Myself Undone

St. Paul Principles and Occupy Denver

2011-11-09T20:30:00.000-08:00

Respect for a Diversity of Tactics

While I don't believe in non-violence as an absolute moral principle, I still have a tremendous admiration for the work of Ghandhi, Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, and Marshall Rosenberg, and I share the belief of many Occupy Denver members about the need to promote non-violent resistance within our particular movement. And it's because I share the values of non-violence that I think it's absolutely essential that we commit to the St. Paul Principles, which, in my interpretation, not only aren't in contradiction to non-violent strategies but offer the only means of sincerely putting those strategies into action. The St. Paul Principles, as I interpret them, do not say that everyone has to agree with the actions of other people in the group; they don't say that you have to approve of actions you might define as violent. They merely state that “our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups”, which is to say that you have every right to disagree with and even resist other people's actions as long as you don't do it through the use of force. You can gently try to discourage someone within our group to not use violence but you can't use violence or the threat of violence to ensure compliance. If someone throws a water bottle at police, you might, in the name of non-violence, respectfully express your disagreement with the person's actions or even stand in front of the police and take the hit yourself. The St Paul Principles say that you can do that. But you can't forcibly try to take the water bottle away, you can't wrestle the culprit to the ground and remove him or her from the situation, you can't verbally threaten the person with violent retaliatory action, and you can't turn him or her over to the police so that they can administer the violence you sought to avoid. The St. Paul Principles, in other words, allow people with different ideologies to remain in disagreement while simultaneously remaining in solidarity against corporate exploitation. Put another way, the St. Paul Principles allow us to use the same non-violent strategies within our group that non-violent advocates would like us to use in response to the forces of the corporate state. If we can ask that our members respond to the violence of the police with acts of non-violent resistance—that we respond respectfully to their disrespect—then we ought to insist that we treat acts of violence by our own comrades the same way. If we're asking our members to not dehumanize the police (the only group we can unanimously agree has acted violently), to not, as recommended by the Eight Rules of Non-Violence, see them as enemies but as potential recruits, and to not respond to their violence with violence of our own, then we ought to be able to respond to our own comrades, even when they disagree with us, with the same measure of respect and decency.

Not only that, but repealing the St. Paul Principles without a plan for enforcement won't actually accomplish anything besides a further division within our movement. Even if we repeal the St. Paul Principles, people are still going to act in ways that some people define as violent. People will show up on Saturdays who have never been to a General Assembly and who know nothing about its decisions, or who have been to GA but don't care about its decisions, or who have been to GA and care about abiding by its decisions but, in the heat of the moment, out of fear or anger, do something in violation of GA policy—people within the movement will still act in contradiction to GA decisions whether you endorse the St. Paul Principles or not. On the other hand, if we're serious about enforcing non-violence—if we're serious about policing ourselves in respect to the principles of non-violence, then, one, we have to be a much more organized and more hierarchical and more centralized entity than we currently are, and, two, we'll have to use force, violence and/or the threat of violence, to guarantee that everyone acts in accordance with our principles. And we'll then no longer be a non-violent movement. If you mean to take Ghandi's and MLK's ideas seriously and literally, and if you mean to model a real democratic community and process, then you can't use violence in the name of non-violence and you can't advocate top-down enforcement of General Assembly decisions. The danger here is in re-shaping the concepts of non-violence and democracy into commodity fetishes that are completely void of significant moral and practical meaning.

In my view, the St. Paul Principles offer a way out of the ethical conundrum. The issue of enforcement doesn't have to be altogether avoided, because a top-down, coercive, and centralized program of enforcement isn't the only option. We can enforce the majority of our primary values democratically, through social interaction, which is mainly what we've been doing and precisely what the St. Paul Principles encourage, but no set of principles, be they democratic or non-violent, can be expected to account for every situation we might encounter and to rule over our every behavior. Neither the St. Paul Principles or the principles of non-violence or democracy should be looked upon as absolute and infallible moral commands. Obviously, if a fellow protestor attempts to rape or murder another fellow protestor, then the St. Paul Principles as well as the principles of non-violence and democracy need to be overlooked in order to end the abuse as abruptly and efficiently as possible. The St. Paul Principles, or any principles, shouldn't be seen as mandates for behavior, nor were they intended as such. The St. Paul Principles specifically mean to challenge top-down decision-making and organizing and to empower everyone involved to take direct action in the world around them. They DO NOT advocate violence. True, they allow affinity groups to choose their own courses of action, but not without some form of consensus or direct democracy to decide on goals and tactics. The St. Paul Principles aren't dictates; they are guidelines, however, for continuing the discussion, for existing in unity and camaraderie with each other in spite of our ideological differences, and for allowing those of us who prize non-violence to continue to practice and promote our values without moral contradiction and without demonizing comrades who think and act differently, which isn't just a more honest and committed non-violent practice but also a much more effective strategy for convincing others to share our values. We need the St. Paul Principles, that is, to prevent the precise kinds of divisions we've seen from recent efforts to have the principles repealed.

St Paul Principles

1. our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.
2. the actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.
3. any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.
4. we oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. we agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

8 Rules of Non-Violence

1) Nonviolent action AND speech, no matter what. Zero tolerance for violence.

2) Unity of message across orgs & people. Consistent demands, all should know them.

3) There must be a long-term and coherent strategy, not just tactics & actions.

4) Police should be seen as potential recruits to movement, not enemy.

5) Keep national/international audience in mind when framing. Goal is win ppl over.

6) Defensive strategies never win. Don't respond to attacks using their language.

7) Claim victory whenever possible. Important for morale.

8) Keep anger in check /w solidarity actions & humor."

....

2011-10-20T09:45:00.001-07:00

The revolution is at hand. Though naked, I will blend with the darkness. You will not see or hear me enter. I will cross over your well-trimmed lawn and slide quietly through a crevice, creeping into your privacy. My bare feet will not make a sound as I step across the kitchen tiles and the wooden floors in the hallway and passed the kids' rooms until I reach and open your door. I will stand over your sleeping body with my hand held out to lead you further into your nightmare.

Message to Occupy Denver/Wall Street

2011-10-11T10:32:00.001-07:00

On The Need for International Solidarity and Civil Disobedience

Today's economic problems weren't created by a few bad policy decisions. They weren't created by the repeal of the Glass-Seagal act or the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling or the Bush tax cuts for the rich. And changing policy, while it might temporarily alleviate the suffering of a few, won't solve our problems. If we really intend to take our country back from the ruling class, we have to fundamentally alter the hit-and-run economy the ruling class has constructed to keep us down; we have to overthrow Capitalism and create a sincere Democracy in its stead.

Let's not forget that the affluence experienced by the middle classes of the 50s and 60s came at the expense of the working and peasant classes in other parts of the world. Capitalism can't function without exploitation, most especially the exploitation of labor. The economic problems we are experiencing today are a direct result of internal conflicts within the Capitalist system itself, specifically the crisis of over accumulation as income is consistently shifted from labor to capital. The problem isn't new, either. It's only new to a portion of the working classes of the First World who up to now have been benefiting from the monopoly control of corporations that reside in post-industrialized nations. The crisis of over-accumulation, however, is too severe at this point for the ruling class to allow First World workers to continue to share in the bounty. If the working classes of the First World want to get back their rights as human beings, not be forced to sell their labor at an ever decreasing price, they have to seek solidarity with the exploited of the Third World. What I mean to say is that the ninety nine percent has to include the non-ruling class members outside of the United States, and outside of Europe and Japan, as well. This has to be a world-wide movement or it's nothing.

That said, the movement also has to be more than a fashion statement, which is to say that it has to take seriously the idea that it might be effective and, as a result, draw down the wrath, disdain, and violence of the ruling class. It has to be prepared to do more than just chant slogans and sign petitions. It has to be ready to succeed, to become historically significant, which means it has to be prepared to break the rules of the system that created the problem and to effectively defend itself against the destructive powers that will inevitably coalesce once the movement becomes cohesive and proficient enough to be perceived as a genuine threat.

Limiting ourselves to legal strategies wont get us anywhere, nor will efforts to achieve solidarity with the police or military forces whose job it is to protect the ruling class from the people. Plenty of the men who donned SS uniforms may have been great fathers, husbands, sons, and friends. But they were still SS men. Their job was to serve and protect the Nazi system. Make no mistake, police officers are the enemy. They do not represent the ninety nine percent. They are not on our side simply by dint of being workers. It is their job to resist us, to protect them from us. And failure to see them as antagonistic is to side with the elites against the people, to side with apathy and against action and creativity. For any movement to make a difference it has to take risks, and that means standing up to the violence of the dominant power structure; that means defying not navigating power's commands. If you are not yet prepared to take real risks, if you are not yet ready to insist on your rights as a complete human being, if you are not quite ready to honestly assert yourself-—then you are not yet ready to occupy anything other than your couches and patio furniture.

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams

2011-05-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

I saw Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams the other night. I'm not a big fan of Herzog, and he does some of the same things in this film that made me dislike him (pseudo philosophizing, confusing tangents, etc.), but, when all is said and done, this is a film definitely worth seeing, if only for the opportunity to see the ancient cave drawings in 3D.

The first thing that strikes you is how well the drawings have been preserved. They don't look like they were made as much as 35,000 years ago. Some look as if they could have been drawn last week. Suddenly, 35,000 years ago doesn't seem that distant.

The next thing you notice is the quality of the drawings. They don't look like “primitive” drawings at all, not in the sense of being childish or simple, the way we too often stereotype anything primitive. One is drawn with eight legs, each set gradually fading, as if to suggest motion, creating a kind of proto-cinematic effect. Another, of a buffalo, depicts the head of the animal looking directly at the viewer, not to the side, demonstrating a knowledge of perspective tens of thousands of years before the Renaissance. The detail and firm elegant lines of a series of horses suggest a mastered and studied technique forged over several years in a rigorous art school. Two rhinos are clashing in combat, their bodies in full motion, perfectly proportioned in spite of the curved contours of the cave walls used as canvas. Even some of the less well drawn figures show evidence of sophistication and creativity. A series of lions are drawn in profile but with two Picassoesque eyes. A misshaped rhino propels its tongue out like a monster from a child's nightmare, creating an almost surreal effect.

The worst executed drawings are side by side with the best, the simplest with the most sophisticated. You feel, as a viewer, neither awed or repulsed, alienated neither by a specialized perfection or an amateur crudity. Instead, you feel a camaraderie with the artists, a sense of kinship for ancestors of a forgotten past. And once again 35,000 years doesn't seem that long ago.

But the sense of connection one feels doesn't come at the expense of wonder. To the contrary, the mystery only thickens as you ponder the drawings' purpose and meaning. The only human depictions are hands, mostly made by the same person, and, depending on your interpretation, a nude overweight female figure embraced by a buffalo. Everything else depicts a non-human animal, mostly horses, rhinos, lions, and buffalo. I saw one bear, but why only one? The cave floor is littered with bear skulls. One of them seems to be placed as if on a pedestal, ashes found below, suggesting a kind of worship. It's unlikely that humans ever lived in the cave (no human bones have been found). It was used only for art and maybe for worship. The cave was home only to other animals, primarily the bear, which, one would think, would weigh heavily on the artists' minds as they created. Yet only one bear is depicted. And if not bear, why not humans? Why only human hand prints? Why is there no history of a tribe drawn out such as you see in some of the ancient drawings from the Americas? Does the lack of the human form show a blissful lack of self-consciousness, an obedience to a lost tradition, symbols for a totemic ritual, or just a literal embodiment of the artists´ needs and desires or interests? We don't know. In the nearby cave at Lacroix, which is now closed, I have read that the original artists would have needed to crawl on their elbows and stomachs for over a hundred yards to reach the chamber of drawings. While easier to get to, the drawings at Chauvet are placed in a similarly peculiar location. Nothing is drawn at the mouth of the cave, the seemingly obvious and most convenient choice. Instead, the artists chose to draw further in, mostly at the very back, hidden in the depths. In other words, they would have needed to enter the potential home of a bear or lion and follow it to the very end, putting their lives unnecessarily at risk, just to draw or admire a few pictures. Why? If you require a logical explanation, you're unlikely to find one, since there isn't any logical reason to create the drawings in the first place. But even in that, in the unresolvable riddle of the drawings' existence, one feels a certain solidarity with the creators. The sense of mystery, the awe that comes over us as we look at their creations, is also their awe, their wonder, appreciation, and fear in the face of the non-human world. And just as they might not always have viewed themselves as part of that other world or, rather, feared their small place in it, their insignificance, so we too are fearful of our connection or lack of connection to them, to the primitive, to a people who lived alongside cave lions and wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers and wolves double the size of what we know today, who may have worshiped bear, who hunted their own food and on a daily basis had cause to reflect upon their relationship to the non human world around them, a world much greater than themselves and beyond comprehension. Perhaps to mitigate the distance between themselves and their environment, to feel less small in their surroundings, they took to depicting some of the outer forces on cave walls, trying maybe to align themselves with those forces if not to control them, bringing cracks of light into the cave's overwhelming figurative and literal darkness. In such an act, we can better imagine ourselves reflected in the drawings, as we too try to come to terms with forces beyond our control and beyond our comprehension, with a past we have lost connection with. The drawings render us fatuous, and, drawn in by their mystery, we rediscover the same kinship with the artists that the artists may have sought with the objects of their drawings. As understanding fails, communion deepens.

The Wise Father and the Liberal Daughter

2011-04-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

Below is something that's been circulating on Facebook recently. And my response to it.

Father & Daughter Talk

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be very liberal, and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch conservative, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He respond-
ed by asking how she was doing in school.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying. Her father listened and then asked, How is your friend Audrey doing?
She replied, Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over.
Her wise father asked his daughter, Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair! I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, Welcome to the conservative side of the fence.?
If you ever wondered what side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test!

I guess if you're an active Fox News viewer, you might find that anecdote convincing. But to any sane person it's an obvious false analogy that bypasses the much more difficult task of providing an accurate critical analysis of class and political reality. Let's see, if I agree that the winning basketball team shouldn't have to give up some of its points to the loser, then that must mean that competition should serve as my model for every human and non-human interaction I ever experience. God, why have I been so stupid not to see that? It's so simple!

Let me give you a slightly more accurate analogy:

Let's say that you go on a tourist safari in Africa with nine other people and you get lost in the jungle. The group soon runs out of supplies and is forced to hunt and scavenge for its survival. After two days, no one has had any luck and everyone is getting weaker and weaker from lack of food and water. Then Mr. Mumabi, the only local in the group, the one who best knows the terrain and how to survive there, makes a kill. He eats the dead animal in front of the entire group and refuses to share. “I earned this meat,” he says. “I worked really hard to shoot and skin that animal.” He contentedly finishes his hearty supper and fades into a peaceful sleep as the other nine people share a handful of berries and move closer and closer to starvation.

That seems pretty bad, but if I want to accurately analogize the current corporate monopoly capitalist system, I need to add a few more sadistic details. What I failed to mention is that in addition to being the only local and therefore understanding the terrain better than anyone else, Mr. Mumabi is also the only experienced hunter and the only person with a knowledge of what berries and plants are edible and what ones are poisonous, knowledge he refuses to share with his “competitors”. I also forgot to mention that the animal he killed was an adult wildabeast, and, since the group doesn't have a freezer to preserve the meat, about ninety percent of it will go to waste. But Mr. Mumabi still refuses to share because he earned that meat and made the kill on his own with nobody's help. He worked hard, after all.

But even with those details, I'm still not accurately representing the political realities of modern day capitalism. I also forgot to mention that Mr. Mumabi owns three fourths of the land the group is traveling on and refuses to let anyone else hunt on his property. The rest of the group then has to share the remaining twenty five percent of the terrain, which, unfortunately, isn't an area known for attracting game animals and has very few water sources. Not only that but Mr. Mumabi is the only person in the group with a gun, and he refuses to let anyone else use it. He worked hard for the money to buy that gun, you know.

By now you should be getting an idea of just how absurdly cruel our economic and political system is, but I'm not through. It gets worse. It isn't enough that Mr. Mumabi owns most all of the land and all of the means of production for securing one's survival and refuses to share any of it with the others, but the rest of the group, if they do, with their limited resources and knowledge, manage to find any food on their small portion of land, will have to give some of it away as a government tax. Mr. Mumabi, however, because he represents a corporation (or we could just say that he is a corporation, because, according to the Supreme Court, the terms 'human being' and 'corporation' mean the same thing), doesn't have to pay anything at all, not even a property tax. Not only does he not have to give up any of his disproportionate share of the pie, the government will actually give him a larger share. They provide incentives and subsidies to make his land yield yet more food and more wealth. And if it doesn't yield any wealth, worse yet if it costs more than it yields, the government will probably bail Mr. Mumabi out because he's simply too big to fail.

If you're a conservative Fox viewer, you might be saying to yourself that my analogy is misleading. You might say that Mr. Mumabi, in the real world, would not let the food he earned go to rot because that doesn't make any sense, even for a selfish capitalist. And you're partially right, in the real world when someone earns more wealth than he can possibly ever use in his lifetime, he doesn't let it rot, he sells his surplus so that he can make yet more money and more surplus. You might also, if you've been getting your information from Fox News, say that in the real world the richest ten percent don't own seventy five percent of the world's resources. And, again, you're partially right. In America, the richest ten percent own more than eighty percent of the wealth, and the bottom eighty percent own a paltry fourteen percent (and those are 2007 numbers; the problem is much worse today), but worldwide the gap is much, much bigger. (And, if I really wanted to be accurate, I would have to add that the little wealth available from the small portion of land allotted to the poorest among us is leased to multinational corporations who use it to make yet more wealth and then give only a small, very small, percentage of the original borrowed wealth back to the original owners, thereby increasing poverty). You might also contend that the richest corporations do pay taxes, and, again, you're right to an extent: A few of them do pay “some” taxes, but not very much. Almost all of the financial institutions that tanked our economy last year, for example, paid nothing for that year's taxes—not a single cent, and they also received a trillion dollar bonus for the trouble they caused us. But, if you're a conservative viewer of Fox news, you probably still don't believe my analogy represents a fair criticism of the status quo. You might say that Mr. Mumabi deserves his exceptionally large share of the pie. Maybe he doesn't necessarily work harder than the others, but, by dint of being raised in the jungle by a family of experienced hunters, he was essentially destined to have more than the rest. That's the way God, or Darwin, planned it. And maybe you're right. But if that's the case, you'll have to calmly accept that it is also Destiny's hand when the other nine members of the group chop Mr. Mumabi's head off and eat the rest of his wildabeast and take his supplies. After all, in the real world, that's what would likely happen. But there's one more detail I left out: Mr. Mumabi also owns a military complex that protects his interests, and, even more importantly, a conglomerate of media institutions, including Fox News, that convinces the other nine people that they're being treated fairly and that what's really happening is that Mr. Mumabi is getting deservedly better grades and shouldn't be asked to share his GPA with the others—that it's really Mr. Mumabi who's being picked on.

novel fragment: thoughts on identity formation

2010-11-10T09:23:00.001-08:00

I looked again at what I had written. I was unsatisfied. I felt as if I hadn’t clearly delineated for myself the line between blending and adapting and being appropriated. How firm do the boundaries have to be? I wasn’t sure. I felt as if the answers to that question were crucial to my own personal development. There was something, I thought, to the idea of mixing on an abstract level—culturally—while still simplifying and protecting one’s literal space. It was important, I reasoned, not merely from an ecological but from a spiritual and ethical perspective, to live in relationship to one’s surroundings, to inhabit a specific location. That literal groundedness had to be preserved not only because it would necessitate an ecologically responsible lifestyle—a way of life that makes evident and obligatory the reason for nurturing and maintaining what nurtures and maintains you—but also because it would keep a person humble, aware, as I had written, that humans exist only as a part of creation and not merely as its creators and stewards—that life is interdependent—separated still, but interdependent. And once that sense of symbiosis is lost—once the partner in the relationship is viewed merely as resource, as convenience, and not as something whose well-being is part of your own and vice versa, once a relationship to one part of one’s surroundings is lost or abstracted, then all other relationships are affected—the way becomes hidden and buried. The relationship one has to space and time affects how one relates to other humans. And it affects self-growth and development, the ability to be a complete and heroic person. If we as modern human beings have become machines, it is because machines have mediated and even severed our relationship to the land, to the soil and blood that created us. If we see the land we live on as a resource to fulfill human needs, we are likely to see other human beings the same way—as resources. If the land is not granted autonomy, neither can human beings. And if we interact with the land we live on only as dirt to be tread and scenery to be viewed or fruit to be plucked—if its presence as our creator is not constant—we will interact with other human beings in the same careless manner. And we will suffer.

So the trends towards isolation, ideas and tools and laws that promote surpassing and not understanding human limits, must be withstood, but history has likewise shown that any effort to completely repel such forces will end in failure—will vitiate and destroy the resistance. Some degree of integration—of knowledge and contact with the enemy soul—is crucial for any resistance movement.

I thought about my personal situation—how I had moved to a somewhat isolated commune in Wyoming but still spent time in New York City. I didn’t need to keep my teaching job in New York; I wanted to. Truth is, I enjoy my job. I enjoy the teaching, the academic culture, and I also enjoy New York City. At the same time, I have come to see both cultures, academic and urban, as inherently noxious. In other words, I haven’t maintained contact with the darkness so as to better recognize and resist it; I’ve maintained contact because I enjoy doing so—because those cultures are a part of me; they bring me pleasure, and, without them, I would feel lost and rejected. How then, I have to wonder, can I achieve liberation?

My conflation with the forces that I theoretically object to explains perhaps why so many revolutionary efforts, both public and private, have failed entirely or mirrored the culture they wish to overthrow. In trying to achieve liberation, I was being forced to cast myself away. I was revolting against myself. It’s one thing to avoid appropriation but quite another to create selfhood once the appropriation of the self has already occurred. I had become one kind of outcast and was attempting to become another so that I might find a place in the world—so I might end my exile, my outcast existence. And the darkness I fought against was a part of me.

I’m thinking about race in America. Growing up in small town Idaho, I did not personally know any black people. During my Junior year in High School, I remember that a newly adopted boy transferred in from Botswana Africa, but he was two grades below me and I don’t recall ever talking to him. For the most part, my acquaintance with black people came through popular media, so most of the black people I knew were of two types: athletes and comedians (or sometimes, as with Muhammad Ali, they were both). I knew of Dr. J and OJ Simpson. I knew of Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy. I knew of movie stereotypes such as Sambo (there was a local restaurant named Sambos, featuring a logo of a black man with a bone through his hair and a large ring through his nose) and Buckwheat and Uncle Remus. I knew of Samford and the Jeffersons and of musical entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Stevie Wonder. Black people, in other words, were familiar to me only as TV images. It was a time in America in which images of African Americans were changing, a time in which the traditional clown images that served obviously to comfort white audiences into believing that black identity could be regulated were still intact but now served not to suggest that black people were better off being cared for by racially superior whites but to convince a recently desegregated nation that black people weren’t really that scary—that they could be as civilized and as tame and as harmless as white people.

At the same time, as if to counter such a blatant appropriation of blackness, these comforting media clown images were supplanted with less comforting images, by films, for example, in which blacks portrayed themselves as the embodiment of everything that whites most feared—violence, sexual potency, unruliness…. The blaxploitation films, however, didn’t really make it to rural Idaho. So for me, black people were typified more by the Louis Armstrongs and Joe Louises and Jesse Owenses and Hattie McDaniels than by the Charlie Parkers and Malcolm Xes and Tommie Smiths and Foxy Browns and Cleopatra Joneses. The latter were there, but they lurked behind the other images, as darkened subtext. As a result, it didn’t strike me as unusual for one of my friends to comment that she loved black people, as if black people were a homogenous group whose every member fit a clear and distinct definition. Fact is, I loved them too. Black people, as I knew them, kept the darkness, kept black people, out of sight.

