My Commercially Appropriated Brain
I fear for myself. For my very identity. I have trouble identifying myself as an individual as anything more than my brain and its contents. We have all learned by now that an individual's identity and merit is independent of their skin color, their physical appearance, and that one cannot know a person without becoming acquainted with their mind. Old news, but this is the source of my fear...despite the fact that the brain is a person's essence, I find myself a member of a society in which pieces of this essence are doled out to highest bidders, for payment between external parties. With each brand name or owned image that I see, my identity is stolen from me, through the appropriation of a piece of that by which I identify myself. This is no passive side effect of commerce. The strategy is a deliberate one - what will stick in my head, what will I be unable to forget, what will change my behavior and my tastes, to benefit others. This alone is frightening enough, but the wide reach of so many advertisers condemns me to a darker sentence - an identity that is increasingly similar to that of the stranger I walk by on the street. I try not to envision my brain as a pie graph, for this makes me bitter with the futile frustration of being an increasingly acute wedge. At what point will it cease?
I decide not to stick around and find out. I make the perhaps childish decision to purge my home of brand names and advertising, in the interest of a counter-offensive on behalf of the portion of my brain that is still my own. It frustrates me that each product functions also as an advertisement for itself, every time I look at it. I drag a garbage bag around my apartment and fill it with colorful labels that adorn too many surfaces, labels that extol the virtues and disguise the deficiencies of the products they adorn. It takes hours. I scratch the name off my soap. I scratch the name off my toothbrush. I scratch the name off of the pills I take to stop my head from hurting. As if there is a child in the house, I draw a little picture of a throbbing head on the label-free bottle, that I don't mistake the pills for something else. I put duct-tape over the names on the coffee cans, and around my toothpaste tubes. But eventually I sit, somewhat satisfied with a visual atmosphere that is apparently under my control again. Reflecting that my own living space is only the tiniest fraction of the bought world, I look out the window to gain some perspective. You know, to keep myself from getting too much of a feeling of accomplishment. I immediately see four billboards, and close the blinds.
Yes, my apartment is now my own, but rather than reflecting my personality, it seems to have an overall feeling of LACK. I decide this is a temporary side effect relative to the visual flood to which I've become accustomed, and that I will become acclimated. I sit on the couch and the lack translates to a sort of visual silence that makes the usual silence unbearable. I need music, but when I kneel to operate my stereo I am faced with another brand name. A big one. I don't panic at first, but stand to get an overall sense of the room, assess the situation, obviously I've missed some things. When I realize the current state of the room, I want to punch a wall. My attempts thus far seem feeble. I have done away with countless insignificant trademarks only to create, with the sudden simplicity, a sort of shrine to the big names that dominate the room. The corporations whose names are welded on to my television and my stereo, and my speakers, and my computer, comprise a larger portion of what I have come to loathe today than anything I've managed to scratch or peel off. The television is a particularly difficult decision. I am tempted to do away with it altogether, but I so little trust any one source of news that only by the constant sampling of at least three media do I feel comfortable forming any kind of opinion. I try to pry off the few remaining signs of commerce with my bare hands, but the damage I do to my hands only amplifies my frustration. I need a chisel or something, but I don’t have tools of any kind. I decide to go find some.
I return home within the hour, terribly frustrated. I have found that unless I want to drive forty miles to a non-corporate-run hardware store, my options are limited to the three local superstores, any one of which would leave me reeling with an inordinate number of in-store ad campaigns ingrained in my memory, not to mention a plastic bag that bears a logo probably matching one on my purchase. I hate this damn world. In any case, I refuse to bring more commercialism into my home, even in an attempt to remove the old. But I will remove the last brand names. I try to pry one off with a fork, which promptly bends. I try to break one off with a key, which is too small and only hurts my fingers. Nothing in my home is quite durable enough. I go outside for a rock.
I am in the woods behind my building, kicking aside leaves and looking for an appropriately sized stone. In my attempts to unearth one, I get down on all fours and stick my fingers in the dirt. I am an animal, I realize. My attempts to protest the ways of humanity have driven me to the earth. This is the nature of things - the commercial machine cannot evolve into something better, it can only be overthrown by starting from scratch. Overwhelmed by the task, I take off my clothes, lie on the leaves, breathe fresh air and try to separate myself from everything. My head is clear, it seems. I look at the blue sky to start something new, without civilization’s dubious help.
I never want to go inside or touch a street again, it is beautiful outdoors. The sky is really the only perfect thing. Why did I ever look away? I look at the clouds, their shapes, forms unalterable by man. They are what I want them to be, but all I see in them are airplanes, automobiles, casinos, television, explosions and other terrible man-made things. I start over, not seeking representation, but seeing the clouds as clouds, and their shapes as natural forms to be admired. After a while, one shape catches my fancy and I can't look away - it has touched something in me that I can't quite grasp, some blurry mental image I feel has always been a part of who I am. With pleasure I forget, for a moment at least, every memory I've had since I was capable of remembering, to focus on what this shape reminds me of, this proof that I can be moved and feel meaning with only the sky to inspire it. When the blurred image in my mind begins to focus, I am nearly sick. I have seen this shape on sneakers since before I could recognize the faces of my parents. I never had a chance.
