Musings on the origins of romance in the human psyche.
Saw this in my RSS reader from digg: Jesh de Rox
Not up my alley, even though it seems well done. You can actually feel the illusory reality emanate from that site. The false, imposed ambiance. It’s something along the lines of a brand. A meme.
It’s the same kind of symbolism the Church and MTV and Suicidegirls and the like have traded in for a long time. There’s a kind of developed sensitivity to these things… certain triggers get tripped to let you feel a certain way.
It’s Friday night and you’re off from work. You’re driving to the movies with friends. Nostalgia for the billion other times you’ve been to the movies. All of the feelings of all of those theaters and movies rushing around in that soupy brain.
You bask in the remembrance of popcorns-gone-by and the time some strange lady thought you were her son and sat next to you for half the movie after she came back from the bathroom.
Association — the so-called train of thought. Now entering ‘this-makes-you-feel-like-this-ville’ And we have a hard time dissociating the meme from the instance. It’s hard to tell a stupid war apart from the quintessential old war, the big one. The one where men died for a greater cause and not just some greedy fools. We don’t want to separate the instance from the idea because it risks acknowledging our own feebleness.
So we don’t. We embrace the romantic meme because it feels good and that song may be lame but it’s okay to be lame if you feel good. We ignore how utterly mundane NASCAR is because it reminds us of our grandfathers or our uncles. It makes us think of giant elephants stampeding down the valley like thunder gods.
We love god because when we were children the ceiling seemed a million feet high and god was up at the very top: the apex of the steeple was stuck in his door, it was his peep-hole and as long as we were there he was watching. We love god because mom used to say how golden we were dressed up and she used to smile and there was nothing warmer than mom’s smile on Sunday morning. In mom’s smile the world outside did not exist, it was foreign and inconceivable. All that existed was happiness.
So sure, feed your romance meme. I won’t judge you for it, or for NASCAR or church or whatever. But please, please recognize it for what it is when you’re outside of it. Be brave enough to come back to earth and live with us and call the war what it is, call the internal combustion engine what it is, call the diamond industry what it is.
Don’t be a sucker to the brand. Let the meme stand on its own, and let an industry be separate.
Thanks,
Adam