Processing Reality
An old sketch from my offine, hard-copy scrapbook of ideas. The exposition is weak but the ideas have merit.
September 25, 2000Life is only as interesting as you make it to be. Your surroundings—the trees, the deserts, the skyscrapers and the space rocket launch pads—are just a backdrop, still life waiting to be animated by your creativity. Most people spend their lives failing to notice the power that they have over their surroundings. Inasmuch as your reality is a function of your perception of the world, you have the power to shape reality. On the one extreme you have people who take everything for granted and do not attempt to tinker with the interpretation of the signals that their brains receive through the five senses. These are “zero processing” or simply unimaginative people. To them a desk is always a desk and they will never even conceive of a question whether behind their backs, desks turn into kangaroos.
On the other extreme are the people who process and distort all the stimuli from the outside world. I don’t think anyone short of a person tripped out on acid or a mental patient with a complete breakdown of unhindered perception falls into this category. Theoretically, one can go farther than this “complete processing” stage into thinking up a reality of his own which is completely disjoint from the actual existing world. However, for the purposes of a practical discussion, this type of processing isn’t interesting.
Few, if any, people find themselves at either extreme. Most, however, gravitate towards the “zero processing” end. A stably functioning society requires such sobriety because otherwise people’s subjective realities tend to diverge. Divergence in perception and therefore interpretation of events disrupts cooperative efforts that are a necessary prerequisite of any functioning society.
Processing is tolerated in societies inasmuch as it can be turned to the society’s advantage. The arts in most if not all their manifestations are the result of advanced processing of reality. Even entertainment in its most primitive form calls for suspension of disbelief which already implies a higher level of reality processing by the consumer of entertainment. Of course, one thing about enterntainment is that it’s fun to create what’s fun to watch. For this reason there is no business like show business: you can spend your life processing reality on the level that would be disruptive in any other profession and constantly be entertained and get paid for it.
After a certain level, however, the results of processing don’t sell to the public. The border between mainstream and “high-brow”, “alternative” or plain weird demarcates this divide. The people who cross this border sometimes are lucky enough to reach a wealthy audience, in which case the society will tolerate them as toys for the rich. More often, the results of these people’s processing don’t sell; sometimes they can’t sell by their very nature. The Merry Pranksters undoubtedly experienced reality very differently from the folks around them yet they produced no tangible art for it (forget One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for a moment). Their lives were the art, and that could only be sold in a bastardized form years later as books, memoirs, perhaps a film idea or two, etc… No assured, immediate payoff there. They were considered no good, social outsiders, and legitimized and romanticized in the mainstream minds only after a way to make money off of their experience was found.
I should know better than to dispense advice to the reading public based on my ramblings. But I don’t know any better, so fuck off and here goes: don’t be afraid to leave your head in the clouds every once in a while. The earth isn’t going anywhere. Make life interesting for everyone involved, including the innocent bystanders. They’ll thank you later.
Thoughts