Aesthetics of Everywhere

It’s been rather hectic, as it usually seems to get around this time of year, so since school’s started up again I’ve been doing my reading in the little snippets I can snag between work and classes. I do a disproportionate amount of my reading through Google Reader and Twitter links. O Internet how you so facilitate acts of low commitment. I probably need to kick my mind back into a state of concentration with a giant novel. War and Peace is still largely untouched I’m sad to say. Or at least write more blog posts, because like essays, they’re at least a concentrated meditation on a topic.

Recently finished reading Don DeLillo’s Mao II and even as it drags in places, there are some harrowing scenes of the very real cult of Sun Myung Moon, of fictional terrorist cells, and of characters constantly battling these forces. DeLillo’s anxiety about individualism’s fate in the Western world is pronounced, especially in this novel. It’s the kind of crowd mentality which is attractive to so many that signals a danger to independent consciousness, to free will, and to the mind itself. Sects rely on programming minds.

On the cult of Moon (you may know them as Moonies), I’m no expert. The “new religious movement” of the Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon is perhaps most visible through mass marriages that he leads. Moon is the one who makes the matches – often the members of his church being married do not see their chosen partner until the day of the ceremony – and these events are huge. Thousands are joined at once, wedding vows conferred in a stadium or other public space.
I do remember a friend pointing out to me a Moonie church – the Unification Church near Adams Morgan on 16th Street – so there is a definite presence here in Washington, D.C. Here’s an article on the Unification wedding that took place at RFK Stadium in 1997 – right in D.C., not that long ago.

Since I’ve not touched much on DeLillo’s Mao II – named after the Warhol prints of Mao Zedong – I’ll at least leave you with a passage, to peak your interest. This is the experience of a father watching his daughter getting married at Yankee Stadium, among a countless throng of others:

When the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith? He looks at each sweet face, round face, long, wrong, darkish, plain. They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief… All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on. And here is the drama of mechanical routine played out with living figures. It knocks him back with awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd.