Because I’m pressed for time, I decide to go to the coffee shop closest to my house—not the usual place four or five blocks away where they know my name and my coffee likes and dislikes, but the café just around the corner that is frequented almost exclusively by gay men.
I walk in. A fit, muscular, bearded man in a Santa hat takes my order. “Hi.”
“Hi. I’ll have a green tea and … and….” I point. “And I think I’ll have a slice of that banana nut bread.”
“Small, medium, or large tea?”
“Uh … small, thanks.”
He grabs the tea bag. “And … I’m sorry. You wanted something else, right? What was it? My phone number?”
I smile, avoiding eye contact. “I’ll have some banana nut bread, too.”
“I’m sorry.” He turns away, looking let down. “We’re just a little too happy here today. Would you like the thick end slice or the thinner slice that isn’t an end piece?”
“Umm….” I look over my options. “Give me the thin slice.” I search my wallet for my credit card. I can’t find it. Damn, I think, I must’ve left it in the ATM again.
“Visa?” he asks, taking the card I had evidently placed already on the counter.
I now make eye contact. He looks embarrassed. I want to say something reassuring: “I’m flattered, but…. If I were gay, you know…. If I ever decide that I’m not straight, yours will be the first number I….” But instead I explain that I thought I had lost my credit card, but, apparently, I had it out right there on the counter, and … and….”
He doesn’t respond, gives me the credit card receipt to sign. I tip generously.
After I sit down, when he’s busy talking to the other barrista, I size him up. He’s young. Young, tall, dark, and handsome. And, to judge by his popularity with the other customers, he seems to have charisma to go with his looks. I'm flattered. And, because I'm flattered, I wonder how to maintain his interests without actually giving him what he wants--without being dishonest. I wait to see if he looks at me. He doesn't.
I take out a crossword puzzle, but I can’t concentrate. To my right sit three obviously gay males and one female. If one of the men speaks, the group immediately responds with a follow-up comment, question, smile, or laughter. The woman, though, has to work much harder to be heard. She gets interrupted and has to speak louder than the others to get noticed. It strikes me that if the men were straight, the woman would be the focus of conversation, especially if the woman were as attractive as this one is. The men would hang on her every sentence, look to her for approval, compete for her attention, trying to do with words what they wish to do with their hands and bodies. But here it’s reversed. The men seem to thoroughly enjoy each other’s company; they interact effortlessly. The woman is clearly forcing it, being inauthentic. And when the men address her, it’s out of politeness more than interest in her views or comments. She looks foolish.
I’m envious of the men. I’ve never had that kind of power, the power of indifference, over an attractive woman.
But, as I bury my head in a book and try to block out their voices, my empathies are with her—with the outsider, the one nervously folding and unfolding a candy wrapper as she tries to follow the conversation, her legs crossed, back straight, shoulders hunched forward trying to politely impose herself, trying to act as if she’s one of them, trying, with less and less poise, not to be forgotten.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Friday, December 21, 2007
Lakota Freedom
On December 17th, Lakota Sioux Indians declared sovereign nation status (you can read about it HERE). Not only that, but they invited anyone residing within the five states that once were Lakota territory to become a citizen, provided you give up your US citizenship.
I’m thinking about it.
I’m thinking about it.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Reforming Cancer
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, America is finally making some headway in its four decade long battle against cancer. Studies show that cancer rates have been dropping 2.2 percent a year since 2001 and by a rate of 1.1 percent since 1993. And this, we're told in an opinion column that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, is proof that our trust in the scientists is well-founded--proof that scientist's "stunning progress in cancer screening and treatment" is solving the problem.
But let's get some perspective here. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, killing one in four of us, and a 2.2 percent decrease, while cause for some minor optimism, isn't exactly a clear sign of victory. Since 1930 when the government first started keeping records, cancer deaths have grown from 114,186 to 556,902 (2003 numbers). That's almost a fivefold increase, out-pacing population growth by about three times. Moreover, what improvements are being made lately are largely due to long-overdue attacks on industry, especially the cigarette industry which accounts for the largest share of the blame for cancer deaths even today. The drop in cancer rates has had little to do with "screening and treatment". And while the National Cancer Society expects to see continued progress in the battle, there isn't a whole lot of evidence to support such a conclusion. Recent reports from Europe show that "adults who have used cellphones for 10 years or more have twice as much brain cancer on the side of their heads most frequently exposed to the phone." And because brain cancer can take up to ten years or longer to develop, it's unlikely that current statistics reflect potential problems with increasing cellphone use (Denver Post Sunday Nov. 11). And cell phones are just one of many new and potentially cancerigenic technologies that are being introduced into our environments on an almost daily basis. The FDA (in cooperation with the National Cancer Society who fought against legislation to prohibit placing known carcinogens into our food), has not only failed to protect us, it knowingly sanctions new industry efforts to make our environments more toxic (one of the first FDA approved genetically engineered foods was a tomato that, it was later shown, induced heart attacks in a large number of people who ate it. Fortunately, the tomato was quickly taken off the market, not because it killed people, but because it didn't sell.) We're exposed to known carcinogens through our FDA approved food, shampoos, skin-creams, ear-phones, computers, and even in the polluted air around us. We eat, breathe, and think cancer into our bodies every day.
Fact is, we are not winning the war on cancer. Science is not saving us. If Nazis run a prison camp in which they kill a hundred prisoners a day, and later they scale back to killing only 97, the resistance shouldn't think that it's on its way to victory. At best, it has merely slowed the inevitable wipe out of the prison camp population. The problem, Nazism, hasn't gone away.
In 1953, due to an ever-increasing litter problem caused largely by magazine ads promoting cans as "throw-aways", legislation was proposed to prohibit the sale of beer in non-refillable bottles. As a result, an organization called "Keep America Beautiful" (KAB) was founded by businessmen from the beverage and packaging industries. In the early 1970s the group launched a major advertising campaign, spearheaded by the now legendary commercial featuring the image of a Native American with a tear angling down his face and the accompanying voice-over message: "People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It" (http://toolkit.bottlebill.org/opposition/KABhistory.htm).
Put another way, don't blame us, the bottling industry, blame yourselves. You're the problem. Now fix it. We don't have to look at the source of the problem--the manufacturing of trash--but at treating the symptoms of the problem--learning to put our trash in "receptacles"--to make the problem, and the litter, go away. Similarly, the problem with cancer is not presented to us as a problem of industry, or of the science and technology that supports and is produced by industry, but as a problem of lifestyle choices that through "screening and treatment" can be easily fixed, that, in fact, we are fixing, at an astounding rate of 2.2 percent a year. Don't expect to fix the litter problem by eliminating the production of litter and don't expect to eliminate the cancer problem by eliminating the producers of cancer (known cancorigens). But we can fix the problem by staying faithful to the status quo--and to science. We can fix the problem with treatment. So pick up your own and your neighbors discarded bottles and wrappers and trust in science to find a cancer cure. But leave Industry alone! Heil Hitler!
http://environment.about.com/od/healthenvironment/a/uscancerdeaths.htm
But let's get some perspective here. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, killing one in four of us, and a 2.2 percent decrease, while cause for some minor optimism, isn't exactly a clear sign of victory. Since 1930 when the government first started keeping records, cancer deaths have grown from 114,186 to 556,902 (2003 numbers). That's almost a fivefold increase, out-pacing population growth by about three times. Moreover, what improvements are being made lately are largely due to long-overdue attacks on industry, especially the cigarette industry which accounts for the largest share of the blame for cancer deaths even today. The drop in cancer rates has had little to do with "screening and treatment". And while the National Cancer Society expects to see continued progress in the battle, there isn't a whole lot of evidence to support such a conclusion. Recent reports from Europe show that "adults who have used cellphones for 10 years or more have twice as much brain cancer on the side of their heads most frequently exposed to the phone." And because brain cancer can take up to ten years or longer to develop, it's unlikely that current statistics reflect potential problems with increasing cellphone use (Denver Post Sunday Nov. 11). And cell phones are just one of many new and potentially cancerigenic technologies that are being introduced into our environments on an almost daily basis. The FDA (in cooperation with the National Cancer Society who fought against legislation to prohibit placing known carcinogens into our food), has not only failed to protect us, it knowingly sanctions new industry efforts to make our environments more toxic (one of the first FDA approved genetically engineered foods was a tomato that, it was later shown, induced heart attacks in a large number of people who ate it. Fortunately, the tomato was quickly taken off the market, not because it killed people, but because it didn't sell.) We're exposed to known carcinogens through our FDA approved food, shampoos, skin-creams, ear-phones, computers, and even in the polluted air around us. We eat, breathe, and think cancer into our bodies every day.
Fact is, we are not winning the war on cancer. Science is not saving us. If Nazis run a prison camp in which they kill a hundred prisoners a day, and later they scale back to killing only 97, the resistance shouldn't think that it's on its way to victory. At best, it has merely slowed the inevitable wipe out of the prison camp population. The problem, Nazism, hasn't gone away.
In 1953, due to an ever-increasing litter problem caused largely by magazine ads promoting cans as "throw-aways", legislation was proposed to prohibit the sale of beer in non-refillable bottles. As a result, an organization called "Keep America Beautiful" (KAB) was founded by businessmen from the beverage and packaging industries. In the early 1970s the group launched a major advertising campaign, spearheaded by the now legendary commercial featuring the image of a Native American with a tear angling down his face and the accompanying voice-over message: "People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It" (http://toolkit.bottlebill.org/opposition/KABhistory.htm).
