and audience's are dead. The only exchange going on is the exchanging of money for a ticket, and all young people care about is how to be the guy receiving the money and not the one forking it over. I guess the initial inspiration for this came from “The Game.” Although The Game is ostensibly about picking up women, it isn’t really about picking up women. The Game is the only book I’ve ever seen that teaches you the mechanics behind social interaction. It opens the hood on the seemingly unpredictable engine of human interaction and shows you piece by piece how everything works, what makes the engine go. There could be other books about this, and probably are, but I didn’t find them because they weren’t under the guise of “How to pick up chicks.” What The Game teaches you, essentially, is that people are not as scary as you think they are, and most of us have biological mechanizations that are predictable and can be manipulated. At it’s worst, The Game makes us all into socio-paths, it turns the world into a great World of Warcraft where we are quantifiable social entities only valuable to each other insofar as we can be manipulated to get what we want (now that I think of it, that sounds a lot like how things are anyway). At it’s best, The Game instructs us how to participate in a society that often seems daunting and cruel, and, doing so, reweaves the fabric of community. It gives us courage, or rather, tools for being human. “The Game” derives not only from the teachings of the Pick-Up artists of yore, but also from the philosophies of Burning Man and the Cacophony Society, which was partly the basis for “Fight Club.” Like I said, I had never heard of Burning Man or the Cacophony Society until a week ago, but throughout my thinking about this social experiment project it seemed like a non-violent kind of Fight Club, which is essentially what The Cacophony Society is.

Housing these ideas, trying to transfuse them under the auspices of traditional art is archaic and ineffective. Art, like most everything else in this consumer-driven commodity society, makes us into passive observers, consumers. If I see a girl jogging down the street, and I think she’s pretty, what is to stop me from jogging next to her and telling her so? Only my own fear of social custom. If I want to speak Shakespeare on the street corner to the businessmen passing by, why shouldn’t I? The only way to bring beauty and joy back into people’s lives is to sweep them up into it. To flood them with passion until the walls of their “Trans Trans,” or train of thought, train of habit and behavior and life, tumble in a burst of feeling. And the only place to do this is on the street, in the places it is not expected. This is what the best rock stars and comedians and actors do anyway, it's just their stage has been co-opted and commodifed, like everything else by the great wolf's head of capitalism.

I realize this sounds like a naive idea that a only a young person has. But as Max Fischer said about his aquarium, "I don't give a shit about the Barracuda. Fuck it. I'm building it anyway." I am young and naive and I will have young and naive ideas and I will chase them as far as they may be pursued. That is the only way to live.