Undoubtedly, both the blackface minstrel show and the 70s blaxploitation films served a similar purpose; they both portrayed blackness from the perspective of white people. You could say, as many popular culture critics have, that both forms of entertainment perpetuated slavery, allowing white people to own black identity without literally purchasing the black body. And that may be true up to a point, but they also offered to blacks an avenue to power, narrow as it was. When blacks donned the blackface themselves, buffooning both their race as well as the masks that portrayed it, and when black writers and producers deliberately objectified themselves in 70s action films, they were claiming, in a way, the only power offered them. They were walking through the one open door whereby they could access and participate in the world (and, if their buffoonery were extreme enough, they could even call into question the world and the boundaries that white livelihoods depended on). That door may have looked at first like an escape—and it opened up no doubt to a refreshing change of scenery—but it turned out to be a well marked path surrounded by bars—an opening from one cage into another. Still, it marked one’s entry, at some level at least and only within very confined circumstances, into the culture of power.

A case can be made that such a deal with the devil might be a necessity—that one must do what it takes to gain entry, and that, once inside, once granted membership in humanity, one can participate in shaping and maybe reforming the universal human face. But identity it seems is defined as much or moreso by what it isn’t as by what is. Culture can be shaped from outside. And when America tells itself that its face isn’t black, isn’t Mexican, isn’t Indian, isn’t Soviet—when it sets up markers for definition, it makes itself dependent on those markers, and, like figure with ground, it shares its destiny. Consequently, both the marker and the marked have an interest, a necessity even, in preserving the boundary that separates them. For both sides it represents a form of power, though for the demeaned element that power comes at extreme cost—the cost of perpetuating an image of themselves as inferior. By accepting, for example, the power offered to black males in the bedroom and the gymnasium, one simultaneously perpetuates a racist image of the black man as less evolved, less mental than physical, closer to the other animals than to humans in his development. But it does give him at least a voice, a voice he might use to counter the racist mythology.

In a modern world delineated not by physical boundaries, by blood ties or territory, but by abstractions—God, the nation state, professional status—identity formation becomes an exceptionally precarious and unnerving process. That insecurity about who we are can lead to such a desperate willingness to clarify and strengthen the boundaries that distinguish and define us that even minorities whose societal images are negative might wish to preserve their inferior status, especially if their inferior status is superior to other groups—they might wish to preserve the stereotypes as markers with which they can shield themselves from evil—as a means of preserving at least some social role or to keep what little identity they have from becoming extinct. Even a false or imposed identity is something, a defense against the void and the dominant culture. So the black man imitates the stereotypical thug, becomes Shaft; or the female wields sex as a weapon, becomes the Black Widow, both embodying the fears that keep themselves and their oppressors in existence—and oppression merely changes form but remains steady and ubiquitous.

Over time, the machine will find a way to incorporate its negation. Then other villains will be created and the process will begin anew. But at some point—it seems obvious—we have to step out of that cycle. And I think it’s possible to do so, not likely perhaps, but possible. I'm not convinced that we're doomed. I’m not suggesting we can or should do away completely with stereotypes. To do so would only increase our anxiety and subsequently our oppression of one another. And generalizations are useful. An effective jazz improv solo can’t exist without a song standard to initiate and frame it, and neither can a genuine individuality emerge without a template to react against and drive it onward. It should be understood, however, that the personality is no different than a jazz solo—it’s a creation, a mix of time, place, and circumstance through which something previously unseen is seen, is lit up. The fictional character created by the playwright and actor’s collaboration is no different than the character created by daily life, which isn’t to say, as some strains of Buddhist philosophy tells us, that our selves are unreal. The characters we make of ourselves, the magician’s tricks, might be temporary and they might be mere symbols, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. In fact, they might be the only part of us that is real—a reality whose nascent form emerges from and depends upon the artificial. Put another way, the real can’t exist without the unreal and vice versa. Figure needs ground.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in American history, the idea of freedom was appropriated. The meaning today is the exact opposite of what it was likely meant to signify (or perhaps the concept was created only to mask any real potential for liberty). Today it connotes an escape from foundation, from ground—a flight away from everything that is deemed unstable and uncertain. Freedom today connotes a completely alien and impossible notion of individuality and disconnect, and, in the name of freedom, understood as a paradoxical flight from engagement, from the very things that create us, we are systematically destroying ourselves. In trying to tame the darkness, to take refuge in the light, in figure, we have raped ourselves several times over. We have driven ourselves insane.

That isn’t inflammatory rhetoric, either. We have become like an eagle trying to be free of its wings. We have waged war against our bodies, the food that nourishes those bodies, our expressive potential, our symbols of all kinds, our passions—everything that makes us human. Freedom has become escape and escape has become a need to transcend life itself. We have become a culture in love with death, with a more sinister kind of death than is possible, with a death that represents no kind of regeneration—an utter silencing.

The concept of freedom hasn’t yet been completely co-opted. We still hold on to counter notions rooted in ideals of democracy—in real democracy, I mean, wherein each person participates directly in his/her fate as well as the fate of the community, wherein each person creates an individuality that embraces and integrates darkness and uncertainty rather than expels them, wherein identity may doubt itself without feeling humiliated. Those ideals have not died all together. They live on in Jazz solos, in various novels and poems, in wilderness areas, in contemplation, in tragedy, in dreams and nightmares—in all types of fictional truth. But the space allowed those ideals grows increasingly narrow.

RAW

2010-10-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hey blogger pals, consider yourselves officially invited to participate long distance in our group for revolutionary writers and artists:

RAW

Special Interests

2010-02-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

I used to take pride in America's relative lack of class consciousness. Unlike Europe and Latin America, people in the US, as a general rule, don't like to overtly call attention to how much money they make. Most Americans, rich and poor alike, prefer a casual, practical style of dress. T-shirts and jeans work for corporate CEOs as well as plumbers. It's considered an honor to have friends from different socioeconomic backgrounds. And you hardly ever hear anyone talk seriously about High Class Culture in tones that aren't ridiculing. Our popular films make fun of snobbery and, while we sometimes laugh at them, the icons of our culture have often been everyday Joes--alias Homer Simpsons or Ralph Kramdens or Mr. Smiths or Davy Crocketts. We even require a certain level (or pretense) of "average Joeness" in our elected leaders.

But recently I've come to see the "average Joe" phenomenon a little differently. While America, the culture not the government, does propagate a positive respect for the everyman, I no longer think lacking class consciousness is something to brag about. It's exactly the opposite, actually--a cause for fear and shame. The sad truth is that lacking class consciousness means next to nothing if you're not also lacking class divisions. And class divisions are pronounced and ubiquitous features of American culture. In truth, American class divisions might be even sterner and more constant than they are in other countries because in America they aren't honestly looked at or analyzed. Our culture keeps them hidden and thereby protected.

Take the phrase "special interests", for example. We love to complain about the excessive governmental influence of "special interests", but, literally speaking, "special interests" don't have undue or excessive influence at all. The homeless are a special interest group and no one suggests that they have too much influence on government policy. Same goes for migrant farm workers and single mothers and artists and scrabble players. The phrase "special interests" is an unequivocal euphemism. What we really mean to say is "the ruling class". But we won't say that because if we did we would have to face the reality that our government is run by the same upper class grinches we love to ridicule in popular films and culture--that the term American democracy is just a euphemism for plutocracy--that the American government cares more about corporations than individual citizens. If we call the elites special interests groups, we can safely keep fiction and reality separate. We can continue to champion the average Joe without having to actually act (or vote) in his interests. The government (with even more ease than before thanks to the Supreme Court's recent decision) can continue to represent corporate interests at everyone else's expense, for if we dared realize that the fictional Mr. Burns-and-Mr. Potter-run America is more real than the one we mistake for reality, then one or the other America would have to be destroyed: the culture or the government. So, instead, one serves to hide and enable the other, to point to the truth only as a fictional gimmick while the real gimmick masquerades as truth, and everyone sleeps peacefully.

Why I'm Not a Primitivist

2009-12-12T16:57:00.001-08:00

Actually, I could just as easily title it "Why I am a Primitivist", because what I really mean to do is to counter the assumptions people often make about my primitive-inspired values.

I do not, for example, advocate a literal return to a primitive lifestyle. Fact is, we can't. In the same way that a frog can't once again become a tadpole, modern human beings can't again become primitives; we have physically changed too much to do so. With the advent first of mono agriculture and then the printing press and then of cars and computers and cell phones, etc., our brains have been rewired. Make no mistake, machines are now a part of us. We are cyborgs. And while we might learn to split with machines, to tear them painfully from our flesh, we cannot rid ourselves of their memories, nor should we. Our interaction with technology has on a very literal level reconfigured our consciousness. The modern brain, while certainly no better than the primitive brain, is unquestionably different, with a different skill set and a different outlook, and denying that reality can only lead to further mistakes in our journey. There is no restore option on the human brain.

Not only that, but even if it were possible to go back to a primitive way of life, we would still not be able to do so, because we don't really know what primitive life was like. The evidence of our primitive history is far too insufficient to make any kind of reliable broad hypothesis. Plus, one of the few things we do know about primitive life is that it was immensely diverse, much more diverse than our homogeneous existence today allows us to even imagine. Evidence among existing indigenous communities verifies at least that much, so the idea of generalizing about primitive existence and then using that generalization as a pattern for building new sustainable communities seems slightly far fetched. Who's to say which primitive history, forged in response to different environmental conditions, should guide us?

Nonetheless, while we can't return to a primitive lifestyle, we can't escape it, either. We do have to integrate our past. And suggestions that we have evolved or progressed since primitive times strike me as an effort to do just that--to deny both history and reality, to deprecate our full selves. If we can learn from the ancient Greeks and Romans, from 1st century Chinese philosophers and 12th century Italian poets and 6th Century Arabian mathematicians, then we can learn from primitives, as well. And while we can't ever again live as our primitive ancestors did, we can again live without exploiting and depleting the resources upon which we depend for our survival, something most evidence suggests our primitive ancestors did far better than we do now. At the same time, we can learn more from modern indigenous cultures about democracy and freedom than we can from all the political theorists who have ever lived. In sum, though much has been irretrievably lost, there's also much more we can do to integrate primitivism into our modern consciousness. That's what I'm advocating.

Put another way, while I'm not literally a primitivist, I am an anti anti primitivist. In other words, I'm opposed to the tradition that describes our ancestral lives as "nasty, brutish, and short" and as something that needs to be left behind and forgotten. And I'm opposed, zealously opposed, to the idea that our species has progressed, an idea wrought with arrogance and racism. What I suspect we mean when we talk about progress is that we are now smarter than we once were and smarter, much smarter, than those who still live as we once did. We mean that we're smarter, in the same way that whites are smarter than blacks, men smarter than women, and humans smarter than other animal species, and, because we're smarter, we're better, and because we're better, we're entitled to use our inferiors as we see fit, belittling them thoroughly enough, we hope, to erase them from our DNA. We're entitled to control even our memories of them, to view even memories, as resources.

For a long time, living in another state and not subject to the daily reminders of my past religious upbringing, I began to deny that I ever took religion seriously. I began to weed that aspect out of my life altogether, even to the point in which it seemed ridiculous to take criticism of the church seriously. Much like lecturing a two year old for not sharing her toys, it just didn't seem worth much effort, not more than a brief scolding. How could I take something seriously that was so blatantly childish and unethical? But, thanks in some part to my blogger pals, I've come to realize just how thoroughly religion has shaped my personality, and how, in attempting to erase that element from my past, I had gotten lost. In no way am I saying that modern mainstream religion has valuable life lessons on a par with primitive life. (I believe there is such a thing as ethical progress, which, I think, can be applied to my evolution away from religion but not to the modernization of the human species.) But I am saying that much, though not all, of my dismissal of religion has been based on the idea of rising above, of transcending--rather than integrating, developing, and relating to--my roots. A butterfly can't go back to being a caterpillar, but neither can it erase the caterpillar from memory and identity.

Rushed Undeveloped Post

2009-10-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

In preparation for seeing my blogger pals soon, I decided to quickly post something:

Yesterday I paid a visit to the African American Clinic for a free medical examination, which started with a blood test. The nurse found a vein and put the needle in, but, at first, nothing happened. So she wiggled the needle around until the blood finally started to flow and filled the vial. At one point, I said to the nurse that I was feeling dizzy. I learned later that what I had actually said was that I feel “dizzzzzzzz”. After that, I went to my happy place. I don’t remember what I was dreaming but I remember not wanting to be woken. When I did come back, I wasn’t sure where I was. I started to think I had had some kind of accident and was now on the verge of death, in a hospital as a team of medics tried to save me. Then my awareness returned. I was given some orange juice and a sandwich to bring my blood sugar back up.

Two other times in my life, I have passed out (been knocked out a few more), once when I was swimming and got caught between my dad’s legs trying to come up for air and the other in a Washington DC office where I interned and I overheard a conversation about accidental asphyxiation. What I remember from both incidents is the idea, which I obtained after the events, that death would not be as painful as I had imagined.

In reference to my last post, I’ve been wondering about how hierarchy both creates identity and makes the realization of human needs impossible. One thing I don’t like to admit is that part of what appeals to me about my travels to Central America is the sense of privilege I feel as an American. I’ve learned that being ideologically opposed to privilege doesn’t prevent me from enjoying it. And what is sometimes even more enjoyable than the sense of privilege is the sense of self-righteousness I feel when I try to resist being treated preferentially, when I refuse the privilege that is offered me. That, too, is another privilege—the privilege of being charitable, of being capable of giving charity.

But it isn’t real charity I’m participating in. Rather, it’s a purchase. In exchange for feeling self-righteous, for having a good conscious, I give someone lower on the social hierarchy my money or my time or my respect … something. The recipient has no reason to respect my generosity, because it isn’t real generosity. Even if I wanted to be truly generous, I couldn’t. The system we live in doesn’t allow it.

I remember when I worked at the County Jail. I had numerous volunteers helping me out and I was a little surprised that the inmates didn’t seem very thankful for the volunteers' efforts. I knew I was grateful, so…. But now I’m starting to get it. You can’t be charitable nor can you be honestly thankful for the pseudo-charity you receive in the world as we’ve created it. Honest charity and thankfulness can only exist as acts of absolute uncompromise and revolt.

The Shopping Mall

2009-09-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

One day in Colombia, a Sunday, feeling as if I needed a break from exploring new activities and socializing with new people, I decided to make my way to the nearby shopping mall to see the latest Harry Potter movie. The mall turned out to be more or less what I expected: a little slice of America with a few Latin twists. The layout was familiar, with department stores on the first floor, a food court on the second, and a movie cineplex on the third. The department stores had different names, obviously, but they sold the same crap that are customarily sold in American malls--mostly clothes, but also books, electronics supplies, crafts, furniture.... And just like in America, the food court specialized in cheap fast food, and McDonald's stood out from the other chains.

I had some extra time before the movie started, so I decided to take in a snack. I passed up on the ice cream promotion at McDonalds and instead bought a brownie at Crepes and Waffles and a cup of coffee at the Colombian equivalent to Starbucks named the Juan Valdez Cafe. It was at about that time, as I finished explaining to the barrista how I liked my Cafe Americano, that I started to observe a change in my demeanor. I was speaking more fluently and my body language in particular exuded a newfound confidence. I walked with more poise, at a smooth even pace, head erect, shoulders straight, with little wasted motion. I gesticulated more overtly, smiled more openly and easily, and used my hands to add emphasis to my spoken words. In short, I was exhibiting a sense of style, of aplomb. I had found myself, or, to be more accurate, I had found a self, a personality--my American personality. And I'm not ashamed to say that it felt good.

One thing that has always struck me about my friend Jessica is the fact that she had no family. None. I can't even imagine what that feels like. I know people who hate their family members--and for good reason--and want nothing to do with them. And even those people, I believe, are better off than Jessica was. Those people have an idea, at the very least, of what they don't want to be--a certain basis for selfhood, even if it's a negative one. They have some sense of foundation. Jessica, though, must have sensed an emptiness around every clear line, a ubiquitous dark ocean surrounding and threatening her. And I think that played a large part in her eventual demise.

The first day I spent in Columbia I stayed with a friend's mom who, eager I think to demonstrate that her country wasn't a banana republic, took me to a shopping center in downtown Bogota. And I hated it. I hated the commercialism, the shallowness, the overly sterilized appearance, the bland and predictable layout ... everything. It stank of America. This was not, I told myself, what I came to Colombia for. And I couldn't get away fast enough.

But three weeks later, after struggling several times a day with language and cultural barriers, finding myself at a disadvantage in almost every social situation I encountered, feeling as if I had reverted to being a little boy at times, I was ready, if only for a few hours, to come back home. I was ready to go back to the family I hated.

Jessica

2009-08-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

I was going to write something about my summer travels this year to Columbia, Venezuala, and Cuba. I had plenty to say--until this morning, that is, when I received a call informing me that a good friend and former housemate, my favorite ski pal Jessica, had asphyxiated herself in the garage two days earlier. Needless to say, I've been pretty upset all day, and my travel adventures suddenly don't seem worth writing about. For that matter, it hardly seems as if I've been gone. My entire summer seems like a very short dream.

When I first met Jessica five years ago, when she applied to join our community, I was not really impressed. She looked and acted like the cliche blonde party girl, not someone I figured I could learn much from or even be entertained by. But she REALLY wanted to be a part of the house, and for that reason alone, I agreed to have her join us. And it wasn't a decision I regretted. I learned very soon why she wanted so desperately to be a part of our household: she had no family. Her parents had both died when she was young and she had been an only child. She had once tried to make contact with an uncle, but he hadn't seemed interested, so she created family where she could, among friends, lovers, and, eventually, in our community at the Lafayette House, where she became, in my view, our most vital community member, the only person in the house who really made us feel like a community. It hasn't been the same since she left.

Mostly because of skiing, she and I became good friends. She helped me through a couple difficult breakups and I returned the favor, learning, in the process, that she wasn't the simpleton I once took her as. I valued my time with her. Our friendship, like most friendships, was on and off, but I felt we were close, that we would both be there for each other in a crunch. Still, I can't say that I ever really knew Jessica intimately. I'm not sure anyone did. There was a part of Jessica that she didn't let anyone be privy to, concealed in layers and layers of happy faces. She had worked for Disney World before coming to Colorado, and she seemed to spend a good deal of effort trying to recreate that experience, trying to turn her real life into a Disney fantasy. In recent months, I thought she was finally coming to terms with the fact that life might not want the same fantasy that she did--that life didn't want to be Disnified--that life, as Rilke says, is always in the right. Apparently, she was struggling more than I knew.

It hurts to know how much pain she must have been in at the end. It hurts to know that the secret world of Jessica could have been so dark and desperate and hidden. It hurts and it scares. And, as I return from my vacation bronzed, well-rested, well-sexed, and stress free, it scares me to think that Jessica's world, dark and terrible, might be more authentic than my own.

Freedom

2009-05-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

A while back I wrote a post (Nurturing the Inner Anarchist) explaining how my anarchist values were motivated less by hope for social change than by a quest for self-preservation and authenticity. I haven't changed my mind about that, but recently I've had several conversations with people that have challenged me not so much to rethink my anarchist values but to clarify them.

First of all, I need to clarify what an anarchist society would look like, beyond explaining what an anarchist society isn't (capitalistic, hierarchical, coerced....). An anarchist society, at it's simplest level, is a free society, a society in which all individuals are free. Admittedly, that's a rather worthless generalization, worse than "democratic nation", but it's a start. The next step is to define freedom.

And, if the truth be told, I can't define it. I don't know that anyone can, because I doubt any person alive today has ever really experienced freedom and I won't pretend to proscribe a free society if I haven't ever experienced its primary condition. Moreover, even if freedom could be, at this time, directly experienced, I don't think the experience could be put into words, could be reified. In fact, part of my definition of freedom is that it can't be reduced to information--it can't be entirely abstracted. Freedom is a subjective experience. But, as I mentioned to my blogger pals recently, it isn't private. It isn't solipsistic. Just as our bodies are dependent on the surrounding environment, so too is freedom contingent on the physical body and the environment that creates and nourishes that body. That isn't to say that our minds can't increase our levels of freedom. Our minds, being inseparable from our bodies, can clearly mitigate physical limitations, our "freedom from"--but they can't completely overcome material reality.

So while I can't give a clear and precise definition of freedom, I think I can give a partial, clarifying, picture; I can describe and specify it.

As explained by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, there are two concepts of freedom: "freedom from" and "freedom to". In my description of freedom, the latter takes precedence. I don't mean, however, to minimize "freedom from". Without a certain measure of "freedom from", "freedom to" is impossible. We must, that is, be free from those restraints that prevent us from surviving--up to a point. We must have freedom from food scarcity, disease, jailers, and axe-murderers. We need the ability to live. But not indefinitely. We can't and shouldn't expect freedom from any and all physical limitation. We can't and shouldn't try to free ourselves from our bodies or the environment that produced those bodies. We can't be free from bad weather or from the need to eat or from the inability to move mountains with our thoughts or from death. To carry the concept of freedom to such ridiculous extremes means to create an idea of freedom that is essentially negative, a freedom
that isn't derived from living but from being free of humanity, or even existence--a freedom from the very thing, life, that makes freedom possible. And that leads me to the second concept of freedom, "freedom to". That, also, in my mind, has to be limited. We shouldn't expect or want to have freedom to do anything--the freedom to run as fast as a cheetah or fly like an eagle or shop like an American. We should have freedom only to do one thing--to become fully human, to realize our subjective potential. What that means to me is that we require the freedom to relate to the world around us completely, serenely, and drunkenly, with the full intensity of our human natures--that we have the means of discovering the radical potential in all of our relationships--that we have the unlimited freedom, as human beings, to commune. I have no wish to become another person or thing, to be free from lust or pain or the human body. Freedom is NOT transcendence. To me, such a freedom isn't freedom at all, but escape--escape from life and from freedom. Real freedom doesn't negate but requires absolute responsibility, something human culture as we now know it prohibits us from fully practicing. And until the material conditions change, real freedom, real communion, can't exist. The individual, then, can't be free until the social conditions he lives in are free, as well. Those social conditions can be changed but they can't, unilaterally, be transcended. And while the individual within modern society can't be truly free, she can, through revolt, by accepting the responsibility of creating a free world, at least attain a higher degree of freedom, more authenticity and more intimate relations, than if she surrenders to the artificial freedom of escapist fantasy.

Part II (Sort of)

2009-04-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, what I meant to say in Part II has been mostly forgotten, but, in the interest of keeping my blog alive, I've decided to post the following, which is an excerpt (and taken out of context may not make perfect sense) from something else I've been writing and which deals with at least some of the themes I hinted at in Part I.

(Excerpt)

A few days earlier, in a grocery store in Bozeman, Montana, I had made eye contact with an attractive thirty-something in the check-out line. I was struck initially by her sexiness. She had the petite body-type that I like, smooth skin, and dewy green eyes. But what captivated me most was her sudden change in demeanor moments before I had made eye contact. She was standing in line, lips pursed, staring directly forward—and then, suddenly, she sighed, dropping her head for a moment and closing her eyes. Then she smiled, faintly, to herself alone, a smile of complete satisfaction. When, an instant later, she raised her head again, she had resumed her public persona. That’s when our eyes met. She smiled at me, warmly but not flirtatiously. And I smiled back, full of light. I had seen something, a flash of transcendence that stunned me. By then it was my turn at the check-out stand, and, by the time I was finished and Jeff had concluded his conversation with the checker, I turned to find her but she was gone, I’m sure never to be seen again.
Until now, that is. Now she was revisiting me, in my thoughts. I recalled her small sigh, her internal smile, and I began to fuse her life with others I have known, and I imagined her story:

I imagined her name to be Grace. She was a thirty-seven year-old former philosophy student now teaching at, say, nearby Montana State University. She had, I decided, recently returned from a trip to … Barbados. A friend from there told her she could stay in her ex-husband’s beach cottage for free, so she decided to take the trip. It was the first time in her life that she had traveled alone and the first time she had traveled period since her divorce.

