Things

Well, I’m back from my vacation to Mexico, and I’m not really too happy about it. For one thing, I realize better than ever how much of a prisoner I am in the city. For that matter, I’m a prisoner anywhere I go in America; the lifestyle itself is a prison. And it wouldn’t be much different in Europe or in Asia—in any place that boasts of being a developed nation. We give plenty of lip service to the idea that the First World—nowadays known as the Democratic World—is a haven for freedom and opportunity, especially in industrialized cities where every service and product you can imagine is available. But freedom isn’t about how many choices you have (especially when the choices are hard to distinguish, such as in the Presidential elections, Pepsi v. Coke, etc.)—it’s about doing –and knowing—what it is you want to be doing. And that kind of freedom, I’m convinced, is more easily attainable in the Third World where civilization has yet to become firmly rooted. There, at least, the jailers are further away and offer less supervision.

As an American, I rarely feel as free as I do when I’m traveling, most notably when I’m traveling outside of the city, especially in an undeveloped country where English isn’t the predominant language and where I’m unfamiliar with the native customs, i.e. where I don’t have any expectations placed on me because I don’t know what the expectations are—and everyone knows it. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to get lost—to purge myself of the things that define me. When I’m traveling, I can re-create myself in ways I’m not even free to imagine when I’m at home and in close proximity to all the cultural artifacts that define me. It’s only when I’m traveling that I realize, and can subsequently alter, how American I am—and how hopelessly artificial and civilized.

In the civilized world, the tools of our bondage, otherwise known as modern-day conveniences, are always close at hand. We can’t be rid of them. In America, in particular, and most particularly in American cities, we can’t survive comfortably without our things—without our automobiles, our laptops, our Ipods, our televisions, our vanity products, our furniture, or our drugs. We can’t survive without our things, because our things are now a part of us. We’re not becoming—we ARE cyborgs. Contrast this with rural areas of the Third World, where the average person lives on the equivalent of one dollar a day. There, you eat what’s available rather than what you choose. You socialize with whoever is in your presence rather than with the virtual society you select with your mouse clicker. You travel by virtue of other people’s generosity. Any place you can lie down is a bed. And any time you can get there is the time you’re supposed to get there. What this means is that you have fewer obstructions to your liberty. You don’t have to be at home to sleep or away from work to have fun. Because your moments are less well defined, your flexibility increases and you live more in the moment. Granted, you can’t live entirely in the moment, because the tentacles of power have now reached worldwide, but life as a genuine event, instead of a product, is still a possibility for the traveler. Maybe not a strong possibility; we’ve all spent years defining ourselves by our possessions—often very similar possessions, which, in turn, homogenize our experiences. But if you have fewer possessions, you, in turn, are less possessed. And when you’re traveling, especially if you travel light like I do, then your possessions become less a part of you. You become freer and more flexible, and the things that you thought were essential prove insignificant; even your sense of self becomes a temporary idea that you have no trouble discarding. You become more aware of the violence that has been done to you by things—how things both abstract and concrete have shaped you into something you’re not—have, in a manner of speaking, killed the real you.

And perhaps no violence is worse than the violence of language. No other tool has weakened us more. Until we put an end to that violence, freedom and authenticity can never exist. It’s one thing to destroy the body, but to destroy the foundation of reality is far more insidious, and that’s what language does. Language is the one tool that makes possession possible. We use it not merely to communicate but to control. It controls us by naming and defining our experiences, making everything that happens a known commodity rather than a unique and genuine event. It controls us by turning everything into an abstraction. Capital, the primary means of possession in the world today, is really nothing but a collection of words—words and faith. Bill Gates has never seen or laid hands on the billions of dollars he’s rumored to possess, but he has plenty of paperwork to confirm his status as one of the world’s wealthiest men—and that’s enough. It’s enough because we believe it’s enough (Derrick Jensen anecdote--from an interview, I think). And that belief appropriates our freedom. Since we believe in civilization we also believe in its laws (another byproduct of language)—and that violating those laws will imperil us. Consequently, we give away our inalienable rights to unadulterated experience. Take, as one example, the experience of adventurous travel. It used to be that you could take off with little or no provisions. You could camp almost anywhere, bathe in any river, find food and water with ease, and trust, to a degree, the hospitality of strangers. To a limited degree, you can still do all that in the Third World, or at least in Mexico. But in industrialized nations, you need permits to camp in the wilderness, passports and visas to travel in foreign countries, and money—lots and lots of money—to eat and drink. And signs—written prohibitions and instructions—are omnipresent. Thus, the experience of travel is restricted to its commodity form: the vacation—the vacation wherein we observe the spectacle of the world instead of participating in it (http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/outlaw.htm). No bomb has ever achieved such lethal results.

And this, I suppose, is why we need writing. It’s too late to turn back the clocks; words are as much a part of us as eyes, ears, and legs. The rudiments of untroubled thought and joy have been buried too deep to be unsurfaced. Our only chance at redemption is through renewal—through making of ourselves a new substance not incapable of harmonizing with the rest of the natural world. To do this, we need to first and foremost change the way we communicate. To quote Alexander Soltysinski: “all wars are wars of words”. And it’s time we joined the fray. ‘Operation Freedom’, ‘Democratization’, ‘The Patriot Act’, ‘Globalization’. Never have we had more pleasant-sounding words to describe murder, thievery, and exploitation as we do today—and it’s only getting worse. The war of words isn’t a war we can win by conventional methods. Language is owned by the powers that be, and it can’t be re-appropriated through mainstream channels. The corporate media and political spin-doctors have all the artillery and manpower on their side. The only means of combating such exhaustive forces is through sabotage and gorilla warfare—by going underground (to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, so to speak) (http://www.carbondefense.org/).

Like in Vietnam, we’re unlikely to win many battles, but we might yet win the war. Remember, the system we’re fighting is self-defeating; it can’t sustain itself much longer. And the more powerful it becomes, the quicker it consumes its resources. So when the goliath comes crashing down in a million pieces, the process of creation will resume. And it has to start by restoring language to its initial purpose as a means of describing, rather than co-opting and defining, reality. Only then will we reacquaint ourselves with life’s adventure, freedom, and mystery—with the sense that something is really happening—something unbounded and non-uniform and non-symbolic.

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The following quote does a good job of expressing some of my feelings about the rural Mexican people. It’s from Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias, a great, but now mostly forgotten, writer from Guatemala.
“[They were] poverty stricken people who wanted for everything because their families were large, and the wealth which passed through their hands in the placers or in the fields did not belong to them. Wretched wages kept them sick and feeble, always drunk. At first [your instinct] is to help them, to, as Don Quixote would have said, shake them like puppets to bring them out of their contemplative renunciation, their meditative silence, their indifference to the earthly world in which they lived. [But soon you grow to not only understand them but to] share their attitude, half dream and half reality, in which existence was a continuous rhythm of physical needs, without complications.”