The Machine Doesn't Care But It Writes Back Anyway: How the Obscene, Grotesque, and Erotic Will Save Humanity
It seems to me that humans are never themselves at any stage of life. We operate within systems and laws, driven by passions. This dynamic helps us understand physical realities and ideological beliefs. Human affairs often break toward the grotesque because of our mortal flaws. We will create anything and destroy everything to avoid our decaying existence. We possess a spirit that "is prey to the most astounding impulses." In the foreword of Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille writes, "Man lives in constant fear of himself." Driven by this inner conflict, we've placed language, eroticism, and death into a mechanical processing wheel.
Later, we will view this tendency as a source of regret. We embrace these concepts because we fear facing who we truly are. By confronting the obscene, we challenge the sterile structures of our society. Linking the obscene with eroticism captures Rimbaud's belief. He thought these experiences, like poetry, transport us to a place where separate “objects blend and fuse together”. They lead us to eternity, to death, and through death to continuity. “Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea." The obscene may be the only thing that could break our reliance on generative AI and constant autopilot. People should follow their own curiosities rather than succumbing to emptiness. We want to move away from the "licentious image" De Sade talked about. But this effort highlights our own mortality.
“One must live with time and die with it, or else elude it for a greater life.”
-Albert Camus
Our Everyday technology offers a sense of hope that leaves us inert. This hope keeps us from revolting against the future and helps us avoid facing the reality of death. It is easier to disconnect from life than it is to feel alone, depressed, or anything at all. Modern tools cannot replace our innate ability to experience pleasure or sorrow. Connecting our finite lives to a higher purpose is an act of acceptance. We must recognize our deep wish to live in harmony with our natural urges. We must not let fear take control. We must not remain blinded by the void, engaging with technologies alien to our nature. We should stay at the heart of creation, unafraid to return to the nothingness we came from. Sex, art, expression, and death help us reconnect with a richness of experience. This cycle is a flow of reality with no beginning or end. Creating from human experience helps us accept the absurd. This acceptance restores our bond with the natural world.
Subjective life is often ignored. This neglect stems from a desire for comfort that leads us to surrender our rights. We endorse our own silence, betraying our language. Hiding behind machines takes away our duty to explore and answer our own questions about creation. We are a society that shapes others' beliefs and views to benefit ourselves. We still need to find ways to escape and overcome the pain, struggles, and poverty in our society.
Our leaders continue to fail to remove this hellish storm. We have let a new spectrum of poison reign supreme over the minds of every Western man and woman. We fear the sacredness in our urges. We ignore how this turns the grotesque and obscene into a new kind of beauty. What gets censored often holds the key to awakening the Western mind. It helps people see their own humanity again. Only God’s own creations can free themselves from these horrors. Machines cannot save us. Without our freedom, we slowly risk becoming like the very things that prey on us: inert machines.
“Life,” said Emerson, “consists in what a man is thinking all day.” Life in our world today is twirling on its toes like a ballerina, in a slop bucket of feces. We have neither time nor capacity to think. We lust to scroll, yet we remain limited by needs that feel beyond this world. We often wish for rescue from everything except God. We shun the erotic, obscene, and grotesque to repackage them into something that could cure our loneliness and fears. We have lost contact with the purest things known to our internal selves.