Put another way, don't blame us, the bottling industry, blame yourselves. You're the problem. Now fix it. We don't have to look at the source of the problem--the manufacturing of trash--but at treating the symptoms of the problem--learning to put our trash in "receptacles"--to make the problem, and the litter, go away. Similarly, the problem with cancer is not presented to us as a problem of industry, or of the science and technology that supports and is produced by industry, but as a problem of lifestyle choices that through "screening and treatment" can be easily fixed, that, in fact, we are fixing, at an astounding rate of 2.2 percent a year. Don't expect to fix the litter problem by eliminating the production of litter and don't expect to eliminate the cancer problem by eliminating the producers of cancer (known cancorigens). But we can fix the problem by staying faithful to the status quo--and to science. We can fix the problem with treatment. So pick up your own and your neighbors discarded bottles and wrappers and trust in science to find a cancer cure. But leave Industry alone! Heil Hitler!
http://environment.about.com/od/healthenvironment/a/uscancerdeaths.htm
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Into the Wild
I just saw the movie Into the Wild the other night, and it got me to thinking about my own experiences when I was the age of Christopher McCandless, the movie's protagonist. Like McCandless, I was somewhat obsessed with reading and with traveling, though I didn't rough it in the same way that he did. And like McCandless, I had a somewhat romanticized notion of what the natural world, or the world away from civilized society, had to offer. My view of nature, though, was a view informed more by literature and art than by direct contact with the wild; you might even say that my view was otherworldly and abstract--a view I now find not only wrong but sinister in its implications--a view that rationalizes narcissism and passivity.
But in spite of his direct experience living off the land and a more informed view of the natural world, McCandless wasn't any better prepared for his journey than I was at his age, and he paid a higher price for his mistakes. Whatever survival experience he had, it wasn't enough to prepare him for life in the Alaskan wilderness. He walked into the forest the same way I walked into the Urban Jungle in my early twenties: naive and ill-equipped. Nevertheless, I don't believe his effort was wasted. I don't want to bury McCandless, I want to praise him. I'm not ashamed of what I did in my twenties, and I firmly disagree with McCandless' critics who claim that what he did was driven by selfishness more than bravery and that he shouldn't be emulated. I think even his stupidity should be emulated.
Like a lot of young people, McCandless wanted to find a way of life richer and more honest than the life his parents and elders had left him, which is something I can relate to. In that sense, McCandless and I took similar journeys--he into the wilderness and I into the heart of the city, but both of us delving, essentially, into the private areas of our individual psyches--into a place almost beyond the reach of human culture--to find it uninhabitable.
Unlike most people, I didn't deal with my loneliness by doing the sensible thing--by seeking companionship and simply being less alone. Instead, I tried to become happy in my loneliness. So I wandered from state to state, working temp jobs to make ends meet, and I read. And I read and I read and I read. And I walked. God knows how many miles of walking I did around Lake Washington in Seattle, through the most hidden and dangerous streets I could find in San Francisco and Oakland, through the ugly suburbs of Virginia, in the canyons of Utah and Colorado, and in and around city parks and abandoned or closed buildings wherever I found them. I also, like McCandless, tried to metaphorically kill myself. I tried to kill off the person I'd been conditioned into being by, among other things, severing most of my previous relationships. I didn't have much contact with my family at that time, and, when I did, I found it numbing. On one trip back home, adolescent drama queen that I was, I told my mother that I didn't want her calling me anymore because of her views on the death penalty. I also broke off relations with all of my Utah friends, telling them, again in adolescent drama queen fashion, that I was going away to find God.
Well, I never found God. He wasn't where I expected him to be--in the unopened closets of my mind. And I didn't find myself, either. In that sense, my journey was a failure. But I did find something, and the movie reminded me of what it was. I found the same thing McCandless found--the knowledge that "happiness isn't real unless it's shared". I learned the lie of self-reliance. And I learned something else, too: that whether you die alone in the wilderness or surrounded by family and friends in the heart of a people-filled metropolis, you die alone. Neither living alone in the wild or living in civilized society gives us the companionship and sense of responsibility that our species requires to be healthy. We need to honor our dependency on the ENTIRE natural world, which includes the human world. Put another way, we have to cooperate. We need what McCandless found: an awareness of our interdependency on the wilderness, an awareness that we can't live by destroying the landbase that makes our lives possible. We have to realize, and rediscover, the wild animals that we are. But at the same time, we have to realize that we're a certain kind of animal, an intensely social animal, dependent on community building for survival. We can't live independent of community, of human community, nor can we live without an awareness of the wilderness that we're apart of. We can't find happiness by denying certain parts of who we are. To do that, we have to live in our imaginations, the only place where our spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional selves are united.
In a nutshell, my journey taught me that you couldn't escape the world nor could you let the world imprison you. You had to recreate it. I now understand that the real battle is stopping the machine, not escaping it, but, before you can take steps to stop the machine, you have to get some distance from it, or, at the very least, stop identifying with it. You have to set your imagination free. And that's what I was able to do during my years of wandering and, ultimately, what I think McCandless did. That's why I think McCandless' journey should be emulated. Because wisdom doesn't come easily or without risk. No one is born with an understanding that the world they're inheriting is one based on the suppression and oppression of self awareness and development. No one is born with the understanding that the civilized institutions of work, marriage, and education can't fulfill our human needs for self-expansion and happiness. And no one is aware of his or her possibilities until they attempt, at the risk of death, to discover them.
By exploring the depths of his imagination, McCandless learned that he couldn't find happiness in civilization's expectations, but he couldn't find happiness alone, either. Unfortunately, he died before he could put that knowledge into practice. But at least he inspired a good story, a story that needs to be honored and which both inspires and delineates the range of human experience, a story that enrichens and awakens our imaginations, a story that, if honored and understood, makes repeating McCandless' mistakes unnecessary. The story alone justifies the journey. At the same time, you can't learn everything from a story. McCandless' story can inspire and teach us, but it can't take the place of our own journeys.
Going into the wild means more than just trekking off into the wilderness to hone up on your survival skills (a delusion, it seems, of many native Alaskans who criticize McCandless and others like him). More than anything, it's a journey into the imagination. William Blake once wrote that "The imagination is not a State: it is Human existence itself." Aside from the literal wilderness of Alaska, McCandless also journeyed into all that the wilderness represents to the human imagination: untamed, and unbounded, and unfiltered "real" experience--into existence itself. In that quest, I think his journey was a success--a success that needs to be emulated.
***
Any man who selects a goal in life which can be fully achieved has already defined his own limitations.
Cavett Roberts
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
We live as we dream--alone.
Robert Conrad
But in spite of his direct experience living off the land and a more informed view of the natural world, McCandless wasn't any better prepared for his journey than I was at his age, and he paid a higher price for his mistakes. Whatever survival experience he had, it wasn't enough to prepare him for life in the Alaskan wilderness. He walked into the forest the same way I walked into the Urban Jungle in my early twenties: naive and ill-equipped. Nevertheless, I don't believe his effort was wasted. I don't want to bury McCandless, I want to praise him. I'm not ashamed of what I did in my twenties, and I firmly disagree with McCandless' critics who claim that what he did was driven by selfishness more than bravery and that he shouldn't be emulated. I think even his stupidity should be emulated.
Like a lot of young people, McCandless wanted to find a way of life richer and more honest than the life his parents and elders had left him, which is something I can relate to. In that sense, McCandless and I took similar journeys--he into the wilderness and I into the heart of the city, but both of us delving, essentially, into the private areas of our individual psyches--into a place almost beyond the reach of human culture--to find it uninhabitable.
Unlike most people, I didn't deal with my loneliness by doing the sensible thing--by seeking companionship and simply being less alone. Instead, I tried to become happy in my loneliness. So I wandered from state to state, working temp jobs to make ends meet, and I read. And I read and I read and I read. And I walked. God knows how many miles of walking I did around Lake Washington in Seattle, through the most hidden and dangerous streets I could find in San Francisco and Oakland, through the ugly suburbs of Virginia, in the canyons of Utah and Colorado, and in and around city parks and abandoned or closed buildings wherever I found them. I also, like McCandless, tried to metaphorically kill myself. I tried to kill off the person I'd been conditioned into being by, among other things, severing most of my previous relationships. I didn't have much contact with my family at that time, and, when I did, I found it numbing. On one trip back home, adolescent drama queen that I was, I told my mother that I didn't want her calling me anymore because of her views on the death penalty. I also broke off relations with all of my Utah friends, telling them, again in adolescent drama queen fashion, that I was going away to find God.
Well, I never found God. He wasn't where I expected him to be--in the unopened closets of my mind. And I didn't find myself, either. In that sense, my journey was a failure. But I did find something, and the movie reminded me of what it was. I found the same thing McCandless found--the knowledge that "happiness isn't real unless it's shared". I learned the lie of self-reliance. And I learned something else, too: that whether you die alone in the wilderness or surrounded by family and friends in the heart of a people-filled metropolis, you die alone. Neither living alone in the wild or living in civilized society gives us the companionship and sense of responsibility that our species requires to be healthy. We need to honor our dependency on the ENTIRE natural world, which includes the human world. Put another way, we have to cooperate. We need what McCandless found: an awareness of our interdependency on the wilderness, an awareness that we can't live by destroying the landbase that makes our lives possible. We have to realize, and rediscover, the wild animals that we are. But at the same time, we have to realize that we're a certain kind of animal, an intensely social animal, dependent on community building for survival. We can't live independent of community, of human community, nor can we live without an awareness of the wilderness that we're apart of. We can't find happiness by denying certain parts of who we are. To do that, we have to live in our imaginations, the only place where our spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional selves are united.
In a nutshell, my journey taught me that you couldn't escape the world nor could you let the world imprison you. You had to recreate it. I now understand that the real battle is stopping the machine, not escaping it, but, before you can take steps to stop the machine, you have to get some distance from it, or, at the very least, stop identifying with it. You have to set your imagination free. And that's what I was able to do during my years of wandering and, ultimately, what I think McCandless did. That's why I think McCandless' journey should be emulated. Because wisdom doesn't come easily or without risk. No one is born with an understanding that the world they're inheriting is one based on the suppression and oppression of self awareness and development. No one is born with the understanding that the civilized institutions of work, marriage, and education can't fulfill our human needs for self-expansion and happiness. And no one is aware of his or her possibilities until they attempt, at the risk of death, to discover them.
By exploring the depths of his imagination, McCandless learned that he couldn't find happiness in civilization's expectations, but he couldn't find happiness alone, either. Unfortunately, he died before he could put that knowledge into practice. But at least he inspired a good story, a story that needs to be honored and which both inspires and delineates the range of human experience, a story that enrichens and awakens our imaginations, a story that, if honored and understood, makes repeating McCandless' mistakes unnecessary. The story alone justifies the journey. At the same time, you can't learn everything from a story. McCandless' story can inspire and teach us, but it can't take the place of our own journeys.
