When we think of a blob we think of a certain quantity of a viscous or gelatinous substance. Unlike a liquid, it can maintain a mass, independent of being in a container. What it doesn’t maintain when it’s outside of a container is its shape or form. Its structural definition. For people who grew up in a modern technological society where so many of the foundations of our most important truths come from the areas of knowledge of math and science, areas based on exactitude and precision, it can be very stressful sometimes to deal with something like a blob. There have been two horror movies made about a blob, a creature from outer space that consumes everything in its pathway. What made the blob so frightening is that, because it lacked internal structural definition, there was no place in its mass that one could shoot it in order to effectively kill it. The blob was not held together by a strong structural definition, but rather by a strong material cohesion. When a substance is viscous or gelatinous, it is as if it is gluing itself together.
nd how does someone confront something like the blob, creature to creature? It totally lacks a central core. Without a central core, the only way of eradicating it would be to destroy every square inch of it somehow. Which in the case of the movie blobs was never seriously considered because it would have proved to be impossible to undertake.
In the cases of both of the movies, The Blob, humans find a way of both flash-freezing the blob, and then keeping it frozen. The good thing for the humans is that although it lacked a core, it had a mass. By freezing the mass, it was given a structured definition, which allowed the humans to find a way of disposing of it.
Now what happens if the enemy of the humans lacks both a structured definition and a mass? How does one effectively fight off such an enemy? Does this sound like science fiction. Not really. It is an enemy that every human being who lives in modern technological society has to deal with every day. I am talking about the experiential vacuum that is one of the bye-products of living in modern technological society as well as the numbness that ensues from prolonged exposure to it. Without mass, how can one fight it as if it were a conventional enemy? One can’t freeze it the way that humans did with the blob.
The key is that one can’t fight the experiential vacuum as if it were a defined coherent adversary in the external world. It is not an entity as such. It can only be fought indirectly through its effects upon oneself as well as on others. Now one can try to manipulate certain components of the external world to minimize the presence of abrasive mechanical stimuli and vacuumized digital stimuli and to maximize the presence of flowing blendable continual organic stimuli. In so doing, one can try to approximate to a certain extent a more traditional natural living environment.
But this is easier said than done. In today’s world, people lose their capacity over time to properly absorb a lot of organic stimuli. And although they are unable to reconfigure themselves in such a way that they can absorb abrasive stimuli in a steady ongoing way, because it is too intense for their mammalian natures, they nevertheless can absorb it in bits and pieces and spurts to temporarily pull them out of their numbness. So, their nervous system becomes reconfigured in such a way that it learns to use kicks in order to feel alive.
The only way to wage war, as it were, on the experiential vacuum is to gradually over time find a way to reintroduce more and more flowing blendable continual organic stimuli into one’s field of experience and, thus, try to reverse the effects of abrasive mechanical stimuli and vacuumized digital stimuli and reconfigure one’s nervous system back to what would be considered a more mammalian nervous system.
Of course, this is easier said than done. For most urban dwellers, such sources of organic stimuli simply are not so readily available. And even if they were, how does one break one’s addiction to the screen reality devices of televisions, video games, computers, smartphones, and tablets. And even if one wanted to get away from his intense involvement with screen reality, for most people everything from their work to meeting romantic partners to making doctor’s appointments to making purchases requires some involvement with screen reality. Until our needs for screen reality can be diminished, we will continue to suffer the effects of being immersed in an experiential vacuum. Perhaps, to help people to focus their attentions on the problem that has been created, we should make a new thriller called The Vacuum. Except it probably wouldn’t be very thrilling. As a matter of fact, it would probably bore people to death.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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