Soft light’s a bitch, because I know it means I’m waking up at Maria’s place again. You know what it’s like, when you wake up but don’t open your eyes, and realise you aren’t in Kansas anymore? (In this metaphor, Kansas is your own bed)
You’re trapped there, vision suspended in swirling colours and blackness, floating in your little world of sheets and pillows, certain there’s a world beyond your eyelids and totally unaware of what it is. That’s the great thing about waking up and not knowing where you are or who she is. You have those few seconds – I’ve stretched them out to almost a minute before – where it’s all potentiality. I try not to imagine where I am as being too awesome, because it’s only something truly special (studio apartment with Monet prints on the wall and flatpanel B&O A/V equipment, hotel room with huge bay window view of skyscrapers, empty white minimalist show-flat with more than one girl) every once in a while. If I imagined it was a place like that, and it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to shake the sense of failure for the next week.
My name’s Irwin, by the way, pleased to meet you.
The rise of the modern age, which we can claim to have truly started in 1781 with the American Revolution and then also in Europe with the French Revolution of 1789, represents the abandonment of the belief in the power of theological models and its subsequent usurpation by the supremacy of the ideological. Up until the French Revolution religious belief had defined human history; as the modern era progressed, through industrialisation, capitalisation and then into the twentieth century, theological belief dwindled and stagnated, becoming a cultural petit four with little philosophical power over the populous in general. Theology and ideology are the two primary ways of measuring the progression of man through time. Theology provides a constant cultural id to the pre-modern existence; it gave man the existential solace of a belief in something beyond the sufferings he experienced in his everyday life. As the living conditions in the modern western world got better there was less need for the kind of grand schemata that was offered by religion. Thus, to fill the void left by faith, ideologies begin to take root; they place man as being fully in control of the creation of his own existential definition by actively demanding of man to make the utopian visions of theology into an earthly reality; this is the new historical progression of the modern era. In the modern era time is measured by the progress of man’s achievements, the goal of progress becomes progression itself, it is no longer defined by a development to a promised land that exists only beyond the corporeal.
