It can be hard to grow up. You wind up wherever you are and flail around in a panic, and if you’re unlucky there isn’t anything to grab onto – nothing but the saline tragedy of lost opportunity. I can only comment from my own experiences, but there is a tendency too to lose yourself in the massive blur of the other many billions of people around you, and this loss of self is often complimented by shattering of ego and fear of the future. It can be hard to live with a fear of the future.
The commodification of the human body is hardly a modern issue – the concept of valuing people on labor and contribution to society has long been used and abused. But now that money is involved it’s a little bit more, if you would, quantifiable. Some people reject this, but many embrace it, for such is life and you either make it or don’t. For those that don’t make it, that too is life.
I once watched a video on YouTube of a large bird of prey eating a deer alive. The poor creature was just standing, exhausted, staring emotionless away into the distance as its entrails were ripped from its body and devoured. This is reality: pain, suffering at the hands of another, and the final concession of defeat in the face of death.
Another time I was hiking in the Cascades and turned a corner in the forest to see an entire mountainside of yellow wildflowers basking in the afternoon sunlight, every so slowly turning to follow their God as it lazily drifted West, where presumably more flowers to illuminate resided. There are few words for moments like those, but if one must make an attempt, then: the feeling of beauty in simplicity and in nature, where exertion and thirst and hunger is just for the smallest bit forgotten in the face of beauty, or as Nabokov would refer to it (albeit in reference to writing), aesthetic bless. This too is reality: pleasure, love, and hiking.
I once visited a place in Oahu called Kahumana, an organic farm that attempted to rehabilitate homeless or troubled natives of the island by having them work on the farm for food and housing and eventually apply to minimum wage jobs. It seems ironic that the solution to the most ostracized and outcast of society are necessarily made to rejoin it, but what exactly is the alternative? To die of exposure or hunger or tuberculosis?
So what, though? What do we care of reality, or transients, or idealistic critiques of the modern world? To that, I can only say that people are people, just as reality is reality, and people should be valued because it is a terrible thing to suffer. Everyone has suffered, and everyone will suffer, and I think that it is in everyone’s best to minimize suffering, both their own and others. However, that is simply the musings of someone who is lost at sea with less to grab onto than he might like – a passing thought in the mind of a drowning man that maybe he left his oven on at home.
The Scenic Climax 