#bothness

When I started my Instagram, the initial rush of the dopaminergic response became a full-blown addiction to being seen, as beautiful, as pretty, sexy,  which transitioned to wanting to be understood or perhaps this vacillating with being considered thoughtfully obscure, etc. etc. None of this is inherently pathological, though none of their pleasures are inherently lasting either... So a question that has arisen through the longitudinal excavation of my fluctuating intentions becomes ... Why would I have done these? All these Selfies of NoSelfies, all of them professing a passion for Dharma and so on and so forth. All of these stated motivations remain true; 

I return, prodigally, to writing here in this blog, renamed to match my Instagram account, primarily to actually take stock of how attention is instrumentalised, how social media technologies and platforms have become so much more sophisticated over time to really rope our attention and reward us in different ways, both in the reductionist biochemical/neurological sense, but then also in the lingual-affective, and yes, also spiritual sense...

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So I compare now the differences in my Facebook and Instagram use, and I also want to note how these have necessarily impacted on my own self-concept, not to mention my developing concept of ‘self-concept’.

That is, given the bizarre gender-shifts and magical awakenings of the past year, especially because of experiments in gender, that were significantly engendered by the Gestalt of media consumption and cultural-informational-exchange as filtered through and structured by these social media platforms, to completely undo any sense of coherent singular egoic identity entirely... 

I find that while I may cognitively apprehend (via Buddhist meditation + study) the ‘notion’ of anatman (No Self), there is no sense that this was ever inhabited as a bodily truth until the manifest karmic neuroses of repressed subtle-body energies were allowed to finally burst forth, make themselves known as transmissions from some underlying force of empowered ‘nature’...

...constructing itself as ready for its own release, as a ‘transmission’, as fecund melody, singing herself “Yumi”.

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I find myself now entirely ‘re-placed’ by an ecology of relations that make up (that have always made up!) the sense of who I ‘am’, and hence, realising also now that I would like to become far more judicious about this ecology directly and what it is most tethered to or conditioned by, as the font of its relational directive ...

... Less pretentiously put: I am interested in becoming more discerning about who my friends are, and how I make friends.

This is not at all an indictment on anybody whom I would have been friends with on Facebook before I deleted it (but with whom I may not have made any especial effort since to keep in touch, nor vice versa); Rather, I am noting already that the Body-Itself is a Social-Animal; and there is a sense that on the physiological level, it is peculiar to have an almost purely cognitive sense of the social without the physiological labours that would ordinarily be involved in connecting to such multi-personal opinions, perspectives etc. etc. 

i.e. “In the past,” (i.e. prior to the current blitz of using digitised peer-to-peer social media technologies), there is no sense that I could have ever engendered this kind of ‘awakening’ when the body itself could not possibly have allowed itself to be so psycho-culturally re-sutured from its cognitive exposure to so many others (whose lingual-bodies contact mine in image and text, forever shaping one another’s and potentiating peculiar outcomes...), and quite so quickly...

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NoSelfies and Narcissism

At the moment, I am not afraid of such an ecological undoing and re-awakening. If anything, I must remain only totally subservient to the ground of gratitude that illuminates the sense of shamanic exposure to such diversity of spiritual messages (in the most crass sense of the meaning of this: the ways I have been influenced by all of y’all, throughout the ocean of inter-activities and communications, organising, etc.) that happened while I was on Facebook. 

At the same time, I am now wary of being any further seduced by the promises of remaining on platforms whose longer term outcomes have entailed my becoming molded by the neoliberal business prerogatives of these Silicon Valley algorithms, especially those that have, in their extreme libertarian form, have led to a significant under-mining of some of the fabric of that which would once have allowed for some modicum of ‘stability’ in my mental health. 

I cannot unsee what I have seen, cannot unknow what I now know.

And at the same time, I can refuse further influence, for a moment at least, for as long as I need or want, indefinitely, if I so choose, if only because now the sense of the need is of Consolidation, not fragmentation. 

Integration, not Dissociation, though with all of the (still-emerging) insights of important and necessary Differentiation (of my gendered / sexed subjectivities, about various forms of dysphorias that are gendered because of post-colonial acculturations into neither male-nor-female lingual forms that could match the gait of this body and how it wants to participate in collective meaning-making... Enabling self-actualisation as ‘no-self’-actualisation, so to speak...)

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On the fifth anniversary of DFW's death, a quote from one of my favorite essays by him that pulls together, in a very David Foster Wallace way, David Lynch and Laura Palmer and our own sad human muddiness:

This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that's what we criticized Fire Walk With Me's Laura for. But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we're going to feel, in Premiere magazine's own head editor's word, "Betrayed."

anyway I'm not not foreshadowing presents I'm gonna make for you guys probably tbqh in six months when I get around to it