Going into the wild means more than just trekking off into the wilderness to hone up on your survival skills (a delusion, it seems, of many native Alaskans who criticize McCandless and others like him). More than anything, it's a journey into the imagination. William Blake once wrote that "The imagination is not a State: it is Human existence itself." Aside from the literal wilderness of Alaska, McCandless also journeyed into all that the wilderness represents to the human imagination: untamed, and unbounded, and unfiltered "real" experience--into existence itself. In that quest, I think his journey was a success--a success that needs to be emulated.
***
Any man who selects a goal in life which can be fully achieved has already defined his own limitations.
Cavett Roberts
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
We live as we dream--alone.
Robert Conrad
Friday, October 19, 2007
Vultures and Photographers
http://static.flickr.com/121/281782970_b6f431cad4_o.jpg
The photo in the above link and the accompanying story have been haunting me for the past several days. Aside from the photo's obvious emotional impact, I'm not sure why it bothers me as much as it does, except that it seems to say something profound about art and human awareness and the solitude of the natural world that I haven't figured out yet--that I need to think more about.
The photo was taken in Sudan during the famine in 1993. It depicts a young girl crawling towards a United Nations food camp about a kilometer away. No one knows what happened to the girl, including the photographer, who, having been cautioned against intervening in local affairs and worried about the possibility of contracting a disease, chased the vulture away and left the scene shortly after getting the shot.
Three months after receiving a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, the photographer, a South African named Kevin Carter, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
His sixteen year old daughter said in an interview that when she looks at the picture she sees in the vulture a symbol for society and in the suffering child an image of her father. Others see it differently: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of [the girl's] suffering," said the St. Petersburg Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
For me it's hard to look at the image without sharing the latter opinion. Yet, judging by the online bios I read about Kevin Carter, he didn't seem like he was in it--in photography, that is--for the fame and fortune. He wanted to help people. He was an idealist. He thought he could change the world, in a small way, by documenting the tragedies that were happening in Sudan and elsewhere. Not only that, he was far from being a coward. To the contrary, he liked living on the edge and constantly risked his life to get his photographs.
So what happened?
It's hard to say. But just as it's easy to condemn from a distance, it's equally easy to look at the world from a distance--to casually observe through a TV screen, a microscope, a photograph, or a camera lens--and imagine what we might or might not do, and then do nothing. Or do nothing while condemning others for doing nothing. We can lose ourselves in the distance. Artifice, the world as image and abstraction and copy, can placate our desire to act, our will to relate to and engage (and realize our interdependence on) the other; it can bury us. But it can also create a space, the only space possible maybe, wherein self-discovery is really possible.
http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981431,00.html
http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5241442
The photo in the above link and the accompanying story have been haunting me for the past several days. Aside from the photo's obvious emotional impact, I'm not sure why it bothers me as much as it does, except that it seems to say something profound about art and human awareness and the solitude of the natural world that I haven't figured out yet--that I need to think more about.
The photo was taken in Sudan during the famine in 1993. It depicts a young girl crawling towards a United Nations food camp about a kilometer away. No one knows what happened to the girl, including the photographer, who, having been cautioned against intervening in local affairs and worried about the possibility of contracting a disease, chased the vulture away and left the scene shortly after getting the shot.
Three months after receiving a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, the photographer, a South African named Kevin Carter, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
His sixteen year old daughter said in an interview that when she looks at the picture she sees in the vulture a symbol for society and in the suffering child an image of her father. Others see it differently: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of [the girl's] suffering," said the St. Petersburg Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
For me it's hard to look at the image without sharing the latter opinion. Yet, judging by the online bios I read about Kevin Carter, he didn't seem like he was in it--in photography, that is--for the fame and fortune. He wanted to help people. He was an idealist. He thought he could change the world, in a small way, by documenting the tragedies that were happening in Sudan and elsewhere. Not only that, he was far from being a coward. To the contrary, he liked living on the edge and constantly risked his life to get his photographs.
So what happened?
It's hard to say. But just as it's easy to condemn from a distance, it's equally easy to look at the world from a distance--to casually observe through a TV screen, a microscope, a photograph, or a camera lens--and imagine what we might or might not do, and then do nothing. Or do nothing while condemning others for doing nothing. We can lose ourselves in the distance. Artifice, the world as image and abstraction and copy, can placate our desire to act, our will to relate to and engage (and realize our interdependence on) the other; it can bury us. But it can also create a space, the only space possible maybe, wherein self-discovery is really possible.
http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981431,00.html
http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5241442
Faces
Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.
For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are so many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.
But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.
The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.
Rilke
For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are so many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.
But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.
The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.
Rilke
Saturday, September 15, 2007
On Reading Proust or The Music of Middle Age
She had taken a casual remark by my father, had worked it up delicately, given it a ‘turn,’, a precious title, set in it the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.
Proust
****
I used to spend hours at night on our upper patio watching the western horizon. I remember once in particular when a storm approached: constant lightning flashes overtop the distant mountains, grumbling thunder, a gentle but increasingly swift wind stirring the nearby trees, a sudden and welcome decrease in temperature. I wanted that moment to go on forever—a moment of quiet expectancy and profusion—the calm before the storm--the calm before my real life, my life of fun and adventure, would begin. I remember another time when I watched the lights on the horizon and listened on my Walkman, in stupid youthful rapture, to the Ennio Morricone soundtrack for The Mission while I imagined what cinema-like journeys of my own I would embark on someday. Another time, I had just watched Lawrence of Arabia and I joyously envisioned the Lawrencian trials that awaited me beyond the horizon I faced and beyond the four mountains that surrounded me, mountains that both hid and enhanced the mystery of what lie beyond.
I remember night games with friends, the pre-dawn sense of solitude as I rode my bike into town to deliver the morning paper, the thrill of discovery and recognition when I read Tolstoi’s War and Peace, waiting in the bathroom with three other guys to see which one Hillary Hanks would choose to “go with” (she chose me!), a deer being shot by police in front of our house, one of my brothers hooking my other brother with a fishing rod in Yellowstone … and many other events of my early life, each of them overwhelmingly intense in the way that only youthful experiences can be and each of them, in one way or another, informed by a symbioses of story and moment—by a fusion of plot and future possibilities.
I also remember moving away from home for an internship in Washington DC and coming back empty. I remember looking at the stars and feeling nothing, watching storms move across the sky and getting bored, witnessing tragedy with aloofness, knowing with certainty that I’d lost something—that I’d grown up and become something I didn’t want to be.
And finally I remember, not distinctly, though, trying to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and getting nowhere. Years later, though—last week, in fact—I resumed the effort, this time with much more success. As a middle-aged man, near the age of the author when he was writing, I can better understand the protagonist’s quest to regain something that’s irretrievably gone—something which can never be restored but which can be, must be, revisited and recreated. Put another way, I can better understand the saga of being middle aged—of enduring the “mezzo del cammin de nostra vita” when we focus less on plot and more on style and craftsmanship, when the story of our lives is secondary to process and substance.
To be frank, the story of my life is a monumental disappointment. If the adolescent who slept under the stars and watched storms move across the horizon could’ve known at the time how dull his life would turn out, he no doubt would have done more to hinder the aging process. More than that, the stars would’ve been less bright, the horizon less enticing, the movies he watched less thrilling, the books he read less engaging, the music he listened to less melodic and captivating. The prospective story, in other words—the sense of possibility, the recognition of a familiar plot—anointed my youthful moments with an almost otherworldly charm that only the naivety of early life makes possible. But today, the expectancy is gone. And only the memories remain.
It’s no secret that life gets less exciting as you get older, at least in the superficialities; as your options narrow, as the plotlines thicken and the story, with all its accumulated banalities, starts to take shape, you lose something— most significantly, you lose the numerous prospects of another life and another story. But, as Proust indicates, you don’t lose, or you don’t have to lose, the intoxicating sense of abundancy that you experienced in childhood and adolescence; you need to find it, though—find the beauty and abundance of life—in the depths of your experience rather than in the multitudes; you need to find it in your personalized experience and in your own individuation process.
Disillusionment isn’t the end of the world for Proust, it’s the beginning; it’s a necessary component of self-realization. In order to become a Proustian-like creator—to find, or rather forge, your particular place in the world, your selfhood—you have to first discover the lie of life as it’s presented; you have to eradicate the assumptions of others and create yourself from scratch, building from the void.
I remember sitting in a jazz club two or three months after my divorce. It was one of the most difficult periods of my life. But as I sat there among friends, listening to the eccentric genius of Bill Frisell, I was as happy as I had ever been. The music at first enticed me with its familiarity and then with its uniqueness—with the grace and novelty of the improvisation. I was utterly swept away by the moment. But unlike my youthful moments of rapture, I wasn’t lost in a dream of future possibilities—of imagining adventures to come, knowledge yet discovered, or fame yet to be achieved. I wasn’t happy because of the moment’s omens. I wasn’t happy because of anything. Though my world had just crumbled down around me and all my plans been laid to waste, I was glad still to be alive, happy not with the pregnancy of the situation but with the situation itself, glad just to be there at that jazz club with that music at that moment, one of countless similar moments I would have throughout the same summer. As I look back, I realize that that summer was possibly the greatest of my life, in spite of, or maybe not in spite of but because of, the hardship and the suffering I had to endure because of my divorce, when the story I’d planned on acting out was stolen away. For that summer, at least, the story of my life didn’t seem to matter; my failed marriage put me in such an unfamiliar place that I was able to experience joy (and all other emotions) on a deeper level than I ever had.
