Moloch! …and The Matrix

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! …

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monsterous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!” Allen Ginsberg “HOWL”

Reading part II of “HOWL” shakes me awake from my day to day drifting dream that is Moloch. Substitute other words in there and it still reads the same way. Try “television” or “our modern consumerist culture” or “human ego.” The beauty of Part II is the breadth of transposition and interpretation. Critics have spent incalculable hours scrutinizing Ginsberg’s work with their analytical combs. There is so much to be discovered and appreciated from all of their hard and thoughtful work. This will not be another piece along those lines. I just merely began with those lines.

I return to The Matrix Trilogy now. Moloch…The Matrix…can I weave these two works together into some intelligent and comprehensible modern duet?

Morpheus: “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” (and also)

Morpheus: “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Morpheus: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”

Those quotes from the 1999 film are powerful statements challenging reality, just as Ginsberg’s rant on Moloch does. This is what Po-Mo’s attempt to do in a fancy, intertwined web of thought upon thought pointing to dualities present in almost everything. I love that, even though, the circular notion of it does get dizzying. Ever try reading some of the philosophical theory written in the past sixty years? Fascinating. As are the ideas flowering forth from both the poem and movies I referenced here.

What is REAL? Why does REAL matter? Why are we fearful of Moloch and also a pod-prison where the matrix dictates our reality? Are we all dreaming our way through life, missing real reality?

Try this. Do an online search of just the word reality. There are thousands of hits. That is interesting since they all differ so much from one site to the next. This just testifies to the philosophical significance of this broad topic. Going back to Plato’s shadows on a cave wall, we perceive our own realities. Just as a pod-person might never know that he or she is in a computer-generated matrix for the entirety of his or her life…one might also not know just how much Moloch impacts our life. Reality is whatever we make of our choices. Now enter a Buddhist notion: the unreality of reality. I will not elaborate in the role of a teacher, other than to say that there is an interesting aspect of “un-doing” our notion of the REAL which certain Buddhists practice. I found this quote on a Buddhist site…http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest
- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affectation for a few people near us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” -Albert Einstein

Shocked that was Einstein, I wasn’t. Physics, matter, energy…Einstein should have been a Buddhist. Everything – us, the table, the air, it is all stardust vibrating as a miracle to construct matter. The electric impulses that our sensory organs send our brain, a code registering these vibrations – light, sound, tactile objects – is interpreted and understood as our experience of the REAL world. I do believe in something beyond just physics, the stuff of souls – as I’ve discussed in previous posts. So, in thinking as such, why do I fear Moloch? Because I’ve succumbed to it and have felt its talons digging into me. Why do I fear the Matrix? I have slid into a day to day life of monotony and complacency…only to know and grow when it is challenged and completely up-ended. The stuff of life should not be complacent…we are meant to vibrate – vigorously, vividly, vivaciously.

Although I fear I have barely scraped the surface of the REALITY iceberg, I do hope that it has been a thought provoking post. Please do not allow your life to be swallowed by Moloch or to be lost in a dream-like existence offered by the matrix concept. Know that whatever your reality, there are ways of deconstructing it via Po-Mo thinking into something that does not snuff out the amazing miracle of you are part of a mystical universe striving for harmony.

~ by the10sdoc on June 28, 2008.