She found the first part of the trip to be frightening and stressful—she didn’t know how to travel solo—but later, after she met and befriended a fellow traveler named Liz, someone much more travel-savvy than herself, she started to loosen up and enjoy the adventure.

One night, Grace and her new friend went to a beachside bar where they met three young local men, none of whom spoke advanced English but who still managed to convince Grace to try marijuana for the first time ever. Fortunately, the quality was good, and it made her feel more aware than tired. Not only that, it made her horny, incredibly so. Of the three local men who were with her that night, Xavier was the quietest and seemed the least interested in her, and Grace chose him to be her first ever one-night stand. Not only had she never had a one-night stand before, she had only had sexual relations with three other men period, one of whom was her husband and two others with whom she had had two and four year relationships. The idea of casual sex, until that moment, had simply never sounded appealing. In fact, since her divorce over four years previous, she had been entirely celibate. That wasn’t, for her, unusual. Grace treasured her solitude and she had gone without sex for even longer periods, for five years, after breaking up with her college boyfriend and first love. During her present stretch of celibacy, she had had several opportunities for sexual satisfaction, but, out of respect for her ex-husband, she had decided that she wasn’t yet ready. Closer to the point, she had remained celibate as a sign of love. She still loved her ex-husband, and, whether her love was requited or not, she wanted to express how she felt about him in whatever way she could.

Grace had not wanted the divorce. It’s true that she had, for most of the marriage, been unhappy, unhappier than her husband even, and it’s true that she had complained more than he about their situation—but she, unlike him, had always believed things would work out. She did once love her husband. He was in fact the only person she had ever loved, really loved. And she was sure that the feeling she once had had not been in vain, and as long as she remained committed to preserving and/or recovering that feeling, to figuring out its meaning and recovering its poignancy, she would not be ready to abandon the marriage.

She felt that way even after meeting another man with whom she felt more compatible than she had ever felt with her husband, a man with whom she began to have an affair, although she never consummated it. She had strayed not because she was looking for escape but because she had wanted to clarify her situation. She wanted to hurt her husband so he would look real—so that she might again recognize in his face the man she once loved so sincerely—so that she would see him again as human, and, more importantly, so he would see her—so he would see her angst and take her seriously, the way he once did. She did not expect that her flirtation, as she called it, would end the marriage, but she knew it was a possibility. She didn’t care. It felt right. The last time she had met with her secret lover, in her home the afternoon after her husband had left for a business trip, was the last time she had kissed a man.

It felt good to have a secret life outside of her normal routine—to be with someone not as a wife or a student or a secretary or as anything other than herself. It made her feel alive. Of course, she didn’t explicate her feelings so thoroughly when it was happening. She simply found it exciting and wanted for it to continue but without getting complicated. That wasn’t how it worked out.

Her husband, after his flight had been cancelled due to high winds in the Chicago airport, had come home for lunch and found her and her lover in each other’s embrace. And that was the end of the marriage.

She immediately ended her ‘flirtation’ and asked her husband if they could try counseling as a means of working things out, but he didn’t even want to talk to her. All she remembers him saying is that she wasn’t the person he thought she was—that he should have known better.

She tried hard to convince him that she wasn’t a villain, but, especially after his family learned what had happened and her mother-in-law took the time to write a letter saying just how awful Grace’s behavior was and how much her son had been hurt by what she had done—her efforts were wasted. All of their couple friends took his side. He was made the victim. She was to blame. She was cast in the role of a scoundrel.

That was a role she never expected to be playing, and she didn’t like it. So, even though she felt she hadn’t done anything too terribly disgraceful, she decided that in order to purge herself, she would undergo contrition and live as if she were a nun. She didn’t make that choice as a sacrifice, as a submission to her enemies, but because she wanted to. She found it pleasurable, that is, to deny herself pleasure. It felt good, and it proved to herself if to no one else that the others had been wrong about her. Also, because she still loved her ex-husband, or remembered loving him and wanted to express that one-time love in whatever way possible and to keep it alive, it felt good to maintain her allegiance to him. Denying love, she savored more the love she had felt in the past; she underscored it by reducing its surroundings.

Two years after the divorce, she learned that her ex-husband had died of brain cancer. She had not been informed. It was only through a chance encounter that she learned what had happened. And that’s when her celibacy took on a stronger meaning. Her celibacy could no longer be seen as a ploy to get her ex-husband back or as a simple act of penitence but as something more—proof that her love was real and enduring—that love itself was real. Now her motives couldn’t be questioned.

After four years of living not just without sexual intimacy but without any kind of emotional involvement whatsoever, except with her own conscience, she had become a different women, one that a person who had known her five years earlier wouldn’t have recognized. By denying herself all but idealized and abstract forms of love, contrary to her intentions, she began to forget what tangible love felt like, and the memory of her first and only love grew dimmer and was replaced by a more symbolic version, an image of love. Her past became idealized. Love became nostalgia. It required that she do everything possible to restore in her heart a moment from her past that never really occurred the way she imagined it; it required that she not just preserve the past but that she change it. To an outsider aware of what she was doing with her life, she may have seemed like a mad scientist trying to clone and enslave a former lover, turning herself into a monster in the process. She had dreams in which she was walking backwards through a garden of paradise, and, because she was not watching her step, she fell into a hole and she somehow used her eyes to slow her descent, lingering for as long as she could on the visions of the garden above as she slowly but surely plunged into darkness. She told her sister that she felt like a ghost—that she was only remotely a part of this world.

Though she had never read Dante’s Divina Commedia, if she had read it, she would have related to Dante’s epic journey. She too felt as if she were taking a journey through hell: Like Dante, she was going backwards, descending. Having lost her way, she had looked to her past, to history, as a means of finding direction. In her eyes, the journey was not an escape, not a retreat from present reality, but, as with Dante, a journey of artistic awareness. Grace would have understood exactly what Dante meant when his long descent into the inferno suddenly turned into a climb, when, by returning, he managed to find his way out, when his fall turned into an exaltation. Grace felt quite strongly that if she could truly resurrect her former feeling—if she could re-live those moments in which she loved her ex-husband—if she could plunge deep enough, and reach the center—she would escape the hell she had entered since betraying her marriage vows. She would discover the reality hidden beneath the life she saw around her.

Even more important, Grace felt that if she could go back to that moment when she was in love, she would learn whether or not her love was real, and, if it turned out to be false, she could redeem it; she could join the naïve love she may have once felt for her then living ex-husband with the unconditional love she now felt for his memory. And she would thereby sanctify her life.

If Grace had ever really thought about her behavior, she might well explain it as I have above, but, in truth, she never bothered to explain it. She simply felt as if she were still in love with her ex-husband—that deep down, beneath the layers, he was something exceptional, a treasure, and her sincere love would reveal that treasure, even from the grave. In his absence, she would not be distracted by trivial everyday thoughts and needs; her love could find the singular focus it had always lacked and thereby be purged in her ex-husband’s image. That was her hope, even though it hadn’t yet worked out as she expected.

With each passing day, her ex-husband faded further from her memory while simultaneously becoming more of an obsession. He was turning into nothing more than an idea, a faint glimmer, like a snowflake falling away from the lamplight, of whatever he once was. And the harder she tried to remember, the more his image faded. Like someone faced with a clue in a crossword puzzle who can’t let go of the first answer that comes to mind, whenever she tried to think of her ex-husband, she could only imagine the idea, the model, that she had replaced him with. The real person was gone to her.

But that all changed when she walked with Xavier to a private spot on the beach, where she allowed him to slip his fingers down the back of her bikini while, with his other hand, he slid up towards her bared breasts. She was starting to forget, to forget about remembering. She lie down in the sand and allowed Xavier to remove her swimsuit altogether, to touch her intimately first with his hands and then with his lips. And then she reached inside Xavier’s trousers and fondled him, sensing him grow firm in her hands.

When he turned her over and inserted himself, she felt as if she were falling. And then, as if she had set aside a problem and come back to it with a fresh perspective, the answer came to her. She remembered. She remembered vividly the first time she had made love to her ex-husband and what it was like when they first met. She remembered how he smelled, how he looked in the throes of passion, how his body felt to her touch—everything. He had come back to her. But contrary to what she had expected, the visitation was not welcome. After all, her ex-husband had come back when she was again in the arms of another man. She began to see her long bout of celibacy as less of an effort to prove and avow her love and more as an effort to keep her ex-husband from haunting her, from coming back to lay on her life an irremovable curse. By focusing on trying to remember, she had kept her memory blocks in place, had preserved her defenses. But now….

She was frightened. She asked Xavier to stop but he didn’t hear her, so she pushed him off and turned over. Xavier thought she had wanted merely to change positions and took her now from the front. She looked up at the stars, while he continued. She looked harder at the stars and tried again to forget. She tried to disappear in the starlight, staring more and more intently and listening to the sea and feeling the tepid sand on her back, heeding her breaths. She was alert now to every small thing that was happening, exceptionally alert, to the sand flies at her feet and the dew in the air and Xavier’s grunts and thrusts and sweat. When he finished, he collapsed to her side and whispered something in her ear. She didn’t hear him and didn’t respond.

This was not the first time Grace had tried to forget something by smothering the event with an infinity of details, by letting anything and everything into her mind, by opening the filter. That was the first step—to include the event she wished to forget in eternity and attenuate its vividness. Then came the re-focusing, the deliberate will to exclude the event from history. The consciousness.

She focused her eyes now on the crescent moon, focused all her attention on it, to the exclusion of everything else. And from that day on, whenever she looked at the moon, especially the crescent unfinished moon, or when she thought about Xavier or heard his name, she would forget a little more about what had happened that night, about the memory that had come back to her when she had been unguarded. The moon, particularly, became a refuge, increasing in beauty each time she looked at it, arresting her in its return gaze.

There was an article I read recently in the LA Times about memory. The University of Oregon did a study in which they asked subjects to remember words in pairs, such as book/slipper, gown/speakers, or scarf/paper. Afterwards, one control group was asked to try to forget the second word in the pairing, which they did. In subsequent tests, they asked the control group to recall the second word in the pairing after being prompted with the first word. And what they found is that the first word in the pairing served not to solicit the memory of the second word but to block it. Put another way, had the control group been asked simply to forget a random word, their later recall, the study found, would have been better than it was when the forgotten word was paired with another. The first word served to block the memory of the word it was paired with. In the same way, if a person tries to forget a painful episode in one’s life, say being beaten with a broom handle, then, subsequently, the broom handle might actually block recall of the event rather than trigger the unpleasant memory. The findings seemed counter intuitive, went against everything the movies had ever taught us, but there they were, confidently and scientifically proclaimed.

So maybe that’s what happened to Grace. The moon became the first of the paired words, a block to her memory, an impenetrable threshold into a life she had once lived and was now lost to her. The moon mercifully prevented the pain and protected her from her ex-husband, replacing him with a shadow, a ghost, with the person she had first encountered but not understood and not the person who had grown to hate her and whom she had betrayed. That person was cold, had grown cold long before their divorce. That person was a strange, frightening, uncaring beast of a man whom she couldn’t relate to. That person was inscrutable—was all mask. He scared her. She couldn’t bear to look at him. It wasn’t the ghost that haunted her, but the immeasurable darkness lurking behind it.

Xavier wanted to walk her home but she declined his offer. Indifferent to the danger of a woman walking by herself at that time of night, she wished to be alone. And she left him. As she walked along the beach, unsure even if she was heading towards her lodging, she listened to the gently splashing waves and she looked into the ocean, into the dark of the water, as far as she could see. The moon was behind her as she wandered into the tide and kept walking. Soon the waves were going over her head. She closed her eyes and held her breath for as long as she could, trying with her arms to push herself further out to sea. But she didn’t have the will to continue. She came up gasping for air, the moon staring directly at her and the light penetrating her closed lids. Then she swam quietly back to shore, her eyes gradually adjusting to the soft light.

Her life changed after that. When she returned to the states, perhaps worried about another visitation, her passion fell off all together, and, to compensate, she returned to school and poured herself into her studies. Eventually, she obtained a Phd and embarked on a career as a professor at Montana State University, where she met a nice man, a fellow professor, whom she felt no physical attraction to but loved all the same. They married and had a child. She was happy with life, but she always felt that something was missing. Something was wrong—but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She couldn’t remember. Though she lived a life of ease and prosperity, though she enjoyed her job, adored her child and felt a strong affection for her husband, she knew that something was missing.

Years later, as she stood in line at the grocery store, in an unguarded moment, she looked at her daughter and it brought something up. She thought about something very very deep in her past, something about her childhood maybe, perhaps an event with her mother or her grandmother—a voice from the dead, or, well, who knows? I’m making this all up, in any case. But I think she remembered something. Something came back to her—something from her past that made her smile, made her laugh at her fears and which put everything about her life into perspective and showed the silliness of her concerns—something that put her outside of the borders, as if she were an observer of her own life and who absolved her of everything she had ever done, who set her free, allowing the immense sea to swallow her up in its ceaseless, boundless waters. Something happened. Something that didn’t last long, that would fade like an ember falling on damp earth but which, for a moment, made her irresistibly happy, unconquerable. Something.

The Journey Westward: Part One

2009-02-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

Last night as I settled into bed, I began to review my weekend, a particularly good one in which I went skiing, saw a movie, had brunch with a friend, dinner with another friend, and attended a house-warming party. For an introvert like me, it was a pretty active few days, with plenty of highlights that I could assemble into a story whereby to shape and preserve a comfortable self-image, creating a weekend personal history that lulled me into what I expected to be a pleasant sleep.

I was wrong. Sometime between 2 and 4 a.m., I woke up, disturbed by a dream, the details of which I don’t remember, except that it was obviously inspired by an extremely trifling event that had occurred earlier in the day: a group of colleagues were talking outside of my office about a party they had attended over the weekend. One or two hours later, when I finally fell back to sleep, I was still thinking about that one small event, bothered by the fact that I hadn’t been invited to my colleague’s party, even though I wouldn’t have gone if I had been invited, and doubly bothered by the gap I perceived between my own life and the lives of my colleagues, almost all of whom are married with children and whom I apparently know so little about—whose stories I’m barely familiar with, whom I affect so imperceptibly. I felt alienated. Though my memory of the night’s remainder is faint, I have a feeling that my dreams continued to explore and develop that one small event, an event that I barely paid mind to when it occurred, but which my unconscious couldn’t let go of and invested with enough importance to disturb my sleep.

In the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes about how in the twentieth century the European Blackbird moved from the forests, its native habitat, into the cities. In terms of historical significance, such an event, a radical transformation in the relationship of one species to another, is far more relevant than the Israeli invasion of Palestine or the British withdrawal from India or the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, events that merely altered relationships among members of the same species. Nevertheless, you’ll not find a single history book, or many books period, that mention the exodus of the blackbirds. The exodus of the European Blackbirds is not part of Western history, not part of its self-definition.

The personal histories we construct are no different than the histories we construct of nations and continents: what we leave out is often far more revealing than what we include.

As I get older, I find myself trying again and again to recall those moments from the shadow side of my history—paths I almost took, women whom I almost made love to, actions I thought about taking but never did—the millions of stories that have never been told, blocked now by the surface events of my life, memories concealed by memories. I long to go back to a time that existed before realization, to the woman whose promise was never tarnished by prolonged interaction, to once again be worthy of a grace I earlier failed to recognize, to find the treasure and return to innocence, to a time before I knew disappointment or satisfaction, before history, to take up space once more in the countless zones that the light never landed on.

Interesting Article

2009-01-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

citylife

Recent studies show that a person's ability to remember (especially visual stimuli) has much more to do with filtering out irrelevant information than it does storage capacity. It seems that city life makes that filtering process more difficult. At the same time, there are definitive creative advantages to allowing irrelevant information into the mind, thus explaining, perhaps, why cities have traditionally been breeding grounds for artistic and scientific discovery.

The Iconography of my Window

2008-12-20T08:58:00.000-08:00

It’s snowing tonight: white glimmers piecing off from a crumbling white sky. If you look closely, and for long enough, your eyes go beyond the flakes in the lamplight and pass into the gray beyond, where you become more and more receptive. You feel yourself changing.

I once participated in a guided meditation that went something like this: Start with your feet. Imagine them bursting into flame. The flame grows hotter and hotter, changing colors as it heats from orange to red to blue and finally to white as the blaze becomes hotter than fire is capable of becoming, transcending itself, passing brightly through the threshold. The conflagration then reaches from your feet to your abdomen and spreads upwards throughout your body until your whole self is a single white flame, immaculate. And now the space beyond your body catches fire as well. And the process repeats itself. It’s as if the world is falling into you, and, through your gaze, is converted also into a pure white inferno. All the universe is white. It empties.

The idea behind icon painting is that the image being depicted isn’t merely a likeness of something else and thereby intended to make the reality and the majesty of the original object present. Icon painting, in the words of Ivan Illich, “is understood as a threshold between two incommensurable worlds, from the perishable and provisional to the imperishable and eternal; from the world of death into the world of life.” As such, unlike the secular image, the religious icon takes on a peculiar sacredness all its own, one that isn’t cast off from another source but which exists within the image itself, as a vision of invisibility. The icon isn’t merely an imitation or copy or even an expression of sacredness but something through which the eternal light radiates directly into the viewer’s eye, an image both borne and conveyed by intrinsic holiness, which holds life and death in its expression.

Western art, by contrast, in attempting “to hold the mirror up to nature,” assumes a certain inevitable poverty in the image. No matter how precisely the image is depicted, it remains a copy, an inferior to the original. And after nature itself, the original original, is successfully converted through the forces of civilization into a commodity, into yet another representation, another image—when nature itself becomes a mere embodiment of its pseudo essence, of the ‘spirit’ it contains, then the entire world becomes a prison from which we futilely struggle to escape. Nothing we see is whole and separable, and the world of dearth that imprisons us, becomes, like suicide as a means of escaping one's fear of death, our hope for salvation. We look to the spectacle to lead us away from the spectacle.

In such a world, the very essence of self implies a neediness. The self becomes a scarcity—something with tangible and real needs and that begs for fulfillment. The world becomes a problem that has to be solved, except that to solve it would destroy creation, because the world can’t exist except as a problem. One helps one’s neighbor because one’s neighbor has needs that one can fulfill, weaknesses that can be compensated for, and the self looks to the outer world to grow not more complete (that’s impossible in a world of duplicating selves) but larger and more resolved, more alien and more invincible. Since everything mirrors something else, satisfaction can never be achieved, even in a world exclusively dedicated to need fulfillment. The original, which is itself a copy, forever reaches back to the form that gave it birth, a form that doesn’t exist. Consequently, our ‘real’ faces are worn like masks while we wait for the right actual mask to be covered by, and we look for love the same way that we look for a new television—by shopping. Relationships become exchanges. Once the world has been reified—once everything becomes a symbol for something else, and once thought (“I think therefore I am”) and the contingent idea of the mind as ruler and creator, becomes the foundation of existence, then the whole world is unified, with only one reality. Everything is borne of the one great law, product of the great mind, and subsequently, as shards reflecting shards, the other, mediated to us by specialists, loses her otherness. No one, including one’s self, is real; one merely symbolizes the real. And the sacred is forever diverted, like endless reflections in opposing mirrors.

The Medieval icon painters never bothered with new techniques such as perspective, the Golden Ratio, or foreshortening techniques, because they weren’t motivated to approximate an outer reality. The simplicity of the image was important because the image was meant to inspire contemplation, a meditative gaze through which a new reality could be entered and explored, and thereby required a certain amount of undefined space and a minimalist formation. The image wasn’t about something, after all. It was the thing itself—and asked not to be interpreted but cherished.

As I stare outside at the snow, I’m thinking about the way Zen Buddhists begin each meditation session with the chiming of a bell: a loud clang that expands and slowly ebbs into silence, empties, like white glowing from out of the darkness and falling again on white, extinguishing itself.

I remember when I was twenty one years old and I had just come back to Utah after a six month long internship in Washington DC. I was forced to stay with my parents until I found a new apartment, and, one night, as I had done throughout my childhood, I pulled the trampoline up next to the glass doors of my bedroom, and I slept outside. But I didn’t enjoy it the way I did as a child. The stars that used to amaze me and keep me awake for hours were no longer so appealing. They were still beautiful, but they were just stars, silent deaf stars that only the right interpretation could make meaningful. They didn’t look back at me.

Twenty years later, as I look out my window and watch the snow fall, I’m learning how to see again.

Sexist Savages

2008-11-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

The other night, while driving home from a college basketball game, my four year old nephew invented an activity he called the Christmas game, which involved getting points for spotting Christmas decorations—or at least that’s what it involved at first. The rules kept changing in order, it seemed, to ensure my nephew’s victory. At times, green and/or red street lights yielded points. Other times not. Car break lights were included in his tally but not mine. And at the end of the game, points were awarded for just remembering Christmas decorations from the past, a nuance I had not been clued in on until the game was declared over. Needless to say, I was soundly defeated—fourteen points to five, and, mature adult that I am, I accepted my defeat in stride, without protest.

The maturity of my response was in marked contrast to the behavior of an elderly man I recently witnessed on a TV show called The Adventures of Mark and Olly about two British men who travel to Papua, New Guineau to live in the jungle with an indigenous hunter/gatherer tribe known as the Mek. In the latest episode, the tree house where the two British men have been staying starts to break down, so the tribe agrees to build a new one—about three hundred feet up. Olly, one of the British men, has a difficult time climbing the trees to help with the building process and so has to stay below and work with the women, causing his status within the tribe to diminish, or so it seemed. Later in the episode, after all of the fires in the community have gone out during the extensive rains, something else happens that, along with the tribe’s distinct gender roles and the fact that the women do the bulk of the work, seems to confirm the modern condemnation of primitive life as backward, immature, and, above all, sexist. When the male elder fails to start a fire, one of the women takes the materials inside, and, within minutes, creates a steady blaze. She gloats, and the man takes offense. The two argue until the woman walks away.

What the male should have done, of course—what any non-sexist civilized man would have done—is to graciously admit defeat, smile, and congratulate the woman for her success. In other words, he should have treated her like an adult treats a child, the same way I treated my nephew after losing the Christmas game. The fact that the male elder took offense, that he argued with the woman about the event’s significance, suggests that he might have some very real doubts as to his superiority in the community. In the modern world, you could make a strong case that no such doubts exist. The sophisticated modern male simply laughs off female victories because he knows deep down that such victories are either aberrations or meaningless child’s play—that they don’t really threaten his dominance. In the modern world, the male’s superiority would not be challenged by a simple failure to start a fire better than a woman.

Why I'm Voting for Nader

2008-10-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Of course Nader can't win--I understand that--but that doesn't mean I'm voting for him to merely "express my conscience", as some people like to put it. The truth is that no candidate, including Nader, comes close to representing my conscience. That choice, in our pretend democracy, is off the table. Our representative democracy doesn't allow me to vote "for" anything, because the voting process doesn't, on a personal level, offer me anything of value. What I can do, though, thanks to Nader and other third party candidates, is vote against something. I can vote against the system.

Obama is one of the more reliable sellouts to ever run for office. Due to political pressure, he now supports off-shore drilling for oil, has voted numerous times in support of subsidizing corn-ethanol (the position that won him the Iowa primary), has clearly voiced his approval of "free" trade policies, has said that he won't withdraw American troops from Iraq before 2013, and has back-tracked on campaign finance reform and coal subsidies since it became politically advantageous to do so. He has solicited for and received millions of dollars in corporate campaign support, from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Excelon, UBS, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, many of the same corporations who directly benefited from the 420 dollar bailout he approved. And his support of Tort "reform" (making it more difficult to sue corporations), his rejection of single-payer health care, his vote to cap the damages that victims of malpractice could receive, and his vote against an ammendment to cap credit card interest rates at 30% show very clearly that he intends to pay back his supporters with policy decisions that represent corporate interest at the expense of everyone else. It's pretty clear that you can't work "within" the system, a system that is evil to its core, and expect non evil results. And Obama unquestioningly represents the system.

