Writing words on the way other words were written covers a broad range of academic activity, from semantics and linguistics to literary theory and the classics; this does not mean to say that doing so, writing on writing, can be anything other than the apogee of hermeneutic schizophrenia. Take immortality, a notion on which much has been written. We have accepted that, ultimately, our political, theological, philosophical and even scientific strife has been on account of our effort to attain physical immortality. And yet any relevant rhetoric is currently in denial; all disciplines unanimously declare that ‘we will always be mortal’, and then indulge in all the aforementioned research activity aiming at the contrary. Alternative ways of negotiating immortality do exist of course, albeit only in the realms of megalomanic medical paranoia and mental disorder.
What little is discussed of the antinomy which characterises our most basic identity predicament is usually shadowed by the-often unidentifiable-proceedings of academic identity theory; the fields of social and gender studies, cultural studies and even political studies stand their ground rigidly: scholarly permission is required before any unauthorised quarters discuss identity. This is traditionally known-by its carriers too-as the fascist identity.
Perhaps it will be important to discover the reasons why the pursuit of immortality through logical discourse has become so neglected and ‘Wagnerian’ a pastime. Even more so when sexual orientation, pop culture, sports culture and animal rights, as well as other similarly secondary, sub-identity issues, are discussed at length. The reconstructionalist and the structuralist philologist will point at the value of analysis; the true thinker will not believe a word they say and not apologise for the suspicious response. There are specific reasons why secondary and false identities are emphasised by the culture industry.
The academic and political communities happily defend any activity which allows the selective circulation of wealth-could we not, after centuries of self-congratulating and self-analysis, detect a glimmer of hope that we may cease to promote the idea of a world in which we consume and in which all non-euroleptic creatures breathe for our edification and entertainment only? Whether we should or not is a matter of a moral imperative, which is irrelevant; but in fact, no, after centuries of systematic exploitation of the weaker people by the mightier people, we could not but continue to enjoy abusing the weaker people a little more. Again, this is not to say we shouldn’t; moral judgements and personal opinion will not be expressed here, but an observation is to be made: we cannot wish to depart from the colonialist era, the question of choice between ‘evil and good’ is solved automatically when accepting to participate in Western life. Poor people from other continents are our servants, and we shall not wish to do anything to change that.
Is this some form of evangelical sermon on the wrongs of sadism? If it reads as such, it may be the writer’s spiteful psyche, or it may be the reader’s super-cynical eyes; alas, it may also be both. In any case, the truth and identity of the matter remain indifferent to our interpretations; the social order of things is plainly this: they produce, we consume. Every day, every one of us buys at least one thing and in the meantime every one of them makes at least one thing for us to use. This hierarchy is our cultural birthright and an immutable fact. Efforts are made to conceal the severe social injustice that this reality and much cherished order entails: the balance and order of things is attached the identity of world economy. This is the practical identity of the world, immovable and yet fragile; its fragility encompassing all the nightmares we might care to predict. No such care permeates this essay.
To our social credit, occasionally we consume pity by offering some limited, publically registered and half-meant help. Then we enter the identity of the christiano-democratic European mind. Guilt, an emotion often despised by the progressive consumer, because it hinders the maximisation of shopping hours, is the proto-indulgence of the children of misericordia, the traditional consumers. No concession will be made here for the lesser social forgery that all such affiliated constituent psychologies represent.
Of course, the more nefarious layers of our consumerist pyramid may even ignore the mechanics of this unjust world altogether and never realise that the excesses of the pleasure they desire usually translates into the misery of many others in economical terms. The archetype modern-day, sofa-bound Scaramuccia usually dismisses such annoying thoughts by deeming them as moralist solecism; this is the first step towards continuing on the road to mental obesity. Examples of such creatures are abundant in the capitalist bestiary of the 21st century and have now supplanted the more Christiano-Democratic prototypes as leaders of social role modelling-the portrayal of social perfection by the mass media has little to do with the glorification of offering a helping hand and when it does, the mien of the affair discussed is so obviously manufactured that it transcends charity and transforms it into unadulterated publicity.
This new class of people who have deleted the few remaining stains of egalitarian justice from the marbles of social interaction represents a new species; homo juvenis, the youth-human. The archetype character of the class remains juvenile, but never young, by conducting the fight against mortality through a constant quest for gratification. Far from being neo-hedonists, youth-humans have no interest in Dionysian decadence, but live faithfully by the ISBN code of honour. Happiness comes at 9.99 of some monetary currency for a few moments, at 99.99 for a day or so and at 999.999.999 for a good part of life, say 9,999 days, the newly established 99-hour days that is. Homo esculens, the edible-human subsists on the other side of the planet, somewhere in the third world; sometimes he gets angry and kills indiscriminately only to be subdued dramatically for the purposes of prime time entertainment, other times he continues to serve the Western upper-classes and dreams of the day when this obsessive decimal arithmetic may come closer to his reality as an invincible aid to social vindication.
