Life is what the living possess...
I had the misfortune of going to a shopping centre today. It was new and white, crazy angles and not-there-glass, blue lights along the railings of escalators and lowered false ceilings. It dazzled and awed. It took a long time to open. All those low bass rumblings and the whining drill sounds take fruition in this thing so clean and ordered. With the area cordoned off like it was and the muffled sounds booming late into the night, you would think they were creating gargantuan life, a mad scientist screaming over the monolith – “It’s alive…IT’S ALIIIIIIVE”
It might be alive but the inhabitants of the mall could hardly be classified as such. The greatest minds in our history are yet to formulate an exact and exclusive definition of what life is exactly.
This is one of the marvellous definitions I came across - the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from nonliving ones; "there is no life on the moon"
An organic phenomenon…interesting, now what the hell is an organic phenomenon. If you look up the definition of organic it tells you that the organic is of the living. Circular arguments and definitions be gone. In the name of Christ I compel you.
An animated object hardly counts. How about consciousness, yeah, and how about sea cucumbers? How about life as something that changes over time and then changes to the point of non-existence? Galaxies do that and yet we can not attribute life to them. What about those things that evolve, that branch out into different species and can reproduce? Reproduction is a big one in the work-in-progress definition of life. Well then are viruses alive? And if they are why is it that they are not classified amongst the living – do they not share behavioural patterns, do they not endure and move and become extinct? Do they not evolve?
As hard as it has become to define life it is easy enough to determine what is living. It’s almost as if the human being comes equip with a life detecting gene, like those life scanners in Aliens and Star Trek. We know the privileged, we know our own, we know how to grow them and eat them, master and control them, but is in the inanimate that our mastery excels. To take plaster, brick, steel, glass and mortar and render it all into a Parthenon for consumerism has become the defining ability, the defining talent of our civilisation. Goddamn it! We in the west know how to build the best darn malls in the world.
And we give life to our monuments to the inanimate. The life of a civilisation, the life of a town, the world spirit, the zeitgeist of an age; all these figures of speech connote a life force that extends from our hands into our greatest creations and technical masterpieces. Buildings with history and the evolution of furniture. In a universe where life seems to be scarce, we seem to be eager to impart life to the non-living, we seem to want to be less lonely in our living.
When did our offspring start to drain us of that indefinable quality or attribute we call life? Could it have been marked by the 1978 release of Dawn of the Dead? When there is no more room in hell, the dead will once again walk the shopping mall, will find an environment suitable for their state of being. Maybe it was the mall that made them dead in the first place…the living dead. Animated like so many other things but excluded from the circle and community of the living.
The mall I went to today almost had that new baby smell. Still untainted by the world, by the treading of muddy feet, it had the gleam of promise, like something special could happen here, like it was designed for something special to happen.
It could be the new town square of the old republican democracies, a place to partake in the cultural evolution of a civilisation, to interact with citizens and activists, a place of sharing and cross pollination. It wasn’t the architecture, the inanimate that disappoints the promise. It’s the masses of the walking dead. The vacancies on two legs, the chickens with no feathers (Socrates once encountered the definition of a human as a featherless bi-ped, a good attempt and probably as good as it’s going to get), walking aimlessly, with me in the middle wondering “What the fuck am I doing here? I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything. Not hungry or thirsty, not in need of shelter or warmth. I wouldn’t mind a coffee, but not the stagnate water they pass off as coffee around here.”
The worst thing about walking around this new marvel, this lifestyle centre for the eastern suburbs, is the feeling of being dead. I don’t know what it means to be alive. I question the notion of it on an almost daily basis, but I know what it is to be dead, to be vacant and gone. What is creepier about it is that it is not the feeling of death, not the feeling of moving from this plane into the oblivion, or into the heavens and hell that are designed and promised to tingle or devastate the nerve endings. It is the feeling of returning, of dying and returning but being excluded from that sphere of the living that we are always, although subtly, aware of.
I hadn’t been to a mall for a long time until I went to one tonight and it might be that on this night I have discovered the reason why that was.