A vote for Nader, on the other hand, represents an honest critique of what our country is doing to the natural environment and to the developing world and to the non-elites within American borders. A vote for Nader represents an honest voice of protest against corporate-dominated America. In short, it represents a protest against abuse.

Let me put it this way: what if someone said that you had to be in an abusive relationship with a person who would beat and molest you every day or a person who would beat and molest you, more mildly, only once a week? That, to me, is the choice we're being given by our two party system. The fact that both Obama and McCain supported a 420 billion dollar robbery--a continuation, in other words, of the American government's practice of taking money and resources from the poor and middle classes of the world and giving it to the elites--only proves my point. And I don't want to cast a vote in favor of abuse, a vote that sanctions and authorizes and legitimizes that abuse. My vote for Nader, who opposed the bailout and who favors placing severe restrictions on the abusive power of corporations, sends the message that I don't want to be in a relationship under abusive circumstances (even if I don't agree with many of the socialistic ideas of Nader). A vote for either Obama or McCain, on the other hand, represents a vote for an abusive system--a tacit approval of exploitation--which, by my definition, is not merely a wasted vote but an unethical one.

Let It Pour

2008-09-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

In Act IV, scene II of Shakespeare's King John, just after John has killed the rightful heir to the throne, causing powerful nobles to defect--just as the forces against John are being assembled and his position of power is being questioned--just as everything seems about to fall apart, a messenger enters the King's quarters, looking fearful. The king, noticing the messenger's troubled countenance, speaks:

"So foul a sky clears not without a storm: Pour down thy weather."

The metaphorical language, as pointed out by Mark Turner in The Literary Mind, is both crystal clear and simultaneously loaded with nuance. The messenger's face corrolates to the foul sky and the messenger's news to the rain that must fall before sunny days are again possible. Pretty straightforward. But, considering the context, much more is in evidence. The king's utterance also implies a certain limitation to regal power--a power to command actions but not natures. A king can command a messenger to convey his message but he cannot determine the message's content, not, at least, without distorting its truth. A king can demand a weather report, that is, but not determine the weather. He might even demand that a frown be called a smile and an overcast sky be called sunny, but he cannot rule over natural forces. A king cannot command the skies.

And neither can US presidents or Federal Reserve chairmen--not even with 750 billion dollars.

Since the dawn of America over two hundred years ago, America has fostered a reputation for its cock-eyed optimism. And, at times, it has served us well. An optimistic spirit was needed, obviously, for a small fledgling nation to defeat the mightiest military of its time during the American Revolution. Optimism is a great quality to have when you're young, when you lack the confidence that comes with experience, and when older cagier veterans are trying to defeat you by mere posturing. It's a great quality to have when you're shooting a pressure free throw, for example, and you need to overcome your nerves and let your body do what it knows how to do, trying not to over-think the moment and become distracted.

But optimism isn't a virtue; it's a skill. And like all skills, you should only use it when it's needed. You might be the greatest sharpshooter in the world, but if you try applying your talent to circumstances in which it isn't required--as a means of resolving conflict, say--then you're probably destined for a life in prison. Your skill will be your ruin rather than your saving grace. Similarly, if you apply optimism to a scenario in which your child is screaming hysterically in the next room, your skill becomes a potentially lethal liability, not to mention an effective means of denying responsibility. Sometimes, too, a skill doesn't manifest strength as much as it conceals weakness. A young man or women might become a master at sexual seduction in order to conceal a sense of complete alienation from the opposite sex--to compensate for the fact that he or she can't connect with others on any other level, and so his or her skill works to conceal loneliness and alienation--as a means of preserving the illusion of compatibility with human society. And a mother failing to respond to her crying child might not be an act of optimism as much as it is an act of denial--a weakness of courage, I mean, to face the potentially dire circumstances that await her if she tries to learn the source of her child's distress.

The American financial system has been crying for a long time. Over eight years ago, Ralph Nader sounded the warning that the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) were on track to follow the savings and loan industry of the 1980s and 90s (TheNation). He was ridiculed. Every month of this year, the unemployment rate has increased while Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke along with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been "seeing signs of improvement" in the economy (dumbasses). And now we have the mess that we have.

What's more, though the screaming child isn't being ignored at the moment, the people in charge don't seem to understand what they're hearing. Rather than going in to check on the child, they've decided to spend 700 billion dollars to build thicker walls--as if the problem is with the screaming and not with the threat that the screams are trying to signal. Put in other terms, our financial leaders are trying to amend the message and not the problem. And the reason why is simple: they can't amend the problem, because the problem with the kingdom isn't that it's unraveling and that the king is about to be overthrown; the problem is with the king. The king is illegitimate. The reason they're trying to build thicker walls is because that's all they can do. That's all they have the authority to do.

Karl Marx, in a small book called The German Ideology, proposed that political ideologies are primarily "the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas". To Marx, ideology is a consequent of material social conditions, such as those of private property, and, in order to keep those conditions secure, an ideology is created to justify and idealize the material condition. In other words, the world is turned upside down. People are taught to believe that the ideology created the material conditions and not vice versa. Consequently, human beings come to view their actions as the consequence of inevitable economic factors. Ideology serves merely to obfuscate the very simplistic reality of material life--and to maintain the dominance of the rulers. Ideology becomes the artifice whereby the rulers obtain and maintain the power to rule. False and illegitimate ideology serves to promote false and illegitimate power. A mirage is created which is invulnerable to attack. Consequently, the screaming of the economy, rather than the material conditions of the economy, become the problem that has to be commanded away.

Now, I don't claim to be a financial expert. I've read about fifty articles about what's currently happening and all I can tell you is that our financial markets are a labyrinth I could never navigate ... but I can tell you this: the market depends on material resources and a financial system that creates money (and not value) from debt isn't sustainable. Ideology in the form of rhetoric can't create real long-term value--and real value (of the materials) can't keep pace with the artificial value (of the stocks) inflated by credit and hyper speculation and short-term investment and derivatives and price fixing and debt securities, etc. More specifically, the current crisis is a direct result of material social conditions which require and encourage debt, the same social mechanism that has been used since the dawn of civilization to ensure that assets are consolidated in the hands of the wealthy.

As Wall Street economist Michael Hudson puts it: "The “magic of compound interest” refers to the tendency of savings to double and redouble exponentially, with a matching rise in what debtors owe on the other side of the balance sheet. These mathematics have been operated throughout history, ever since the charging of interest was invented in Sumer some time around 2750 BC. In every known society, the effect has been to concentrate wealth in the hands of people with money. In recent years, one’s own money is not even necessary to do this. The power to indebt others to oneself can be achieved by free credit creation. However, the resulting mushrooming exponential growth in indebtedness must collapse at the point where its interest and other carrying charges (now augmented by exorbitant late fees, bounced-check fees, credit-card costs and other penalties) absorb the entire economic surplus.

This is the point that has been reached – and passed. It has been developing for many decades. But there is a great reluctance to accept the fact that debts cannot be paid."

Summed up: no economy can grow as exponentially and interminably fast as debts--no matter how much they're commanded by the Fed to do so. This bailout has nothing to do with preventing a recession. No market can exist without recessions, and the king can't do anything to change that fact. Recessions, like rainstorms, are not only inevitable, they're also good for the market economy. A recession simply means that money has been invested in an industry that no longer serves the economy's needs, and now that money has to be re-invested in other industries. In the long run, the economy is better off after the reinvestment takes place. By trying to prevent recessions, we only inflate the bubble and make the ultimate crash a little bit more severe--but the recession still comes. The king can't prevent the economy from functioning like an economy, but he can ensure that the recession doesn't hurt the people in charge; he can ensure that it protects his illegitimate power, provided we go along with it, provided we continue to believe that we're simply the victims of inevitable economic forces rather than illegitimate rulers. And that's what this bailout is all about. It's a chance to keep the bubble inflated long enough for the illegitimate people at the top to cash out before it pops. The pop, though, is inevitable.

Just before the messenger arrives in the throne room, King John has been informed of the death of Arthur, the rightful heir to the crown, and the lords give him an accusative look. The king responds:

"Why do you bend such solemn brows on me?
Think you I bear the shears of destiny?
Have I commandment on the pulse of life?"

Once again, the King's powers are demarcated. The king, by his own admission, doesn't command the pulse of life. He can't determine destiny. And yet the King is directly responsible for Arthur's death, giving further indication of his illegitimacy. The king can kill, though it isn't a legitimate power, but, as John learns later in the scene when he learns of his mother's death, he cannot bear the shears of destiny. He cannot keep either his mother or the kingdom she seized for him alive.

For me, the larger question isn't whether the Fed should try to stave off a recession. As I said, recessions are inevitable in the market economy, in the same way that storms are inevitable and in the same way that deaths are inevitable, even the deaths of empires. Not only is the financial system of the American empire unstable and ripe for death, but the entire empire, an empire dependent on infinite growth in a world of finite resources, is long overdue, as well. It's time has come. The longer we prop it up with illegitimate power, the harder the ultimate crash will be and the more people will suffer. I say we let it die now. Use the financial crisis as an opportunity, an opportunity to die and be reborn--to reinstate the rightful king, which is none other than the natural world on which we're all dependent and a part of. Don't re-inflate the economic bubble or the empire bubble. Just pop it. Let the clouds over-saturate and tilt your face up to greet the rain. Messenger, pour down thy weather!

hudson
counterpunch
alternet

Honduras Thoughts and Highlights

2008-08-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

I’m still in the process of defining my trip, but, for now, here are a few memories:

Copan

A small town, heavy on tourism, built next to an ancient Mayan city. The temples there aren’t as large or as numerous as those in Tikal, where I visited last year, but the architecture and the presentation of the sight are more interesting in Copan. Another thing I liked better about Copan is that they don’t try very hard to sell you on the idea that you're in a spiritual place. The tourist information is more honest: You are standing on ground that was once decimated by the ancient Mayan life-style—and the Mayans paid a heavy price for their irresponsibility. By not taking care of the land that took care of them, they were nearly wiped out—and the jungle they took for granted reclaimed their temples and their homes for itself, tree roots embedded firmly into the mortar they used for construction and the forest terrain burying every inch of their once proud and highly developed civilization.

Copan doesn't bear witness to the greatness of a civilization but to the greatness of the jungle.

The town itself, though a little too touristy for my taste, grew on me in spite of the numerous difficulties I had while there, difficulties which included stomach trouble and a major hassle trying to obtain money after losing my debit card. What made the visit worthwhile was my homestay. My host mother was so generous and trusting that she offered to let me use her credit card for the duration of my trip and bring it back when I was finished. She wrote down her pin number for me. And the two young boys were a hoot. The oldest surprised me with a big hug after coming home from my first day of Spanish classes (I had known him for a day), and the youngest would shout my name all day long. One day he was playing with a sword, and I asked him in Spanish “What’s that?” He thought for a second, put the sword between his legs and said, “Un Caballo.” A horse. It was cute. I’ll miss them.

La Ceiba

The Night Club.

I’ve been in packed houses before, but nothing like this. You could barely move and there was no AC. Still, it was fun. I danced most of the night with a local woman named Carla. I think my Spanish must be getting a bit better, because I met and befriended a lot of locals on this trip.

Los Ex-Patriates

The owner of the Ex-Patriates bar is a 50 – 65 year old gringo who, though he’s lived in Honduras for ten years now, speaks at best maybe ten words of Spanish. One night he was there at the bar with a gorgeous 20 year old Honduran woman trying to explain the Fourth of July fireworks: “It’s like … boom. Like … like Feliz Navidad.” Apparently they light fireworks at Christmas time in Honduras. Amazingly, the woman seemed to, or pretended to, understand everything he said.

The same night another old gringo walked in, this one also with a gorgeous younger woman, only, in this case, the woman looked like a prostitute. I was talking to the bartender when the gringo walked up, or strutted up to us, said: “I’m so-and-so from the Caribbean. I’m here with my la-dy” He stood up tall and proud as he said it, then slammed 500 limps on the bar. “Pay it!” He then walked back to his extremely unhappy-looking “la-dy” as the bartender and I rolled our eyes at each other. Real life can parody itself better than any fiction.

Cayos Cochinos

Just before leaving La Ceiba, I paid eighty bucks—a fortune in Honduras—to spend the night on my own private island along the corral reef. Actually, I wasn’t alone. I was with four young ladies from Britain and Holland. Even better. We made a little camp fire on the beach and talked late into the night, but the best part of the stay, and what made it worth the eighty bucks, was the snorkeling. Snorkeling along the corral reef is like seeing the Grand Canyon underwater, only with more colors and with live animals who swim alongside you and occasionally turn to stare you straight in the face. It was quite literally like passing into another world.

Trujillo

The most beautiful town I stayed in, if you don’t count the jungle. It’s flanked by an impressive forest-covered mountain on one side and the beach on the other. By all rights, it should be a tourist mecca, but the locals are a bit too laid back to make it happen. The Cruise Ship Industry offered to make Trujillo a stop on their tours if the town built a port and improved the sewer system, for which the Cruise Industry provided the money. The money, though, was quickly laundered away and so Trujillo remains the same sleepy laid back town it’s been, apparently, for quite some time.

La Casa Kiwi

The hostel I stayed in the first three nights in Trujillo. I was able to do some more snorkeling there. We weren’t directly on the reef, so the snorkeling wasn’t as awe-inspiring, but I was able to swim out to an old shipwreck site, where I jumped over the side and swam around inside the hull, watching schools of fish go in and out of the hatches. Among the fish I saw were barricudas, jellyfish, and stingrays.

Casa Kiwi is a bit remote, so at night I would congregate in the hotel bar with the owner and the other five guests to drink and play pool. Nothing else I could do, and nothing else I really wanted to do.

My Morning Routine

I fell into a nice little routine in Trujillo, which started with coffee and an ice cream at a downtown hotel. The coffee in Honduras sucks. You wouldn’t think so, since you’re surrounded by coffee plantations, but they make it super strong and without any flavoring save a half a cup or so of sugar. What did taste good, though, was the coffee-flavored ice cream they sold next to the hotel. So I took to buying a cup of coffee which I would mix with my ice cream to improve the flavor. After finishing my coffee and my writing, I would go down to the beach and drink dollar mimosas while swimming and reading the newspaper. Not a bad way to start the day.

Raw Sewage

It was in Trujillo that, thanks to the knowledge of some Peace Corps volunteers, I learned that the strange looking mud I sometimes had to pass through in my sandals was exactly what I thought it was.

Olancho (the so-called ‘Wild East’ of Honduras)

I arrived in a little town called Catacama, the second largest town in Olancho but not very large, with maybe a thousand inhabitants and absolutely no tourists. I showed up at one of the two hotels in town and, after hearing the price for a single bed, asked the old woman who I presumed was the owner whether I could have a look at the room—which was about five feet away and already open. “No,” she said, without explanation. Eventually, after a few more pleas, she consented, and the room turned out to be great—probably the best I stayed in my entire trip. I think I was the only guest, too. I wonder why.

They have some caves outside town that were discovered in 1996. Inside the caves are two chambers full of bones, which, due to the calcite, glow in the dark. The bones were analyzed and dated back to 1500 BC. Unfortunately, though, as I didn’t find out until I got there, the bones are closed off to the public and all you can see are replicas in the museum. Still, I had a pleasant adventure hitch-hiking my way to the site.

The Howler Monkeys

I met a guy who owns a large farm outside of town, which he agreed to take me to visit. While there, I got to actually climb around with the dozens of howler monkeys who live there in the trees by the river. It was amazing. Afterwards, on horseback, we followed a school of parrots to the edge of the property.

The next day, when the same guy gave me a ride to the base of the mountain where I’d be hiking into the jungle, he was sure that the most memorable part of my visit to his farm was feeding cookies to the cows.

Hiking in the Rain Forest

My travel book said that I might be able to find a guide by inquiring at the town information office, but the office was closed and would remain so for several days, so, instead, a local fixed me up with a friend of his and I paid way more than I should have for what turned out to be a less than qualified hiking guide.

The first day, after getting a late start, we hiked to a house in the mountains, not too far out of civilization, where my guide had some relatives. Jose, my guide, didn’t tell me much about the rain forest along the way, but he told me an awful lot about himself, including his secret for staying young and fit, which was to conserve his sperm. Only once every eleven days, he told me, and only with one woman (a comment he later had to amend after confessing to a long affair with a woman half his age). He also claimed to be a Shaman, one whose powers came from Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, and an “hombre muy raro” who didn’t care about money. When I suggested that he prove his exceptionality by providing me his services for free or at a discount, he quickly changed the subject. “I’ve fathered twenty one kids,” he told me.

There was a moment after we arrived at the house that I’ll never forget. I was sitting on the house patio, tired but endorphin-drunk from the day’s hike, watching and listening to these two older guys in Cowboy hats as they sipped coffee and talked politics. A candle against the wall behind them lit their backsides but left their fronts in dark silhouette. Further out: a night sky covered in stars, as many as I have ever seen, and a forest full of fireflies.

The next day we took mules until we arrived near the peak of the mountain, just before the trail ended. Jose said that we had to leave the mules with the boy who had accompanied us for that day’s leg of the journey, because the upcoming part of the forest was sacred,. We were in the heart of the jungle now, and mules were not allowed. I wanted to believe that it had something to do with a prohibition of one animal making the other into a beast of burden, so to speak, but Jose didn’t accept my romantic Westernized explanation. He said that the mules might eat part of the forest, something all animals in the forest do, and something far less damaging, it seemed to me, than hacking the forest with a machete as my guide was prone to do throughout our hike. Still, after hearing a bit more about the rare and exceptional qualities of my Shaman guide Jose, we continued our journey, arriving about an hour later at a small hut which Jose claimed to own. What he didn’t own, though, was a key to the lock on the door, so he chopped the door down to get us inside. We spent the night there, in a cloud of smoke that Jose created to keep the mosquitoes out.

Next day, we headed into the thick of the jungle. The trail had ended, so we had to machete-cut our own path, moving about a hundred feet every thirty minutes. We were trying to make our way to a cave that was less than three hundred feet from our campsite, but we never made it. Jose explained the failure by claiming that the caves probably didn’t want to be found, no doubt because of my gringo unworthiness, and instead we headed for the peak of La Picucha, the highest point in Olancho. Five or six times, Jose stopped, looking confused. “I have to concentrate for a minute,” he would say. “I need to think.” Believe me, the jungle is no place to get lost. Unlike wilderness areas in the States, the Jungles are so thick and so wet and slippery that being even a few hundred feet off course could be disastrous. So I was getting worried. We had hiked for over seven hours, our sleeping supplies were back at the base camp, and it was getting dark. Jose clearly was a little concerned as well, so we turned around, the peak no where in sight, and started to make our way back. Whether it was dumb luck or the fact that my guide knew the forest a little better than I thought, we did, in less than two hours, find our way back to the base-camp, where we settled in for a much deserved rest.

Jose had promised to take me at least to the caves the following day, but, when dawn broke, he announced that we were heading back. Though I hadn’t got to see either of the two things I had paid him to show me—the caves and the peak—I didn’t complain. I was ready to leave.

Going down was much faster, but, due to the slipperiness and the pounding on the knees, much more difficult. Plus, it didn’t help that I fell into the river trying to jump from one rock to another to avoid getting my feet wet.

After we got back into town, Jose announced that I owed another five hundred limps, about 25 dollars. Apparently, to him, a day occurred with each sunrise rather than a twenty four hour period. I told him I wouldn’t pay, especially since I hadn’t seen anything he had promised to show me and I was paying way more than the going rate to begin with. Unfortunately, though, my hiking boots, which I had traded for waders after falling into the river, were in his bag. So I wound up paying twenty five extra dollars to get my shoes back.

Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula

Didn’t spend much time in either place. They’re both big cities, and, since I live in a big city, I prefer to vacation in smaller towns and the countryside. Still, I was surprised, as I was throughout Honduras, at how friendly the people were. Once, for example, in Trujillo, I came upon three guys smoking pot on the beach, and I asked them if they knew where the Spanish School was. Long pause. After a minute or two, an old guy of about fifty years of age, slowly rose up, shook off his pot-induced ease, and proceeded to walk me five blocks to where he thought the school was. When that wasn’t it, he walked me another four blocks to another destination, failing again. So he then called a friend who gave me directions (which turned out to be wrong, but still…). This kind of thing happened on a daily basis, even in the big cities.

Traveling always makes me more aware of my mortality, but especially so in Honduras. My last night in San Pedro Sula, or in Honduras for that matter, I saw a dead body on television. The dead man had been hit in the head, and half of his face had swollen up like a balloon, and flies swarmed around the bluish-colored, water-soaked flesh of his body. This kind of imagery isn’t unusual in Honduras. It’s ubiquitous. Earlier that day, on the front page of the newspaper, I had seen the photo of a nine-year old girl who had been killed in an auto accident. Her face was shown buried in a mound of mud and grass that must have been pushed up by the impact of her body. The mangled wreckage is right behind her and beyond that a crowd of onlookers and police.

One night I woke up from a dream in which my family had, for some reason, traveled to a foreign country for a loved one’s funeral and I had wandered off to mourn in private. The dream itself isn’t really that significant. But it evoked in me a feeling of sadness like I have never experienced in my life. And it wasn’t a sadness that could be satisfied, either. It was something intrinsic to life. Not something that made life into a tragedy but a profound and inescapable sadness nonetheless. I could not cry hard enough to express it. Even now, I can’t shake it. Honduras has changed me.

Gone Traveling

2008-06-17T09:44:00.000-07:00

I had planned on posting something before I left, but the departure date kinda snuck up on me (I leave on Thur. morning). I wanted to write something about either how nature, historically, has been mis-defined or about what elements of civilization and the "civilized mind" ought to be preserved--but I won't have time.

I'll be traveling until August, when I have to be back for the new semester. Hopefully, I'll have plenty to write about when I get back--if I have time, that is.

Have a great summer y'all!!!

The Moon and Zapatista

2008-05-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

In the moon’s light is a nudity

That wants to be looked upon.

And in the brightness reflected upon your adoring eyes

You see a world un-darkened

And un-envious.

As to an oracle, you cry out to her

And she prophecies through the falling leaves:

“You are now the shadow of an earth

That in dreams alone can still be seen

Through a tired gaze, as dancing shapes in the dust.

You, a shadow, will see but not become the light.

You will walk and fight with no air in your lungs,

With those whose voices are unheard except as faded echoes.

You will find no shelter, no repose, no grace.

You may find one to love, and your heart

Will talk through your mouth

Each time you say “I love you”.

But you, a shadow, will never find the lips

That will say “you”, “It is you.”

You will search and you will fight

As the din of your quiescent hopes

Until the night and your shadow are one,

Until you are no more even a shadow.

You, among the dead of always,

Will die once again,

This time that you might know

What it means to live.”

***

"We are Mexican, mostly indigenous, and we took up arms on January 1 of 1994 demanding a voice, face and name for the forgotten of the earth.”

“We want a world where many worlds are possible.”

--Subcomandante Marcos

Overpopulation

2008-04-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

According to psychologist Theodor Reich, masochism is not actually an enjoyment of pain, but a way to gain control over pain. In other words, a human being sees a painful occurrence as inevitable. There is no way she can avoid it. She feels helpless. So, in order to gain a degree of control over the situation, she connives to bring the pain on herself, which promotes the false idea that she actually enjoys pain—that she desires suffering—that she wants to be hurt. By and by she becomes unable to experience pleasure. She learns to delay gratification, and, in doing so, feels a stronger sense of self-mastery. She becomes stoic and disciplined. Although she takes no joy in it, and although she intends only to decrease her sense of impotence, she begins to destroy everything around her—not out of hatred or pride or greed, but unconsciously—as an effort to lessen her feeling of helplessness and to escape her inevitable victimization.