Both species are likely mistaken in judging that the attainment of immortality is expected through the avenues of shopping. The lack of zeros in contemporary culture is, by the stage which we have reached, complete and irreversible. Any deeper reflection on non-identities is absent, if quite lamentably so: the presence of a non-identity ever qualified the true value of identity via scepticism. On the contrary, what has no price tag or classification number today is not merely a non-identity or a non-being, but a non-entity. Experience is now the whim of the industrial monopolies of identity leading to a conceptual vacuum of totalitarian proportions. Unsurprisingly, public voices of dissent are dealt with: they are assigned the identity of the grotesque, the raging dissident, or of madness, meaning that the public domain belongs to the industry of culture alone.
More specifically in the creative arts and in music, it is no secret that the quantification of sound and its commodification are now globally absolute. Identification and teminology are the proto-tools with which sounds are disseminated and experienced; cataloguing is therefore essential. These procedures are well documented and harmless, for they express the ancient enterpreneurial spirit of creativity and they are a piece of contemporary folklore like any other.
But what of the creative agent who self-catalogues? When a composer suggests that she is a female composer as opposed to a male one for instance, what does she mean? Are the notes pink? Do the stems grow breasts or are the silences periodic according to some gynaecologically derived temporal scheme? Does the sound give birth to mini sounds? Is the writer of this text a misogynist for not caring at all about the term ‘female music’? Why does a composer speak of irrelevancies in order to set up a fictional identity for the music? What happened to the composer’s self and its manifestation in music? Is this composer so untalented, so far away from writing anything interesting that an allusion to the identity of the vagina is the best idea she can put forth for the listener to contemplate upon?
This phenomenon must be quite new. The creative musician is traditionally a mystic. In the words of Susan Sontag “Just as the mystic has to end with a via negativa, a theology entailing God’s absence…so must Art tend towards anti-Art…[Art being] a medium towards an end which can only be achieved by abandoning Art…”. Of course, the mythologies of Art are recent and do not hold any axiomatic truth. But the positivist, common sense, practical mind worships idiomatic terminology so categorically than any sense of poetry is lost in the autocratic schemes of financial causality and identity plagiarism.
Oddly enough, perceiving culture as an abstraction or at least wishing to remain outside the domain of property transaction is known as the post-marxist identity. Even the Teletubby world allows for more colours than human opinion, it seems, and one is not allowed to disagree with the proposition of consumerism or one will be immediately called discredited names in punishment. To add to this needless paragraph and to qualify it, always with apologies to the intelligent reader, here follows a clear confession: this is not a post-marxist text.
Equivalence in culture is political hubris. Sound does not mean anything. It cannot mean anything other than the sound it was; the past tense of the matter is operative here; i.e. reproduction of sound is not the recorded sound itself. Again, the culture industry promotes the conviction that the logic in the above statement is flawed and that somehow sound is to be captured with microphones and other emblematic apparatus and classified for shipping and purchase. It is no great crime to promote such an absurdity if it makes the lives of people ‘better’ than they were. And to an extent it does, but there is a point reached with artifice when the self, the true identity of human beings, is negated the full experiences of life.
More generally, in all things cultural, false identity gradually obfuscates the essence of experience and the experience of the self. If an eccentric artist throws paint all over a wall in a Manhattan apartment we call that contemporary art and celebrate it at dinner parties. The same act performed by a young boy in Tang Hall is condemned as an act of vandalism, not to mention that in other parts of the world the act would probably result in the actor’s amputation.
The above distinction refers to modes of perception. The painter unleashes part of “his angered identity” on “his own wall” which he “graces with creativity”. The boy unleashes “anger” on “someone else’s wall” which he “destroys”. Translating this: the former generates wealth because of the inherent energies in the reception of such work in certain sociopolitical conditions; the latter generates negativity because such deeds only result in impoverishment. Financial criteria emerge as the sole arbiters of the act’s artistic value.
Naturally, in art the intention is important and it informs and shapes the act itself, but surely, even the above example, however tedious, shows that no artistic act is autonomously perceived and that according to the culture industry, the intention of the artist must be extraneous to the art-form before art is made. The force of associative imagery in contemporary culture demands our attention rather than our participation: sounds are not to do with hearing, painting not to do with vision. Instead, it is style, the informant of capitalism, which directs our experience. The self, trapped in style, ’shakes its brass nightgown’ and continues to accept the finite time it is granted by the Gods of contemporary identity - consequently immortality as an unending physical existence, is only perceived throught the prism of decay.
At this point it may be useful to illustrate the criticism of this essay with an improvised fable:

