Mimetics: 3. Mimesis & Mimics

INTRODUCTION

Today I will address a topic that has been subliminally expressed throughout each installment in this series. Modesty does not possess me when it is necessary to mention it, despite the difficulties that this subject brings within the context of the 21st century. This is, the context of a mega-technological western society, with a scientism idealized by the majority, with an hyperinflation of the matters of the mind over those of body and spirit.

Fortunately this is changing; the hegemony of the mind and the ego are giving way to a re-awareness of everything that encompasses the human being — and everything that the human being encompasses — and that is why it is possible to speak freely of topics that previously would have been banished to a single liminal domain, more typical of madmen and beasts than of rational beings, moved by a wide curiosity and intrinsic motivation.

Today’s topic is the nature of mimesis and the mimics that stalk the path to it. An essay of this category and proposal deserves more of a book than a simple article, but in the spirit of the methodology and format to which I am currently committed, it will be so.

So, mimesis. That word that I got into the habit of repeating. It is not a new concept, at least not in its organic sense — that is, what it does, what it represents. We already said in previous installments that this is, plain and simple, connecting to the matrix. Connect with God, with the Whole, with Nature, with the Cosmos, with oneself, with Reason. All concepts that approached from the seriousness cause more than one beat outside the bar. For a long time, the human being focused more on mastering the outside than understanding the inside; this has an explanation. And yet, Chaos is expressed in many ways and where the light goes out, monsters party. That’s what I think western society is like; we illuminate the streets, we erect monuments to Order, we monitor with cameras and we regulate with laws, and yet … The interior of each one is an unknown, mysterious beast, too unearthly to even recognize it as real. We identify with the ego, that is the program, we believe we are what we consciously see and understand about ourselves — or even worse, what they tell us we are or should be — , a mere reflection of the Mirror of Chaos (this is, an endless pool of the Unknown that throws back at us what we see, which is what we are). There were exceptions, of course. Philosophers, spiritualists, mystics, psychologists and all kinds of thinkers have dedicated themselves to investigate, at their own risk, in the matter of chaos, of the shadow within us, our own nature and that of the cosmos.

Discerning mimesis as imitation requires more than understanding it as what we think is a copy, a product. Earlier I said that there is no such thing as real and false as to an idea, but that it is always real insofar as it is an intrinsic event. We strive to create a distinction between the real and the unreal to generate order in our micro-cosmos, in “our reality”, and yet what we have manufactured is an inelegant divide between what we perceive (extrinsic) and what we experience (intrinsic). Today we will take a few steps towards the heart of the chaos that is the World — the world beyond the world of the human — and how this concerns us. Good luck.

MIMETICS & MIMICS

Is it too risky a proclamation to say that the western human is a creature that hardly knows the worlds that surrounds and compose it?

You have to think about it. How much of the life of the common human is invested in understanding what is not “productive” to the capitalist framework? It is logical: time is limited, hence many of our activities and desires are aligned with the possession and proper investment of capital, of goods. Spending time on something other than making money is … Losing money. And to lose money is to lose freedom. Makes sense? It is coherent for me to conceive it, but absolutely insane to integrate it as a part of an internal value system. Or are we corvid creatures meant to accumulate? Is it not the case that the things that are most valuable to the human life also those which can’t be bought? And lastly, are these not the ones that are harmed when we invest too much of our life in “winning”?

The universe around us is a complex place. Science is evidence that the more you dig, the more you find. Each object of study is reducible to smaller and smaller units of information, which progressively become more elusive. For those who have studied enough about something, you know what I am saying: finally, the “reason” for things is a mystery. And not to mention the inner world, which is known through reflections and evades us at every single moment. Eventually those who seek God find themselves, and those who seek themselves find God. Curiously, the object of that we call religion differs tremendously from the washed-up product the masses ingest and which we know as doctrine. In their terrible ambiguity there is a myriad of symbols — the conception of religion itself is fascinating as it is, despite their results (the perception of this tends to be biased as hell, by the way). And in this seemingly irreconcilable systems there are constants, they all understood something. It is precisely in the asynchronous similarities that we contemplate a ceaseless proposition: there is something in the human being that repeats itself as a pattern, as the expression of a matrix. And this search we all undertake is neither more nor less than seeking an encounter with Truth, with Reality, with … what we all are. We want to understand, we want to know, we want to find order in chaos. Build sense from all of this. Perhaps that is why so many people are desperate to follow whoever gives the impression to know what’s up. Nietzsche announced it: after God died, either people would become gods in themselves or search for a new god anywhere, anyhow. That is the primal distinction between individualism and sheep-i-lism. The drive to master one’s own reality or cower in the refuge of someone else’s. But why do we seek out meaning?

