Poshdeluxe

Tis hard for us to rouse our spirits up–

It is the human creative agony

Though but to hold the heart an empty cup

Or tighten on the team the rigid reign.

Many will rather lie among the slain

Than creep through narrow ways the light to gain–

Than wake the will, and be born bitterly.

But we who would be born again indeed,

Must wake our souls unnumbered times a day

And urge ourselves to life with holy greed.

Now open our bosoms to the wind’s free play,

And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still

Submiss and ready to the making will,

Athirst and empty, for God’s breath to fill.

(George MacDonald, “Diary of an Old Soul”)

From “Fury” by Salman Rushdie:

All around him the American self was reconceiving itself in mechanical terms, but was everywhere running out of control. This self talked constantly about itself, barely touching on any other topic. An industry of controllers– witch doctors whose role was to augment and ‘gap-fill’ the work of the already witchy doctors– had arisen to deal with its problems in performance. Redefinition was this industry’s basic mode of operation. Unhappiness was redefined as physical unfitness, despair as a question of good spinal alignment. Happiness was better food, wiser furniture orientation, deeper breathing technique. Happiness was selfishness. The rudderless self was told to be its own steering mechanism, the rootless self was instructed to root itself in itself while, plainly, continuing to pay for the services of the new guides, the cartographers of the altered states of America…

In spite of all the chatter, all the diagnosis, all the new consciousness, the most powerful communications made by this new, much-articulated national self were inarticulate. For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost. An excess of this heart damage was the issue, not muscle tone, not food, neither feng shui nor karma, neither godlessness nor God. This was the Jitter Bug that made people mad: excess not of commodities but of their dashed and thwarted hopes. Here in Boom America, the real-life manifestation of Keats’s fabulous realms of gold, here in the doubloon-heavy pot at the rainbow’s end, human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments. When arsonists lit fires that burned the West, when a man picked up a gun and began killing friends, when lumps of concrete smashed the skulls of rich young women, this disappointment for which the word “disappointment” was too weak was the engine driving the killers’ tongue-tied expressiveness. This was the only subject: the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at at time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before. In the tormented flames and anguished bullets Malik Solanka heard a crucial, ignored, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable question– the same question, loud and life-shattering as a Munch scream, that he had just asked himself: is this all there is? That, this is *it*? *This* is *it*? People were waking up… and realizing that their lives didn’t belong to them. Their *bodies* didn’t belong to them, and nobody else’s bodies belonged to anyone, either. They no longer saw a reason not to shoot.