In the Lilliputian Leviathan (Lilli Levi), the body count of societal prescript still rings clearly, with an air of, ‘experiment‘ about it. The image of clandestine groups of scientists and theoreticians smuggling themselves away to clean, smoke filled committee rooms, converged around vast, mahogany tables, remains one which falls almost immediately into ridicule, at the arrogance from which it is created. ‘Social Experimenters,’ ‘The new Gods of the Earth.’ These sound like a stale statements because they are. Actually, they are so stale that they are now now brittle. Clearly they have not been shattered over the kitchen counter as they ought be, for the practice of prescribing our societal interaction with reality, in the form of a, ‘newer,’ or, ‘modified’ formulation of a previous one, is now without question, common practice. Now, everybody seems to be, ’a Philosopher.’ Of course, a populous, thinking about, ‘the system’ is preferable to it remaining the past-time of it’s rulers, however this phenomenon of prescriptive, societal hypothesising, serves only to maintain the old idealism of the state, political, and philosophical promise. The promise of, ‘a better tomorrow.’ The promise of more comfortable dwelling and less burdening labours and all of that, “rather very serious business” (You know how grown-ups are). That each, ‘citizen‘ will become positively magnetic, and will be required to simply stand and exist, for necessities to begin flying toward him. The reason I call these, political theoreticians, ‘the new Gods,’ is because, the act of theorising these things, either, denies the necessity of, or presupposes the possession of, infinite knowledge. In the Lilli Levi, theirs is the worshipped alter; theirs is the sacrosanct shrine and theirs is the totemic catechism.
Since reality can be broken down into an infinite number of parts, and since no one possesses infinite knowledge, one can never know if the fatal floor to one’s theory, is lurking, unseen, in that for which is yet to be accounted. One cannot account for everything on the list of realities parts, so one must select an incalculably small portion of items to inspect. I cannot remember, although I think it was an earth-man named, ‘Whitman,’ who talked about the carefree fellow, who, now sleepy after a day of blissful walking, through the meadows, lays to rest his weary self onto the cool, soft grass, only to lower his head upon a nest of snakes. Could you be deaf, standing sideways on a train track, blissfully unaware of the steam train, bearing toward you? You are. This is who we all are. Do I have Cancer? perhaps I do. Or perhaps I will suffer a Heart Attack in a few seconds. Or perhaps the next time I leave my house, I will be blown down by a passing car. At all times, we are in grave danger. Yet this fact, for most of us, is utterly tolerable. It does not haunt our every living second or diminish our spirits, unrelenting. It is in fact, that which defines our spirit. It is the definition of faith. Faith! That which is the quiet defibrillation, of a quivering heart and a maturating level for the fibrillating spirit, of a premature man. Faith, is not exclusive to the, ’Religious,’ it is the one thing which must be present, for anything we call, ’good,’ to be experienced as such at all, as without it, the terror wins out, over the joy.
’The Fall of Man,’ was always a curious metaphor. Adults think they understand it but really the children do (though they have no name for it) by spectating, grown-ups. It means what I earlier, said. We fell, when we realised, our perpetually frailty, delicateness and endangerment. ‘Paradise Regained,’ after-all, is finding a way to leave the house. It is arriving at a place in ones mind, where at which one is not made paraplegic by terror. Paradise Regained, is making oneself, unafraid. Alas we, in the Lilliputian Leviathan, in the horrors of the shade and the menace of the years, find and have found ourselves, quintessentially and unequivocally, wholly afraid. I tell you this, not that you endeavour to arrive in paradise, but that you might stumble upon the pleasure of regaining it.
The Lilli Levi, is a place of loud comforts and quiet commotions. A place where in which, one can feel as though one has time to think, but is stolen away by the urgency with which one thinks oneself required, to squabble with every other man, woman and child, about whether one should crack an egg on the larger side or the smaller, lest he falls, ’out of season’ if he plants his flag to late. In the Lilli Levi, ‘The Idyllic,’ is so worshiped, yet changes so often. We find ourselves in a hunt, which is that of finding Neverland, a land that can never be, as the children, the finders, have died in their sleep. It is not Robin Goodfellow, whom we are following, (with whom, I know you to be in league) but Peter Pan (of whom I am aware, you are not so fond). Everything, all at once. Pan is our new God. The God of androgyny, but an androgyny which never stops moving. An androgyny which can never be located, just as the position of light, moving in space can never be certainly known. We find ourselves with constant dislocated identities. Un-locatable identities. Un-identifiable identities. We find ourselves, of course, not without Identity. One cannot be and have not, identity. Rather, we find ourselves without the ability to view our identities. Without the ability to identify our identities. Identity is now, merely beneath the scope of our currently incapacitated vision. We find ourselves peering out of our skulls at the line up in which we ourselves are standing, groomed by the uncertain song of Pan’s flute, unable to identify ourselves from the rest.
The Romantic identity can, at a push, sound similar. ‘A wandering traveler in the realm of the unknown,’ ‘foraging for the Self.’ The Romantic urge however, despite its unceasing bastardisations, is one which defines identity by that which it is not. In the same way in which societal prescriptions must always fail, because of the lack of infinite knowledge in the face of an infinite landscape, so to, under that guise, lurks the urge to be prescriptive about one’s identity, and so awaits its failure. The Lilli Levi’s catechism maintains that one proclaims, ’I am this’ instead of, ’I simply, am.’ The Romantic urge maintains that we can never find out who we are, because that is to be prescriptive and is to construct, ’an identity‘ from behind the gates of arrogance and greed and anger and pride and the rest.
Naturally, now that we have been prescribing ourselves, our ’identities,’ we have failed, because what we have conjured up, does not exist. We have destroyed The health of our minds by funding our, ‘identities’ with prescriptivist pills; by convincing ourselves that we are something which we can never know ourselves to be. The mirror which we use to look in upon ourselves, is now not a mirror at all, rather, a self portrait. One which has been painted with fine brushes held firmly by the right hand of fear and the desire to, ‘matter.’
Is it any wonder that ‘pills’ are the new politics?