Wanting people to listen you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore, you need to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.
John Doe, Se7en
People have been overpowered with too much noise and so their listening has receded in order to protect itself. Not listening then becomes a defense mechanism often employed without the user's knowledge. The power to listen thus atrophies over time so that when the time comes to listen (to extract and retain the essential information that is voiced by another), there is no capacity left to do so. The person thinks he can listen but he can't. His ability to retain information and penetrate the essence of what is being said is lamentably low. This is why in the past few days in Minneapolis things have kicked off and riots have come to the streets: because nobody is listening to what the black community are saying. This is why the sledgehammer is such an important weapon in the armory of the poet-artist, the sledgehammer as a ramping up as a poetic license let's say, a polemic with bite, something that grabs your attention and makes you think.
John Doe, Se7en
People have been overpowered with too much noise and so their listening has receded in order to protect itself. Not listening then becomes a defense mechanism often employed without the user's knowledge. The power to listen thus atrophies over time so that when the time comes to listen (to extract and retain the essential information that is voiced by another), there is no capacity left to do so. The person thinks he can listen but he can't. His ability to retain information and penetrate the essence of what is being said is lamentably low. This is why in the past few days in Minneapolis things have kicked off and riots have come to the streets: because nobody is listening to what the black community are saying. This is why the sledgehammer is such an important weapon in the armory of the poet-artist, the sledgehammer as a ramping up as a poetic license let's say, a polemic with bite, something that grabs your attention and makes you think.
The poetry of the sledgehammer awakens.... opens up... dismantles all the nonsense that you have been filled in with. As the John Doe character in Se7en clearly tells Brad Pitt's police officer in the final scene of the movie, 'You can't just tap people on the shoulder and expect them to listen... you need to hit them with a sledgehammer.' And it's true. The noise of society's institutions and its institutionalized lies are too loud for any single voice to be heard anymore. But if you're radical enough, root-based enough and in touch with Nature, that single voice will always find a way, because that radicale and root goes way down and in doing so connects with other radicales and other roots, and together, form a great Voice that can be heard the world over.
Society is a violent phenomenon under progress and capitalism. Its violence has been drilled into us (and thus accepted) so much that it cannot be seen anymore. Whether its society's institutions which sell Life and Land in a variety of clever ways, or simply the idea that technology is some machine outside the body, the violence is serious and deadly. We are violated on a daily basis whether through the act of being transported or the act of work which is not nourishing but depleting. We are violated in our very homes simply by having a television or any number of tools and machines that suck the earth's energies dry. We are so inured to the violence hidden in plain sight (because we were born into it) that we actually buy into it and celebrate it. This is the problem with a 'culture' that is not transmitted naturally (through the technology of Nature and not the machine) that it becomes violated and thus transmitted violently. Our evolution has been replaced with progress and thus our genetic transmission displaced by the printing press and all its sundry delivery items. Our knowledge thus comes from the machine and is thus violent. Accordingly it is not knowledge but an 'in-formation' that does not come from the inside and form us according to Nature's precepts but which deforms us because it is imposed from without. This is why our world is in constant strife, why we peddle about in pollutants that destroy our land and our bodyminds, because we are deformed creatures whose minds can no longer think but which act according to the thoughts placed into them.
In western societies, you are surrounded and perforated by lies and trickery and deception. And falsehood. Nature by contrast in her wholeness is Truth. But the city, by its very essence, is anti-Nature and thus anti-Truth. The incessant cultural monster continues unabated mediated through its various tentacles: social media, news, movies, TV, consumerism, work... science, progress, bla bla bla. It is all mediated and thus all false. Here, the poetry of the sledgehammer is the poetry of Nature cracking open the kevlar carapace (and bomb suit) that has been fitted onto you, and dispensing with the mediated. Once into the immediate, one begins to see Reality itself outwith all man's decorations and descriptions.
And so here it is, from the belly of the capacious cactus herself, spines and needles included, the (universal) sledgehammer in all its slender yet powerful (and cosmic) glory...
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