Now, I’m not really into sado-masochism (a million other kinky things, but not that), but, explained as it is above, I can understand its appeal. I can understand how easily a person’s desires can be changed, how easily a person can be convinced to take pleasure in something that actually causes physical pain and harm. It’s easier to cope with an imposition, after all, if you can convince yourself that the imposition isn’t an imposition—that it’s what you really want. In fact, it’s exactly this human ability to delude ourselves that makes our current capitalistic system possible.

As explained by Slavoj Zizek, capitalistic society is more effective than socialism because it adds an extra layer of injunction. Socialism tells you that you have to stop playing with your friends and go visit your grandmother, whom you don’t like, because you’ll be in trouble if you don’t. Capitalism still demands that you visit your grandmother, but it tells you so in a different way. “No,” says the capitalistic parent, “you don’t have to visit your grandmother. You can be selfish, if that’s what you really want. I thought you were better than that, but, well, if that’s what you want…. You can stay here and play with your friends and let your family down. That’s your decision. We don’t mind. If you don’t want to be with your family who loves you…. I mean, maybe you’re not the caring, loving child we thought you were. What kind of person doesn’t love their grandma and enjoy visiting her? I don’t know. Maybe you’re a little less considerate and colder than we thought. That’s too bad. But, you know, don’t worry about it. You do whatever you want to do. It’s your decision.”

And, of course, the Capitalistic child isn’t stupid. He knows what he just heard: “You not only have to go visit your grandmother. You have to LIKE IT!”

And if a child learns how to obey the second injunction, to “like it”, he doesn’t have to obey the first injunction, or, more importantly, to even acknowledge that an injunction exists. If I’m able to convince myself that I like being a slave, then I’ll probably have an easier time dealing with my enslavement. Because I won't have to even acknowledge that I'm following orders, I’ll have a better, healthier life on the plantation—but I’ll also be more likely to remain a slave. And as long as my enslavement continues, thanks to the omnipresent human incentive to make the best of a bad situation, I can never completely trust myself or my desires, even when the desire is one as seemingly natural as having kids.

For most of my life I wanted to be a father, and a part of me still does. When I tell people that I don’t want to have kids, I don’t really mean that I don’t “want” kids, what I mean is that I’ve made a decision not to have kids because I don’t think it’s a socially responsible choice. There are too many humans on the planet, and I don’t want to add to the problem—so, to honor the landbase, I’ve repressed my desires and decided to remain childless.

Still, when I watch a movie about a father bonding with his son or daughter, when I see men my age come alive as they re-live their childhoods through their offspring, when I realize how much of a minority I am because I’m not a father, when I realize there might not be anyone around to take care of me as I get older, when I listen to fathers talk with pride and selfless love about their kids, when I see assholes turn into caring and mature human beings after becoming fathers, I start to feel regretful, even scared, and I wonder if I’m making the right choice.

That’s why it’s easy for me not to get preachy about the issue of overpopulation. Not only do I sometimes question my present beliefs about my personal responsibility in curtailing the problem, but I understand why people have kids in spite of world overpopulation. I understand the desire. Plus, I’d be a hypocrite to condemn others for having kids, because I haven’t always felt the way I do now. When I was married, my wife and I talked about and agreed to start a family but then divorced before we could follow through on our plans. Even then, I knew overpopulation was a tremendous problem in the world, but I had no intention to help remedy the matter by remaining childless. Back then, I didn’t really feel like I had other choices. Simultaneously, I didn’t really feel any sense of responsibility for the choice I had made about starting a family.

But I’ve changed. And the most obvious difference between then and now is that I’m not married. As a practical matter, I can’t have children, or at least not without huge negative complications. And I make no secret about the fact that my current views evolved as a direct result of my divorce. Put frankly, deciding that I didn’t want kids, or, more to the point, that I didn’t desire to be father, helped me cope with the fact that I couldn’t have kids—and, for a while, I was in denial about my true feelings. But I’m not anymore. I now fully acknowledge that I want children—I want to be a father—but I’m also firm in my decision to remain childless—in my decision to repress that desire.

In other words, I no longer use my beliefs about needing to neutralize the problem of overpopulation as a mask for my impaired ability to have children. I don’t have to cover up my desire anymore to cope with my disappointment. At the same time, my disappointment isn’t what it used to be. More to the point, my desire to be a father is now outweighed by my desire to act on my beliefs about ecological responsibility. The latter desire, I now believe, will lead to more happiness than the former. Like I said, I’ve changed. And in addition to not being married, I’m now in an environment where I don’t feel like I need to be married to fit in. That makes a huge difference. If I still lived in Utah, where I grew up, I would not have remained single for as long as I have—and I definitely would have had children by now—because I wouldn’t know of any other appealing options. My choices would be narrowed, and I would not be able to imagine a happy bachelor’s life nor would I be as aware of the problem of overpopulation as I am now, if I still lived in the area where I grew up. Even to this day, when I go back home to visit, I’m made to feel like a failure because I haven’t started a family and because I’m well passed the age in which you’re supposed to start a family. Let’s face it, getting married and having kids is part of our culture’s recommended story—a rite of passage for all respectable citizens, an initiation test. And if you don’t live up to those expectations, you are considered a failure. While the injunction to have kids is stronger in Utah than it is Colorado, the injunction still, indisputably, exists.

And most likely for that reason, though it’s less powerful, I still have some desire to be a father. The fact that I now have more and better options for being creative has lessened my desire but it hasn’t killed it. Unlike when I was planning a family, though, I no longer trust my desires. Just “wanting” children isn’t enough. I’m now convinced that my desire to have kids isn’t really a desire; it’s an order. And because of that awareness, it’s easier to repress the pseudo desire. And I couldn’t have that awareness if I didn’t live within an environment that shows very concretely that fatherhood isn’t necessary for personal fulfillment—if I didn’t live in an environment where I can safely question and distrust my desires, and, in turn, become better acquainted with my passions and their sources.

Put another way, my desire to have kids, as well as my current desire not to have them, is a social not a biological urge. I’m not biologically predetermined to want children. And that isn’t only true for myself and other men; it’s true for women, as well. I grant that we might have a biological urge to create and nourish our species and our bloodlines, but, to me, that doesn’t translate into a biological urge to procreate. If you put a dozen worms in a jar and then reduce their food supply, the worms will stop procreating. The worms’ behavior seems to suggest that preserving the land base and thereby respecting carrying capacity, overrides the urge, if it exists, to have baby worms. And, as writer Derrick Jensen joked during a recent lecture I attended, “worms don’t even have brains!” Worms, because they can’t rationalize, can’t be manipulated with thought the way humans can and, consequently, can’t be misled about their desires and urges. They act on instinct, and instinct tells them to stop having baby worms when there isn’t enough food to go around. It says that quality of life, not just quantity, matters. It says that you have to involve yourself in your surroundings, respecting the needs of the land’s other inhabitants—that your self and your species and your bloodline extend to your entire environment and not to certain narrow and clearly delineated boundaries. It says that, for worms, respecting the ‘other’ is the most efficient way to ensure a certain quality of life for the ‘self’.

No doubt, in my mind, that in our present situation we would act the same way as the worms in the bottle if we weren’t following orders—if we were more receptive to our passions than to our duties. That isn’t difficult to prove, either. Look anywhere in the world where women’s rights are increasing, where women can more honestly and more effectively assess their human needs, and the birth rate is in decline. But in places where women, the primary victims of globalization-induced poverty and nearly all human rights abuse, have fewer rights, the birth rates are exploding. In the non-industrialized parts of the world that are being used mainly as fodder for western enterprise, where modern power is most evident—in parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa—and in places where the culture publicly endorses the subjugation of women (not coincidentally the same regions)—the birth rates are growing exponentially, while in Europe and America, places where feminism has at least taken root and is at least given voice to and where power is more diffused, the birth rates are not sufficient to maintain current population levels. And it’s only within minority western communities—the Black and Hispanic communities in America and immigrant populations of Europe, within communities where, because of economic disadvantages, members have fewer opportunities and subsequently fewer freedoms—that birth rates continue to rise.

Put simply, the more enslaved within our current system a person finds herself, the more likely she is to have children. And it’s easy to understand why. If you’re born into a certain level of enslavement, you have little control over your actions. You have little say in how you define yourself as a person. You don’t have the right of self-determination, and, as a result, you become defined by your masters—by male masters, mostly, who offer you only the roles that serve their interests—the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. The reason that the US and other developed nations haven’t sufficiently supported Third World family planning programs and the reason that many non-industrialized nations don’t see overpopulation as a problem is obvious: it’s because you can’t solve the population problem without solving the problems of misogyny and oppression, two elements required by the dominant culture to function. If you give women more options, options that don’t support the power structure, and if you give men more options than the ones in which they dominate women (and support the power structure), you weaken the hierarchical and oppression-based system that rules us. You weaken patriarchy. What world leaders implicitly realize but don’t allow into their consciences is that the problems related to overpopulation—concomitant problems of world hunger and poverty, for example—are primarily women’s issues. More broadly, as suggested by Riane Eisler, they’re issues that challenge the very foundations of the andocratic/dominator system that all nations on the planet currently practice. If you advance the rights and choices of women, if women come to be known as more than just breeders, we will no longer need society as we know it. The system would collapse, because giving in to women means giving in to the very thing that modern society is trying to rise above—nature.

So, we cope as best we can. By accepting traditional roles, by convincing ourselves that those are the roles we most want to adopt, we cope better with our subservience. We learn to like it. That isn’t to say that the desire to be a mother or father isn’t real, only that it’s a manufactured desire. It isn’t pre-determined. Nor am I suggesting that the desire to be a father or mother is intrinsically unhealthy. Under certain circumstances, the desire might be created by forces other than coercion and will complement the needs of the environment. In the present-day world, though, the human desire to have children is destructive and, I believe, a-natural. It decreases what I believe all living things most desire—freedom.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we blame those with the desire, on the slaves making the best of their enslavement. To solve the population problem, we shouldn’t add on more layers of injunction. We shouldn’t, like China, start passing laws to prohibit having too many children and thereby increase current levels of servitude. Nor, as we do in America, should we do more to enable people’s desires, desires that simply serve the status quo and not the individual. Instead, we need to challenge and re-think our desires, which isn’t possible so long as we remain in positions of confinement. To solve the population problem we need to create new desires and new opportunities. More precisely, we need more not less freedom. We need to give people the world over the right to self-determination, the right to create their own stories and their own self-definitions, and not force people to adopt a way of life that gives one a choice between awareness and misery or false-happiness and increased enslavement. Barring that, barring a complete change in and destruction of our current dominator-based way of life, we can at least show people, ourselves included, that slavery isn’t inevitable; it isn’t biologically pre-determined. As artists or spokespersons, we can give others a glimpse of alternative fulfilling lifestyles—create even an artificial view of life that exposes people’s current desires as the social creations they are and which points the way to other realities, to epistemologies that favor opening of the self and not constriction; if we can’t literally expand people’s freedoms, we can expand their imaginations and thereby make it easier to acknowledge and resist our confinement. In a phrase, we can provide people with new visions and new insights—to allow both sexes a means for achieving personal fulfillment—for being creative—other than having kids.

***

Civilization is advancing not so much on the back of humanity, but, eerily enough, without it.

Murray Bookchin

***

Riane Eisler The Chalice and The Blade; Slavoj Zizek Zizek!; Philip K. Dick Valis; Murray Bookchin The Freedom of Ecology

Days When I Can't Stop Weeping

2008-03-02T14:18:00.000-08:00

When I haven’t slept well the night before, I tend to get emotional over almost anything. I heard a song and wept once in the car on the way up to the mountain. I wept twice more while skiing: once on the lift when I saw a blackbird playing in the wind and again on my final run of the day.

At Keystone they have two very long mogul runs. I can arrive at the mountain by noon or even one o’ clock and take those two runs the rest of the day and come home completely exhausted, as if I had skied from early morning until midnight.

Today, I skied extra hard, but, in spite of the fatigue, I was having a good day. I was so in the zone during my last run that I decided not to stop and rest a quarter of the way down as I normally do, and I kept going until I reached the midway curve. Catching my breath, I sat down in the snow and waited for my heart rate to calm. When it did, I was able to focus on the view: a clear sky and miles and miles and miles of mountain and snow-frosted pines.

It looked like "Mercy".

Postscript

2008-02-18T09:52:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's the point, or part of the point: on the surface, it might seem as if the conclusions reached by the Minotaur's justice system are a bit crazy--and they are, except for one thing--to any careful and rational thinking reader, they're not. By the standards of conventional logic, the argument made by the Official Prosecutor is both sound and valid. In other words, the premises of his case (that you can't exist if you don't have a mother, that you can't create or give birth to something already in existence, etc.) are nearly beyond question. They are, by almost any rational account, true. And what's more, the conclusion he reaches is perfectly valid; it contains all of the premises. In other words, the premises are true and the conclusion, because it is valid, is also true. By the standards of formal logic, you can't argue with the Official Prosecutor's pronouncement that Mrs. Anderson doesn't exist. In additon, the Official Prosecutor's argument isn't limited only to the circumstances of the skit; you could apply the same deductive reasoning to yourself and reach the exact same conclusion: logically, you don't exist. (you can find the basis of the argument repeated here: nagarjuna).

And yet you do exist--I think. Logic, in this case, seems to go against what observation and ordinary sense tell us is factual. So does that mean that either logic or our observations are lying to us?

In a word, no. All it means is that the tool, logic, can't be effectively used in this instance. By the same account, addition is a great tool for determining how many chips you'll have after you win a big poker pot, but it won't be of much use in collecting rain drops. Two rain drops plus two more doesn't equal four raindrops; it equals a larger puddle. Observation, likewise, is a great tool for certain situations--such as assessing whether the current weather is suitable for a picnic--but it isn't very good, without the help of certain technologies, for determining the shape of the earth.

Even more to the point, logic didn't really fail in this case; language did. Language is simply too inaccurate to serve as a flattering vehicle for logical analysis. And that brings me to my thesis: language doesn't just express knowledge, it also inhibits knowledge. The key is to make language serve you rather than the other way around. The key is to make sure that you aren't becoming an addict. A drug used properly can cure you of a disease or even open you up to new creative insights, but once the drug starts to use you, once you become dependent, once you can't function without getting your fix, then the drug becomes a disease rather than a cure and it closes you off from, rather than exposes you to, new creative manifestations.

And in a world of addicts and pushers, somebody, a postmodernist writer, for example, has to be a voice of reason and reveal the modern drug-of-choice for what it is--a tool that is being misused and overly relied on. She has to demonstrate the limits and the drawbacks of the drug, which is exactly what certain post modern writers are trying to do with language; they're trying to prevent language from using you instead of the reverse. By exposing the failings of language, the postmodern writer isn't muddling the truth and she isn't doing scientists a dis-service, she's helping scientists and all other seekers of knowledge to see things more clearly and from less restricted perspectives. She's doing an intervention.

And while most scientists understand this, there are certain pseudo-scientists, Richard Dawkins foremost among them, who feel threatened by imprecise and creative uses of language because they're seeking a unifying singularity rather than knowledge; they're seeking confirmation for their own brand of fundamentalism, which they spread through the church of reductionist science. Like the Catholic missionaries of yesterday, the prophets of reductionism are hell-bent on spreading their gospel to anyone who will listen, or be forced to listen, and it isn't truth that matters to them, but ideology, an ideology that anyone can receive if he just opens up his veins, sticks the needle in, and gets carried away by the sense of certainty and cohesion.

The reductionists don't use Science as a tool; Science uses the reductionist to filter out knowledge that it doesn't like--as a means of minimizing what can be known so that everything supports a particular ideology. It's not surprising then that a reductionist would want to do the same thing with language that she has done with Science. Instead of seeing language's limitations and using it only in the limited circumstances in which it's feasible, and instead of trying to re-vision language to make it less able to undermine the truths of experience, the reductionist strives to purify language as a scientific instrument by putting its limitations onto the actual world--to make the world fit the language (and the Science) instead of vice versa.

Properly and narrowly applied, science, like language, can be a useful tool. I'm not questioning that. But I am questioning the value we place on scientific knowledge. It seems to me that by failing to acknowledge the limitations of science, we run the risk of defining science as a dogma rather than as a tool--we're setting it up to be our master, a master that we've managed to codify and embody in words. But words can't be mistaken for the things they represent. The moon is not the same as the finger that points at the moon, and scientific knowledge, which must be expressed through language, either the language of words or of logic and mathematics, is not the same as the truth it attempts to express. This, I believe, is what many post modernist writers are trying to make evident. So, while in certain circumstances, despite its limitations, I might find scientific knowledge extremely useful, even to the point of delegating to it my own less-informed judgment, I don't trust it as my master, and neither should anyone else. If either science or post-modern philosophy tells me, for example, that I don't exist, I'm not going to trust it, no matter how impeccable and accredited the reasoning and no matter how insistent others are that I use no other tool to make a verification.

Here's an article that further details the flaws in reductionist thinking:
Darwinian Fundamentalism

Justice

2008-02-11T09:55:00.001-08:00

I wanted to write a post today, but I’m pressed for time, so I’m going to take a shortcut.

The following is a skit I wrote as a brainstorming exercise on the subject of how language can be used to manipulate people. Since I no longer belong to a theater group and since the piece was never written to be developed as a performance in the first place, I’ve decided to post it here in an effort to say something about postmodernism, language, and science, a subject that HH introduced on his blog here. I’ll post the skit first, and then, in a postscript I’ll write as a separate post, I’ll explain how it relates to the value of postmodern style and discourse and how deficiencies of language can lead to deficiencies in knowledge.

Scene
A woman sleeping.
Enter Minotaur. He stops, looks at her, pokes her ribs to wake her up.
Woman
Stop it! Can’t you see I’m sleeping?
Minotaur
Madam, you can’t stay here. You’re trespassing.
Woman
Shh!
Minotaur
Madam, you don’t just invade someone’s home like this and start bossing them around. If I want to speak, I have every right to do so. I’m the king here. But you—you have NO right to do anything without my permission. You’re trespassing.
Woman
(She sits up, starts to rub the sleep out of her eyes)
I’m not trespassing.
Minotaur
I beg to differ, Madam.
Woman
(Looks at him, startled)
You’re a Minotaur.
Minotaur
Of course I am.
Woman
But you can’t be a Minotaur.
Minotaur
Like I said, this is MY kingdom, Madam. Not yours. You have no right to be telling folks what they can and can’t do.
Woman
I must be dreaming.
Minotaur
I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.
Woman
You can’t be a Minotaur, because Minotaurs aren’t real. I must be dreaming.
Minotaur
Madam, I’m trying very hard to be patient with you.
Woman
I’m dreaming you. You’re not real—so you can’t hurt me.
Minotaur
I’d rather not force you into exile, Madam—I’m trying very hard to implement democratic reforms here—but I’ve very nearly reached the end of my wits. I’m afraid that if you don’t leave at once, I’ll have to call in the guards.
Woman
You can’t force me to do anything, sir. Because you’re not real.
Minotaur
Oh … now I understand. Now I see what this is all about.
Woman
Do you?
Minotaur
You’re staging a coup, aren’t you?
Woman
A coup?
Minotaur
You’re here to assassinate me.
Woman
I don’t mean you any harm, sir. Like I said, this is just a dream.
Minotaur
It’s no dream to me, Madam. And the consequences for attempted assassination are gravely serious.
Woman
I’m not here to assassinate you. I promise.
Minotaur
Did you or did you not just say that I don’t exist? Did you not deny my right to existence!?
Woman
You don’t exist. This isn’t real. None of it. You’re not real. This place isn’t real. That palace in the distance isn’t real. That village isn’t real. It’s all a dream.
Minotaur
Ah, so you’re not just an assassin. You’re here to wipe out my entire kingdom, aren’t you? You’re waging war against me.
Woman
I’m going back to sleep. (Lies down)
Minotaur
Guards!! (Enter guards) This woman has just murdered an entire village and wiped out the castle and the countryside. Seize her at once. (They seize her)
Woman
Wait a second! You’re hurting me.
Minotaur
I gave you fair warning, Miss. It’s too late to ask for mercy now.
Woman
I haven't done anything wrong.
Minotaur
So you wish to plead innocent then?
Woman
Of course I’m innocent. I didn’t do anything.
Minotaur
Very well. Do you have council?
Woman
Council?
Minotaur
Legal representation?
Woman
No, I don’t.
Minotaur
Very well. We’ll appoint you an attorney. We are a democratic country, after all. We’re not the Barbarians you take us for.
Woman
I don’t think—
Minotaur
Council! (Enter defense attorney, his hair unkempt, his shirt half tucked, a bottle of booze in one hand). Council, you’ll be representing the defendant.
Defense Council
(Takes a drink, sits) Very well.
Minotaur
Prosecution!
(Enter prosecution team, accompanied by march music. All are dressed in identical suits and ties, holding identical briefcases.
A gallery, bench, etc. (a court scene) are set up.)
Minotaur
Court is now in session.
Defense Council
Your honor, the defense rests.
Woman
No, your honor. The defense does not rest.
Minotaur
Do you wish to testify on your own behalf, Madam?
Woman
I wish to say that—
Minotaur
Please take the witness chair, Madam. (An electric chair is brought out. She is forced to sit)
Woman
I wish to say that I did not kill anyone or wage war against your kingdom.
Minotaur
Is that all? Do you have any proof?
Woman
(Thinks)
My proof is this: I can’t have killed anyone, because none of this is real. It’s all a dream. You can’t kill people in dreams—not for real. (Gallery murmurs in astonishment)
Minotaur
Is that all?
Woman
And since none of this is real, that means you aren’t real—and your kingdom and all it’s inhabitants aren’t real. And you can’t kill or destroy what isn’t real. (Heightened murmurs)
Minotaur
(Angered)
Is that all, madam?
Woman
Well … well, yes. I think so.
Minotaur
Prosecution! Would you like to cross examine the witness?
(The team confers, then Prosecution lawyer number one steps forward.)
Prosecution number one
Yes, we would, your honor. (He approaches the witness) Miss …?
Woman
Miss Anderson.
Minotaur
Miss Anderson, your claim is that the victims of your horrendous acts are in fact not real, correct?
Woman
Well … well, yes. There are no victims. They don’t exist.
More murmurs.
(Prosecution lawyer number one confers with his team, as if confused by the answer. Prosecution lawyer number two then steps forward.)
Prosecution lawyer number two
By what authority, Miss Anderson, do you claim to determine what is real and what is not real?
Woman
Well … well, I’m not sure. I just know what I know, because … because I’m a real person, whereas … whereas you all are characters in my dream.
(Prosecution lawyer number two, in confusion, confers with his/her team. Prosecution lawyer number three steps forward.)
Prosecution lawyer number three
So you claim, that since you’re real, you have the authority to determine what is not real? Is that right?
Woman
Umm … yes. Yes, that’s right.
Prosecution lawyer number three
And do you have any PROOF that you’re real, Miss Anderson?
Woman
Well … well, I’m real, because … because I am, because … ah! because “I think therefore I am.”
(Confused, Prosecution lawyer number three confers with team. Prosecution lawyer number one steps forward.)
Prosecution lawyer number one
Your honor, due to the special circumstances of this case, I think it appropriate that we call in the official prosecutor.
Minotaur
The official prosecutor? Is it that serious?
Prosecution lawyer number one
Considering the nature of the offense, sir, I think it is. After all, the survival of the very kingdom is at stake here. We best have the real thing.
Minotaur
(Thinks)
Very well.
(Rock music sounds. Enter Official Prosecutor, a train of adoring fans and dancing women in his wake.)
Official Prosecutor
Miss …?
Woman
Anderson.
Official Prosecutor
Miss Anderson, you base your claim of innocence on the grounds that your victims are not real, correct?
Woman
Correct.
Official Prosecutor
And you base that assessment on the fact that you, as a “real” person, have the authority to determine what is real and unreal, correct?
Woman
Correct.
Official Prosecutor
Miss Anderson, isn’t it a fact that you are lying?
Woman
No.
Official Prosecutor
(Snaps his fingers in disappointment, regains his composure)
Isn’t it a fact, Miss Anderson, that you don’t have any authority to determine reality whatsoever because you yourself are NOT REAL!
(Gasps from the court)
Woman
(Shouting over the murmurs)
No, that’s not true!
Official Prosecutor
(Slight pause)
True or not true, Miss Anderson? In order to exist, you had to have been born?
Woman
That’s true.
Official Prosecutor
True or not true? In order to be born, you need to have had a mother who gave birth to you?
Woman
True.
Official Prosecutor
Your mother then is your producer.
Woman
Right.
Official Prosecutor
And in order for one thing to give birth to another, the conditions for the thing produced—for the effect—must be inherent in the producer; some portion of the thing being produced has to be present in the producer. I mean, ants can’t give birth to hyenas, correct?
Woman
Umm … correct.
Official Prosecutor
And you can’t produce fire from water, correct?
Woman
Correct.
Official Prosecutor
My tie, at this moment, can’t give birth to a sea turtle, can it?
Woman
Of course not.
Official Prosecutor
But a sea turtle can produce a sea turtle egg or a even a piece of jewelry if crafted appropriately, correct?
Woman
Correct.
Official Prosecutor
So in order to cause the existence of something the thing that’s created must be inherent in the creator, correct?
Woman
Uhh... Yes. Correct. I think so.
Official Prosecutor
Now, to restate your earlier testimony, you told the court that you were given birth to by your mother—that you were in effect produced by her actions, correct?
Woman
Correct.
Official Prosecutor
Which is to say that your mother is at least one of the causes of your existence, correct?
Woman
Correct.
Official Prosecutor
But, as you just now testified, the conditions for your existence were inherent in the creator—in your mother, to be precise—and if the conditions for your existence were inherent in your mother, that means that, in essence, you yourself were in existence at that time, correct?
Woman
I’m really not sure where this is going?
Official Prosecutor
Which means that you were already in existence prior to your mother giving birth to you, which means that your mother can’t be said to have “caused” your existence at all. You can’t cause the existence of something that already exists, can you?
Woman
Well, no, but—
Official Prosecutor
You were, as you stated, inherent in your mother, correct?
Woman
I suppose so, but—
Official Prosecutor
Which is to say that you existed prior to being created by your mother, correct?
Woman
Well, yes—in a sense, I mean—
Official Prosecutor
And you can’t cause something to exist that already exists, can you?
Woman
No, I suppose not, when you put it that way, but still—
Official Prosecutor
And if your mother didn’t in any way “cause” you to exist—if she didn’t produce you—then, by definition, she can’t very well be your mother, can she? (She thinks, doesn’t respond). Which means you don’t have a mother, Miss Anderson. (Still no response). Which means you were never born. (Again, no response. Long pause) Which means that you, Miss Anderson, do not exist. (He sits. Everything goes quiet.)
Prosecution lawyer number one
(Rises)
And if she doesn’t exist, your honor, she has no authority to determine what is real and unreal, which means that the entire basis of her defense—her claim of authority to determine the unreality of her victims—is verifiably false.
Minotaur
Yes. Yes. And that means … that means … that … that….
Prosecution lawyer number two
That means that she has no defense. Her entire testimony is a lie. She herself is a verifiable lie.
Minotaur
Right. Which means ….?
Prosecution lawyer number three
Which means that she is guilty.
Minotaur
She’s guilty?
Official Prosecutor
It means, your honor, that the evidence of the prosecution, namely your first-hand testimony, has gone unchallenged. And you may now give the court your ruling.
Minotaur
Guilty!
Woman
That’s not fair, your honor. You can’t be judge in this case. It’s not fair.
Minotaur
I can’t be judge in this case because I don’t exist, I suppose?
Woman
Because you’re the victim. You’re biased.
Official Prosecutor
Your honor, since the defendant has now admitted that you are in fact her victim and thereby confessed her guilt, I move that she be convicted for perjury as well as murder and other war crimes.
Minotaur
Guilty!
Woman
That’s not fair!
Minotaur
Silence in the court! Council, please silence your client. (The defense council wakes up, tapes his client's mouth shut, straps her to the chair). Considering the magnitude of your offense, Madam, I’m left with no choice but to give you the maximum penalty. You shall be taken forthwith from our kingdom and be made to spend the rest of your mortal life in exile from all human society and from all “real life”. You shall be tossed into the eternal abyss never to be seen again. Bailiff, take her away!
(The bailiff complies.)