A little man was walking down a street when he saw something in the distance. Immediately he assumed that when you see something from far away, it must be a bar of chocolate or a very attractive female, so he ran towards the spot only to find a very large man with a club waiting for him. The large man said: ‘I do not like men who are smaller than me.’ The little man then tried to run away from the larger man but wasn’t fast enough, so he was killed after some 49.99 minutes of one-sided violence.

Epimythion (pessimistic version)

when you see something from afar it is not always something you would like to see - it may be something you would rather not see

Epimythion (optimistic version)

when you see something from afar it is always something you would like to see if you end up dead because of seeing it, it is because you wanted to be dead

In Prometheus we find the first true hero of European mankind. It may or may not be important that the first definition of heroism is to do with the defiance of divine order, but it is so nonetheless. Stealing fire and the right to light from the Gods translates, in contemporary terms, into stealing back our identity and the right to self. Heroism is out of fashion and perhaps not accidentally so - the Gods have grown wiser and they do control marketing and advertising campaigns exclusively. If the 300 of Thermopylae become a blockbuster film and their identity marred, and if the throne of the anonymous hero is usurped by the greedy impostor through the centuries, there is still ample historical precedent to show that history itself is only an identity of sorts, an impostor of experience.
Ultimately the question becomes clearer, upon reflecting on the small things and the immediate perspectives. This text is identifiable through its symbols, its many meanings and philological conventions. They, the identities which constrain its experience, are the Gods who command it. Outside their divine wish, the text is unidentifiable and therefore no longer a text as such. Were an infant’s virgin eyes to meet these lines, they might be saved the trouble of confusion and choose to focus on the pleasant geometry of printed symbols instead. Ceci n’est pas une pipe: the heart and privilege of the baby world as opposed to the blue and pink vision we have of it.
To conclude, let us place our experience irrespectively of the unexplored depths of ontology concerning identity and ask a simple set of questions: Who wants to believe in Gods that curse their people dead and dying? What God is it who cannot promise us infinity? Who cares for such idolatry, and why? Do we not recognise the fathers of our culture anymore? Rilke wanted to rediscover the Gods himself through naming things from the beginning, dismissing fabricated identities. In the Art of fugue, Bach created the most splendid and unidentifiable abstraction in the documented history of music, while Shakespeare wrote that “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie”. The self, then, rather than the plastic attributes of lifestyle identity, is where true cultural experience ensues. Not many of us can be heroes ourselves, but we can use the Promethean fires well, even from the confines of a capitalist routine. As for Prometheus, the first thief of spiritual copyright, his fate is known: for immortality, for the sake of immortality and ad infinitum, tortured and wronged, chained on a rock by unjust Gods, he is awaiting for Hercules, the visceral hero of humanity to rescue him. In the meantime, he looks at the wild, dramatic skies of pre-history and whispers a biblically inspired Non Serviam.