In addition to Proust, I’m also re-reading Moby Dick, a book which starts out much like my early life experiences: full of hope and intrigue and expectation of adventure. And while the protagonist certainly finds a kind of adventure, it isn’t the adventure he would’ve wished for and nor is it the adventure that makes the whaling journey worth the trip or the novel worth the read. What makes the novel worth reading, and I imagine what made the journey worthwhile for the protagonist and what made the novel worth writing for the author, is the laborious and often tedious—yet substantative—middle. It isn’t the story that makes Moby Dick a classic. The story is just another variation on a familiar motif. What makes Moby Dick a classic are the digressions from the story in which the narrator ponders the whiteness of the whale, when he enumerates the whale's historical depictions in art and literature, when he details the ins-and-outs of the whaling industry and everyday whaling life, and when he painstakingly elaborates on the whale’s taxonomy—when the vast storehouse of whale trivia spills out of the narrative and suggests, as I believe Melville meant to suggest, that the story hardly matters—that it’s no more possible to capture the white whale, or any whale in its entirety, than it is to contain, to capture, life in the written word, in a story. Nature isn’t reducible to information, nor is it capable of being interpreted by language or possessed by written knowledge. Life is a journey into the unknown. And it’s only in that element—the element of the unknown, when you have no firm ground to stand on—that the marrow of life can be mined and a deeper substance discovered. As Melville puts it: "in landlessness alone resides the highest truth."
The middle, that point in our lives in which we find ourselves lost in the dark forest, our “selva oscura”—when we’re afloat amid the vast oceans and the world, and life as it once presented itself to us at last fades away—the middle is where we finally begin to find our essence—when the story that we were expected to ratify is lost to us and a new world, a richer world based in elusiveness, epiphany, and substance, can be created in its place. It’s only then, in the artist’s Purgatory, that we learn to appreciate and understand the full radiance of our peculiar existence—when we begin to see, and are unafraid and perceptive enough to see, passed the story and into the bottomless depths and the inexhaustible richness of our private moments.
In Proust’s novel, we can see the protagonist’s evolving perceptiveness of life in the way he comes to appreciate the subtleties, i.e. the substance, of a certain sonata:
Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirely -- it was an image of life.
In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it.
After I got back from Guatemala, I sat down to have lunch with a friend. During the course of our conversation, he asked me what I thought my life would be like if I had stayed with a particular ex-girlfriend. And that’s when it hit me. My life isn’t too bad. I’m grateful for all the choices I’ve made that have led me to where I am—to this moment. I’m happy just to be alive—to be here in this place under these circumstances at this particular inimitable time. I’m happy that my life didn’t fulfill the expectations I once placed on it. I’m happy to be a failure. I’m happy that I’m no longer motivated to emulate a familiar story. I’m happy to be middle aged.
***
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
Rilke
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Oral history
storycorps
These are amazing. I've only been able to listen to a few because the emotions are so intense (the one about the woman talking about the death of her sister will break your heart, and the one about the bus driver helping an old woman off the bus is a perfect jewel).
These are amazing. I've only been able to listen to a few because the emotions are so intense (the one about the woman talking about the death of her sister will break your heart, and the one about the bus driver helping an old woman off the bus is a perfect jewel).
Friday, August 10, 2007
A few memories, among many, of my trip to Guatemala
Maximon
Apparently he was an actual person, but he’s now worshipped by the indigenous people as a god—a god unlike any I’ve ever known. He smokes a big cigar, dresses in the finest clothes, and accepts mostly offerings of liquor, especially the expensive stuff, though he usually has to settle for cheap tequila.
Since the effigy is moved to a new house every day, I had to pay a little boy dos quetzales to show me the location. I arrived in a small one-room house, where the effigy was surrounded by one woman and a dozen or so men, most of whom seemed either drunk or high. I gave another three quetzales to the effigy and asked to hear the story of Maximon. They told me, as best I could understand, that Maximon was a great Shaman, went by other names in other parts of the country, and that he helped people succeed in love and business. I joked that I needed help in both of those areas, and the room roared with laughter as if I were the next Richard Pryor. After the obligatory questions about who I was, what I did, and where I was from, everyone in the room took turns trying to pronounce my name, each butchering it a little more than his predecessor—and then I said adios.
The boy who had taken me to the house was waiting for me outside. He wanted more money—another five quetzals, which is nothing, but, out of principle, I told him no. He and his brother then followed me around for the next hour trying to get their pay, eventually settling for the opportunity to hurl insults at me.
More than anything, Maximon struck me as an indigenous person who had adopted all the traits and mannerisms of the dominant culture—a conquistador, in other words—who uses his wealth and power to get all the drugs and chicas he desires: the embodiment of success in the western world, a modern day shaman.
Sunrise in the Jungle
I woke up at three am to watch the sunrise from the top of a Mayan temple. The sunrise was nice, less for the view than for the symphony of sounds we listened to as the jungle awoke.
The Hold-Up
Estuve en un internet café, cuando un hombre entro con una pistola. El commenzo luchar con un otro hombre y entonces ambos salieron, el hombre con la pistola perseguindo el otro hombre. Tuve miedo, y esta me sorprendido. Nunca habia visto una pistola esa cerca (casi un metre). Despues la incidente, los trabajadores del café cierraron la puerta y esperamos hasta que toda era seguro.
Nunca regresse a este café otra vez.
(it would take too long to put in the accent marks, so.... and feel free, Ron, to correct my grammar).
One Night Stands
Not something that’s ever been a big part of my life—and not something I intend on ever making a big part of my life—but….
We’d been talking for maybe three or four minutes and she asked if I knew what a “something or other” was. I didn’t. She said it was a local term for “makeout session”. So we made out for about twenty seconds before she asked if I wanted to have sex. Believe it or not, I seriously considered saying no—that things were moving way too fast for me. But I didn’t. Before I knew it, I was back at her place being smashed against the wall and my pants dropped to my ankles.
Later though, once our clothes were scattered about the floor and once the booze started to wear off, I lost my nerve. Naked and in a well-lit room, she didn’t look quite as attractive to me as she did in the bar, so instead of fucking we lay in bed and talked. She told me she’d never been in a relationship; she’d had plenty of one-night stands, she said, but had never been in a long-term, meaningful relationship. And at one point, without provocation, she started to cry and I consoled her. The honesty of the moment got to me, so we did what we originally went there to do, and then I left. She wanted me to stay, but, since I didn’t have any contact solution with me and because it was nearly sunrise anyway, I decided I had to go.
At 4:30 am, the sky full of stars, in a profound silence, I made my way back to the hotel. The whole city was mine; there wasn’t a person in sight and hardly any light (no street lights in Xela and the moon had fallen). I hadn’t experienced that kind of pure liberty and wonder in a long time. It was one of the most beautiful moments I had in Guatemala, or in my entire life—and probably one of the loneliest.
The Snake Woman
To celebrate the town of San Pedro’s Saints Day, they had a big dance, circus rides, and a genuine freak show in which a young woman was buried up to her neck in sawdust with a dead boa-constrictor body pushed next to her head. I’ll give her this: she took her job seriously, not breaking character once.
New Friends
Lots to say here, but for now I’ll just give the names and nationalities: Mira (Finnish), Addie (US), Meagan (US), Silven (Guatemalan), host family father whose name I can’t remember (Guatemalan), Conrad (Swiss), Trevor (US), Brandon (Canada), Brooke (US), Maria (India), other girl from India (name starts with a P), host family eldest daughter whose name I can’t remember (Guatemalan), Nery (Guatemalan), Merlinda (German), bar owner in San Pedro whose name I can’t remember (Dutch), Trines (Guatemalan), Wilco (Dutch), Sarabeth and Abbie (fellow Coloradoans), the two guys from Boulder who hiked the volcano with Mira and I, guy I went kayaking with whose name might be John (US), all the interesting ex-pats at the party in Panajachel (US), Max (Israeli), Emily (US), Brian’s novia (Guatemalan), and many more that I spoke to briefly and would like to have gotten to know better.
****
A few more (added later):
Standing at the mouth of a cave with thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of bats swarming around me.
A should-have-been forty minute bus ride in which we had not just one but TWO flat tires!
Conversations with my traveling buddies, in which we asked each other personal questions like “what would surprise us most to learn about you?”, “what is your proudest achievement?” etc. Conrad, the quiet unassuming Swiss guy, would preface each answer by telling us how much he hated these types of questions—then give a detailed thirty minute response.
The five foot one teenager who wanted to fight me. Still not sure why.
Taking a seven hour chicken bus ride while hung over. Bad idea.
The Italians in the Cafe in NY who took overwhelming pride in their baking.
Being stopped and frisked by the police. They asked me if I was there to buy marijuana, and, drunk and unable to understand the tone of their question in Spanish, I thought maybe they were selling.
I played it safe and said no.
Apparently he was an actual person, but he’s now worshipped by the indigenous people as a god—a god unlike any I’ve ever known. He smokes a big cigar, dresses in the finest clothes, and accepts mostly offerings of liquor, especially the expensive stuff, though he usually has to settle for cheap tequila.
Since the effigy is moved to a new house every day, I had to pay a little boy dos quetzales to show me the location. I arrived in a small one-room house, where the effigy was surrounded by one woman and a dozen or so men, most of whom seemed either drunk or high. I gave another three quetzales to the effigy and asked to hear the story of Maximon. They told me, as best I could understand, that Maximon was a great Shaman, went by other names in other parts of the country, and that he helped people succeed in love and business. I joked that I needed help in both of those areas, and the room roared with laughter as if I were the next Richard Pryor. After the obligatory questions about who I was, what I did, and where I was from, everyone in the room took turns trying to pronounce my name, each butchering it a little more than his predecessor—and then I said adios.
The boy who had taken me to the house was waiting for me outside. He wanted more money—another five quetzals, which is nothing, but, out of principle, I told him no. He and his brother then followed me around for the next hour trying to get their pay, eventually settling for the opportunity to hurl insults at me.
More than anything, Maximon struck me as an indigenous person who had adopted all the traits and mannerisms of the dominant culture—a conquistador, in other words—who uses his wealth and power to get all the drugs and chicas he desires: the embodiment of success in the western world, a modern day shaman.
Sunrise in the Jungle
I woke up at three am to watch the sunrise from the top of a Mayan temple. The sunrise was nice, less for the view than for the symphony of sounds we listened to as the jungle awoke.
The Hold-Up
Estuve en un internet café, cuando un hombre entro con una pistola. El commenzo luchar con un otro hombre y entonces ambos salieron, el hombre con la pistola perseguindo el otro hombre. Tuve miedo, y esta me sorprendido. Nunca habia visto una pistola esa cerca (casi un metre). Despues la incidente, los trabajadores del café cierraron la puerta y esperamos hasta que toda era seguro.
