Poeisis of the Star Gazer
The ocean sighs as the earth breathes upon a rose pink colored sunset flooding your eyes. Stars come and freckle the sky with rain glittering upon the ocean, reflections of the moon. Rain falling on my face like diamonds of the sacred eternal. Upon a night that is effervescently immortal. Kissing me in its glistening washed up waves upon the shore. The wind blowing whispers of love and embrace. The sand flowing under my feet reminds me of this body I am in. Serene peace. The moon smiling back at me. Loving me as I am loving you, and in the end I am you and you are me, Made in your reflection so that you can see. The beginning of loving myself. Attaining to be real and true to keep a permanent happiness that never leaves. Natural to this earth, love is born.
So why does love have to be so hard in the times of technology? In this time of our lives called the 21st century? Has love ever been so easy? Love is like a war in a mirror, you see what you don’t like and you see what you adore. The only person you can’t live without and the one body you’ll take to the grave, is yourself. Only to see what is a false image of “I” in a trick mirror staring back at you. You stare to find where you are, who you are. Questioning if the voice in your head is the voice that really belongs to you? Is this thought really yours or is it a consciousness reaching for your higher truer self? The potential you reach to aspire to be. It may just be a false image of delusion half the time in search of memory and of your innocence. A time where you really knew yourself.
Truly when will you see yourself show up in the present moment next time you stand in front of the mirror? Next time you post a photo of yourself on social media? One that represents unconditional love and acceptance. A wholeness. It may sound narcissistic but loving one self is a projection to another with your gaze, be it a female or male gaze. Cliche as it must be but how can you love another if you don’t love yourself? Where do you find the balance? Optimism and pessimism, light and shadow dancing in a relationship forever. A swimming of dominant and submissive, of abuser and victim, of master and slave wrapped up all in the conscious and subconscious levels of your own mind. As Freud puts it, the id and superego are in the midst of finding balance through the ego.
Then here comes the train of social media on the internet. An even bigger empire where you can project the image of who you would like to be seen as in the house of mirrors. Or is it the real image of your true self? The real delusion of the interweb. This delusion coincides with the competing self expression of individuality of who or what is more attractive. Of what is “COOL”. This ultimately deludes the purpose of healing the collective. How did this internet house of mirrors all begin?
Well, the use of the internet usually is like Jia Tolentino’s experience, “In the beginning the internet seemed good. “I was in love with the internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was the ultimate COOL,” I wrote, when I was ten, on an Angelfire subpage.” (Tolentino, 2019, p.3). Thus, the beginning to everyone’s unexpected addiction. An addiction to a life that soon turns into a competition of what is “COOL” on a hand device of 24/7 reality tv. It becomes the gateway to exploring what will be the current popular culture. To what will be the next trend.
When the gate opens to the“I”nternet, it becomes a place where people are addicted to peoples lives they don’t know in real life, including themselves. A place to share your expressions and aesthetic. With a condition to always come back to this interweb to remember who you are. Ultimately creating a form of self-delusion to identify your own independence or even your own community. Sociologist Erving Hoffman (1959) acknowledges this theory as playacting with the “lively belief that an unseen audience is present,” in appealing to a significant effect on the conscious mind. All the while Jia Tolentino elaborates:
“Offline, there are forms of relief built into this process. Audiences change over — the performance you stage at a job interview is different from the one you stage at a restaurant later for a friends birthday, which is different from the one you stage for a partner at home. At home, you might feel as if you could stop performing altogether; within Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, you might feel as if you had made it backstage.” (2019, p. 13)
The question, is this a new form of social engineered slavery to AI and to self? Or is this a step closer to positivism of the truer consciousness of one’s own kind? Or is this all just a superficial context of what a dream life could be in the setting of isolation? An imagination that comes true on the web. A place where dreams begin. The glamour and the glitz.
The start of the future came in such an innocent and fascinating way on big bulky screens with the internet as a forum to create and share ideas with our friends and family. An evolution into a mall of multiple social media platforms and dating websites that soon became apps. The authenticity of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 comes in a wave like a flash compared to the authenticity of days before the web. Tolentino (2019) elaborates her personal experience we can all relate to:
“The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new altruisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, where we now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.” ( p.7–8).
It’s like monochrome television going into color. We use an “I’ statement in our reality and in our web platforms as though we are individuals with separate languages to create color with our tongues at the tip of our fingers. It is a place of sharing the collective consciousness through photography, memories, art, and plain out expression. A place to colonize and decolonize.
Desperately trying to connect with our higher potential self. Not just in appearance but in quality. We crave the ideal version of ourselves. This craving leads to thinking we lack something. That something becomes desire for what’s outside of ourselves. An obsession over our flaws, over what the new mainstream of pop culture and beauty is.