Money and Make-Believe Part II

2008-01-24T11:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, let me try to explain this more clearly--or to the best of my understanding anyway.

Let’s say that due to a nuclear accident there are only three people left in the world: persons A, B, and C. And let’s say that all three of these people are dedicated Republicans who believe strongly in the American way and wish to recreate the American system of government, beginning with the US financial system. If that were the case, one of those people, let’s say person A, would be designated the money maker (in the real world that role is divided between the Federal Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and commercial and state banks, only the first of which is a purely Federal institution) and the other two would be designated the money receivers, or, in the American system, the money borrowers.

Person A then decides to create one hundred dollars by telling person B that he now has one hundred dollars (today we make this transaction by typing that amount into a computer; rather than saying you have one hundred dollars, someone types it). But that one hundred dollars is not given freely or as compensation for labor. It’s created from nothing and given only as credit, which means that the money has to be paid back with interest.

Person B now takes that one hundred dollars and decides to make a purchase from person C. Person C is obligated under the rules of the system to accept person B’s imaginary one hundred dollars as payment. In other words, he agrees that person B’s imaginary one hundred dollars is real money and has real value. Consequently, person B becomes the proud owner of a slightly used but very warm winter coat, and person C is one hundred dollars richer.

But, because person B still has to pay the one hundred dollars back to person A, he will have to earn back his one hundred dollars by either selling merchandise to or by going to work for person C. Remember, there is only one hundred dollars in the system at this time, so person B is likely to turn to person C, the owner of all the money in existence, for help in repaying his debt. Person C understands this fact and agrees to pay person B five dollars a day in exchange for B’s cooking services. At this rate, the principal on the loan could be paid off in twenty months. However, since person A lent the one hundred dollars at a five percent monthly interest rate, B’s one hundred dollar debt will have doubled by the time he earns his initial one hundred dollars back. The problem, though, is that there isn’t an extra one hundred dollars in existence. Person A only created one hundred dollars, not two hundred; he created the principal but not the interest person B is expected to repay (and it should be pointed out that if person C deposits his money with person A, there will be an extra ninety dollars available for borrowing).

This means that Person B will have two options. One, he can borrow more money from person A and use the money he receives and was created from his second loan to pay back the first loan, and then later use the money from a third loan to pay back the second, and then later take out a fourth loan to pay back the third … and on and on indefinitely. Or, a more appealing option, he can convince person C to take out a loan also. If person C takes out a loan of one hundred dollars, then person B can sell his secret cooking recipes to person C for the same one hundred dollar amount and pay off his loan in full. Then person B is debt free. But person C is now in the same position that person B was before paying his debt. So person C, eventually, is left with the same two options that B had. Someone within this system has to remain in debt; someone has to be losing in order for the other to get ahead or to just stay even. Equal prosperity is impossible.

Inevitably, someone will ALWAYS be indebted to person A who has now made close to three hundred dollars simply by twice speaking the same sentence: “you have a hundred dollars".

How well do you think A, B, and C would get along being governed by this system? What would the quality of their relationships be like? Pretty shitty, I imagine.

To be fair, though, I’m not an expert in this field, and I’m sure my analogy oversimplifies a few things. I know, for example, that in the actual world, person A wouldn’t be an actual, complete person (and wouldn’t thereby be accruing wealth, just money) nor would he be the only designated wealth-maker (central banks don’t have a monopoly on wealth, just money-making) and A would also have to pay interest (in extremely small sums) to hold on to the assets of persons B and C etc.—but, for the most part, I believe, if the information in the movie is correct, my analogy creates a reasonably accurate picture of the current system. And if that’s the case, I doubt it would take long for B and C to realize that the system wasn’t working out too well. And I doubt A, B, and C would become super good friends while the system was in place. Talk of revolution wouldn’t be described as Utopian fantasy, but talk of maintaining and accepting or even merely tweaking rather than overthrowing the system, by anyone other than person A, would likely be described as pathologically passive and delusional—the type of talk that you hear from an abused wife when she’s rationalizing her husband’s abuse for the upteenth time. Moreover, person A would have a tough time convincing B and C that their inevitably cut-throat and manipulative behavior towards one another isn’t a required behavior pattern of the system. He couldn’t say, well, it’s not the system that causes you to exploit each other the way you do; it’s your animal nature. YOU’RE the problem. I doubt B and C would believe him.

Well, on second thought, they probably would.

*****

We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar in circulation. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture; the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is.
Robert Hemprill
Credit Manager Federal Reserve Bank

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
Economist

Money is a new form of slavery and distinguished from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal; there is no human relationship between master and slave.
Leo Tolstoi

Money and Make-Believe

2008-01-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

While standing in line at the grocery store yesterday, I overheard the following conversation between a mother and her daughter:

“Mom, can I have some gum?”

“Do you have any money?”

“Yeah.”

“Not pretend money. They don’t take pretend money here.”

“I have real money.”

“Show it to me then.”

“It’s orange.”

“Let me see. No, you need real money here. They don’t take pretend money.”

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have some gum?”

It’s sad but true. The store doesn’t accept imaginary orange money, not even from adorably cute little girls. But the mother wasn’t entirely correct in telling her daughter that the store didn’t accept pretend money. The store does accept certain kinds of pretend money, so long as it comes from the right people. It accepts my debit card, for example, which, since it withdraws money from my bank account, is only slightly less substantive than the empty hand the little girl showed to her mother. That doesn’t help me any. Whatever money I spend with my debit card represents real wages that I’ve earned with my labor. But when I deposit my earnings into a bank account, most of my money, about ninety percent of it, even though I use the full amount to make purchases, will disappear. The only reason I’m able to make purchases with my money is because its value is secured through other people’s debts, debts that generate profits for the banks. And if everyone in America paid off his or her debts, I wouldn’t have any money. NO ONE would have any money! Here are a couple videos to explain it all in more detail:

Moneyasdebt

moneymasters

I haven’t watched the second one yet (it’s REALLY long), so I can’t really vouch for it. Let me know if it isn't worth my plug.

Nurturing the Inner Anarchist

2008-01-03T16:09:00.000-08:00

Last week, while visiting Utah over the holidays, I met with three other members of the blogger community for what my Brother-in-Law has termed the first annual Exmo Expo. There were a few threads of discussion (we talked for over five hours!), but only two that I want to give more time to here: the issue of whether Christopher McCandless (the young man who inspired the book and movie Into the Wild) was being inconsiderate to his parents and the issue about whether “anarchism” is a realizable goal.

In an essay on Shakespeare’s most famous play, the poet TS Eliot makes the claim that the only way of expressing emotion in art is by “finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” He goes on, using the objective correlative as a fundamental criterion for successful artistic expression, to condemn Hamlet as a failed play, a play in which Hamlet’s emotions are “in excess of the facts” and the dramatist’s emotions unconverted by his artistry.

To his credit, Eliot later denounced the objective correlative as being too rigid and dogmatic, conceding that “it does not necessarily exhaust all the emotional overtones, which are conveyed, as far as they can be, by the incantation of the verse”. But he didn’t denounce the concept entirely, insisting that it “must satisfy the reader or theatrical onlooker that it is the equivalent of the author's feelings, and thus as far as necessary communicates and renders intelligible these feelings”.

To a certain extent, as I’ll explain shortly, I agree with Eliot’s insights, but I strongly take issue with his final judgment. Hamlet is a great play, and it’s precisely because Hamlet lacks an objective correlative for his emotions that the play works. It’s the failure of the play—the failure to force experience into language and a familiar story—that makes Hamlet the indisputable success that it is, both in terms of its impact and its longevity.

Eliot is right on one account, though. The play is, ultimately, a dramatization of failure—a failure, in this case, to create a set of facts capable of reproducing the intensity of the artist’s inner experience. For that reason, Hamlet is not a play for everyone. It’s not a play for the vast numbers of people who have deadened the intensity of their emotions by trimming them down to fit the circumstances of the world that they live in—for those who, because their careers and their domestic lives insist on it, have put their feelings to sleep. For that audience, art has to be jarring and unpleasant. It has to awaken.

But Hamlet is not for that audience. Hamlet was written for those already awake, for those too much awake, for those too much alive, or, to use Hamlet’s words, “too much under the sun”. Hamlet is a play for the other Hamlets of the world, for the person of sensibility, who, as Eliot deftly articulates, has maintained the life within him (and the intensity of feeling normally only felt in adolescence) by his “ability to intensify the world to his emotions”.

Such a person was Christopher McCandless. By fleeing “into the wild”, McCandless was not merely attempting to escape his parents and society’s expectations, he was trying to keep his emotions alive and to intensify the world he lived in to match his inner awareness; he was seeking an objective correlative, an objective correlative that would not limit and tame his inner feeling but would enhance and nurture it. He was trying to avoid domestication. McCandless sought the kind of relationship that he couldn’t have with his parents or with anyone who has “trimmed down her feelings to fit the business world”; he sought a relationship that only an artist can realize and a relationship that can only exist in the raw, in primitive conditions, a relationship “between two solitudes that protect and greet each other”, a relationship between two autonomous and equal entities. For McCandless, as with Hamlet, the thought of reducing his passions to accommodate society’s expectations was unthinkable. For the Hamlets of the world there is only one way to interact with society, and that’s by elevating society, by intensifying the world, even with cruelty, to match their inner passions, passions as yet undiminished by the threats and tyranny of civilization.

For these people there are two choices: suicide or revolt. They cannot cow their emotions to suit those who love them. They cannot be imprisoned, except by bad dreams. Instead, they must create the conditions for cohesion by not merely escaping into the wild but by importing the wild into civilization. They must act to embody their passions. Otherwise, the life within them will be extinguished. Though they direct their actions onto others, it is their own fullness, their own life and freedom, at a minimum, that is being preserved.

For the anarchist who has not forsaken his feelings and authenticity, the question of whether anarchy is a realizable goal becomes secondary; the real question is Hamlet’s question, the question of whether “to be or not to be”, the question of how life itself, in all its freedom and wholeness and reality, can be perpetuated. Whether the anarchist dream can actually be achieved is merely an intellectual question, a question asked by the prisoner in order to tolerate his incarceration. It isn’t a question asked by the animal in an effort to stay alive or the mother instinctively acting to protect her child, and it isn’t a question asked by the anarchist.

But it is a question that every civilized human, even the Hamlets of the world, have to wrestle with at one time or another. While most of us deal with the problem by putting our hopes to sleep, others, the intellectuals, deal with it through exorcism, by finding an objective correlative that will petrify our yearnings rather than nourish and broaden them. In Hamlet, we witness such an effort, the effort, as described by Herman Muller, “to articulate a despair so it can be left behind.” Art provides a means to articulate that despair and to consequently escape it, but, as Hamlet shows, it is an effort doomed to failure—to failure and to isolation and to existential impotence.

The ghosts of our fathers, the ghosts that speak to us from the grave and from the mouths of our parents and our teachers, must be listened to but they don’t have to be obeyed. The past does not have to be exorcised or to determine us. That attempt at determination, that social programming, in fact, must be resisted, just as Hamlet and McCandless resisted it, by insisting on one’s non-meaning and wildness—by refusing to become an objective correlative that can be owned—by maintaining one’s solitude and one’s otherness in the face of a reified world attempting to tame, largely by shaping our desires into fetishes, our natural passions.

Both Hamlet and McCandless succeeded in their resistance (or would have succeeded, I’m presuming, had they lived). They learned that the only way to preserve their solitude and their authenticity was by engaging the other as other—by relating creatively to the life around them rather than imposing their will or being imposed upon. In a sense, both learned to become artists—post-modern or Zen artists, in a way, who attempt to relate to others through experience, through untamed and unlimited experience, rather than through dogma and conceptualization. They learned to engage the world rather than symbolize it. In that respect, Hamlet’s and McCandless’ quest becomes the quest of the artist—the quest to find self-expression through poetry, through “the incantation of the verse” instead of through the manipulation of concepts and language that would define and thereby minimize rather than intensify the experience of the audience. By not identifying a clear objective correlative, by not defining or minimizing Hamlet’s experience in any way, Shakespeare manages to engage the audience without condescension, without determining them or allowing their preconceptions to determine his expression and his actions. By altering traditional expectations of meaning and structure, the audience is allowed to experience the play afresh, without instruction. As a result, the theater experience is intensified in a way that enables the audience to relate to the play, and to the artist and characters who help create the play, in all its terrible beauty and horror--as "the thing that it is that can be no other thing". The viewer is forced then to look life head on, in all its wildness and ineffable mystery, and to choose either to ignore or to exorcise it, but not to control it, not to make of it a possession. In other words, the artist insists on being related to honestly. At times, such an insistence might be seen as cruel (“I must be cruel, only to be kind: Thus bad begins and worse remains behind”--Hamlet Act III scene IV.), and at times, because the stipulation isn’t honored, it can be seen as evasive, but in truth it is neither.

And the struggle to realize anarchy, to strip experience of all that defines and limits it and in that way to create a space wherein honest and equal interaction is possible, is no different than the artist’s struggle to reach an audience. One does not embark on such a struggle out of feasibility but out of self-preservation. And the artist’s public struggle cannot be divorced from the private struggle. One’s private revolt, one’s efforts to preserve a healthy solitude and to avoid domination, becomes realized only through action, through public and conspicuous resistance. In an interdependent world, the self cannot exist except through relationship, which means that one cannot exorcise the problems of the world away or cast them outside of one’s self. The past cannot be left behind, but, by engaging the world as a creator, as one who magnifies possibility instead of coercing it into oblivion, the past can be transformed. And by transforming your conditioned self, the self imposed on you from patriarchical ghosts throughout the centuries, and by simultaneously transforming all your relationships and preserving your authenticity, you are also transforming the world; you are attempting to realize the anarchist both within and beyond you. In that sense, the artistic and the anarchist struggle, the struggle to achieve self-liberation, is also the struggle to achieve communion and a struggle that isn't avoidable, a struggle to love and to be loved without restraint.

****
“I believe that reading, in its original essence, is the fruitful miracle of communication within the midst of solitude. [To read (and, I might add, to honestly relate)] is to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”
Proust

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html

Getting Coffee

2007-12-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Lakota Freedom

2007-12-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Reforming Cancer

2007-11-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

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

Into the Wild

2007-10-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

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

Vultures and Photographers

2007-10-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

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

Faces

2007-10-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

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

On Reading Proust or The Music of Middle Age

2007-09-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

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 remember when I was young I used to sleep outside on our trampoline a lot. I used to pull the trampoline up next to the glass doors of my room so I could watch both the television and the stars. What I watched on the TV I don’t completely remember (old black and white movies, I think, and Magnum PI), but I’ll never forget the euphoria I felt when I gave my full attention to the starlit sky before drifting off to sleep. At the same time, I think I used, or tried to use, the two vistas to enhance each other—for the TV movie to give a story to the stars and the stars to add mystery and depth to whatever movie or program I was watching.

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

Oral history

2007-09-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

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).

A few memories, among many, of my trip to Guatemala

2007-08-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Learning to Tango: an Anarchist View of Relationships

2007-06-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

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

Elk

2007-05-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Ashes and Snow

2007-03-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

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).

Constance's Blog

2007-01-28T19:19:00.001-08:00

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.

Applying Adorno and Marcuse

2007-01-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

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

Link

2006-12-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

good article

Immigration Analogies

2006-12-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

My cousin Ron posted the following email to his blog

A lady wrote the best letter in the Editorials in ages!! It explains things better than all the baloney you hear on TV.Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration. Certain people are angry that the U.S. might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely. Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests.Let's say I break into your house. Let's say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave. But I say, "I've made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors; I've done all the things you don't like to do. I'm hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).According to the protesters, not only must you let me stay, you must add me to your family's insurance plan, educate my kids, and provide other benefits to me and to my family. My husband will do your yard work because he too is hard-working and honest (except for that breaking in part).If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my right to be there. It's only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I'm just trying to better myself. I'm hard-working and honest, except for, well, you know, the breaking in part.And what a deal it is for me!! I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of selfishness, prejudice, and being an anti-housebreaker.Oh yeah, and I want you to learn my language so you can communicate with me.”Why can't people see how ridiculous this is?! Only in America ....if you agree, pass it on (in English). Share it if you see the value of it as a good simile. If not blow it off along with your future Social Security funds.

You can read about my cousin’s response here but I want to address it as well.

I’ll start with my own analagy: let’s say I break into your house. Let’s say that when you discover me in your house, you don’t insist that I leave. You agree to share. Not only that, you agree to show me how to use many of the tools and appliances in your house that enable me to survive there. In turn, I don’t do any work—I don’t make the beds or wash the dishes or do the laundry. In fact, I insist that you start living without those things on account of your need to act more like me—more civilized and more Christian. After establishing myself in your house, thanks to your assistance, I then decide that you have to leave, so I can make room for my other family members who are immigrating on the next boat over. In other words, I take your house and send you to live elsewhere—in a far smaller and inferior house. Years later, when someone tries to move into the house I’ve claimed as my own and bequethed to my children, I label them as criminal and create stupid analagies showing how ridiculous it is for them to expect me to share.

(And remember, we didn’t just steal from the Indians; we stole from the Mexicans, too. Ironic that we now accuse them of being the criminals.)

Or here’s another analogy: Let’s say that I own some property, and I want to use that property to make a living for myself and my family. Since the soil I live on is the best in the world for growing corn, I decide to become a farmer. The decision makes sense not only because I have good soil but because I know a lot about farming and I enjoy it. Moreover, farming allows me to stay at home and be close to my family. After all, the last thing in the world I want to do is leave my homeland, where I feel connected and secure and where I can live the lifestyle that I find suitable to my needs and interests.
Unfortunately, though, when I take my extremely tasty and healthy corn to market, I find that another vendor is selling corn for less than it costs to make it. So my corn won’t sell. I decide to grow fruit instead, but I face the same difficulties; large corporations who often benefit from government subsidies can sell produce at a far lower cost than I can—so I can’t compete.
And since the only marketable skill I have is farming and since I can’t afford to pay for an education and since they aren’t currently hiring at the multinational corporation that recently opened up across town, I realize that I can’t make a secure living for me and my family unless I decide to move. So when my uncle tells me of an opportunity to work for $6.00 an hour picking grapes in California, I decide to take it, even though it means risking my life in an illegal border crossing and even though it means a too-long separation from the family and homeland that I love.

Of course, that’s not really an analogy. It’s what actually happens in Mexico. But God forbid we point the finger at our own government when it’s so much easier to point it at a good-for-nothing, freeloading Wetback who has few means of defending himself. God forbid we admit that our “nicer houses” are built by Third World labor and resources that we’ve coerced, plundered, and stolen.

My cousin rightly points out in his blog
that we need to look at the root cause of the problem—“lack of good jobs and economic mobility in Mexico”. It’s true those are essential problems, but the actual root of the problem is the United States’ and European trade practices. Our economic policies—the policies of the IMF and World Bank, for example—and our Imperial tradition have created the economic necessity for Mexicans to come here illegally. Athough America built its economy by practicing isolationist and protectionist trade so our industries could develop independent of longer established industries abroad, we now deny that same strategy to be put into practice by the Third World. We do so because we need Third World goods and markets to preserve our way of life. If the Third World isn’t impoverished—if Third World people become self reliant or all migrate to the US—then we can’t plunder Third World resources to maintain our luxury. And that’s the real source of the problem. But God forbid we blame ourselves. God forbid we acknowledge that we—the Americans with the “nicer houses”—are the real parasites.