Nunca regresse a este café otra vez.
(it would take too long to put in the accent marks, so.... and feel free, Ron, to correct my grammar).
One Night Stands
Not something that’s ever been a big part of my life—and not something I intend on ever making a big part of my life—but….
We’d been talking for maybe three or four minutes and she asked if I knew what a “something or other” was. I didn’t. She said it was a local term for “makeout session”. So we made out for about twenty seconds before she asked if I wanted to have sex. Believe it or not, I seriously considered saying no—that things were moving way too fast for me. But I didn’t. Before I knew it, I was back at her place being smashed against the wall and my pants dropped to my ankles.
Later though, once our clothes were scattered about the floor and once the booze started to wear off, I lost my nerve. Naked and in a well-lit room, she didn’t look quite as attractive to me as she did in the bar, so instead of fucking we lay in bed and talked. She told me she’d never been in a relationship; she’d had plenty of one-night stands, she said, but had never been in a long-term, meaningful relationship. And at one point, without provocation, she started to cry and I consoled her. The honesty of the moment got to me, so we did what we originally went there to do, and then I left. She wanted me to stay, but, since I didn’t have any contact solution with me and because it was nearly sunrise anyway, I decided I had to go.
At 4:30 am, the sky full of stars, in a profound silence, I made my way back to the hotel. The whole city was mine; there wasn’t a person in sight and hardly any light (no street lights in Xela and the moon had fallen). I hadn’t experienced that kind of pure liberty and wonder in a long time. It was one of the most beautiful moments I had in Guatemala, or in my entire life—and probably one of the loneliest.
The Snake Woman
To celebrate the town of San Pedro’s Saints Day, they had a big dance, circus rides, and a genuine freak show in which a young woman was buried up to her neck in sawdust with a dead boa-constrictor body pushed next to her head. I’ll give her this: she took her job seriously, not breaking character once.
New Friends
Lots to say here, but for now I’ll just give the names and nationalities: Mira (Finnish), Addie (US), Meagan (US), Silven (Guatemalan), host family father whose name I can’t remember (Guatemalan), Conrad (Swiss), Trevor (US), Brandon (Canada), Brooke (US), Maria (India), other girl from India (name starts with a P), host family eldest daughter whose name I can’t remember (Guatemalan), Nery (Guatemalan), Merlinda (German), bar owner in San Pedro whose name I can’t remember (Dutch), Trines (Guatemalan), Wilco (Dutch), Sarabeth and Abbie (fellow Coloradoans), the two guys from Boulder who hiked the volcano with Mira and I, guy I went kayaking with whose name might be John (US), all the interesting ex-pats at the party in Panajachel (US), Max (Israeli), Emily (US), Brian’s novia (Guatemalan), and many more that I spoke to briefly and would like to have gotten to know better.
****
A few more (added later):
Standing at the mouth of a cave with thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of bats swarming around me.
A should-have-been forty minute bus ride in which we had not just one but TWO flat tires!
Conversations with my traveling buddies, in which we asked each other personal questions like “what would surprise us most to learn about you?”, “what is your proudest achievement?” etc. Conrad, the quiet unassuming Swiss guy, would preface each answer by telling us how much he hated these types of questions—then give a detailed thirty minute response.
The five foot one teenager who wanted to fight me. Still not sure why.
Taking a seven hour chicken bus ride while hung over. Bad idea.
The Italians in the Cafe in NY who took overwhelming pride in their baking.
Being stopped and frisked by the police. They asked me if I was there to buy marijuana, and, drunk and unable to understand the tone of their question in Spanish, I thought maybe they were selling.
I played it safe and said no.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Learning to Tango: an Anarchist View of Relationships
I remember taking a Tango class last year when one of the teachers instructed the males, the leads, to treat our partners like puppets, “puppets to maneuver in whatever way we pleased”. Besides being politically incorrect to the extreme, the advice seemed to go against the instructions I’d received in earlier classes—instructions that we “invite” our partners to move by opening up a space for them to step into. The latter instructions seemed, at the time, much more useful and agreeable to me, so I wrote off the puppeteering recommendation to sloppy word-choice and ignored it. But maybe I reacted a little impulsively. In practice, I have to admit, the latter instructions never really worked for me. What’s more, I seemed to dance best when I worried less about what I was doing and focused more on what I wanted from my partner—in other words, when I treated her a bit like a puppet.
If truth be known, although I never became a skilled Tangoer, being an assertive lead came quite naturally to me (as my partner Constance indicates HERE). For that matter, I rarely have trouble being assertive in any part of my life, especially when it comes to offering my opinion about something (just ask my housemates). But, despite the stereotypical misunderstandings about my political philosophy, being a sometimes-assertive person does not make me a bad anarchist. Anarchists are not composed chiefly of bandana-wearing, gun-toting, chaos-loving, mayhem revelers who oppose all forms of order and leadership. That’s a misconception. In my understanding, anarchy not only accepts natural law and order and reasonable leadership, it embraces them. It implies a state in which the freedom of self-determination is increased rather than decreased, even when the expansion of one’s freedom comes, as it often must, by way of imposed restraint.
True freedom, like true creativity (which is really a synonym for freedom), can’t exist without restraints. Our current capitalistic culture has convinced us otherwise, of course, by equating freedom with having a plethora of choices. But true freedom and honest self-expression can only arise under conditions that promote clarity and cohesion—not extravagance. If you’ve ever engaged over a long period of time in any creative endeavor then I don’t need to tell you this. There’s a reason that writing a haiku poem or a sonnet often releases much more in-depth thoughts than writing in less restrictive genres. Form matters. The imposed restrictions entailed in writing a haiku require the mind to go in directions it wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It forces you out of your box. Put another way, it forces your mind to explore—to seek different methods of expression and understanding. And it’s in that explorative process, I believe, that we find our freedom.
That isn’t to say, however, that the world would be a better place if society were more regulated. I am, like any good anarchist, opposed to all forms of obligatory hierarchy and governance. But unlike the laws that regulate human society, the rules in writing a sonnet or haiku were not put in place by force or coercion. No one ever said that writing in Iambic Pentameter is the only way to write a poem. The rules were put in place and adopted because they proved useful. And when the rules deterred self-determination rather than deepened it, they were abandoned—brilliantly abandoned in the cases of Shakespeare or John Donne, for example. The imposed restraints of writing a sonnet are meant to enhance individual expression—to allow one to break out of the constraints imposed by social engineering—and as such they are followed voluntarily—so long as they’re needed and out of complicity rather than obedience. Voluntary restraints serve more as guides—guides in constant flux as situations change—than as eternal laws or commands. They don’t determine our behavior, they challenge us. And without challenge, the mind—the whole person, really—is dulled by habit and turns to stone; it becomes fixed and confined, a stereotype. Challenging restraints are put in place to stretch the imagination and to goad us into a clearer and less rigid vision of who we are—to push us past ourselves—not to limit our potential.
There’s an old Buddhist koan which says that if you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him. The idea is that you shouldn’t cling to anything, not even Buddhism, in your quest for self-realization and enlightenment. A Buddhist may subject herself to the most rigorous and confining disciplines imaginable, but when the disciplines no longer serve her interests—when they no longer expand her awareness but instead hold her back—she abandons them. Both her submission and her renunciation are voluntary. In Buddhist philosophy, you’re taught never to cling to anything, because clinging implies ownership, and ownership, in an ego-free/self-free world, is a delusion. At the same time, the disciplines of Buddhism aren’t meant to be discarded or devalued (not too soon, anyway); they are, in fact, essential tools of the practice. The same is true of the rules of Tango.
And though I didn’t stay with the Tango long enough to come to any dependable conclusions about what learning methodology works best, I imagine successful long term practitioners see their art as something akin to writing a haiku poem or practicing calligraphy or jazz or any of the other improvisational arts. All improvisation requires boundaries and limitations. So whether you’re leading or following in the Tango, you have to limit your freedom—limit your freedom to find your freedom, that is, through improvisation. For me, leading never felt like bullying or controlling. It felt like a constraint, sure, but a constraint that forced me to focus, to be more in the moment and thereby more myself and more in tune with my partner—more free—and more free of myself. And I imagine following requires a similar intensity of concentration and self-abandonment—an opening for reinvention—and feels equally as liberating. In both cases, the constraints allow for more not less freedom of expression. When you watch the Tango experts, you don’t get a sense of one person leading another. Expert couples seem to move together without any conscious will to be regulated by and with each partner giving to the other as much as he or she receives. Neither does there seem to be any loss of individual expression. Both followers and leaders have distinctive personalities and styles no matter whom they’re dancing with. The constraints, once mastered, I suspect, hardly feel like constraints at all. Instead, they suppress the ego so that what really matters—the dance—becomes more prominent. Like carrying weights while jogging, the dance strengthens the body through impediment; it gives one the strength to move as the imagination desires: both back home to our essential selves and far away and beyond.
It takes years of training to dance like an anarchist.
******
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas."
— T.S. Eliot
If truth be known, although I never became a skilled Tangoer, being an assertive lead came quite naturally to me (as my partner Constance indicates HERE). For that matter, I rarely have trouble being assertive in any part of my life, especially when it comes to offering my opinion about something (just ask my housemates). But, despite the stereotypical misunderstandings about my political philosophy, being a sometimes-assertive person does not make me a bad anarchist. Anarchists are not composed chiefly of bandana-wearing, gun-toting, chaos-loving, mayhem revelers who oppose all forms of order and leadership. That’s a misconception. In my understanding, anarchy not only accepts natural law and order and reasonable leadership, it embraces them. It implies a state in which the freedom of self-determination is increased rather than decreased, even when the expansion of one’s freedom comes, as it often must, by way of imposed restraint.
True freedom, like true creativity (which is really a synonym for freedom), can’t exist without restraints. Our current capitalistic culture has convinced us otherwise, of course, by equating freedom with having a plethora of choices. But true freedom and honest self-expression can only arise under conditions that promote clarity and cohesion—not extravagance. If you’ve ever engaged over a long period of time in any creative endeavor then I don’t need to tell you this. There’s a reason that writing a haiku poem or a sonnet often releases much more in-depth thoughts than writing in less restrictive genres. Form matters. The imposed restrictions entailed in writing a haiku require the mind to go in directions it wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It forces you out of your box. Put another way, it forces your mind to explore—to seek different methods of expression and understanding. And it’s in that explorative process, I believe, that we find our freedom.
