Sometimes, especially when watching TV or wasting time by various means, I have that feeling of exhaustion, surfeit, revulsion, retreat: somewhere among the parts of my rather dull life over the past decade as an aging academic living alone in a small northern city with lots of wet, cold weather, and despite seeking some sort of new fire for existence out of my Jungian studies, and while being bored with the round of teaching the same subjects and modifying the same spreadsheets and taking care of the same problems year after year, I'll remember that I wanted life to be more interesting, more alive, more amusing. My fault of course: the television can always be turned off, it's always possible to go outside; like so many I am too often mesmerized by glowing screens and computer games, that whole lower existence that has become so typical of many of us.
It's a bit like the moralistic painting by Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience. A well-meaning if didactic work; there is a most interesting take on it scattered through Brian Aldiss' fictional 'Zodiacal Planets', or Zeepees, a bunch of artificial planetoids scattered across the inner solar system that furnished the setting for a handful of wonderfully bizarre stories he wrote in the 1970s. The stories emphasize a mildly, chaotically decadent lifestyle of minor art forms and arcane indulgences – astrology and weird foretelling, casual chemical body and mind modification and drugs, recreational schizophrenia, art works that suggest a slightly rotting culture (perhaps he'd read Spengler on the indulgences of 'late' civilizations, or maybe he was just thinking of Gibbon on late Rome). Across the background of two or three of the stories, a famous video artist uses dense data streams to recreate the Holman Hunt painting as well as other Pre-Raphaelite 'story' paintings, and extend them into videos that tell what happened in the following ten or fifteen minutes... a blithely useless artistic endeavor that suggests the sillier and more expensive Saatchi-funded trivia you can see in major galleries.
It is, of course, a malevolent if fun setting for Aldiss' stories; but it does a good job of suggesting that awful feeling of energetic pointlessness, of people desperately looking for something to do... which always begs that question: if we didn't simply watch screens and phones, or only somewhat more healthily read books; and run races and go to gyms and tanning salons and public parks, and look for pseudo-religious meaning in local classes and study groups; and get massages and acupuncture; and go to gallery openings and museum exhibits, then... what would we do?
An acutely uncomfortable puzzle.
I don't want to turn the television back on; but... what else is there, that is really so different from it?... ah well. Time to get up from this piano bench, at least....
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