Why? Clearly something compels us, both when we create it and when we destroy it. As Gilles Deleuze (1980) said, a brick serves to build an institution or to break a window. Human history, the history of the World is similar to that of a lung, an inhalation of chaos and an exhalation of perpetual order that is built, destroyed and rebuilt by searching … Searching for what? Perhaps find that which is most perfect, the most complete form, one that becomes immortal. What works and does not change. Within a context of equilibrium, everything performs within a self-regulating system which settles whether they should change or not. Chaos is the advent of order: an order built on temporality comes to chaos. Consciously or unconsciously we seek this golden rule, like all the others, not of perfection as a thing in itself but of perfect balance. A balance … that is sustained over time. Although, to tell the truth, isn’t that exactly, with more or less tragedy, what we have been doing all along?

In this search for understanding in order to achieve balance, we search for the truth inside and outside of us. We look for the path towards it that calls us from the Hereafter, that which is beyond the wall, in the deep forest. We perpetually tend towards the Infinite. With each step, we illuminate the shadows and take the light beyond, the knowledge beyond … But where does the shadow go? It does not die; it is within us. The interior is an abandoned place. And in it, the monsters nest. With each shadow we beat on the outside, a shadow is added to the inside. Why? Why? Because … We don’t win. You can’t win. Every tactic to fight the Truth only provokes another expression of the Truth. We have historically put the enemy on the other side of the door as a motivator, as a by-product of our biological and cognitive evolution. And so there is always a monster to kill, a Hydra head to cut. But with each attack the Hydra grows, grows strong, and eats. Eat and eat and eat. Learn. It hides, it evolves; as the conscious human being grows, so does its unconscious. And if both are antagonistic, it is an arms race. The chaos of light is compensated by the order of the shadow, and vice versa. Too much order creates chaos. Too much chaos creates order. The inability of the human being to see a historical circularity, to believe “that this time will be different” is a sign of childishness. Of irresponsibility with the coherence of reality. After all, a whim not to change. And so this shadow of Humanity is a mimic, literally a grim imitation of who we are, and it blends in with us — it assumes our form, causes us to question who we are — are we us, or it?

The victims and failures of the paths of meaning that we have marked have created the creatures that now stalk the routes and assault the walkers, trapping them with aggression or misleading them so that they are lost forever. These figures live in the psyche, manifest themselves on the outside as dark aspects of the mental archetypes and blindly lead us into the jaws of the Great Mouth of Chaos. That is, if we do not integrate them harmonically. Which we are not teaching, and we must teach. Instead of looking for monsters to hunt outside, we need to create a world where monsters can be kind. Or who knows, maybe monsters are more than projections, and they are dangerously real in their own way. Let us hope not.

In the search for the mimesis or the mimetic state we seek a real connection with Reality and nurture ourselves from that contact. The World speaks to us when we connect, this connection is real, and who has not had it rejects it but who knows it cannot deny it. These are the great illuminations, to hear the voice — to feel the palpitation and to recognize that it is all One. It is this connection what heals us, harmonizes us and restores us. That cosmic hug with yourself. We need that. And yet, sinister shadows seek to cling to that notion like parasites and seek to confuse us in order to guide us — not to ourselves, but to a stiff wall. These “mimics” are a hangover from reality, the byproduct of, ultimately, an incongruence, our invention. Let’s face an understanding and logic to identify them.

Mimics are false lights. It is what is posing as something “good” to achieve something “bad”. A policy of “justice” that turns out to be a tyranny. A fair redistribution that is theft. A shelter that is a hidden slavery. A freedom that opens the way to abuse. A love that is a manipulation. A faith that is a scam. A promise that stole a kidney from us. A love that is pure projection. A sensible speech that is pure manipulation. A treasure chest that promises reward, only to devour us as we open it.