That isn’t to say, however, that the world would be a better place if society were more regulated. I am, like any good anarchist, opposed to all forms of obligatory hierarchy and governance. But unlike the laws that regulate human society, the rules in writing a sonnet or haiku were not put in place by force or coercion. No one ever said that writing in Iambic Pentameter is the only way to write a poem. The rules were put in place and adopted because they proved useful. And when the rules deterred self-determination rather than deepened it, they were abandoned—brilliantly abandoned in the cases of Shakespeare or John Donne, for example. The imposed restraints of writing a sonnet are meant to enhance individual expression—to allow one to break out of the constraints imposed by social engineering—and as such they are followed voluntarily—so long as they’re needed and out of complicity rather than obedience. Voluntary restraints serve more as guides—guides in constant flux as situations change—than as eternal laws or commands. They don’t determine our behavior, they challenge us. And without challenge, the mind—the whole person, really—is dulled by habit and turns to stone; it becomes fixed and confined, a stereotype. Challenging restraints are put in place to stretch the imagination and to goad us into a clearer and less rigid vision of who we are—to push us past ourselves—not to limit our potential.
There’s an old Buddhist koan which says that if you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him. The idea is that you shouldn’t cling to anything, not even Buddhism, in your quest for self-realization and enlightenment. A Buddhist may subject herself to the most rigorous and confining disciplines imaginable, but when the disciplines no longer serve her interests—when they no longer expand her awareness but instead hold her back—she abandons them. Both her submission and her renunciation are voluntary. In Buddhist philosophy, you’re taught never to cling to anything, because clinging implies ownership, and ownership, in an ego-free/self-free world, is a delusion. At the same time, the disciplines of Buddhism aren’t meant to be discarded or devalued (not too soon, anyway); they are, in fact, essential tools of the practice. The same is true of the rules of Tango.
And though I didn’t stay with the Tango long enough to come to any dependable conclusions about what learning methodology works best, I imagine successful long term practitioners see their art as something akin to writing a haiku poem or practicing calligraphy or jazz or any of the other improvisational arts. All improvisation requires boundaries and limitations. So whether you’re leading or following in the Tango, you have to limit your freedom—limit your freedom to find your freedom, that is, through improvisation. For me, leading never felt like bullying or controlling. It felt like a constraint, sure, but a constraint that forced me to focus, to be more in the moment and thereby more myself and more in tune with my partner—more free—and more free of myself. And I imagine following requires a similar intensity of concentration and self-abandonment—an opening for reinvention—and feels equally as liberating. In both cases, the constraints allow for more not less freedom of expression. When you watch the Tango experts, you don’t get a sense of one person leading another. Expert couples seem to move together without any conscious will to be regulated by and with each partner giving to the other as much as he or she receives. Neither does there seem to be any loss of individual expression. Both followers and leaders have distinctive personalities and styles no matter whom they’re dancing with. The constraints, once mastered, I suspect, hardly feel like constraints at all. Instead, they suppress the ego so that what really matters—the dance—becomes more prominent. Like carrying weights while jogging, the dance strengthens the body through impediment; it gives one the strength to move as the imagination desires: both back home to our essential selves and far away and beyond.
It takes years of training to dance like an anarchist.
******
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas."
— T.S. Eliot
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Elk
or
The Pain of Self Examination and the Subsequent Deliverance
Last Sunday we had our ecology book club meeting and one of the members asked the following question: would you be excited if you heard that several dams and cell phone towers had been blown up overnight?
I immediately answered that I would.
She responded with skepticism. “But wouldn’t you be scared?” she asked. “I mean if the system were really crashing down?”
When she first asked the question, it never occurred to me that a few blown up dams and cell phone towers might actually imply an end to the system. If the system really were crashing down, I would be scared, damn scared. But, here’s the thing, I don’t think it’ll come down—not in my lifetime. Deep down I don’t believe it’ll happen. In a really perverse way, I have faith in the system—faith that it’ll endure. What I also realized is that if it did come down, I’d be left feeling a little empty—not because I’d miss the system, but because I wouldn’t have anything left to fight for. I wouldn’t have a purpose anymore. So maybe it’s the sense of purpose that drives my anarchism more than an earnest wish to see my anarchist values put into place. In short, I’m a phony!
That night I had a dream. I was attending some sort of a performance, a performance that had an interactive quality to it and which began with a brief interview. I was asked if I have a car, for example, and a few other questions I can’t remember, but questions that one might hear at a job interview. Later (there’s a gap here that I can’t remember) I was asked by the company organizing the show if my uncle (or someone like my uncle) could use my car for his driver’s test. I agreed and then watched as my car was wrecked pulling out of a parking space. I got furious. Then, when I realized my uncle’s insurance wouldn’t cover the damage and he was unwilling to pay out of pocket and the company who asked to borrow my car in the first place was equally indifferent to remedying the problem—I got even more furious. The dream goes on but that’s all I remember. I know, it seems like a pretty trivial and arcane incident, but I think the feelings it evoked are somewhat meaningful. Here’s why. First, even as I was dreaming, I felt taken aback by my initial response to my car getting wrecked. As an anarchist who’s fully committed to the slacker lifestyle (living outside the labor economy as much as possible), I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to the prospect of losing a little money, especially since my current financial situation is pretty stable. What really bothered me in the dream, I think, is the fact that I felt let down. I trusted these people with my car and they failed me. What’s interesting about that is that I’m not supposed to trust in the system, anyway (I’m an anarchist!), yet clearly I do. So I’ve been exposed, first in my waking life and now in my dreams, as a fraud. Moreover, my uncle, someone with a kind of outsider status in my family (but also a ward of the system, in a way), seemed to get really pissed off at the fact that I was making such a fuss. Maybe he saw through me. Maybe this dream is confirming the self doubt inspired by the question raised at the book club meeting; maybe it’s telling me that there’s more of a rift between my ideals and my actions/emotions than I think there is. Maybe it’s showing me just how enslaved to the system I really am.
Needless to say, I started to get a little down on myself. And by Wednesday, my birthday, I was pretty depressed. Since my birthday last year was ruined by a psycho girlfriend I had at the time, I decided that this year would be a private affair—and I went hiking. The weather, though, suggested I should’ve made other plans. The clouds got darker as I got to the highway, and by the time I left the city boundaries, I was hydroplaning at every curve. Nevertheless, I was determined—determined and also quite contemplative about aging another year, so contemplative in fact that I missed my exit and wound up taking an unfamiliar detour where there were no marked hiking trails. But, like I said, I was determined. So, even though there wasn’t a trail, I pulled off to the side of the road and made my way into the trees. By this time, it had stopped raining. As if by miracle, I had found the only square mile in Colorado where the rain had, at least for a moment, stopped.
As soon as I got to where I couldn’t see the road, I slowed my pace and started to take in my surroundings. The cloud-darkened skies, the mist, and the shade from the pines gave everything a soft obscure glow, and, just like that, I was enchanted.
I made my way to the top of a ridge and looked down. Suddenly, from about twenty feet away, a rock stood up and looked at me. It was an elk. A beautiful, tall, regal, chestnut-brown elk wondering if I was a predator. Seconds later, another twenty rocks stood up, and, being led it seemed by the elk in front of me, they galloped away. They were moving too fast for me to follow, so I sauntered along what was left of a deer (or more likely an elk) trail, which took me several times away from the ridge’s edge and then back again. Though I took my time, enjoying the solitude of the pines and stooping every now and then to run my hands through the dew-tipped grass or to ponder my mortality in front of a pile of old bones, I kept running into the elk every time the trail led back to the spine of the ridge. By the time I reached the crest of the hill, the elk were a mere ten feet away or so, their eyes searching below the hill for me while I spied from behind a clump of trees. They loitered for a minute, then fell off the opposing hillside and disappeared. I tried to follow, reaching the edge of the hill only seconds later, but they were gone—vanished, it seemed, into the earth. I was awestruck. The deftness with which they leapt the barbed wire fence at the top of the hill, the sheen on their hides, the easy grace of their trot, the apparent poise they showed in the face of danger, made me feel as if I’d chanced upon a secret witch dance, but without a movie screen to protect me. The effect only increased as I descended the hill, now in a gentle quiet rain, and got back into my car.
I no longer questioned whether I’d miss civilization if it came down. I wouldn’t. I was in love with the outdoors, with the elk, the trees, the mist, and the rain—and with every person I met that day. And I felt no fear. I wasn’t fighting for a “cause”; I was fighting for something I loved. (Art—the theater, I realized—was a mere substitute for what I missed by not being in contact with the beauty of nature). And that makes all the difference. I would still be afraid if the system started crashing down around me. Transitions are difficult, no matter how necessary. But, right now, at least, I’d be more excited than afraid. Kind of peculiar how loving life makes you less afraid to lose it—less afraid to die.
Maybe the most inspiring thing I saw in the elk was their courage. For all they knew, I could’ve been a hunter with an easy shot. And, while certainly not laying down to let me take better aim, they didn’t seem overly panicked. Their black eyes were alert, but still soft, ingratiating, accommodating, and unknowable—like temperate pools of confidentiality—like the natural world.
Seeing elk in a zoo or even on a free-roaming ranch isn’t the same as seeing them in the outdoors, especially when you’re alone. Seeing them in the outdoors is like seeing the flash of fin in the waves as opposed to the flogged octopus spread out on the sunny asphalt (see “Link”). It’s like seeing the woman of your dreams stop on an anonymous street corner, look at you knowingly, smile, and then rejoin the crowd.
The Pain of Self Examination and the Subsequent Deliverance
Last Sunday we had our ecology book club meeting and one of the members asked the following question: would you be excited if you heard that several dams and cell phone towers had been blown up overnight?
I immediately answered that I would.
She responded with skepticism. “But wouldn’t you be scared?” she asked. “I mean if the system were really crashing down?”
