The Multiple Molestation of Meaning

When you write a lot, there is a continual pressure to be original. I live in perpetual fear of using the same words and phrases, and also of working with the same ideas. A comfortable writer is a dead hack. You have an obligation to yourself and others to be heading somewhere.

However, there is one word that I find myself returning to in endless horror and fascination, like an arsonist returning to his mother’s burning apartment to masturbate over the flames.

It is ‘saccharine’. Yes, the stuff they put in NutraSweet.

Saccharine has no energy, no caloric value. It is a chemical creation, pieced together in a lab from errant molecules, designed and packaged, then turned out in packets of 500 so you can remove the guilty feeling, the emotional weight, of eating sweet foods. The taste is curiously hollow – undeniably sweet, but with an accompanying emptiness where your taste buds inform you that you are in fact being screwed.

It is the divine monarch of metaphors when it comes to describing the festering haemorrhoid that masquerades as the modern creative imagination. This bald-gummed drooling monstrosity, this baseless perversion, has so many, many things to hate I scarcely know where to begin or when to end.

We have television, film and music is ‘entertainment’ and not art, and art itself is pornography and dime-store sensationalism. We have “pre-stressed” clothing. We have astrology, horny goat weed, homeopathy and emails from those mysteriously rich Nigerian fellows who seem so desparately keen to make us a million dollars. We have the fucking abomination that is the self-help industry. We have the Artist’s Way franchise, which will inevitably help us discover our inner artist.

“But what if I’m not artistic?”

Don’t be silly, child. There’s no question of being uninspired. We have done away with all the stupid people and now we’re all special, with ‘different talents’ and ‘various levels of achievement’.

Marx was right in Grundrisse – a conspicuous product of capitalism seems to be stupidity. When we commodify an object or an act, we imply that it has no inherent value, because it can be co-valued and exchanged universally with any other entity. If we want to get fit, we buy a gym membership, new sweats, running shoes, goofy bike pants, ab gadgets from the television. We do not grind ourselves to a standstill and persevere. If we want to be a porn star, we buy expensive pills that rudely hijack our biology and give us erections you could hang an overcoat on for a week. As in life, we do not address that which makes us impotent. Impotence in all things is not a disease, it is a symptom. It cannot be ‘cured’. It will go away when a disease no longer produces it.

And what of method and rigour in all this? They are merely two players in this grubby little game, aspects of thought being slowly watered down. The respect that they earned over thousands of years up to the Modernist era is now being pissed on at an alarming rate by people whose raison d’etre for drawing breath holds no respect for truth, art or beauty.

This is one reason I take refuge in science. The area is not without its problems, but the central premise of the academic, regardless of where they work, is to give meaning. Rigour is both necessary and expected. The statistical and imaginative requirements for greatness are savagely maintained, while on the other hand, those who deviate from the correct method are treated as bastards and pariahs, and the boundaries of what is and isn’t science are patrolled by academics who rally around the Sokal Affair as a defining moment in keeping the head of cultural stupidity properly kicked in.

This is one lonely area of human endeavour where we maintain some kind of standard of decency. Many others languish. We only have space for the most recent example to do my head in.

This is a review of an album by an awful pop-punk cretin. He was on a television show called Australian Idol, a low-fidelity antipodean knock-off of American Idol. I have no intention of listening to his music. I do, however, have every intention of eviscerating its reviewer.

“Don't get too precious and snort that "this Idol joker with the stupid hair couldn't make a decent album". Put this alongside pretty much any of the bright/dumb Cali-punks - your Blinks and Good Charlottes - and it's not out of place.

Sure, every song works the same format, Harding's voice gets plenty of studio tweaking and its rebellion is as heartfelt as a McDonald's ad. Yet the choruses come perfectly packaged, the guitars run headlong, the energy buzzes and, well, it doesn't suck at all.”

Take notice, you arty whores. It’s ‘precious’ to insist that a bad artist makes bad art.

The correct perspective is to say merely that it isn’t offensive and therefore acceptable as entertainment.

I mourn for what’s left of my species.