The Yes Men strike again

2006-11-14T09:56:00.000-08:00

Yes Men

Poem

2006-11-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

And though my body has burst
Into a thousand barely seen traces
The day will yet come
When my worst
And all, by miracle, I shall re-collect
Into a larger sum
And then
Bearing eyes of enchantment renewed
With all my thousands of faces
I will look back at you
And you will never forget.

Passion and Civility

2006-10-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

The other night I got into a political discussion with a few of my housemates and some party guests. The discussion quickly turned into a fiery debate when someone made a comment about the Third World having a choice on whether it conforms to US-designed IMF and World Bank policies. As the person implied, Third World countries have only themselves to blame for the mess that they're in because they chose to open their markets and, as a result, they chose the exploitation that decision brought with it. Long story short: it's their own damn fault that they're impoverished. Pretty ridiculous stuff, I know. But Globalization isn't what I want to write about (aside from saying that the above is easily the most uninformed opinion I've ever heard on the subject). What I want to write about—and defend—is not my (much more informed and well-evidenced) opinion, but my manner of expressing myself.

You see, when I heard the above remarks, I got angry. I got angry and I started to shout (actually, I didn't feel like I was shouting, but, apparently, everyone else in the room did), so very quickly the discussion was diverted into an attack not on my opinions but on my manner of expression. I was chastened for "trying to convince everyone that I was right" and for sounding "threatening" and for "getting mad". Mind you, I wasn't the only person who got mad. In fact, one of my opponents apologized to me afterwards for, in her words, "getting mad and telling me to shut up," and we made our peace. But I was the only person who got rebuked for my conduct (in fact, the person who apologized to me was praised the next morning for "standing her ground").

In retrospect, I'm sure much of the focus on my "passion", as one person termed it, was a red herring. It's easier to attack a person's emotional outburst than it is a well-reasoned and sound argument (and, though I was drunk and upset, I was still reasoning clearly). At the same time, I'm sure many people genuinely were bothered by my anger and genuinely felt threatened. But it wasn't me in particular that they were threatened by; what scares most people about anger is that it's a real and honest emotion and as such you can't predict or control it. Put another way, anger isn't tame—it's uncivilized. And that scares people.

In truth, my "passion" was as much a part of my argument as my reasoning. Emotional expression counts. It doesn't count in a world governed by abstract thought and abstract, bourgeoisie morality, but it counts if you value honest expression, as everyone should. Anger—and I mean genuine anger not posturing—is one of the purest and most honest emotions that exists (although I grant that it has an ugly, bullying side as well)—and it’s nothing to be afraid of. In fact, the world would be a much better place, in my view, if more people got angry. For one thing, fewer people would believe the Third World is responsible for its own poverty if more people were angry and impassioned enough to speak out about what's really happening (and maybe then the exploitation would cease). Moreover, if more people got angry about the way our government treats not just the Third World but its own citizens, then we might not have many of the problems with poverty, crime, and environmental waste that we face within our own borders—problems which every one in the discussion agreed we had to solve. Fact is, anger has a purpose. Anger emboldens us, it motivates us, and it punctuates our beliefs. In my case, I wanted to show the sincerity of my convictions; I couldn’t do that through logic alone. I also wanted to make it clear that the views held by my opponents weren’t innocuous. In my view, people who defend Globalization are defending abusers and attacking victims. That’s a serious claim and I want it to be taken seriously. Also, in order to have my more radical and already marginalized views accepted on an equal footing, I needed to show that I was not only sincere and serious about my beliefs but confident in them. You can’t accomplish that logically—not when your opponents feel that the world and God are on their side, in other words, not when you’re arguing against established opinion (i.e. Capitalism is an effective means of giving people what they want; America isn't perfect but it's the best country there is or ever has been; we’re much freer and better off today than we were in the Stone Age or at any other time in history). Logic is easy to tune out. Anger isn’t. Anger lets people know that you’re serious. Moreover, when you’re confronted by anger, the tendency is to get angry in turn—to get passionate. And when the experience becomes a passionately felt one, you’re more likely to remember, and, conceivably, learn from the event.

So it’s no mystery why people felt threatened by my anger (which, by the way, wasn’t personal; I never called anyone a name or told anyone to shut up, for example). Anger is a real threat to the system and to all those who belong to and believe in the system. Plainly speaking, the system couldn't exist if people weren't emotionally repressed. It couldn't exist if "passion" was allowed to flourish. People are afraid of passion because it isn’t phony. They’re afraid of passion for the same reason they're afraid of violence, one potential outcome of human passion. Of course violence is a common aspect of all natural interaction, including human interaction, but, living within the system as we do, we don't have to see the violence. We don't have to hunt and kill or pluck our own food; instead we go to the grocery store. So many of us are fooled into thinking that the system--i.e. governments, the "free" market, and other abstractions—and not our natural environments makes our lifestyle—no, our LIVES—possible. So instead of worshipping and giving thanks like so many primitive cultures to the wildlife that sustain us, we worship the system (and we forget the fact that our lifestyles are funded by other species AND other humans--i.e. humans in the Third World) and we defend it against everything deemed not a part of that system, such as passion.

If you believe in the system, then anger—passion of any sort—is indeed the enemy. People are confused, however, when they assume that the opposite of systemic violence and systemic aggression is non violence and pacifist, non-passionate behavior. Liberals certainly have the right idea when they attack the system's forceful abuse of power, but what many of them don't realize (and all of the people in the debate considered themselves to be card-carrying liberals) is that the problem with institutionalized violence is a class problem; it isn’t a problem with violence. The truth is that pacifism and institutionalized violence go hand in hand. To quote Feral Faun, “Pacifism is an ideology which demands total social peace as its ultimate goal. But total social peace would require the complete suppression of the individual passions that create individual incidences of violence - and that would require total social control.” He goes on: "There is no systematic violence in the wild, but, instead, momentary expressions of specific passions. This exposes one of the major fallacies of pacifist ideology. Violence, in itself, does not perpetuate violence. The social system of rationalized violence, of which pacifism is an integral part, perpetuates itself as a system.”

The bottom line is this: freeing yourself from the machine requires the liberation of your thoughts, your body, AND your emotions. Repressing the so-called beast in you will only serve to rid you of your humanity; it won’t make you freer. So people are right to be threatened by anger just as they're right to fear violent resistance and just as they’re right not to fear exclusively pacifist resistance, because anger—genuine passions of all kinds, for that matter—and violence are genuine threats to the system that people falsely believe provides them their basic needs. Repressing your natural passions is the same thing as destroying those passions—and that’s exactly what the system wants. The system can't perpetuate itself if we maintain our natural human—in other words, our animal—selves.

So don't be fooled by the pacifist pathology. If you’re passionate about your opinions, then show people that you’re passionate—express your ENTIRE self, even if, especially if, that means getting angry.

http://www.anti-politics.net/feral-faun/insurgent-ferocity.html

quote

2006-09-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings there exists an infinite distance between them, and once two people succeed in loving that distance, a wonderful living side by side can emerge, in which each learns to see the other whole, without defect, and against a wide sky.

Ranier Maria Rilke

I hate Superman

2006-07-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the Christopher Reeves movies. I did. And it isn’t that I have issues with X-ray vision, or super strength, or solid steel flesh. Like anyone else, I'm no stranger to omnipotence fantasies. In fact, what I really hate isn’t Superman at all. What I really hate is that I don’t hate Superman. I hate that the gimmick works on me.

Superman, after all, is a disempowering myth, and, unfortunately, it works. As with most feel-good movies, the Superman series doesn’t make me happier to be alive. It makes me sad that the real world isn’t more like the movies. It makes me wish I had superpowers. Moreover, it makes me tolerate the dullness of reality by encouraging a regression into make-believe and pseudo happiness. Like Clark Kent, I’ve dealt with abusive bosses, inconsiderate women, and bully male coworkers. But unlike Clark Kent, I can’t put a cape on and have all my problems go away. What I can do, though, is go to the movies. I can indulge in fantasy. I can watch someone else put on a cape and make his and the rest of the world's problems disappear. In the movie world, at least, we know we're safe.

Yeah, I understand that Superman, once he dons his cape and tights, fights evil and injustice non-stop. He doesn’t run away. True. But he doesn’t exactly fight the system, either. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the movie or the comic book or the tv shows, Superman never takes a political stance—he preserves the status quo. Goody, well-assimilated immigrant that he is, he protects Metropolis from the enemy aliens who haven’t bought into the American way of life the way he has. In short, Superman is nothing more than a status fantasy. By day, he’s a mild mannered mistreated and incompetent reporter, but none of that matters, because Clark Kent isn’t real (just as “normal” Harry Potter or Scott Parker isn’t real); it’s all an act. Superman, after all, is the true identity. In other words, the workaday world with its mores and values doesn’t matter; it isn’t real. What’s real is the mythic fantasy. And this, no doubt, is what Americans want to believe—that their private, juvenile, fantasy-embodying, escapist selves are real and the guy who goes to work 40 to 60 hrs. a week with 10 to 20 hour commutes tagged on is the fake. The real me isn’t the “me” that exists in the here and now; it’s the inflated me that I know someday I’ll become—the “me” that is promised by the system and “the American Way”, that will have everything he wants, that will live entirely in a world of fantasy, abstraction, and cybernetics.

So let’s face it, Superman doesn’t fight for the little guy—for people; he fights for the powers that be—for Metropolis (a city, like all cities, dependent on imported goods that it hopes to control the supply of by whatever means possible). When he strays from this goal, as he did in Superman Four when he tries to eliminate nuclear weapons, his audience goes cold. What Superman fanatics really want is a guy who preserves all the hype and adolescent power fantasies of the American way—a myth that makes America look like what it says it is rather than what it ACTUALLY is. In a sense, Superman is America—the most boring, meekest, modest and pure-intentioned (in the out-of-ignorance aspect) person on the playing field: an ordinary mild-mannered reporter on one level, an everyday joe, but an invincible hero when sacrificed to a higher power—to the American way. Rephrased: because you in yourself are weak, empty, boring, and timid, you need to identify yourself with something greater—a higher power—such as your religion, America, the Party, the race, God, the movies, or the myth of Superman.

The chief enemy of morality--and art--is fantasy.
Iris Murdoch

Global Warming

2006-06-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from and analysis of the handout given at the end of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

Ten Things You Can Do

Want to do something to help stop global warming? Here are 10 simple things you can do and how much carbon dioxide you'll save doing them.

Change a light: Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

Analysis: We made up the figure of 50 light bulbs per household (by counting the number in our house, which seems pretty typical of houses around here). 50x150=7500 lbs carbon dioxide per household. Multiply by 105,480,101 households (2000 Census http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_DP1&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U) this comes to 395,550,378 tons of carbon dioxide (using short tons, not metric tons here)

Drive less: Walk, bike, carpool, or take mass transit more often. You'll save one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile you don't drive.

Analysis: We figured a 50% reduction in driving. Annual miles driven is 2.3 trillion (https://www.worldwatch.org/node/99) Half of that is 1.15 trillion miles, which translates into 1.15 trillion pounds, or 575,000,000 tons of CO2 saved.

Recycle more: You can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste.

Analysis: 2,400 pounds for 105,480,101 households comes out to 126,576,121 tons of CO2 per year savings.

Check your tires: Keeping your tires inflated properly can improve gas mileage by more than 3%. Every gallon of gasoline saved keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Analysis: Total US Fuel Consumption (in 2002 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004727.html) is 167,730,000,000 gallons. Five percent savings would come out to 8,386,500,000 gallons. At 20 pounds per gallon it comes out to 83,865,000 tons of CO2 saved.

Use less hot water: It takes a lot of energy to heat water. Use less hot water by installing a low flow showerhead (350 pounds of CO2 saved per year) and washing your clothes in cold or warm water (500 pounds saved per year).

Analysis: We figured two low flow showerheads per household and multiplied the clothes washing number by 2.59 (average household size 2000 Census) to get a figure of 1995 pounds of CO2 saved per household. Multiplied by the number of households (above) results in 105,216,400 tons of CO2 saved.

Avoid products with a lot of packaging: You can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.

Analysis: 1,200 pounds per household comes to 63,288,060 tons of CO2 saved.

Adjust your thermostat: Moving your thermostat down just 2 degrees in winter and up 2 degrees in summer could save about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

Analysis: 2,000 pounds per household comes to 105,480,101 tons of CO2 saved.

Plant a tree: A single tree will absorb one ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

Analysis: Using a 40-year average lifespan for a tree (http://www.friendsoftrees.org/tree_resources/facts.php), we figured that each tree would save 50 pounds of CO2 per year. If each person in the US (299,084,893 US Census Bureau Population Clock http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html) plants one tree, that results in 7,477,122 tons of CO2 saved (temporarily sequestered) per year.

Be a part of the solution: Learn more and get active at ClimateCrisis.net.

Analysis: We didn't figure any particular carbon savings coming from visiting this website.

Summation:

Total carbon dioxide savings if every person in the US does all of these things: 1,462,453,182 tons.

Total annual CO2 emissions in the US (2004 figures http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/UniqueKeyLookup/RAMR6P5M5M/$File/06FastFacts.pdf ) (converted from metric tons) is 6,600,572,400 short tons.

Total carbon dioxide savings represents 22.2% of the total. If every man, woman, and child in the US made all of the behavioral changes listed above, the total CO2 saved in a year would represent 22.2% of the total. This is just for CO2. Other greenhouse gases are not included in this calculation.

Now...here's the extra credit problem: What is the current yearly percent increase in US CO2 emissions? How many years of growth would it take at this level to wipe out (in absolute terms) the savings calculated above?

Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

*** the above was copied from a listserv I belong to.

Interpretation: There isn't a "safe" solution. The problems are systemic. If we want to end global warming, we've got to bring down the system.

a few quotes

2006-06-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

Even the best recipe book is no match for the worst-cooked meal.

Aldous Huxley

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live
without and know we cannot live within."

James Baldwin

What you risk reveals what you value.

Jeanette Winterson

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the
same

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place
every day.

Albert Camus

The Death of Hope

2006-05-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Not that I ever believed that Horatio Algier bullshit in the first place, but there’s an interesting story here which offers conclusive proof that America is NOT the land of opportunity—that in fact most European and Asian countries put us to shame when it comes to upward economic mobility. In Denmark, for instance, you have a 14% chance of rising from poverty to be among the wealthiest 5%, whereas in America you have merely a one percent chance—or a .05% chance if you’re Black (Federal Reserve Bulletin).

None of this really surprises me, yet I was still dismayed to read about the poll showing that today nearly 80% of Americans believe that you can be born poor and become rich through hard work alone, but only 65% of Americans held that conviction in 1984 when the income gap was considerably smaller than it is now. Maybe some people will see in those numbers a cause for satisfaction—a testament to the indomitable and optimistic spirit of America. But I see something more dismal--a sign that Americans, no matter how badly they're lied to, will continue to believe that everything is okay and fail to take any action to improve their conditions.

That’s sad. But as much as I’d like to get on my high horse here, I can’t. I can’t because, like it or not, I’m a product of my environment and I, too, am an optimist. In my best moments, I’m not. In my best moments I don’t have expectations either positive or negative; I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. But when things aren’t going right, I, like most Americans, revert to dreaming and hoping instead of action. That’s the American way.

This pattern of behavior becomes most prominent in those moments when I’m vulnerable—in a relationship, for example. That’s because fear and hope are really two sides of the same coin. As a lovely Buddhist saying puts it: hope and fear chase each other’s tails. When we place expectations on a relationship (or anything for that matter)—whether that relationship be the one we have with our government or with a lover—we essentially kill the connection between the two parties; we turn the relationship into a commodity meant to yield certain goods and/or services instead of—well, instead of a relationship. We place our emphasis on what could be instead of on what is. And when you do that you’re not really relating at all; you’re manipulating. As a result, you stop seeing the relationship for what it is, and, in the case of the relationship between American citizens and their government, the abusive aspects of the dynamic go unacknowledged. As the income gap widens, our belief in the promise of prosperity becomes more deep-seated. The dream trumps the reality. Promise, not connection, defines the relationship. And consequently, the relationship comes to depend on its assurances rather than the intimacy you feel for each other—on hope rather than awareness. And hope kills.

I know. I know. Hope is supposed to be a good thing—a gift from the gods to compensate for all the ills let loose from Pandora’s box. But I see it differently (and more pessimistically). To me, hope wasn’t given as a gift at all. To me, Pandora’s box was a box full of evil. Period. Hope should not only be included among all the other malignities, it should stand out as maybe the most pernicious—the one that makes all the other afflictions stick (analogy compliments of Derrick Jensen). Without hope, after all, we might be more inspired to remedy our other problems—to put up some fight. But as long as we have hope—as long as Americans believe the system is capable of reform, for emample—the less likely we are to challenge the status quo.

Still, like I said before, I’m hardly one to talk. I fall into the hope trap all the time in my relationships. In fact, I’m doing it right now. I’m in a relationship that scares me a little bit, because I know what it will take to make it work—honesty and concession—but acting that way makes me feel vulnerable, which makes the alternative to intimacy more and more appealing. And the alternative is to settle for hope. As long as you have hope, you don’t need responsibility; you don’t need to act. The fantasy of the relationship takes precedence over the real thing. I know all that. And I know a relationship can’t work (at least not in the way I want it to work) unless both sides are committed to avoiding the fantasy, yet, somehow, I still prefer the fantasy. I prefer to extract myself from the moment and focus on the relationship’s positive or negative potential instead of living with the natural tension (and tension isn’t always a bad thing) of trying to connect with someone. Put another way, I get scared. My fear then drives me to live on in hope and exile, where I fail to take responsibility for my decisions. Like the American I am, I live in naïve optimism instead of action and sincerity. And that’s pretty fucking hopeless.

Fantasy

2006-04-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve had this fantasy about selling everything I own and disappearing. And I mean really disappearing—disappearing from Denver, from my job, from family and friends, and even, and most importantly, from myself. I dream of hitchhiking to another country, changing my name, giving up every interest or mannerism that ever defined me, and starting over.
Of course I won’t do it; I’m too encumbered and attached to my lifestyle to give everything up. But I don’t think I’ll ever be happy until I can. At the same time, when, or if, I’m ever capable of disappearing, I probably won’t fantasize about it.

Things

2006-03-28T18:31:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

Attn:

2006-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

Gone to Mexico for a month. Blogging correspondence to resume sometime in March.
Hasta luego!

Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-29T22:10:00.000-08:00

Just saw the film Brokeback Mountain. It's a sad movie, and it got me to thinking about relationships. Bottom line is this--gay, straight, inter-species, it doesn't matter; you can't have a love story about two people who actually live together.

To Burn Or Not To Burn

2006-01-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

The other day I made an interesting realization: many of the starkest memories in my life are of dreams, not actual incidents. Moreover, the few vivid memories I have of actual experience are from early childhood—before I became civilized and learned to conceptualize the world and before dream and reality became clearly distinct. As an adult, the sensual poignancy of my waking life seems to diminish more every year, but the impact and drama of my dreams remain as strong as ever—stronger, sometimes, than pivotal events like my marriage, my first sexual experience, my first time teaching a class, or visits to famous landmarks or museums. This indicates, in my case at any rate, that dreams are significant. They aren’t just random neurons firing at will. Or, actually, maybe they are--but so what? Is real life any less random? And does randomness prohibit meaning? I don't think so; meaning is created, not predestined. And like our waking experiences, dreams, whether random or not, have something to teach us, provided we're willing to learn (and maybe we do ascribe their meaning after the fact, as we re-envision them, but that doesn’t reduce their impact or relevance).

One dream I remember as being especially noteworthy was about my father. He was imprisoned at the top of a large wooden tower that had been set on fire. I was watching him from the ground below. As the flames grew higher, he stood at the tower’s edge and prepared to leap off. I yelled at him not to, pleading for him to bear the flames just a little while longer, but to no avail. He plunged to his death, and I woke up.

I had this dream when I was in my early twenties and just about to graduate college. In other words, I was about to enter the so-called real world, to leave the carefree life of my youth behind, and become a part of the adult workforce. In that context, the two participants in the dream are more likely representatives of two sides of my self—the young self, staring up at the menacing structure I would soon have to enter; and my future, elder self, which was being burned alive inside the same structure.

As I think about the dream now, I see a prophecy fulfilled—at least in part. If the dream were to reoccur, I imagine I’d see it from the reverse perspective: looking down at my symbolic son while I suffered the fire’s wrath, then leaping headlong into the void to abolish my pain, my son's disappointed eyes being the last image I see before smashing into the earth's surface. Burning is what adult life often feels like to me—like a blaze that imprisons and consumes. And the temptation to “leap”—to give up the fight and ease my hardship—is a temptation I fight almost every day, both in the literal sense of contemplating the bourne of no return and also, and more typically, in the figurative sense of dulling my troubles in TV or alcohol or daydreaming or sugar (or religion, when I was younger)—but not just dulling my troubles, dulling, and annihilating, my whole self along with them. What I mean is that I constantly fight the temptation to diminish the power and impact of my life by decreasing my awareness of and my participation in the actual living world. And I’m not alone in that.

Since most Americans hate their jobs, they start to envision happiness as a state of inactivity—kind of like being dead. As a result, they use the fruit of their labor to purchase things like computer games, TVs and DVD players, MP3s, Romance novels, and so on … in other words, things that encourage passivity—things that don’t require active agency as much as compliant admiration and fantasy building. While some commodities such as computer games might give the illusion of agency, real activity—the kind that truly affects the world we live in—is forbidden. The result is that we live our lives between two equally dismal conditions—the fire and the abyss.

The activity we're allowed comes in two forms: activity we do for another—i.e. activity that doesn’t really belong to us but is done to earn money for purchases and, in the Third World, for survival; and activity that we do in our spare time and which we purchase with the activity we sell to another, or, put another way, activity designed to escape the former activity—“escapist” activity (or art-ificial activity). In either case, we’re not acting to realize ourselves—we’re acting to serve the system. We’re acting to erase the legitimacy and effect of our lives—to join the ranks of the living dead via domestication (see Fredy Perlman at insurgent desire for more on this). The choice we’re presented with is to either merge entirely with the system—to die by fire, or to escape into darkness and isolation—and die by plummeting. It’s the story of Icarus all over again, but without the heroic connotations and without any hope of survival.

But maybe, with enough diligence, we can find another option. As my dream suggests, the flames of life might not be as punishing as we imagine them. In Buddhist practice, the main objective is to achieve Nirvana, which translates, literally, as the extinguishing of the fire. Only the fire of Buddhist imagery isn’t extinguishable. According to the ancient Brahmans, when a fire was extinguished it went into a detached or latent state. Rather than ceasing to exist, it simply freed itself from any particular fuel source—it became “unbounded”. Fire also features prominently in Buddhist art and mythology as a force for transformation. In the Tibetan Mandelas, for example, fire is drawn at the outer edge of the image to represent the transformation that has to take place before entering the sacred territories within. In the Western World, too, fire is often used as a symbol of transformation (the Phoenix, to name just one), and it seems likely that this might have something to do with the fire depicted in my dream, as well.

A burning tower is as good a metaphor for my current life as I can think of. The world I live in IS on fire; it’s consuming itself, and me and its other inhabitants, out of existence. At the same time, escape, while tempting, is not an option. The flames are inextinguishable. That leaves only one alternative—to live within the twilight of the two world's--to practice, and to recognize, what Buddhists refer to as the Middle Way. To me, that means much the same thing that it means in the Tantric traditions; it means that I have to be fully alive and open to life’s natural forces but that I can’t cling to or wish to possess those forces. It means—get ready now, this might sound sappy—that I act lovingly instead of on principle or duty or for hope of reward. It means that I act without selfishness or ego. What it doesn’t mean, though, leastwise not to me, is that I act non-violently.