Mimics are ideologies. They are bundles of stagnant ideas that group together and focus on building a fixed structure of the world. It is a network that wraps around us until people are trapped. They trade their freedom for the safety of a working model. But human beings should not be safe, no, not at the expense of their ability to enter the unknown. Not at the expense of entering freedom, in mimesis. In being able to merge with the self on the other side of the mirror: the “everything I cannot conceive of being”. Ideology literally rejects everything one believes “not to be.” And therefore, the shadow is always on the other. Curiously, ideologies always create anti-theses, there is always a counter-position to a position since they cut out a fragment of reality. They necessarily collide. Each of these ghosts shows its ugly and painful muddy head through hatred, fear, discrimination, horrendous justifications, degeneration and deconstruction of meaning. They seek to lead us to a dark place, to catch us, to gently undress us from everything that we once were and leaves us a brick. The only option left then is to be a part of the wall, or to be thrown out the window.

Mimics are enemies of mimesis by definition. If mimesis seeks, through its imitation, to get closer to the source, to create new meaning, then mimics seek, through its imitation, to get away from it. Mimics are not only a political party — it can be a transaction of pleasure that offers us satisfaction in exchange for realization. A pay-to-win in which the price is the meaning that is built when walking the path of hope, expectation, mystery and effort. They tell us that at the end of the rainbow there is a pot of gold, so why not take a taxi? Little do they know that each coin in that cauldron is equivalent to each drop of sweat spilled, each tear, each heartbeat and each emotion. We reach the end and we went down into a land without colors, a land of nothingness. The car drives off with our money and we find that the pot is empty. Now we are trapped on the other side of the rainbow, and if depression does not kill us then the tragedy will take care of it. The way back from the new Nothing to the old Nothing. A terrible walk of shame backwards into the womb that has now become a grave.

Mimics are the promise of an empty reward that claims to make sense. It’s a bargain. “How easy it is!” This is not to say that something must be difficult to be good. In other words, the human being seeks meaning, seeks to create meaning in chaos, and this is achieved through the relationships we established with ourselves and with our environment along the path towards our destiny. Cutting the section, taking shortcuts, will do nothing in the service of creating meaning and when you arrive you will find yourself exactly where you started. Because “the other side” is not on-the-other-side, as something that is achieved by going from one end to the other. The Hereafter is found when we look back and down, towards the abyss of meaning that we leave behind, and realizing that it goes as deep as it goes up connecting Heaven with Hell. In that retrospective we understand, and with the it we are free to make contact with a new reality — we regenerate ourselves, we are transformed.

It is this transformation that we seek in our contact with the Real through mimesis. There must be investment. How much of what we are. By giving what we are, we get what we will be. We cannot be something new without ceasing to be the old; the treasure of the spirit is worth because we had to overcome the dragon to obtain it. Without the dragon there is no treasure. Without the dragon there is no challenge, there is no sense. Mimics are, today, the dragon. All the illusions that promise us paradise just by applying ourselves to the program. Those routes that tell us that the enemies “are them”. At the end of the game we realize that all the monsters, the bosses, the creatures and the traps were only expressions of a system designed to test us and give us, in due measure, what is necessary to get to the end and start a conversation. Heroes and dragons seek each other, because this is how the wheel turns.

CLOSING

So we must turn the wheel. We must push the stone up the hill. Face the dragon that guards the treasure. Fighting does not mean killing. In that dialogue, we understand that we are not so different. It is our means that define us. What we do with what they made of us. The meaning of all that? Well, thats personal.

Thank you very much.

Outro

I want to take the opportunity to do a little postscript. Today we care so much about the benefits that we are inclined to discard what we believe in but does not “pay” us. In the world of video game development, this means throwing out an idea because it “doesn’t sell,” because it doesn’t seem profitable. However, if we appeal to the comfort of the masses, if we adjust only to what the indices say, then we do not create anything new: we are feeding fat pigs. Every step forward has been conquered by those who heard the call of the far away, the drum in the heart of the jungle of the soul, and moved away from the safe and the known to reach and shape it. They were the ones who risked what they were to get the treasure of what they will be, and built with it. That is the legacy that constantly reaffirms the value of Humanity. Understanding how to draw a line in Chaos and bring back the golden eggs is a heroic task, and it can be accomplished by both those knights with swords and a designer with a pencil and paper. Where blood does not flow ink gushes, and we are facing a new era that will be molded by the heroes of culture. Artists, thinkers, intermediaries. To resolve conflicts, harmonize discrepancies and embrace differences — opening a wider arc to what it means to be human, and to be allowed to explore each different path as one sees fit by supporting one another.

And remember: not everything that glitters is gold. Smack that suspicious chest at least once; you never know when it can be a mimic who wants to eat you. But just because it’s a mimic it doesn’t mean it’s been all in vain — they usually keep a treasure for themselves, too.