Mephistopheles, er, Chris, I found your post very moving. Which suggests
something is moving very cross-grained against your professions of
disbelief and radical scepticism - the urge to "conduct myself" in a way
"that doesn't make me feel false". Your desire towards nothingness
sounds positively _Buddhist_. If I may say so, they're rather poetic
oscillations...

"Shock value" makes me think of those Bennetton posters. I saw that guy
interviewed on television: what a plonker. "I make more money than three
account executives put together," he said, flinging his fur coat over his
shoulders. "I am an _artiste_." No, I wanted to say, you're selling
advertising, and what you're making is a kind of pornography: the
masturbation of conscience in the pursuit of money. There was a
fundamental dishonesty, a cynical evasion, in his thinking; you could
argue that he is pointing out that all art is a consumer artefact, all
art is "selling something", all conscience is a consumerist lie, but, you
know, I just don't think that's the whole truth (to say why needs much
more space than I have here). Can art move outside that consumerist
matrix? Everywhere people are telling me "no": according to the
Australia Council I am a "small business", according to the tax office I
am "pursuing an activity for profit", according to newspapers I am
pursuing a "career in the arts". I loathe all this, something visceral
inside me reacts violently against these definitions, which seem to me
the expression of a horrifying poverty: and yet I also acquiesce in those
things I have no power to change. I live in this society, after all, and
I have children to feed... I could become a Stylite but it's er not my
style. Writing poetry, however, seems to me fairly resistant: it doesn't
work very well as a consumer object and pursues its own economy, which I
can say from experience is often radically at odds with the economies
around me. Maybe there's a possibility of some honour there, a
possibility of true speaking. That's the gamble, anyway, and only time
will tell on that one.

>Do animals and plants have souls in people's thinking here or are they
>excluded?

This question was the reason I became an atheist at about seven. It
didn't make sense to me that my dead pets, whom I knew were sentient and
capable of love, albeit rather more inarticulate than humans, should be
banished from Heaven. I thought God was unfair, and then I figured that
"all Gods reside in the Human breast" and that was it for God as far I
was concerned.

I'm much less certain these days, of course.

Best

Alison