When she first asked the question, it never occurred to me that a few blown up dams and cell phone towers might actually imply an end to the system. If the system really were crashing down, I would be scared, damn scared. But, here’s the thing, I don’t think it’ll come down—not in my lifetime. Deep down I don’t believe it’ll happen. In a really perverse way, I have faith in the system—faith that it’ll endure. What I also realized is that if it did come down, I’d be left feeling a little empty—not because I’d miss the system, but because I wouldn’t have anything left to fight for. I wouldn’t have a purpose anymore. So maybe it’s the sense of purpose that drives my anarchism more than an earnest wish to see my anarchist values put into place. In short, I’m a phony!
That night I had a dream. I was attending some sort of a performance, a performance that had an interactive quality to it and which began with a brief interview. I was asked if I have a car, for example, and a few other questions I can’t remember, but questions that one might hear at a job interview. Later (there’s a gap here that I can’t remember) I was asked by the company organizing the show if my uncle (or someone like my uncle) could use my car for his driver’s test. I agreed and then watched as my car was wrecked pulling out of a parking space. I got furious. Then, when I realized my uncle’s insurance wouldn’t cover the damage and he was unwilling to pay out of pocket and the company who asked to borrow my car in the first place was equally indifferent to remedying the problem—I got even more furious. The dream goes on but that’s all I remember. I know, it seems like a pretty trivial and arcane incident, but I think the feelings it evoked are somewhat meaningful. Here’s why. First, even as I was dreaming, I felt taken aback by my initial response to my car getting wrecked. As an anarchist who’s fully committed to the slacker lifestyle (living outside the labor economy as much as possible), I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to the prospect of losing a little money, especially since my current financial situation is pretty stable. What really bothered me in the dream, I think, is the fact that I felt let down. I trusted these people with my car and they failed me. What’s interesting about that is that I’m not supposed to trust in the system, anyway (I’m an anarchist!), yet clearly I do. So I’ve been exposed, first in my waking life and now in my dreams, as a fraud. Moreover, my uncle, someone with a kind of outsider status in my family (but also a ward of the system, in a way), seemed to get really pissed off at the fact that I was making such a fuss. Maybe he saw through me. Maybe this dream is confirming the self doubt inspired by the question raised at the book club meeting; maybe it’s telling me that there’s more of a rift between my ideals and my actions/emotions than I think there is. Maybe it’s showing me just how enslaved to the system I really am.
Needless to say, I started to get a little down on myself. And by Wednesday, my birthday, I was pretty depressed. Since my birthday last year was ruined by a psycho girlfriend I had at the time, I decided that this year would be a private affair—and I went hiking. The weather, though, suggested I should’ve made other plans. The clouds got darker as I got to the highway, and by the time I left the city boundaries, I was hydroplaning at every curve. Nevertheless, I was determined—determined and also quite contemplative about aging another year, so contemplative in fact that I missed my exit and wound up taking an unfamiliar detour where there were no marked hiking trails. But, like I said, I was determined. So, even though there wasn’t a trail, I pulled off to the side of the road and made my way into the trees. By this time, it had stopped raining. As if by miracle, I had found the only square mile in Colorado where the rain had, at least for a moment, stopped.
As soon as I got to where I couldn’t see the road, I slowed my pace and started to take in my surroundings. The cloud-darkened skies, the mist, and the shade from the pines gave everything a soft obscure glow, and, just like that, I was enchanted.
I made my way to the top of a ridge and looked down. Suddenly, from about twenty feet away, a rock stood up and looked at me. It was an elk. A beautiful, tall, regal, chestnut-brown elk wondering if I was a predator. Seconds later, another twenty rocks stood up, and, being led it seemed by the elk in front of me, they galloped away. They were moving too fast for me to follow, so I sauntered along what was left of a deer (or more likely an elk) trail, which took me several times away from the ridge’s edge and then back again. Though I took my time, enjoying the solitude of the pines and stooping every now and then to run my hands through the dew-tipped grass or to ponder my mortality in front of a pile of old bones, I kept running into the elk every time the trail led back to the spine of the ridge. By the time I reached the crest of the hill, the elk were a mere ten feet away or so, their eyes searching below the hill for me while I spied from behind a clump of trees. They loitered for a minute, then fell off the opposing hillside and disappeared. I tried to follow, reaching the edge of the hill only seconds later, but they were gone—vanished, it seemed, into the earth. I was awestruck. The deftness with which they leapt the barbed wire fence at the top of the hill, the sheen on their hides, the easy grace of their trot, the apparent poise they showed in the face of danger, made me feel as if I’d chanced upon a secret witch dance, but without a movie screen to protect me. The effect only increased as I descended the hill, now in a gentle quiet rain, and got back into my car.
I no longer questioned whether I’d miss civilization if it came down. I wouldn’t. I was in love with the outdoors, with the elk, the trees, the mist, and the rain—and with every person I met that day. And I felt no fear. I wasn’t fighting for a “cause”; I was fighting for something I loved. (Art—the theater, I realized—was a mere substitute for what I missed by not being in contact with the beauty of nature). And that makes all the difference. I would still be afraid if the system started crashing down around me. Transitions are difficult, no matter how necessary. But, right now, at least, I’d be more excited than afraid. Kind of peculiar how loving life makes you less afraid to lose it—less afraid to die.
Maybe the most inspiring thing I saw in the elk was their courage. For all they knew, I could’ve been a hunter with an easy shot. And, while certainly not laying down to let me take better aim, they didn’t seem overly panicked. Their black eyes were alert, but still soft, ingratiating, accommodating, and unknowable—like temperate pools of confidentiality—like the natural world.
Seeing elk in a zoo or even on a free-roaming ranch isn’t the same as seeing them in the outdoors, especially when you’re alone. Seeing them in the outdoors is like seeing the flash of fin in the waves as opposed to the flogged octopus spread out on the sunny asphalt (see “Link”). It’s like seeing the woman of your dreams stop on an anonymous street corner, look at you knowingly, smile, and then rejoin the crowd.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Ashes and Snow
This is beautiful:
filmclip
(If you get redirected to a myspace page (as I am on my computer), just copy/paste this url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8nSiQgtjkk
or go to Utube and punch in Ashes and Snow).
filmclip
(If you get redirected to a myspace page (as I am on my computer), just copy/paste this url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8nSiQgtjkk
or go to Utube and punch in Ashes and Snow).
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Constance's Blog
My friend Constance (whom I introduced to the Tango) has now started an all-Tango blog here
Needless to say, she's left me in the dust where Tango is concerned.
Needless to say, she's left me in the dust where Tango is concerned.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Applying Adorno and Marcuse
While back in Utah over the holidays I heard a remark about the Mormon church that I used to hear a lot when I was younger: “The Church is true (or good, perfect—there are several variations), but the people in it aren’t.” I remember a friend of mine reciting that same phrase and I answered by saying that I felt the exact opposite—“the Church isn’t good, but some of the people in it are”. He took offense. In other words, he found it okay for non-Mormons to dislike individual Mormons or even the entire Mormon community, but intolerable to critique the church itself—the institution. At the time, my friend’s reaction surprised me, but it shouldn't have. It makes sense that if you put your faith in systems rather than people—and if your sense of selfhood is contingent upon that faith—you’re bound to blame the latter when things go awry. (Other people are “other” but the system is part of you). Consequently, it’s deemed okay to insult your equals—the people—but an extreme act of hubris to take on your superiors—the system and its caretakers.
As a result, it’s PC to hate individual Muslims—I mean terrorists—but not okay to challenge Islam; the problem of obesity is linked obviously to lifestyle “choices” rather than systemic environmental manipulation; and every problem from illegal immigration to drug abuse can be solved with disciplinary police enforcement rather than structural reorganization. The problem isn’t with the machine; it’s just a few bad parts. Accordingly, we have hope. If we can just teach individuals to act a little more responsibly, the problems will go away; progress will continue unabated, and our potency, and thereby our autonomy, will be preserved. The belief that we truly can shape our own destinies and have all the things the system tells us we desire--and the belief that the system is capable of reform--is kept intact. Simultaneously, our authentic self is buried beneath a pile of false needs and false hopes, and the status quo is protected. The victim, not the system, is to blame.
This past summer, I saw a movie called The Secret, which touts an idea called “the law of attraction”. The law of attraction states that… dramatic music please … our thoughts influence reality (that’s the secret). Put another way, what you attract to yourself is a manifestation of what you think. Think about being rich, and you’ll be rich. Think about having sex with lots of alter boys, and you’ll have sex with lots of alter boys. It’s that simple. Another premise of The Secret is that you really can have it all; we live in a world of infinite possibilities, so there’s no limit to what you can achieve. So don’t sell yourself short by thinking mere millionaire thoughts when you could be thinking gazillionaire thoughts. Why limit your potential?
The implications of The Secret philosophy are that you can’t blame anyone but yourself for being poor or for being obese or for being depressed or for being an addict or for contracting aids. On one level, the idea has merit. Of course our thoughts and attitudes influence what happens to us and of course the individual has some responsibility for his/her condition. But to suggest that ONLY our thoughts influence what happens to us is absurd. For one thing, our thoughts are influenced by our environments—environments we didn’t create by ourselves. Moreover, we don’t live on an island. If I choose to rape an alter boy, it isn’t because the altar boy was thinking about being raped. It’s because I gave him no choice but to be raped. Likewise, I can’t very well visualize being a millionaire if another New Ager trumps my wish by visualizing ownership of all the money in the world. In an interdependent universe, we can’t have without taking; we can’t realize without limiting. We can’t have it all.
I know. That’s pretty obvious. Painfully obvious, in fact. Yet The Secret and the book that inspired it have made millions of dollars. Larry King and thousands of other non-retarded adults claim that it changed their lives for the better. Sequels abound. Certified teachers of The Secret’s doctrine are ubiquitous. The public, it seems, is eating this stuff up. Are people really this adolescent in their thinking?
I should be surprised. But I’m not. The law of attraction is no more ridiculous than the mythology endorsed by most religions, certainly no more absurd than the Joseph Smith story the Mormons tell, and it reiterates what all mainstream ideology is intended to reiterate: rebellion should always be personal and private rather than political; if you desire self-realization then distance yourself from social engagement and criticism.
