Part 5 Essays (Ensayos) by Mike Mahoney

Art from Wild Grace's Lapis Lazuli series

El poeta Mike Mahoney continua exponiendo su constelación de ideas escritas en respuesta a La chispa azul libro compuesto por nuestro socio JP Kruse. 

Poet Mike Mahoney continues to expound his constellation of ideas written in response to The Blue Spark by JP Kruse. 

"Changing a way of life means changing a reality, and this is not a minor operation; when imposed forcibly it comes close to the annihilation of an individual or a culture as a whole.” - J.P. Kruse, The Blue Spark

Pure terror is involved here. Nauseating, dizzy, boiling cold & freezing hot terror. Gravity upside-down, blood-chilling terror. For people in prison so long they grow afraid of freedom, I think the word used is ‘institutionalized.’

Perhaps on the larger cultural scale, we've become so incarcerated inside our Pan-repressed terror at the world we've created, that the choice of freedom, suppressed for so long it's petrified in the dream-deep brain sediment & strata of human myth & vague nostalgia, is even more frightening and out of the question than our simultaneously present yet still impending world extinction.

Perhaps we’ve all become institutionalized within the dark prison walls of our capitalist ideas and cultural fears; inside the insultingly tight borders of our story – this fantastically growth-stunting western culture of gizmo-fetish wage-slavery, instant gratification & resource addiction; inside the cancerous catacombs of our inherited linguistic limitations & the gradual disemboweling of our spiritual fortitude.

It feels as if we’re so cut off from life as we knew it for the past two million years that the smell of Earth seems a distant memory. The kindling of fire an ancient lost practice. Lost on our dress shoes and iPads. It’s as though we’re animals who’ve been broken and tamed, humiliated into technology’s house pet, locked inside for so long we’ve become amnesiacs too afraid to go outside because we’ve forgotten there is an outside. Or if we do remember, it’s more we’re looking down at it as a child above the deep end of a swimming pool, scared of imaginary sharks, gripping the diving board with white knuckles too paralyzed with fear to jump. Somewhere deep inside him he remembers this should be fun. Exciting, even.

Without rituals that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, we spend our culturally-prolonged adolescence erecting walls and motes of behavior around our fears, insecurities, and shames until, by the time we become “mature adults”, we’ve repeated our own & our culture’s lies so much to ourselves we not only believe in them, we identify with them. And in a world as manipulative, cheap and illusory as ours can be, where massive corporations & fictitious markets roam the Earth munching up resources & thriving off of our societies’ lies to itself – the lies endlessly repeated, marketed, advertised, printed & publicized – we all believe we need to believe in something, even if it's believing in nothing. We all need some kind of psychic anchor to feel secure we won’t just drift off into insanity. A psychic mantra to localize us in the fuzzy temporal & dimensional space of ambiguity, abstraction and info-overload swirling all over the world. A psychic shield to protect us from overwhelming grief, anxiety and panic. From manipulative image magic and coercive reality engineering.

These anchors, these identity mantras and nexus points of recognition, these rhythms of refrain and hook, ground & coordinate us in a world where nothing else seems certain. They stake out a conceptual ground upon which we can stand. When this space is threatened, it's defended as if losing it would be worse than death. (And when it comes to moving into a larger reality, most of us would rather be invited than demanded. A smile, an invitation, these are much more persuasive than any demand, declaration or order.)

We hold on with a death grip to our phantom securities and illusory delusions of control in life, & over life. To avoid the nasty feeling of being completely naked, present, vulnerable and intimate with ourselves, with each other and with the surrounding reality, most of us will fight, scratch, kick and claw with tooth and nail to the death when we feel our tough outer shell of a world-view or self-image threatened.

It’s still a fear of death. A fear of the death of the ego if our identity is changed, challenged or threatened – if we lose our job for example, & therefore our confidence because our financial situation has changed, or if we lose our significant other, or a part of ourselves through accident, injury or illness. It’s a fear of death, whether the literal death of our body, or the virtual death of any of the other hundreds of chimeras of self we’ve created – all of our false senses of security, of legacy, of self-image, confidence & ego, of power & privilege, guilt & shame, of invincibility, independence & wealth, etc.. A fear of the death of our knowledge of the way the world works. Or the fear of admitting we’ve had it all completely wrong. The fear of the death of our trust in our world, or the death of our trust in self – (mostly an amalgamation of what the various fears, authority figures, and cultural narratives of our lives shaped us to be, and so probably shouldn’t be trusted anyway.)

Para mas información sobre La chispa azul 

por favor, visiten la página siguiente: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

The Blue Spark can be ordered here: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Para información sobre el poeta,  sus libros y discos, 

por favor visiten la página siguiente: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com 

For information about the poet, his books and CD's, 

please visit his website: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com