on cookies, music, and...

This week's prompt is quite wide, so I've decided to narrow it down and focus my pondering on one aspect of it. Whether this shall be detrimental or not to the flow or depth of my pondering... we shall see. Because it doesn't exist yet. ...But it's in the process!

I was fascinated by the little bit of Alan Kirby's article that we read aloud in class the other day, because, though my brain wasn't completely wrapping around it at first, one little tidbit really sharpened my focus: "Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism."

This shocked me. All at once it made perfect sense, though I'd never thought of it that way before--today is all about complete and total immersion. Maybe it was something in the back of my mind, somewhere, but I'd never thought of it as a bad thing. In fact, even now I'm not totally sure it is all bad.

I think my best way to present this is with a few real-world examples. Not just real, but... well, real, as in, right off of me. Example one: anyone who knows me [semi-well] knows of my recent obsession (is obsession the right word? I haven't figured that out yet...) with baking. Things lately are stressful. The process of baking cookies makes the world disappear for about half an hour, and all I can think about is cookies, cookies, love, cookie dough, and more cookies. As Kirby states, it "takes the world away."

Example two, and I think this is one we can all identify with (since I'm such a weirdo with the cookies): sometimes I flick on my iPod, shuffle to the perfect song, and imagine that nothing exists but the music. It's not difficult, if you don't have too much on your mind--all original thought sort of melts away, replaced by lyrics, melody, harmony, bass lines, the sound of the singer's voice. For approximately three minutes and thirty seconds, that's all that exists.

There are a billion other things we do, every day, in an attempt to exclude ourselves from the world--we don't always know it, but we do. I feel like this should be a scary thing.... But maybe it's not... Maybe it is....

So let me have a minute to try to reason it out a little bit... Maybe the bad part of it is that we feel like there's stuff out there we want to hide away from--we want the world to go away for awhile. So what's out there? Hatred, ignorance, death, despair, misunderstanding... And that's nothing we can fix, easily, quickly--that's stuff that's going to be there for the rest of our lives, somewhere, in some form, always audible, always painful.

Plus, we're really relying on that, aren't we? All the painful stuff--we can just ignore it, if we can fully immerse ourselves in something else, forget that the world around us exists. It's more than a defense mechanism, it's just what we do. What we've come to live. Just like I said--I didn't see anything wrong with it, at first. I'm still thinking it's kind of okay. It's just the way we've moved as a society. Then, of course, that brings up all the questions about how we are moving as a society: Are we progressing? Is this progress a good thing? What do we get once we've reached the tippy-top of that progress? Where will we be then? Can you progress past the tippy-top of progress??

Ahhh, good old postmodernism. Ask a simple question, and all you get for an answer are more questions.