The Illuminati

Listening: nothing.
This is my newest spoken-word piece; it would be a slam poem, but it's too long and I want to perform it while improvising on the piano to emphasize the motif of "music".

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I heard Lady Gaga was part of the Illuminati.

I heard that our radio stations are actually controlled by Freemason masterminds whose object it is to ruin American morality in order to make it easier to control our spending habits.

I heard they write songs that worship youth so we'll ruin ourselves with pleasure at party schools instead of learning logic and overcoming ignorance.

I heard they attract young atheists by pointing out that all the great intellectuals were too smart for God, dropping hints about Lucifer being the good guy, the one who embraces the free will of man and rejects religious morality as a control device. They make it seem like those who are willing to sell the souls they don't believe in are the ones who rise to the top. That people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce and the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift are really musicians with incredible talent who are paid to sing only the kind of music that keeps people focused on money, love, and themselves. That these people are perfectly willing to do it because they still have their talent, and they can still make beautiful music in their own homes and it's a small price to pay for a release from the control structure. And that one day, because of the talent they were born with, these young atheists will walk into an office at a recording studio and someone will close the door and tell them yes, it's all true, the Illuminati want you to sing about sex on the radio to keep people from thinking about anything else. And they'll summon their courage and sign the papers because they think they'll be able to change the game from inside. And then they get their fame, and they fall in love with it and stop caring. And the atheists who do not have this mythical meeting simply go on living the life described in Lady Gaga's music: sexual, passionate, loving, intense, and inconsequential.

I heard that the Illuminati don't mind if you do believe in God. Because that makes it even easier: you follow the rules most of the time, feel guilty when you don't, listen to Taylor Swift, focus on trying to be a monogamist by listening to songs about love, cheating, and breakups, and secretly wonder whether you're doing the right thing. You memorize songs with lyrics like "let's play a love game, play a love game, do you want love or do you want fame, are you in the game?" And if that line caught your ear, made you look up, then you're already faced with a choice. Do you subscribe to Lady Gaga's affirmations of ephemeral sexuality, or do you wanna get married? Or is it both? Do you wanna slut around now and settle down later? Of course - everybody does. And look at that - 40 years later and you made your personal life your everything, and didn't get famous, and had no influence, and justified that by convincing yourself that the influence you have over the lives around you is enough to make a difference in the world.

Now, according to the theory, the Illuminati themselves aren't trying to make you believe one way or the other. They know you'll pick one for yourself. They write music that constantly reminds you of the choice: a Christian hears Lady Gaga and says "I'm such a good Christian that I don't need to go to the club on Friday, so I won't"; an atheist hears Lady Gaga and says "I'm so enlightened; I know there's nothing to stop me from going to the club on Friday, so I will". But they don't care whether you go or not! They tempt you with eternal life and they tempt you with pleasure. It doesn't matter which one you take, all that matters is that you spend your life taking it. Because the Christians focus on being strong and avoiding drugs and sex and worldly influence, and the atheists focus on being smart and living their lives and transcending the petty obligations of the Christian doctrine.

I heard they're creating a world where the faces of Jehovah and Lucifer overlook an ongoing battle between Christians and atheists, moralists and nihilists, conservatives and liberals, workers and dreamers, none of whom are doing anything with their lives but trying to become closer and closer to their ideals: THEIR ideals.

Because the Illuminati, I heard from someone, they control both sides, and your personality predisposes you to one or the other. They own Lady Gaga and they own Taylor Swift, so no matter what you believe, they have music for you to buy. And by creating this conflict, they make you passionate about "living your life", no matter what kind of life it is. Whether your addiction is drugs, sex, God, math, or pain, they get you addicted to something, so that you cannot contribute to the resistance. You are desiring, but you are not inventing. You are writing, but you are not publishing. You are thinking, but you are not acting. And you say you'll act once you get older, once you get more educated, once you acquire a position where people take you seriously. But once you get there, you don't want to do anything to risk your job, because you worked so hard to get it!

Now, the Illuminati probably don't exist. Lady Gaga might just be a talented singer who grew up in New York and got lucky enough to sign a record deal. But does that mean, even if there's no one behind it, that pop music and religion don't still have this combined effect? That this really is the way we live our lives? And if so, what do we do?

I say we fight simplicity with diversity. Don't be part of a category. Don't even use nouns. When somebody asks you if you're religious, don't just say "yes" or "no", explain yourself. Say you believe in God because of Pascal's wager. Say you don't believe in God because you think evil can't coexist with benevolent omnipotence. Say something other than "Methodist." "Catholic." "Atheist." When they ask you if you're straight or gay, tell them about the Kinsey scale. When they ask you if you're liberal or conservative, ask them what issue they're talking about. Stop simplifying yourself. The only word that accurately describes you is your name. When you escape from categories, you escape from categorical methods of control.

And if you can, learn how to make music that sounds like you, so you don't have to sound like someone else.

Nocturne, but a few hours later

Listening: The local Spanish channel (Univision 41), so I can concentrate.

In the fourth hour of the morning, the vigilant observer may detect an anomaly in the teenagers' behavior: they are no longer actually watching the TV. They are listening to the sound of the fan in the projector, maybe, or at most taking stray words from the characters' voices and fueling their hazy imaginations.

It always seems very important to me, during the early morning, that I express this feeling, that I not let it pass with the dawn and fall asleep. But there's not much to say: I feel inspired, but have no subject. It's just that everything is so much more interesting, more exciting, when you're so tired that you regress to childhood and you find yourself thinking thoughts that were familiar then: "it's 4:49. 4 plus 4 is 8, how do I get to 9? 4 divided by 4 is 1, 8 plus 1 is 9; so (a+b)+(a/b) = c ... shit, now it's 4:50."

As soon as you move, even just to sit a different way, the feeling either changes or disappears: just in writing this I've almost lost it. Why does it feel so important to hold on to it? It's not really a feeling of being alive. It's just that words like "alive" are reentering my vocabulary. "Pain". I've been living off the words "beauty", "love", "morality", "ennui", "sex" - every feeling that you can make impersonal, intransitive. The words "trust", "honesty"...well, it's harder to think of them; these are the ones I haven't been using.

My sister and I walked to the pizza place yesterday, where she informed me that I was aloof, self-centered, and unavailable. I denied it, but it was true. This blog is helping, though. I know you've only seen three posts so far, but I have about five more in Drafts, and I think about it a lot. I ate with my dad at the diner on Route 303 this morning, and I told him something that I think made sense:

I know the answer to almost every question people ask me. That doesn't mean I'm smart, it's just that over the course of a day, nobody asks me anything I don't know. So it becomes easy to give automatic answers, and to simply let my mind wander - except that it doesn't wander, it falls asleep. And it's been asleep all summer. So I think I'm doing this blog in order to ask myself questions I don't know the answers to, in order to force myself to think, be creative, and eventually rejoin the ranks of sentient humans. And, as I assured my dad, to tune up my writing for those college essays I'm supposed to be working on.

How strange, to realize there's actually something wrong with you.