It is a prolific way in which we look for love, attention, and recognition to boost our own self esteem. It makes us believe in our potential to love ourselves only to meet another person to love our void we sometimes carry in ourselves. This game on social media becomes a place of profiting off of the human suffering of the soul through competition. Thus, ultimately taking away from what makes us human. It can take away from not just our soul but our spirit, our mind, our inner well being if not managed in moderation. If we don’t access the ‘moderato’ inside ourselves the technology can eat away at our internal health. Making us hostage to the internet. That is if fixation takes hold to the superficial state. Then the app you keep checking keeps you hostage to your own insecurities.
There is a way of owning your social media apps by using it to your own profit in a positive way to further yourself. The choice is yours to be master or slave of technology. To better understand this construct it can be seen as choosing to be a leader or a follower. A creator or a consumer. As Jameson puts it in his work Reification of Utopia in Mass Culture, the inter-web becomes, “The theory of mass culture — mass audience culture, commercial culture, “popular” culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known — has always tended to define its object against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition.” (Jameson, 1979, p. 130).
Mass culture and “popular culture” nowadays seem to say what stays and what goes. Also a way to set a trend in a world that is run by the patriarchy. This can be an opportunity to use the power of women’s sex appeal and brilliance that holds power over a country run by men. A way of controlling the misogynistic views of others by developing strategies for females social media and apps in which women can take control of the Web 2.0.
Tolentino elaborates, “ the ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the ways she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself” (2019, p.64). This can be the entry to a revolution through lipstick femme fatales used to free women from the laws that are turning the country back to the hands of a patriarchy. We ask ourselves how may this be a revolution for women? The answer is by applying the natural power women hold over men. That is sex, love, romance, her fertile grace, seduction, and the brilliant intelligence underneath womens skin to be able to take their power back from men. To turnover the rules of the patriarchy. Tolentino explains:
“ the ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure, of “lifestyle”… we can decode social priorities through looking at what’s most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave a male power intact, or strengthened, by draining women’s energy and wasting our time” (2019, p. 85).
So why not wear those “thigh high” nylons political men love and rule them so women can finally be heard. It almost like giving in to the patriarchy. Like giving into the “man”. While at the same time owning your feminine power and sexuality over men by ruling over them with allure and illusion of them having control. A natural power the role of the femme has in everyday life. A trick mirror in letting men think they are in control by owning your sex appeal for you.
Poet Vanessa Matic is a perfect example of how to embrace your feminine sexuality through social media platforms and her writings to empower yOURself. She has a spellcasting way with words that allure to her central identification. A charm of sexual empowerment to voice herself, heard upon the masses of men that swarm to her feet. She exemplifies Erving Goffman’s playacting theory to her audience in her poem To Set The Sea In Wolves Teeth in her emblematic description:
“If you do not see me I do not exist / I am a negative as if of film / I bleed into this surface but I do not go into place / this permanent death he says is nothingness… But it’s just the illusion of romance; you don’t even see me. I’m dressed in your silhouette I want to enter your soul and it’s twilight like our last kiss; don’t embrace me. Kiss me, hit me I know you want to I am parts of yourself you hate and love. I am parts of yourself you hate and love.” (Romance & Revolution, 2020, p.82).
The male gaze is real. All the while the female gaze is entrancing to the male gaze as a swimming of lovers. Much as what goes on in identifying oneself upon the masses of social media or better said the Internet. How to stay an individual amidst the algorithm while being a woman can be easier than it seems.
The world on social media is a way of recreating highschool culture, fame, and so on by whos hot whos not, whos smart whos not, whos cool whos not, and all the whos you can think of. With this mentality it can condemn it to maturation of that stage of life, stunted. It can even make conspiracy theories seem real. You know the typical people who troll your Instagram or Facebook. The people gossiping about each other on social media to one up each other or making fake accounts to spy on their friends or exs’. It’s like playing a Hollywood chess board to see who gets more views to become “Insta-famous” etc., or who can jock who’s card. That mentality usually leads to this perfect example Tolentino explains as, “Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone: when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work,” (2019, p.25). It’s much like hating someone else for having what you wish you had and then trying to ruin their reputation or their relationship because that’s what you wanted. In the end all cameras are on and watching on social media to see what’s the next plot line. The interweb is like a 24/7 reality tv show that you can tune into at any time. With all the gossip, with all the rumors, with always being on the screen of reality tv and acting for the audience of apps we carry in our hand Tolentino states:
“ I constantly overestimate the impressions that I’m making on other people. I monitor myself, wondering how my friends and classmates see me, and then trying to control whatever they see… Knowing that I was seen got rid of my desire to see myself, to analyze myself as a character” (2019, p.45).
How do we stop this constant over-critical way of thinking? Maybe the solution is love within oneself. Reflecting on what we project onto others to view deeper into what we like or don’t like about other people that says more about our relationship with our own reflection. It says more about how we feel & view ourselves. Only the truth can set us free and begin our inner healing. So why not embrace women having the power of their artificial cyborg. The power of their sexuality to take back their power from the patriarchy. Please yourselves mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers. Love yourselves. The choice of “I” is yours in your beautiful interstellar web.
Thank you to Michael M. Cohen.
