Here's an example. At work we have this "incentive program" where they ask us to complete a number of activities which are supposed to "keep us healthy". It's not a popular program. I tend to think of it as another example of Silicon Valley snake oil, something that's supposed to provide "deliverable outcomes" but is implemented in such a fashion that it's easy to interpret as gatekeeping.
Anyway. 20 points for viewing inspirational quotes! I do this every day for six months of the year until the computer tells me I have enough points and then I stop. This quote stuck out to me:
Garden Your Body
Getting Active Card
"Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are our gardeners." - Shakespeare
“Shakespeare”! Well, you know, Shakespeare wrote a lot of things. Hardly a proper citation. Well, no matter, I can always Google the quote and find the source.
Othello! Act I, Scene 3. Roderigo is complaining to Iago that he is too much in love with a woman to control his feelings.
IAGO
Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost'rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.
So, Iago – who has long been widely considered the most evil of Shakespeare’s villains – is here counseling Roderigo. Virtue? Nonsense! Love? Nonsense! No such thing. There is nothing but what we ourselves will, and it is this will which will in the end triumph. Iago continues:
IAGO
It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies! I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness.
A lust of the blood! Drown cats and blind puppies! Well, I’m bloody inspired, for sure.
It gets better than that, though. I do seem to recall - and I haven't verified this, so it could be hearsay - that "will" was Elizabethan slang for sexual potency. So, in some sense, this "motivational" quote, in context, is telling us to for God's sake, go on and fuck something already!
What's interesting to me is that this presents a well-known text as a palimpsest, shorn of the (honestly sort of crude and offensive) meaning intended by the author and given a, err, sort of panglossian gloss. I'm not a stickler for original intent; it's interesting in an academic sense but seems to have little bearing on how we live our lives. When understanding why things happen, why they are the way they are, knowing the objective truth is, of course, invaluable, but it is also valuable to know what people, in practice, believe and why they believe it.
I have a book by a gentleman by the name of Maurice Rickards entitled "The Encyclopedia of Ephemera". It's a big coffee-table book guide to all of the weird things people collect. Opening to a page at pseudorandom I find, on page 200, "Lunacy Papers". You can see why this is of great interest to people today. I understand myself today better if I understand how people under other circumstances, in other conditions, lived their daily lives. This in turn makes me more critical of the ephemeral conditions I am living under, the nonsense we live with and take for granted.
I attach here a few bits of ephemera. The first is something printed on the back of an ATM receipt from the downtown Beaverton Fred Meyer. It reads:
cash is freedom
cash is social
cash is control
in a sans serif font, the last word of each line bolded. This is accompanied by a picture of a dog sticking its head out a car window.
My initial response to this was that it was a weird twist on a Bazooka Joe wrapper, but there is, I think, more going on here than its placement in the pantheon of questionable advertising.
(Here, for instance, is a 1906 poster for Mackintosh Toffee which I find endlessly amusing and have tacked up in my work cubicle:)
No, revisiting this wrapper today it reminds me of nothing so much as the Wacky Aunt memes a friend of mine keeps posting. It's easy for me to get a bad feeling from a lot of them. They are designed to propagate superficially without the people viewing them or passing them on really thinking about the deeper meaning they might have, and a lot of them, honestly, they're pretty defensive about behavior that I would consider to be potentially abusive. Example: "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." Accompanied, like this photo is, with a stock image which bears no apparent relation whatsoever to the text. Life imitates Un Chien Andalou.
With ephemera like this, authorial intent is difficult to actually divine. I need to take things like these in a Baudrillardian sense and read it contextually, with no reference to intent.
The repeated slogans mostly evoke to me the three slogans of Oceania from Orwell's "1984", Oceania's credo so to speak:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
It's not just that these statements are absurd, it's that, as with any credo, their truth value is irrelevant. They are empty slogans repeated, in places where they cannot meaningfully be questioned, until they are taken to be true. Linguistically it springs from not just Orwell's Newspeak but from Carroll's Humpty Dumpty.
So I have it on my makeup mirror as a memento. I'm not likely to forget the absurdity of this world but I keep it around in case I'm tempted.
The other thing I have is from the back of a Splenda packet I had with my tea this morning.
It reads:
Be Happy!
It drives other people crazy!
"Be Happy" is in bold and italics. This has a childlike drawing of a smiling mouth below it in red.
Maybe I am really disconnected from the world, but I do find it shocking. This, to me, evokes Conan the Barbarian's answer to the question "What is best in life?"
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
I guess there a lot of people who really do genuinely live by that ethos. I have a hard time whenever I am confronted with that reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment