FRAG CITY SHAMANS

FRAG CITY SHAMANS
Beliefs
Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.[7] Shamanism requires individualized knowledge and special abilities and operate outside established religions. Many shamans operate alone, although some take on an apprentice. Shamans can gather into associations, as Indian tantric practitioners have done.[citation needed]
-WIKIPEDIA
The image is something like this: we are like swallows in the air above a city. We swoop. We descend. From a distance-as I have watched the winter swallows above the ancient city of Rome from high on the Goethe-treading hills above Prati-it looks impressive. There, in a blob-like swarm are a couple of thousand birds who make the patterns of indiscriminant blobs above the city…. they dive and they swoop and you wonder if they move from the command of some leader, or do they react to the one next to them. The first two or three seconds that I saw this swarm of small birds high above the streets of Rome I immediately thought it was something supernatural or some UFO. The visible world with this phenomena and the spectacle of the light hitting thousands of underside white as they turned seemed to be more supernatural than any invisible force behind this outer manifestation. Where they breeding? Feeding? Delighting in the company of the other or the pattern that they could make? If they were merely reacting to the birds closest to them…as they probably were…then what could they do as a collective? Could they change their destiny?
Or were they condemned to move in bulbous clouds above the city? Will-Less and lacking in purpose? Did they feel very few simple elements within and this was an added extra for them to communicate with each other? What if there was no purpose other than to breed and eat and they could accomplish this very well on the ground hopping about like squirrels.
Of course that image moves immediately to that of the purpose-laden animal of the city. The upright hominid. Was the city itself a frozen swarm and now…. the frag city…. was detaching and the colligated swarm of concrete, steel, and traffic was now becoming part of a big global city? From what I have seen on the streets…the bumping up against ‘the other’ from Seoul to the plane to the streets of NYC…I wouldn’t want to follow the patterns and larger movements of the individuals next to me who appear to have some form of inscrutable autism spectrum disorder. No way. The kid next to me on the crowded airplane immediately tapped into his electronic device. So did I. Then there were the facilities…. the infrastructure of the LCD screen in front of everybody. The streets where I live have two or three new expensive food markets. The suburban turned urban baby yuppies push their Maclarens with their baby yuppies down the sidewalk three abreast and defy anybody in their path to challenge their supremacy and arrogance as breeders. There is an implicit feeling in the air as you move through this delightfully diverse city that everybody has or should have a script. If they don’t embrace this they cannot make those beautiful swarms of database aesthetics high above the city.
This is the new type of morality, which is actually the old type of normative morality. From prison Gramschi talked about the ‘tyranny of the collective’ and how it is the petite bourgeois impulses from the core of this thoughtless, purposeless swarm that produces the leaders like Mussolini and George bush…not the other way around. There is probably a lot of truth to this. The group swarms and convinces itself that there is no other larger good…. family, religion, the meaning of death, even the idea of ‘retirement’…outside the pattern of the swarm. In the social feed of face book the swarm appears as a parade but the pattern of the behaviors and the choice of archives creates the imperative for the next person to take their ‘stance’ in the exhibitionist line of the next small biography.