Case in point number one: the obesity epidemic. Currently about one in four Americans is estimated to be obese and the number is rising at an alarming rate. Thanks to the Mass Media, we know exactly who to blame for the problem—ourselves. We eat too much fatty foods and we don’t exercise enough. And the solution is equally as simple: diet and exercise. That’s all there is to it. What we don’t hear about, though, are the studies linking obesity to metabolism changes brought on by industrial chemicals. Nor do we hear much about the limited dietary options available to Americans in poverty or the accelerated puberty brought about by steroids in meat and dairy products or the potentially adaptive value of extra weight in certain polluted environments or the multi-generational effects of a high-fat diet during pregnancy. And I’m not surprised that we don’t hear about it. We don’t hear this kind of information because it's unsettling. Hearing it might require that we take social action—that we develop our social selves and not merely our private reified selves.
There isn’t a calculated conspiracy to conceal the truth about obesity. The truth about obesity, like the truth about immigration (see last post) or the truth about Islam (that its doctrine advocates terrorism) or the truth about Mormonism (not too dissimilar from Islam) or the truth about addiction (that it’s inevitable as well as necessary in a consumer capitalistic world) or the truth about The Secret (that it endorses an obvious contradiction), is in plain sight if you want to see it. The truth is that obesity is a creation of the System as much as it’s a creation of the individual. And that’s not what people want to hear. If I were obese, I’d much rather hear that my problem can be solved through diet and exercise than acknowledge that I can’t solve the problem at all (my genes/hormones don’t allow it) or that I can’t solve the problem unilaterally—that I can’t be cured until the whole system is cured.
The media is a business, and, as such, they’re going to tell people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. To tell people what they need to hear, i.e. the truth, is, after all, an extreme act of arrogance. It isn’t arrogant to lay the blame for obesity and poverty on the victims—on those deemed lower than or equal to you on the social ladder—but to take on the system itself or its elite caretakers is the highest form of hubris imaginable. So we use the concept of accountability to brow beat victims but not to challenge the status quo. We, in essence, set up a substitute form of rebellion—escape—not to mention a substitute individual identity--so as to tolerate our lack of real freedom, thus preserving the existing social order. Naturally then, by challenging the social order, you set yourself above all those confined to its borders, when all you intended was to stand outside it.
And when it comes to liberation, the philosophy of The Secret ought to be embraced; we shouldn’t limit ourselves. There’s enough genuine freedom for everyone—not the freedom to do as you please, even if it includes the violation of others, but the freedom to self-actualize—to, as René Dubos has suggested, realize "actual biological necessities such as quiet, both interior and exterior private spaces, independence, and initiative". The current forms of liberation are limited to private forms of temporary escape—not to the betterment or the realization of the self but to the negation of conscious involvement.
So of course we find it arrogant beyond belief when someone challenges the system. When we challenge the system, we’re asserting our political selves, without which honest self actualization is impossible. Put another way, we’re asserting our greatness. As Desmond Tutu has said, “it isn’t inadequacy that we most fear but greatness—not the darkness but the light. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”; we fear that by claiming our full potential as individuals—our potential in the public as well as private spheres—we distance ourselves from the human race altogether. Since we’re unable, or afraid, to see humanity as anything more than the system that includes it—as anything more than a bounded and easy-to-comprehend concept—we fail to create an environment in which our better, more natural, mysterious, and genuine selves can exist. And so we use responsibility--the word responsibility, at least--to deny responsibility. We tout the doctrine of individual accountability while accusing the truly accountable--the ones who challenge the real source of the problem--of being arrogant and judmental. The last thing the system can tolerate is individuals asserting their power.
****
It [the publicity of self actualization in Western culture] isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could 'find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. Herbert Marcuse
As a result, it’s PC to hate individual Muslims—I mean terrorists—but not okay to challenge Islam; the problem of obesity is linked obviously to lifestyle “choices” rather than systemic environmental manipulation; and every problem from illegal immigration to drug abuse can be solved with disciplinary police enforcement rather than structural reorganization. The problem isn’t with the machine; it’s just a few bad parts. Accordingly, we have hope. If we can just teach individuals to act a little more responsibly, the problems will go away; progress will continue unabated, and our potency, and thereby our autonomy, will be preserved. The belief that we truly can shape our own destinies and have all the things the system tells us we desire--and the belief that the system is capable of reform--is kept intact. Simultaneously, our authentic self is buried beneath a pile of false needs and false hopes, and the status quo is protected. The victim, not the system, is to blame.
This past summer, I saw a movie called The Secret, which touts an idea called “the law of attraction”. The law of attraction states that… dramatic music please … our thoughts influence reality (that’s the secret). Put another way, what you attract to yourself is a manifestation of what you think. Think about being rich, and you’ll be rich. Think about having sex with lots of alter boys, and you’ll have sex with lots of alter boys. It’s that simple. Another premise of The Secret is that you really can have it all; we live in a world of infinite possibilities, so there’s no limit to what you can achieve. So don’t sell yourself short by thinking mere millionaire thoughts when you could be thinking gazillionaire thoughts. Why limit your potential?
The implications of The Secret philosophy are that you can’t blame anyone but yourself for being poor or for being obese or for being depressed or for being an addict or for contracting aids. On one level, the idea has merit. Of course our thoughts and attitudes influence what happens to us and of course the individual has some responsibility for his/her condition. But to suggest that ONLY our thoughts influence what happens to us is absurd. For one thing, our thoughts are influenced by our environments—environments we didn’t create by ourselves. Moreover, we don’t live on an island. If I choose to rape an alter boy, it isn’t because the altar boy was thinking about being raped. It’s because I gave him no choice but to be raped. Likewise, I can’t very well visualize being a millionaire if another New Ager trumps my wish by visualizing ownership of all the money in the world. In an interdependent universe, we can’t have without taking; we can’t realize without limiting. We can’t have it all.
I know. That’s pretty obvious. Painfully obvious, in fact. Yet The Secret and the book that inspired it have made millions of dollars. Larry King and thousands of other non-retarded adults claim that it changed their lives for the better. Sequels abound. Certified teachers of The Secret’s doctrine are ubiquitous. The public, it seems, is eating this stuff up. Are people really this adolescent in their thinking?
I should be surprised. But I’m not. The law of attraction is no more ridiculous than the mythology endorsed by most religions, certainly no more absurd than the Joseph Smith story the Mormons tell, and it reiterates what all mainstream ideology is intended to reiterate: rebellion should always be personal and private rather than political; if you desire self-realization then distance yourself from social engagement and criticism.
Case in point number one: the obesity epidemic. Currently about one in four Americans is estimated to be obese and the number is rising at an alarming rate. Thanks to the Mass Media, we know exactly who to blame for the problem—ourselves. We eat too much fatty foods and we don’t exercise enough. And the solution is equally as simple: diet and exercise. That’s all there is to it. What we don’t hear about, though, are the studies linking obesity to metabolism changes brought on by industrial chemicals. Nor do we hear much about the limited dietary options available to Americans in poverty or the accelerated puberty brought about by steroids in meat and dairy products or the potentially adaptive value of extra weight in certain polluted environments or the multi-generational effects of a high-fat diet during pregnancy. And I’m not surprised that we don’t hear about it. We don’t hear this kind of information because it's unsettling. Hearing it might require that we take social action—that we develop our social selves and not merely our private reified selves.
There isn’t a calculated conspiracy to conceal the truth about obesity. The truth about obesity, like the truth about immigration (see last post) or the truth about Islam (that its doctrine advocates terrorism) or the truth about Mormonism (not too dissimilar from Islam) or the truth about addiction (that it’s inevitable as well as necessary in a consumer capitalistic world) or the truth about The Secret (that it endorses an obvious contradiction), is in plain sight if you want to see it. The truth is that obesity is a creation of the System as much as it’s a creation of the individual. And that’s not what people want to hear. If I were obese, I’d much rather hear that my problem can be solved through diet and exercise than acknowledge that I can’t solve the problem at all (my genes/hormones don’t allow it) or that I can’t solve the problem unilaterally—that I can’t be cured until the whole system is cured.
The media is a business, and, as such, they’re going to tell people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. To tell people what they need to hear, i.e. the truth, is, after all, an extreme act of arrogance. It isn’t arrogant to lay the blame for obesity and poverty on the victims—on those deemed lower than or equal to you on the social ladder—but to take on the system itself or its elite caretakers is the highest form of hubris imaginable. So we use the concept of accountability to brow beat victims but not to challenge the status quo. We, in essence, set up a substitute form of rebellion—escape—not to mention a substitute individual identity--so as to tolerate our lack of real freedom, thus preserving the existing social order. Naturally then, by challenging the social order, you set yourself above all those confined to its borders, when all you intended was to stand outside it.
And when it comes to liberation, the philosophy of The Secret ought to be embraced; we shouldn’t limit ourselves. There’s enough genuine freedom for everyone—not the freedom to do as you please, even if it includes the violation of others, but the freedom to self-actualize—to, as René Dubos has suggested, realize "actual biological necessities such as quiet, both interior and exterior private spaces, independence, and initiative". The current forms of liberation are limited to private forms of temporary escape—not to the betterment or the realization of the self but to the negation of conscious involvement.
So of course we find it arrogant beyond belief when someone challenges the system. When we challenge the system, we’re asserting our political selves, without which honest self actualization is impossible. Put another way, we’re asserting our greatness. As Desmond Tutu has said, “it isn’t inadequacy that we most fear but greatness—not the darkness but the light. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”; we fear that by claiming our full potential as individuals—our potential in the public as well as private spheres—we distance ourselves from the human race altogether. Since we’re unable, or afraid, to see humanity as anything more than the system that includes it—as anything more than a bounded and easy-to-comprehend concept—we fail to create an environment in which our better, more natural, mysterious, and genuine selves can exist. And so we use responsibility--the word responsibility, at least--to deny responsibility. We tout the doctrine of individual accountability while accusing the truly accountable--the ones who challenge the real source of the problem--of being arrogant and judmental. The last thing the system can tolerate is individuals asserting their power.
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It [the publicity of self actualization in Western culture] isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could 'find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. Herbert Marcuse
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