Category Archives: Radiant Days

Fame = Existence

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From today’s New York Times:

    Fame has become an existential condition: If your image isn’t reflected back at you, then how do you know you’re alive?

Reminds me a bit of this:

    We live today in a society where it is necessary to see yourself, or your likeness, in the media as confirmation of your existence. People scan the television dial, major magazines, movies, or the latest pop novel to find someone who resembles them, someone who is out there mimicking their actions and gestures in the big arena. … Lest we forget, this whole scenario is market driven, and if your image does not appear en grand across the whole media superstructure of America, it is because the marketing mechanism has not deemed your niche to be worthy of selective attention, and thus—O humiliating failure!—there is nothing out there for you to buy. Which is to say, You don’t exist, go die. … You have no identity, you are invisible. You don’t even need to be “disappeared” because you are already not there.

This was written back in 1994, so it took the New York Times just sixteen years to catch up. Though I will give them credit for distilling the idea to its purest form.

Only Scraps

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This text and many others can be found on Radiant Days, my collection of fragmentary writing. For example, try this one, this one, or this one.

The first thing to know about me is I was born in the wrong place. I should have been born somewhere where people are free and full of love. Instead I was born in a world where people play power games and fight for scraps. That word “scraps” explains the problem, I think. Instead of sharing a mountain and enjoying the whole mountain, which belongs to no one, each person wants a piece. One person sees he can make a nice little business selling soft drinks to the hikers there, and another doesn’t like that because it spoils the view from his veranda. So the power games begin. The once calm and happy mountain is divided into warring territories. In the world into which I was born, this pattern repeats itself at every level, from children competing to be their mothers’ favorite, through the power games of generals who kill millions to win an extra star.

It’s been this way, we are told, ever since there were people. Even animals do it, a war of survival in which the predator is the next victim. Even plants do it, with vines strangling a great oak to reach the sun. So it isn’t people’s fault, apparently. The universe is hard-wired this way, it seems. There isn’t really a place here for someone like me, who would be happy to live on air, water and sunlight, feet scarcely touching the ground. Instead, the world being what it is, I’ve been forced to make compromises—but as I’ve already said, it’s not my fault. In a world like this one, such compromises are inescapable. The whole mountain doesn’t exist—there are only scraps.

Until Then….

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Regular readers will have noticed that I haven’t been posting here with the regularity that I did back in 2007. That’s because I’ve been spending my time on other projects that I want to finish before returning to Morocco before the end of the year. I’ll continue to write new blog posts whenever I feel the urge, but I want to let you know that the real action is on other parts of this site. All my works in progress are visible somewhere on eatbees.com, so I hope you’ll visit them and then leave a comment here to let me know what you think!

  • Not From Here, a novel about an young musician who wants to change the world with his music, who instead ends up in a hidden network that seeks to control people’s lives without their knowledge.
     
  • Morocco: A Cruel Country, a photo essay that offers a slice of Moroccan life, neither glamorized nor sensationalized, from my travels there in 2003–2006.
     
  • Radiant Days, a collection of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry—mostly early work—arranged in a nonlinear fashion that allows you to experience the work in a new way each time you visit.

For those of you who still prefer blogging about current events, don’t forget to check the post below this one to see if it is new, or check out my page of favorite posts from 2007.

Travel

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Interstate 40, Seligman, Arizona, October 1986.

This photo is from a series called “Postcards from Nowhere” that I made during a crosscountry trip when I was 23 years old. Most of the images were destroyed in a fire in Paris a few years later, but a few of them survived to the digital age. You can see two more of the “Postcards” on the front page of my website Radiant Days.

I’m leaving for California today and will be gone for about three weeks. I’m planning to see old friends in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, where I lived for several years. I’ll be driving 4000 km in each direction, which means it will take me at least three days to get there. When I return, the car will be full of books, papers, CDs, blankets, dishes and all the many things we can’t live without. God will be there too, because “He’s so high you can’t get over Him, He’s so low you can’t get under Him, He’s so wide you can’t get around Him.”

[audio:http://www.eatbees.com/blog/audio/help-me-somebody.mp3]
“Help Me Somebody” by Brian Eno & David Byrne (1981)

While I’m away, I’ll connect to the internet whenever I can, and I’ll try to share my adventures with you, but it will probably feel like I’m away from the house for days at a time. So I encourage you to settle in, make yourself some tea, and strike up a conversation with anyone else who stops by. Most of the visitors to a blog leave no trace, but since I won’t be around, now is the time to change that. The world map I display shows that I have visitors from places like Norway and Tunisia, Bahrain and India. Let each other know you are here!

In case you’re here by yourself and you feel bored, I’m leaving you a video that I’ve been saving for a special occasion. It’s called “Dance Monkeys Dance” and it’s based on a spoken word poem by Ernest Cline. Consider it a message about the human condition.