Heightened Senses

Hello. I'm Imraan. This is my attempt at a productive silence.

Tag: capitalism

Warning- Explicit and Vulgar – Art detached from Beauty.

Warning- Explicit and Vulgar – Art detached from Beauty.

I’m glad that the Huffington Post says that people are somewhat disturbed about this…

But if there’s any example from this year to suggest that the feminist project has gone rather wrong – might it not be this? In what universe of the preposterous does this in any way advance the cause of treating women with dignity? How will this in any way truly return the social and spiritual position of our sisters to where it ought to rest?…affording them their right as those sacred beings created by a loving God, those hosts and nourishers of the seeds and saplings of the miraculous human project and endeavour, those beings upon whose arrival into the world is described in the prophetic literature as a “Mercy” from God upon their fathers…

Perhaps I’m more disturbed by the fact that people find this ‘funny,’  – maybe I’m just a prude or someone lacking in sophisticated taste. It’s interesting that the ‘artist’ seeks to show what the woman’s body is ‘capable’ of,  a self-proclaimed feminist whom I suspect seeks the liberation of the female from the objectification of the world and socioeconomic structures around her,  she goes ahead and commodifies it.

My friends of a conservative, religious or more pious temperament than I, I apologise if I’ve subjected you to this. But it was almost too disturbing not to share. Because of the dating system I can’t tell whether this piece was published last week or in April…

Maybe the point of this is not to demonstrate any sense of beauty – her art is a tool (or perhaps in this case, an end) for/of social activism and agenda politics or campaigning) – and I’ll admit I’m not familiar at all with the philosophical debates about aesthetics or what the literature in the study of the fine arts has to say about this, but for God’s sake, can’t art be just a little beautiful?

My soul is crushed, hurt, wrenched – the centuries of struggle faced by our sisters ought, I pray, not have peaked at this postmodern (?) expression of tragic irreverence and self-contempt. What hurts more is that I’m reading on my social media feed that people find this ‘funny’. But they’re not to blame. What categories of distinction do we have in our linguistic and moral currency to actually tell us what ‘this’ piece actually ‘is?’

Please don’t ask me to dismount from this supposed high horse, because I promise you that this comes from a place of concern from just another ordinary and person just like you.

A friend of mine suggested postmodernity, this socio-intellectual age in which we find ourselves, is basically a symptom of the decadent pathology of late-stage capitalism…

I’m not an apocalyptist (if that’s a word)…but sometimes I lament that Marx was way off….

Maybe what’s needed is not a Revolution, but a Flood.

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Ignore the title, if you prefer, above the  following video, but Mr Winter gives a much better account of what beauty might actually look like.

Sweet dreams, pray hard …you scumbag politicians, complicit and bought-off media, and Godless institutional oligarchs…

‘Let’s be clear what it at stake: services, people’s health and even lives. As Professor Terence Stephenson of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges put it last week, doctors’ warnings had been ignored, and “unnecessary competition [would] destabilise complex, interconnected local health economies, in particular hospitals, potentially having adverse effects on patient services.”‘ Owen Jones, The Independent.

Please read this article – and if you’d rather not – here are my thoughts on the reforms to the NHS in a slightly broader context.

For those of you who voted Tory (that’s ‘Conservative) at the last election, and New Labour at the previous ones…thank you so very, very much.

As a disabled person who is in need of NHS services regularly, I have experienced first the sub-standard care that comes when you turn healthcare into a racket based on the coldest, most dehumanising economic principles…from being unable to see the specialists that I need fourteen miles away from my home, in the very city in which I live, as ‘there is not enough funding in the PCT to justify it’; to waiting over a year for an application to be heard with regard to getting in-patient rehabilitation (as yet with the case in limbo sandwiched somewhere between a bureaucratic fat-cat’s wallet and pool of blood resting in his chalice..)

..to being discharged by physiotherapists and occupational therapists repeatedly because my recovery has been ‘too slow’ to justify me ‘being kept on the books’ (how’s that for economic?) –  maybe four times in the last year – twice after just two visits…. – my being forced to see psychiatrists because the institutions were at a loss (both in terms of finances and morale, and even expertise) to be given drugs, effectively to shut me up and stop complaining (incidentally, these drugs have only had a negative effect on my health)… as I said, thank you, dear comrades.

…Yet there are countless others who have both lost their lives or have suffered the most dehumanising cruelty at the hands of an institution, and a government, and a complicit public, whose responsibility has been to protect the vulnerable. I didn’t plan on falling sick at 18 and not being able to contribute to the services on which I became forced to be reliant (no, I don’t have a sense of entitlement – just had a hope that I might be able to leave a better NHS behind for my own, and your children)… but thanks to those of you who justify propping up a godless financial behemoth, killing millions in far-off lands with money you have stolen from your own fellow citizens to fight for natural resources that you were never entitled to… you know what….thank you again.

…Forget just the atrocities committed against those of us reliant on the ‘welfare state’, and what grief we have to go through to ‘prove’ we are sick or in need, with less than 0.5 percent of us as fraudulent claimants to disability support… think how many months we are cut off from financial support etc, to be forced to rely on people who can barely afford to feed themselves…. There is blood in your hands, in all of them, in mine too… in your bellies because of the unjustified sustenance procured at the hands of your soldiers, in your wallets because of the circulated wealth that has come from robbing it out of the pockets of those who needed it the most through ‘savings’ (not ‘cuts’)…

But of course if you know not of anyone who is in desperate need of these services which were a birth-right to them, and to you, a part of the compact they have made as contributing citizens to this country, and to each other (that’s you included), you will sleep in relative peace tonight as the lives of millions of them are ravaged further after today. Sweet dreams, comrades.

…Hopefully Hell won’t spit you out in disgust… I say this not flippantly – but if you happen to believe that Christ died and arose for your sins this weekend…Happy Easter to you. Enjoy the festivities with your families… but think about this… how many others are you killing off for your sins? That you will never be able to be vindicated for nor redeemed, without an act of all-out sacrifice and nothing short of Grace… pray hard for your souls…pray very, very hard indeed.