Reflectionalism: Life in the Pre-Apocalypse

So if you live in PDX, and you're generally a compassionate person, and you have some interest in art, politics and/or environmentalism and you look around your world with some curiosity, you may notice that it looks strangely like what my new friend, James Squeaky, calls, "Life in the Pre-apocalypse".

I think I've hammered the whole idea of Reflectionalism as a moral concept enough now (sorry if it was a lil' repetitious, dears), but the next important idea in Reflectionalism is futility.

While I, personally, can choose to be a Kuntry Kowgirl one day, a Lipstick Lesbian the next, and an Emo Emu the day after that, my options in identity are limited by my own (and a universal) sense of futility. Am I anything?

As Post-Modernism is a movement of the watched, we march towards an imaginary place where everything is revealed, stripping off layer after layer after meaningless layer. Self-revelations simply become secrets tried on for size and examined for usefulness in creating yet another temporal identity.

Here's what the Reflectionalists have discovered: it is not only impossible, but completely manipulative and self-serving to write, paint, and create in general what you present as your authentic self. All that happens is another toy soldier gets propped up in the parade of books of the month, those little self-made angels and devils swaying uneasily to familiar ching ching music.

How do we take risks with our hearts and our fury in the pre-apocalypse?

We change the stakes of fiction.

We make our best attempts at truth in sculpture, lit, painting, film and more because there's not enough time left to ignore our shifting and dishonesty. We know that we will never be able to be truly honest. All narrative is fiction, by acknowledging this, and the futility of expressing anything genuine, we are our own watchers.

Reflectionalism expresses the fact that there is no way to be honest in a representation of one's self. We are all too blinded by fear, weakness, capitalism, cowardliness, spite, greed, cruelty, and stupidity.

In an age where humans have changed the balance of nature to point of killing thousands of species completely, in a time where the use of torture is considered an effective strategy, in a place where we are completely removed from the horrors we ourselves are perpetuating, all of our art is in some way a confession of both our pain and our culpability.