I would have liked to have found (what junctive?) my pad so that I wouldn't try to imagine the new ergonomics I am missing at the keyboard because of the angles we now pay more for and have yet to come to the standard clones. Beside that my work seems to partake a different flavor when I am not so constantly backing up and rekeying. Nevertheless it is of Kennan and Madonna I sing at this moment of knowing.
The Anglo American (for want of historical specificity) axis of sexual behavior and mores are so ridiculously obvious and tainted that they bear some of my precious scrutiny. I have been implacably bored by Madonna's Body of Evidence and having begun Kennan's Ragged Hill, love raises once again its taboo head. At the moment I am limp and spent as well so I suppose that real visceral experience just past echoes quite loudly as these media abstractions. But I am brought to mind on listening to the giggles of whatever you can characterize as the moviegoing public and the semi Victorian adjectives attached to Kennan's mindset on the subject of a particular science fiction book I read many years ago. As loathe as I am to consider science fiction inspiring it often provides illuminating passages that augment my arguments against it. My favorite is the consideration of the planet of the triped mammals which was easier accessible to my impressionable elementary or junior high school mind than was any literature with young black subjects. Ahh the imagination! Yet the example I had in mind this time was that of American astronauts stranded on a planet of lovable and intelligent people whose equivalent taboo was eating. They had essentially built a complicated set of rituals around the acts of ingestion, digestion and excretion which was as ridiculously repressed as are 'conservative' attitudes towards sexual behavior. The word 'eat' in their language was equally vulgar and offensive to 'fuck' in ours. One could not consume food in the presence of another until adulthood. Taking food in public was an arrestable offence, etc. I seem to remember that the only way our culturally repugnant explorers could be at least partially reprogrammed by their captors was by forcing them to drink water out of rather complete male animal bladders. (Yes Virginia they were straight white male astronauts)
I imagine Madonna on this planet saying out loud, "I'm hungry and I don't care who knows it". I imagine G.F.Kennan explicating that this primitive urge to eat, though basic, served to inform the culture through it's inherent conflict with a basic civilizing force. This duopoly of viewpoint might likely create in this strange world an artist colony devoted to painting shocking cornucopias but the subject would always be the same. Madonnas always have their Kennans and both are equal dupes to the dualist dialog. Both given their respective [and respectful] tropes continue to define - each in their own increasingly convoluted ways - the meanings attached to the struggles of our lives.
One has to ask, in the end, what difference does sex make? Here on the Earth sex makes all the difference in the world (read in our heads). "And so", as Mozart's simulacrum patron said in the film 'Amadeus', "there it is." The mystery of sex exists, conflated as it is with matters of life and death, politics and power and whatever other fetishes the ages bring us. Yet those stories are as old and tired as Henry Miller and Judith Kranz. As we come to the close of the century, we need not more of the same controversy, but a completely original one. Perhaps we might consider the reality of our other urges and create a new catechism based on other original sins. Might it not give us a completely new moral currency with enough capital to last another millennium? Since AIDS is likely to kill off all of us who don't demystify the entire subject we might as well.
Although eating seems like a good place to start, we already have a bit of the sensualist ethos in the munching of caviar. There is already something a bit illicit about the fruits of Cézanne not to mention Reddi Whip. I think it's high time we begin the mystification of breathing. It's one of the few things we have failed, somehow, to completely discipline and control, Jacques Cousteau notwithstanding. All we need are the right researchers into the literature and history and we can begin a new mythological system. With a little help from the tobacco industry on one side and the people who bring you Juicy Fruit Gum on the other we can cajole the public commercially. No doubt young people will still have the opportunity for sweet breathed innocence, while reprobates, retards and retirees can be canned in ways we never could before. Sic Newt Gingrich on the banalities of breath and in no time it will become a patriotic duty for certain groups of Americans and a dastardly crime for others. I mean haven't you always wanted to lock up those oafs who wheeze ADD on your favorite Deuche Gramophone CDs? And haven't you I think you understand the airs I'm putting on. Let's do the cultural redefinition of respiration before the Japanese sniff it out first. If we ventilate our ideas now we can leave the rest of the world sucking dust.
Imagine a world where the politics of air are as real as the politics of sex, where real teeth can be put into a breathy subject. Best of all we originators can be all of the same orientation. We breath *in* loudly and exhale softly. Now you know. We gasp, they huff.
Needless to say, the new elite needn't be free of advanced peritonitis. The flawed priest can still lead the ignorant to heaven and Madonna's boobs aren't really all that hot. Despite the fact that we listen to Kennan and Madonna today, their time is limited. Sex is passe, all the metaphors are used up and it's bound to become a smokestack industry real soon. Let's get on to breathing. Enjoy it now in this, it's heyday while you can still say 'suck wind'. One way or another we can capitalize on this air thing. Its the final frontier.