When Will You Get It?
"I must have been mad, I never knew what I had, until I threw it all away."
Bob Dylan was talking about lost love, of course...you knew that. But this is the era of sampling and subversion, of sublimation and seduction - every turn of the anti-corporate screw co-opted, becomes part of the next pro-consumptioin paradigm. Given the number of people on the planet, hasn't consumption become the ultimate evil? The best trick the Devil ever played, so the cliche goes, was to convince the world that consumption is good. For as we consume, so shall we be consumed by the fires.
Jesus was seriously into giving it away. "Give all your worldly goods away and follow me," he said. (Of course religions were quickly organized to provide someplace to receive all that giving.) And he didn't mean follow him to the mall to get some more. The pro-consumption folks will say "what will you have to give away if you don't buy anything?" How about giving of yourself? (And then, will you have any self left for yourself?) "...I never knew what I had, until I threw it all away," until I could emerge, like a butterfly, out of the cocoon of possessions, until I unbound myself from the silken skein of continual consumption. "I must have been mad," to spend myself in the pursuit of one leaf after the next, I, and my brothers and sisters, stripping the green off the planet, digesting it and shitting out the silken threads that bind me, the fine fibers that are woven to clothe the rich.
So the season of giving approaches, and everyone is busily getting so they will have something to give. Get, give, get...twice as much getting as giving - getting squared -but still never getting enough, and never getting that getting is, in fact, taking - taking food from the mouths of the starving, taking the very substance of the earth, being taken by the fever of consumption, a rube, taken for all you're worth, being given credit so that they can take you all year long. If you're going to be taken anyway, why not give it away first - then at least you'll know who got it, then you'll be able to see the smile of thanks rather than the evil grin of the deceiver.
"You're just throwing it away," the Devil will say. They won't use it as well as you, won't get the full value of it, (and worst of all, they won't become consumers like you - salt of the earth, support of the system, cog in the machine of consumption), they'll fritter it away on booze and drugs (and who supplies the booze and drugs?). If you're not going to "spend it wisely" (on our products) at least save it (in our banks) so you'll have it (to give to us) when you need to, to spend on health care (in our hospitals), or a retirement home (in our gated communities), or on a vacation (in our resort hotels).
I must have been mad, to spend so much of my substance on what was, at the end, so insubstantial. I never knew what I had - what was already there, hidden inside myself, buried in the obesity of my consumption - until I threw it all away, gave it all away, shed the fat, unburdened my body, opened my heart, felt the pain...started living...