Who are you? How do you define yourself?
If something, anything, happens do you respond to it based on the
values and social norms that were downloaded onto your cranial hard
drive as you were reared and socialised by family, school, religion,
media, and all the rest? Is that really your response or just an
instruction? Is your sense of 'self' merely a construct formed by
external cultural and societal forces? What are you other than a
range of predictable responses and a few personal memories and
traumas that you have placed into a formalised context that depends on the aforementioned
external influences? Is there a self there at all? Are you there at
all? How free a thinker are you? Do you even really think and, if you
do, do you ever find yourself thinking something and then stopping
yourself thinking it because it seems disconcertingly transgressive
or embarrassingly absurd?
Do you think you're a rebel because you
dress like a rebel or are you actually a rebel? What is a rebel? What
are you rebelling against? How are you rebelling? Is that really the
best you can do? Is that actually rebelling? Are you just playing the
part of the rebel in an agreed upon cultural game?
I went to art college. They asked me to
make something and to give of myself so I shat on the floor. I was
following instructions but interrogating those instructions and
showing them up for what they were by carrying them out. Why? Because
we must be constantly awake and make no lazy assumptions. Every
moment of every day our true selves are smothered by the externally
constructed selves imposed upon us by whatever culture presides at
the time. We must remove the blinkers. We must reject and then we
must reject rejection and learn to accept nothing. Does that make
sense? Why not? What is sense? Ceci n'est pas une pipe!
Language too is blinkers. What is
language but a way of placing boundaries on thought and expression?
If we could ditch language and communicate telepathically we could
say so much more. Dogs are more genuine when they snarl and whine and
sniff each others' arses. We are just trading agreed assumptions and
myths. Even when we're telling the truth we are lying.
Last week I held a protest against
protesting. It turned into a riot against rioting so I threw a
molotov cocktail at a molotov cocktail. Then I told a woman that I
loved her but that I didn't know who she was or what love was and
neither did she and she said that love was a feeling and I said that
I didn't know what a feeling was and she said it was just a feeling
and I said that I had a feeling she was just told that by someone who
heard it from someone else. Later we got married and divorced at the
same time and then I sniffed her arse and whined and then I snarled.
I am most awake when I am asleep. I
will not sleep in a building. I will not live in a house. A house is
a contract and a house is a series of assumptions. When I lived in a
house I slept in the bath, I shat in the kitchen sink, and I ate my
dinner from the toilet bowl. When it got dark I hung my pyjamas over
the windows and I dressed in curtains. Then I sat in the fireplace
and set fire to the rest of the place. I will not live in a house or
an apartment. Apartment. Apart-meant. Where we are 'meant' to live
'apart'. Apart from others and ourselves. What is a roof but a
blindfold?
I live in a forest. I eat nuts and
berries and when I eat the wrong berries I get a sore tummy. I shout
and roar as I endure the cramps but I do not call a doctor because a
doctor will just say this is a stomach, this is poison, this is
illness, and then it will be decided that my stomach is ill because I
ate the wrong berries and that I ate the wrong berries because my
head is ill and I am not adhering to the all powerful Adherable and I
should be locked away. I only trust one type of doctor. I only trust
the proctologist. The proctologist sniffs people's arses and so knows
more than any other because up our arses is where our heads can be
found.
We only think we are people in the same
way that we think that there is a world and there is a universe. That
is all just an idea. It's not even our idea, we were just told the
idea. The truth is that there is nothing. The Big Bang was just an idea
that got out of hand and spread out into the void. If we think about
something else maybe it will all just go away. What will we think
about? We will think about nothing. Nothing at all. We will think
about nothing and it will be easy because even when we think that we
are thinking about something we are thinking about nothing.
And now I must go. Using language has
made me feel cheap and dishonest and besides, I've still got a pain
in my stomach and it's really getting bad but maybe that too is all
in my head and my head is up my arse and everything is a load of
arse. Someone call a proctologist!
2 comments:
"Fugger is the naked and visceral voice of a fully-clothed and bemused generation." Time Magazine
"Ripping back the veil of our sensibilities the way a French soldier would rip back the veil on a screaming Algerian woman in the 50's"
Das Spiegel
"A rip-roaring vindication of our career decision" Proctology Monthly
"Mad cap. Off the wall stuff. Great fun altogether." Craig Doyle
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