“Every natural thing in this world has the innate skill of obedience. With the North American history of slavery in plain view, and with every weekend Buddhist looking to kill every Buddha they meet on the road, obedience generally goes against the North American grain. As adults, we are not big on obeying. The quality of being obedient is not much sought or taught, except to small children while they are small. Etymologically, obedience has nothing to do with being some kind of slave. It means instead a willingness and an ability to listen to what is, to attend to it. Obedience is a following the grain of things. With that skill of obedience, every natural thing knows above all how to be itself, come what may. Dying is a natural thing, and left to its natural self each living thing knows how to die. The body has the genius of a natural thing, and it knows how to obey the accumulation of time, wear and tear, disease and symptoms. It knows how to stop. But med-tech, not in any sense a natural thing, knows how to subvert the way disease and symptoms have of keeping and marking time, and in doing so it subverts the body’s knowledge of how to stop.”
—Stephen Jenkinson, “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul”, North Atlantic Books, 2015, page 51.
Tag: Time
I Am a Machine
I am a machine. I do not act from careful consideration, I act from conditioning. I am run the way society has taught me to run. I am run by my habits. I am run by an underlying sentience which has learned to imitate, to fit in, to wear many faces, but has not yet become self-aware.
I am a machine that feeds on many inputs: my childhood, my environment, the society I live in, my education, the interactions I have every day. I feed on many sources, but produce one primary output: waste. I am a waste machine.
I gobble up everything around me — food, mood, products, information, experience — and shit it out. I leave behind a trail of waste: wasted words, wasted time, wasted energy.
I leave behind a trail of trash: plastic wrappers, grocery bags, styrofoam takeout containers, coffee cups, water bottles, band-aids, paper towels, floss, jars, bottles, rotting fruit, wilted vegetables, stale bread, countless boxes, packages and containers.
Even more liberally than I use the world around me, I waste energy. I waste energy with frustration over trivialities — whether I was invited, whether I should do it today or tomorrow, that the cups were put back in the wrong cupboard, that I’m out of clean socks.
I waste time and energy working for someone else’s profit, for a wage I waste on beer, tea, and organic corporate tomatoes.
I waste energy with lust, eyes finding incarnate fantasies in too many bodies. I lust for a life I could be living and forget to live the life that I am alive in.
I waste thoughts, filing intellect into useless bins: opinion, judgment, interpretation, complaint, dissatisfaction.
I expel emotions and energy carelessly and thoughtlessly, like a loudspeaker with no one at the controls, mic passed around aimlessly. Whatever is shouted into the mic, I shout back louder.
I am a machine calibrated for efficiency and immediacy, and waste is the quickest, easiest response. So it has become my default reaction, even to the pettiest concerns.
I am one input in a civilization built on waste. My mechanicalness is incorporated into the mechanism of civilization; my waste is absorbed into the waste network.
Drains take my defecation and urine and liquid food and dirt and phlegm, so I don’t have to see them, think about them or deal with them. Trash cans on every street corner, in every restaurant, and in every house take anything I throw into them. I acknowledge my waste for a moment and then it’s gone and I’m already processing something new for disposal.
A system of screens, billboards, signs, stores, headlines, posters, voices, images, and structures funnel my time and attention, telling me where to look and what to think. My time and attention is processed as waste material. Endless inputs, branded as information, entertainment, guidance, wisdom, news, think for me, or distract me from needing to think at all. I am calibrated to allow these inputs to turn my awareness off and let the machine work, taking in life and producing waste.
As a waste machine, I am a reliable source of income for the industries of modern civilization, which are efficiently arranged to run off the time, attention, labor, money and resources I mechanically spend.
My waste is a necessary resource for the waste cycle of civilization. As a productive waste machine, I am a productive member of society.