Picture: The Egg Dance by Pieter Aertsen
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It would be sufficient to quote the title of literary oeuvres such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to end this article in one sentence. Or, perhaps, a few sentences. It’s under everyone’s eyes how a lot of us are becoming increasingly dependent on technological substances, whether the specific use of a certain device triggers the release of a certain hormone within the physical body, or a given chemical is, let’s say, breathed in through a mechanical device. The latter can be assimilated to substances used by humans and other animals throughout history, such as smoke from burned leaves or fermented fruit. The former is more subtle and has more to do with our imagery: sound and vision; with the assumed inability of our brain to fully distinguish between two-dimensional inputs and three-dimensional inputs; and on the auditory side of things, the inability to tell between recordings and organic sounds. These addictive triggers, freely available on any digital device, would then perform the function of what the Ancient Romans would call circenses, the games, in the popular Latin phrase panem et circenses ‘bread and circuses’. Let us now knead a few more references and ideas together and bake some panem.
In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the author refers to a mythical country called Country of Cuccagna, curiously translated as Cockayne in English, and he names it Bengodi, literally ‘enjoy well’, in the third novella on the eighth day in the book. In this country, there is no lack. Shelter, victuals, and alcoholic beverages are perpetually at one’s disposal – it’s fair to mention that Boccaccio wrote in 14th-century Europe, where food and drink were not exactly abundant. Another key aspect of Bengodi, or Cuccagna, is that one would not need to work to feed oneself. Let us take this one step further: if one is constantly and freely satiated and inebriated, the consequent pleasure deriving from it would soon dissipate. That’s where the ingenious novel Brave New World (1932) completes the picture with the essential ingredients for a tyranny of pleasure: early childhood conditioning, chemical drugs to extinguish any kind of pain, and steadily available entertainment. (I will leave out of this article the, albeit fruitful, theme of early programmed death.) Ensured survival of the flesh and ready painkilling for the psyche. Does it sound familiar?
Yes – and no. I will leave to you, based on your perspective of what we may call reality, further reflection on today’s world, or worlds – or, even more accurately, your world.
Could it be that the goal of pleasure is overrated? Could it be that transcending duality by choosing only one of the two ends of the spectrum may engender a rather incomplete and potentially wasteful existence? These are not rhetorical questions. Let us genuinely ask ourselves. Wouldn’t pleasure, when artificially increased to its ridiculous, tacky parody, become a distraction from something more meaningful? That something is not to be identified on my part. What is perhaps my responsibility is to include in these lines an exhortation, from the Latin exhortari ‘to incite out’. So I incite you to emerge out of this sea of distractions and look. By looking, I mean asking, not answering, but asking the questions listed above, for example. And the many more questions that will surely derive from these.
At first, asking yourself questions of this magnitude may feel like dancing among eggs, trying not to crash them, as the painting above suggests. Our upbringing has, in most cases, fabricated some ready-made answers for us: those are the eggs not to crush. It may seem inviting to stomp on them, to feel the pleasure of their cracking sound, of the visuals of yolks and whites bleeding out. Yet you cannot eat an egg that is smashed under your foot. And a higher form of nourishment is what we may be in desperate need of.
Hence, the next time you are feeling the urge to reach for the magical golden tablet you keep safely in your pocket, or your handbag, and consult the oracle you think you will find in it, stop for a moment. One moment. And ask yourself questions such as: What am I doing? Pause; do not answer like an automaton would – afterwards, you can continue with your habitual behavior. But before that, take the time to question it…
With a question.
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Herons