(This) Demise of a Blithe and Sibylline Spirit

I feel today as if I want to attack stupid people. And not stupid passive people, but actively, aggressively stupid people. It strikes me as sad and strange to have concerns that are well beyond your field of vision or reality. Personally, I believe in minding one's own business to an extent, because I don't want to be all heavy handed and American about things. The reason for this is because I don't presume that I am always right, properly informed or in authority. Some people are corrosively stupid, to the point of disliking intelligence. These are probably the people who think The Da Vinci Code is mind blowing and a great literary work (fucking philistines!) We all position ourselves with such particularity, and sit there feeling righteous. I know so many people who do the 'right thing' and don't question what the 'wrong thing' actually is or why they don't do it.

I was talking to ZP last night about the way we position ourselves politically/morally/ethically etc, and how we make a massive leap of faith when we decide that where we sit is the right position. Is violence ok? Is racism normal and quite acceptable? Why do we feel the need to care about other people? We exist in a rich, busy and telluric reverie, so involved in our own mud, that we forget the meta level, we forget to be critical, we forget that perhaps existence is a concept rather than a fact. And it seems stupid to me.

You can always take a moral highground when you choose not to think beyond the immediate. When you accept your own position with such sureity, you are inevitably missing the things that make the world work. You are also shutting off awareness of your own perceptions and judgments.

This isn't ever about restitution or moral arrogance, but about making sense and making pieces. I look askance at the people around me and wonder what they think. Do we all feel as if we have inherent understandings of certain things? AM showed me some Paul McCarthy live art; a very weird performance piece - him punching himself in the face wearing boxing gloves and making guttural and animalistic sounds. He pours paint (or tomato sauce, who knows?) into his gloves and continues to punch himself. He is naked and his penis is covered in a red goo. The first time I watched it I found it really funny, but there was also something about it that I found quite disturbing. AC watched it, and I commented on the fact that I had found it disturbing. He just found it funny. Perhaps he removed himself from the artistic level and only saw the ridiculous? Perhaps when I first watched it I was in a fragile mood? To me the very idea of perception/(and)interpretation is endemic to the instant response (or the gut response, or whatever you want to call it), and it turn to living itself.