I know. I know. The first precept of Buddhist ethics is to abstain from harming living things. But I don’t care. For one thing, I’m only a half-assed Buddhist, anyway, and for another, I don’t think pacifism is the correct tag for that precept. If you shoot someone while he’s in the process of massacring your family, you’re not harming life—you’re protecting it. And if your country’s government is hell bent on the destruction of all living things to serve its elitist interests, then you ought to do anything within your means to stop it—including acts of violence. You can do as much "harm" to other living things through pacifism as you can through blood-letting, and, in some cases, the latter option serves the greater good. That's obvious. Defensive violence is not the same as an act of aggression. Sometimes the bully really won't leave you alone until you fight back.

During the Vietnamese War, Buddhist monks were known to set themselves on fire as an act of protest (click here for a picture:flaming buddhist). Onlookers marveled at how serenely they bore the flames, never grimacing, never breaking their postures, never screaming out in pain. Now, I’m not necessarily endorsing their methods—there are other ways to be heard--but torching yourself for a cause does say something about commitment and sacrifice—and about lack of ego. Nevertheless, it’s also a violent act—a violent act AND a loving act. In the words of their fellow Buddhists “…they [monks and nuns] had been driven to take the stand they had by their profound compassion for their suffering people, and by the fact that there was literally no one else who could speak for the war-weary people and their longing for peace.” So this very clear act of harming another living thing—the actor’s self,in this instance—was not seen as a violation of the First Precept. As Thich Nhat Hanh explained, "the compassionate intent of self-immolation overshadows the argument that it’s harmful". In sum, acting lovingly trumps acting violently—it trumps the ideological precept.

With that in mind, we can’t, if we’re serious about struggling with and for the oppressed, rule out violence as a means to further our resistance. Acting violently doesn’t mean “you’ll become just like them.” You’ll become just like them when you act out of the same egoistic mindset that they do—when you act selfishly instead of lovingly, or, when you act in obedience to a principle or precept, instead of from the heart. That’s it. No need for a bunch of philosophizing here. And I’m not saying that you MUST act violently. Maybe that’s not your path. I’m simply saying that we can’t rule it out.

Okay, now back to my dream. I don’t think it was telling me to pick up my gun and head for the jungles in Chiapas. The reason I bring up the issue of violence is to show how easy it is to retreat into passive, escapist, death-loving pseudo action—to take the leap from the tower instead of to bear life in its entirety. Unquestioned and unwavering obedience to any principle or law, even a principle or law of non-violence, is an act of submission and escape—not love. As I’ve stated in other entries (Action and Art, On Instinct and Intelligence), when you follow principle you inevitably make actions secondary to concepts. (To reiterate what I said in Action and Art: Instead of being in the act of loving someone, you "fall in love" or "find love". The principle--of love, in this case--becomes the subject of the action.) That's what principles do—they exalt themselves and objectify their followers. If you have a principle, you don't need to be responsible for your behavior, because you're just following a code. And codes also take emotion out of your decision making; they suggest that you can reach a moral decision by adhering to an abstract rule, excluding all other factors. You don't have to feel anything—or think anything, for that matter—and you don't have to take any risks; you get to maintain your unearthly purity. Principles also imply that words are richer than experience, an idea that Buddhism does a good job of debunking.

In a nutshell, what I think my dream was telling me is that there is no refuge from love. But maybe love isn’t the best word choice in this case. Maybe a better choice—one less imbued with sentimentalism—is responsibility. Existentialism 101—you and only you—not God, not a precept, not an institution, not an ideology, not your Mommy and Daddy—are responsible for your actions, and you alone have to bear and recognize that responsibility. You have to bear it when it costs you friendships or romantic interludes, when you lose sleep or when the anxiety becomes so intense that you contemplate suicide. And the only way to bear the full weight of life's responsibility—to be fully aware and fully committed—is to not be bounded by the inferno that surrounds us—to live within the flames but not be imprisoned by them. And the only way to accomplish that (gonna get sappy again) is through loving others. That means accepting our mutual dependence and realizing that you can’t, by yourself, escape suffering. It means that you can't ever find solitude. Bodhisattva like, you have to live within the inferno for the sake of the living world. You can’t escape your responsibility—not even in your dreams.

****

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

tags:
anarchist
buddhism

Colola Beach

2006-01-17T19:38:00.000-08:00

This is where I'll be throughout the month of February:Colola Beach, Mexico
Check out the thatch hut where I'll be sleeping!

Letters of Support

2006-01-09T19:55:00.001-08:00

If anyone wants to write letters of support to the activists arrested on Dec. 7, the information is listed below. Don't expect a response, but I know the letters are greatly appreciated.

Here's a link about the story:

arrests

*Darren Thurston #701415
*Multnomah County Inverness Jail
11540 NE Inverness Dr.
Portland, OR 97220
*
Daniel McGowan #1407167*
Lane County Jail
101 W 5th Ave
Eugene, OR 97401
USA

*Chelsea Gerlach #1308678*
Lane County Jail
101 W 5th Ave
Eugene, OR 97401
USA

*Kevin Tubbs #1213751*
Lane County Jail
101 W 5th Ave
Eugene, OR 97401
USA
.

PS: My cousin Ron also has a blog--lots of thoughtful, intelligent entries here (including a critique of my blog). Well worth the read.

2006-01-07T15:36:00.001-08:00

I know I’m going to lose a lot of street cred with my anarchists pals, but I have to come clean—I love to ski. I know the resorts are bad for the environment, and I completely support the ELFers who fire bombed the resort here in Co. (two of whom, by the way, have been arrested now. If you want to write them your support, see the above entry). But if I could have my druthers, I’d like ski resorts to be one of the last vestiges of civilization to come down.

This year I bought what’s called The Five Mountain Pass. For $360, I can ski year round at five different resorts. That’s a pretty good deal. Yesterday was my third time up, and the first time I spent the whole day on the black diamonds. It was great! I’m skiing as well as I’ve ever skied in my life—in spite of an almost ten year lay off and a body that’s well past its athletic peak. Part of the reason it’s so fun is that I’m not as competitive as I was when I was younger, and skiing doesn’t reward competitiveness (unless you’re a racer, I guess). If I try to show off or even if I try to ski better, then I fall apart. The only time I ski well is when I shut my mind off and just go. If I look down the mountain and think: “Damn, that’s pretty steep”, then I fall apart. If I look over my shoulder and see another skier I want to outdo, I fall apart. If I get lazy and expect things to just happen naturally, I fall apart. But if I focus without thinking—I know that sounds contradictory—if I block out every distraction except my line down the hill, then I ski the hell out of every bump and cranny I touch. And it's effortless. And then if I think: “I’m skiing the hell out of every bump and cranny I touch,” I fall apart.
I think there’s a lesson there that goes beyond skiing.

other blogs

2006-01-04T14:26:00.000-08:00

On my last post, edjog left an interesting comment about how heroic or noble action depends, in large part, on how you feel at the moment--whether you slept well the night before, etc. He's got a pretty cool site at: edjog. Check it out. My friend Lisa also informed me that she has a blog. You can check that out at: lisa My Brother-in-Law's blog is: trav And my friend Lorraine is at: lorraine
More to come.

new year blahs

2006-01-02T14:08:00.000-08:00

I've almost run out of money. I took the semester off in order to travel and ski, but didn't expect my savings to dry up so quickly. It didn't help that I bought a new car and put $4500 down when I could've put down ... well, zero, but that's another matter. As things stand right now, I need five to seven hundred dollars before I leave for Mexico--and that's what I'm thinking about as 2006 begins. I hate thinking about practical shit like this!!!!!

It's not only that, but when I stress over trivialities like this (and it is trivial; all I have to do is pay the withdrawal penalty on my CD, and I'm covered), every other area of my life seems to plummet. Right now, I'm feeling like a complete waste of space--like everything I've ever done in my life is worthless. I'm thinking about what a crummy activist I make. If this is as well as I handle minor stresses, how will I react to being imprisoned for resistance activities or putting my life on the line for what I believe?

Contradictions

2005-12-20T20:13:00.000-08:00

Sound of the Silent Mystics

Oh mind, let me in—
Into the deep, dark, din
Of my Oblivion--
Into the sound of the silent mystics.

Conceal me in its depths
That I might no more be left
The vain shapes my eyes beget

Or the faces I used to dream of.
Let me find no more truth in love—
In unions fated from above—
But in the sound of the silent mystics.

Let me think no more on where I’ve been
Now—now that I am comfortably within
The deep dark din of my Oblivion.

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as 'dazzling obscurity,' 'whispering silence,' 'teeming desert,' are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
William James (The varieties of religious experience)

Do I sound contradictory? I am much, I am many, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman

Action and Art

2005-12-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

This morning I watched a docudrama about the Rwandan genocide. In one scene a Huntu man, loyal to “the party”, is stopped at a roadblock and made to watch his Tutsis wife and their children being slaughtered in front of him; afterwards, the killers let him pass. Another scene has a group of school girls being mowed down in mass because they stood together and refused to give up the Tutsis among them. In both episodes I was brought to tears and driven to contemplate what my own behavior would have been under the same circumstances. In both cases I determined that I would’ve acted heroically. I would’ve given my life (with a fight, of course) to show solidarity with the others and hopefully reveal to my oppressors a little of their inhumanity, thus planting the seeds for change. That said, I don’t think I’m ready, and neither is anyone else, to pin an award for heroism on my chest and congratulate myself for hypothetical bravery and sacrifice. Feeling moved by a movie isn’t the same as being moved by real life—and acting hypothetically isn’t the same as acting in relation to other living things. At the same time, I don’t think life and fiction are completely separate, either. So what does it mean that I felt so moved by this movie, but when the Rwandan genocide was actually taking place I was mostly oblivious to it?

I belong to a theater group which practices elements of what’s called Theater of the Oppressed, a type of interactive theater designed to empower others to see themselves as subjects rather than objects within an imposed political system. Essentially, we try to pose the same kinds of questions I asked myself during the movie—what would you do in this situation and what would that accomplish? More than that, though, we want to show that art isn’t just a packaged reality to be passively accepted but a real “thing” to respond to and accept responsibility for—as the expression of a subject interacting with other subjects. As Samuel Beckett said, “it isn’t about something, it is the thing itself!”

In contrast, you have pornography. I read an interview of Susan Griffin yesterday, in which she condemned pornography as being deterministic. I quote: “The pornographers are very deterministic. They feel, well this is the way people are and we're just giving them what they need. But in fact that's not at all true. The culture is a human creation and we can make choices in what kind of culture we create, and culture has a profound effect on behavior.” I also found an excerpt from the book she was being interviewed about (Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature) in which she says: “And let us remember finally that we cannot choose to have both Eros and pornography; we must choose between beauty and silence. (p. 249)” James Joyce distinguishes between art and pornography by claiming that art arrests the mind while pornography stimulates it. I think this is true. Moreover, I think pornography kills emotion while art heightens and at the same time transcends it. Beauty (in art or in nature) makes me feel more alive and more eager to take action—not action to satisfy a craving but action motivated by a feeling of relationship to and dependence on other living things—a feeling of thankfulness. To paraphrase Joyce, beauty enables me to see a thing as the thing that it is that can be no other thing or to see the other as autonomous and separate from myself, yet necessary to my existence. It makes me want to “act lovingly” as opposed to falling in love or giving love. It places the behavior, as opposed to the principle or concept, as the subjective essence. Pornography, on the other hand, turns experience into an object. It locks the experience down, pigeonholes it, defines it, takes away its freedom and determines it to be something. It suggests that your desires are determined rather than made, and that your desires are a part of you, when in fact they’re by definition separate and other and can never be possessed. In summary, art empowers us and makes us account for our freedom while pornography determines (makes us all the same—at one with the universe) and manipulates us.

But maybe I’m oversimplifying. Is the docudrama I saw on the Rwandan genocide artistic or pornographic? Or neither? On one hand it stimulated and made me want to do something. It prompted this writing for one (if you can call that doing). But I’m not so sure it was the movie that prompted me to write this or the discomfort I felt knowing that I could be so moved by a film when all around me real life tragedies are going on that I’m unaware of and unmoved by. Is art a replacement for experience? By vicariously experiencing these people’s sufferings am I protecting myself from them—denying responsibility for them? In art, aren’t we primarily living in the past or the future—in our imaginations instead of our hearts? Aren’t we eliminating risk from our experiences? I’m wondering if art doesn’t help us maintain our purity in the world by presenting us with clear-cut decisions which don’t require compromise.

While I’m writing this, there’s a movie called Speak playing on TV. I’ve seen it before and, like the docudrama on Rwanda, it moved me to tears several times. Speak is a pretty cheesy movie, though, and hardly what I’d intuitively call art. The bad guys are clear-cut stereotypical villains and the good guys are clear-cut stereotypical heroes and the victims are clear-cut stereotypical victims. And I think the docudrama on Rwanda is probably closer in substance and style to Speak than it is to Hamlet or War and Peace. The villains in both movies are easy to hate, and the choices represented in both movies are the kinds of choices we’d all like to have in real life, but can’t. Right now I’d like to go out and do something. I’d like to go out and give money to a homeless person, fight alongside a freedom fighter in the Third World, make an abused woman feel like she’s a human being—anything besides sitting here in front of my computer and bitching into a word processor. In short, I’d like to act heroically (even if only for appearances sake). But those heroic choices aren’t available. The homeless person I give money to might grow increasingly reliant on the generosity of others and view him or herself with less and less respect. The freedom fighter might use my assistance to replace one repressive regime with another. The abused woman might see my concern as yet another manipulation or come on. So how can I act in a way that really communicates who I am or want to be (and heroic isn’t how I really want to be but an egoistic fantasy, but that’s another subject)? Through art?

Doesn’t real life and real freedom require that we sully ourselves—that we act period instead of for the sake of principle? Doesn’t art preserve principle? Preserve our dignity and our selves as objects? In that sense, isn’t all art pornographic? Or can art avoid objectification by calling attention to itself as art, by maintaining its ambiguity and declaring itself as behavior rather than dogma? There is, naturally, an obvious difference between Deep Throat and Speak—between pornography and cheesy but well intentioned movies, that is. And there’s even a bigger difference between Sade (educated porn but still porn) and Shakespeare or Dante or Emily Bronte or Jane Austen or Rembrandt or Bergman or Bach. I think pornography deadens but art enriches. I think art enhances awareness and immanence. At the same time, it memorializes and kills. It replaces reality with language and ideology. It oversimplifies and delays action. It encourages myth and fantasy. And if we lived in a pure perfect world then there might not be any need for it, but that isn’t the world we live in. And if we want to live in the actual world, we have to tolerate ambiguity and imperfection and compromise. We have to pollute our images and we have to be willing to take risks. So art isn’t perfect, but if it empowers people to take action and to better appreciate natural beauty, as I think it often does, then it matters, even if in turn it risks the abstraction of real life. Art isn’t our salvation but neither is it our ruin. Some art works are more empowering than others and some works of pornography are less degenerate than others. If the world we live in is artificial then maybe it’s necessary to use artifice to get us out of that world, no matter how simplistic or even emotionally manipulative the art form might be. Art that exposes our cultural assumptions—that lifts the veil we cover nature with—that transforms us—is valuable and empowering. A docudrama reminding me of a genocide that took place while I was alive to help prevent it may not be Shakespeare but it is art and it is something that matters—and so is writing about it … I guess … maybe….

*****

There's no such thing as a compassionate person who doesn't act compassionate, as a thoughtful person who can't articulate her thoughts, or a villian who doesn't participate in acts of villiany. We are what we do. Period. Actions beget principles, not the other way around. And the same goes for emotions. If you don't have a heart, act as if you do, and you'll have one. Fail to act, and you'll be left with nothing except your purity.

*****

To know and not to act is not to know.
Ancient Chinese proverb

Awareness

2005-12-06T18:34:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went out to celebrate Halloween (this is a dated entry). I had a great time, but there’s one particular not-so-great moment that stands out. Towards the end of the night, we stopped off at a bar, where I met, talked to, and exchanged email addresses with an attractive woman named Laura. She probably isn’t my type, but I was flattered by the attention and we were having a fun time together—so much fun, in fact, that when a homeless man entered and sat down a few seats away from us, I did everything within my power to ignore his presence. He didn’t do anything wrong—he didn’t act strangely, emit any body odor, or ask me for money—yet, as my body language no doubt made clear, he was an unwelcome intrusion into my life. The reason was obvious. I was having a good time, and I didn’t want anyone disturbing it.

It was pretty easy to ignore him, too. I can’t tell you how long he sat there; when, or if, he left the bar; nor would I even have a memory of seeing him if it weren’t for the fact that my housemate had spoken to him that night and later recounted to me his extremely tragic story (he killed his wife and kids in a drunk driving accident). Who’s to say how many people I casually dismiss from my life in the same manner—not only the homeless, but prison inmates, Native Americans on reservations, the disabled, the unattractive, the socially awkward, the depressed, the abused—anyone who fails to enhance my good time. And what does it mean to have a good time? In this case, it meant that I was fitting in. I was following the appropriate conventions of dress and behavior and, in turn, being included in conversations, flirted with, and acknowledged as a real human being. That’s rewarding. Shallow, yeah, but still rewarding. And that’s why acknowledging a homeless person beside me creates such discomfort. Acknowledging him means acknowledging the reality of life outside the group, which means acknowledging a threat to my good time. Acknowledging a homeless person also means that in some way I have to relate to him. That means becoming part of his world and experiencing a part of his isolation—an isolation I never feel too far removed from and which scares me more than anything else. Moreover, it means acknowledging my own privileged situation, which brings up the reality of my being an oppressor—or part of an oppressive system, at the very least.

And this is why I live the way I do. This is why I don’t buy some land in the forest and learn how to practice permaculture. It isn’t because life within civilization is safer or more convenient. (With crime, traffic dangers, air pollution, war, carcinogens, and terrorist activity civilization can hardly be described as safe. And working forty plus hour work weeks with two to three hour commutes tacked on is hardly my idea of a convenient lifestyle.) It’s because I don’t dare to become a social outcast. And this is why I so often fail to act on my beliefs. The opportunities to act on my beliefs and become the person I want to be are everywhere, but I don’t seize them because I don’t want to exchange social isolation for private fulfillment.

To some extent, compromise is inevitable. If we give up our membership in society we likewise give up our ability to influence that society—and that helps no one. Nevertheless, being a part of society doesn’t mean that we have to lose touch with everything outside of it—with the homeless, the Third World, the animals, and so on. We don’t have to surrender our natural selves entirely. Nor do we have to participate full-force in our society’s exploitation of the natural world and non-elites. Nor do we have to ignore the homeless and other outcasts. We can, with help—and only with help—learn to put up some resistance and become more aware of ourselves as repressive vectors and agents, and with that awareness we might gain the courage to live outside of the system. But we can’t do it alone.

Social isolation doesn’t just scare me; it’s an absolute terror. It terrifies me for two reasons: one, it’s a real and ever-present possibility in my life, and two, it represents the loss of the one thing I care most about—relationship. Anyhow, that’s what I tell myself—that’s how I rationalize my fear. In truth, you could argue that it isn’t social isolation that scares me but class isolation. But see, that’s part of the problem. You can’t separate the two. I think I would be content with the company of the underclass if the underclass would be content with me—but I don’t think that’s possible. In many ways, prison life represents my ideal lifestyle—lots of free time, no responsibility, relatively few stresses. In fact, my lifestyle now isn’t much different from that of your average inmate’s. And I could say the same thing about the lifestyle of the average homeless person or institutionalized mental patient. It’s pretty similar to mine (even in terms of income), except in one key respect—I’m a professional, and, as such, I have a degree of status in our society which confers on me a certain degree of esteem and the freedom that comes with that esteem. For that reason, my language is different, my dress is different, my habits are different, and my methods of relating to others are different. And those are the qualities that social interaction is based on. That’s what having a good time is based on, too, but, to be clear, having a good time has nothing to do with relationship.

Relationship depends on bringing your whole self to a situation, and you can’t bring your whole self to a situation if you’re in denial about the homeless person setting next to you. Having a good time, in most cases, is opposed to being authentic and authentically relating to others. You have a choice: put on the social mask and participate in our culture or tear the mask off and risk permanent exile and isolation. And I have to be honest. For me, the illusionary and egoistic pleasures of participating in society feel good—not as good as forging an authentic relationship with someone, but good nonetheless. On the other hand, loneliness hurts. It isn’t an abstract pain, either. It physically hurts. It hurts so bad that putting a bullet in my brain can strike me as a welcome relief—a lesser pain. And therein lies the rub. If social membership requires personal delusion, where do you draw the line? Where’s the circumference from which you can both be yourself and be in honest relation to other human beings?

I can’t remember what it’s called, but Sartre wrote a book about the Jew and the Anti-Semite, in which he suggests that secular Judaism might be a response to Jewish oppression. The secular Jew, Sartre contends, conceives of psychological processes as mechanical functionings. Being condemned by opinion, the secular Jew strives to negate the value of opinion in favor of rationality (today’s Liberalism). In this way, the Jew can recreate society in a manner which allows his equal participation in it. That’s one way of re-integrating yourself into the system—changing the system. But that method has its costs—namely, that you have to lie; you have to objectify yourself via scientific rationalism. You have to give up your humanity. That isn’t relating; it’s being co-opted. But for Sartre there is another option. You can choose to be an outcast. That is, you can will yourself into history as a doomed and exiled creation. You can accept the obligation to live an effectively unlivable life. By consenting to your isolation, you escape it. You discover your true humanity and the limitless possibilities contained therein.

And what, according to Sartre, is true for the Jew is true for all of us. You can’t become an authentic human being without renouncing the confines of society. You can’t live a dignified and truly free life, except in exile. But that doesn’t say anything about the political solution to the problems of classism, racism, sexism, or consumer capitalism. And neither does it say anything about fulfilling human needs. We need other people. We need relationship. But if our needs can’t be fully realized either in human relations or in isolation, then aren’t we doomed to suffer regardless of our choices? Isn’t life a ridiculous Catch 22?

I don’t believe so. But, for the moment, I can’t articulate why. In part, it’s because my life seems to have gotten so much more fulfilling since I’ve started to deliberately set myself apart from society. But that isn’t an entirely accurate description of what I’ve been doing. If anything, I’m becoming more involved in society, in the respect that I’m accepting more social responsibility, interacting with more like-minded people, doing more political work, going out more often, and expressing myself more openly. Concurrently, I’m more ignorant of popular culture, less willing to tolerate the company of assholes, and increasingly separate from modern interests and customs. And I’m a more complete person, too. Yet I still block out the reality of homelessness at times.

In addition, I block out women who have snubbed me, men who have exploited me, and authority figures who have failed me. It isn’t just my social inferiors I repress awareness of, I reject those higher up on the ladder, as well—those who haven’t accepted me as their equal and who thereby deny my reality in the same way that I deny the reality of homeless men who sit down next to me at a bar.

Yesterday I read an email about a woman who had been at a bar where a man tried to rape her. She yelled in fear and the man backed off. Then, as she returned to her friends she actually apologized to the man for yelling. She apologized to her would-be rapist! I’ve seen similar acts of self deference in the homeless, prison inmates (I used to teach in the prison system), and employees when confronted by acts of abuse by their superiors. It isn’t uncommon. From women loving their abusers to the poor admiring the rich, human beings find it easy to deny the realities of oppression. We deny it when we excuse our own mistreatment but also when we fail to acknowledge or thwart the mistreatment of others—or to see the abuser in ourselves. And when we deny oppression, we in effect deny reality. We enhance our good time at the cost of self (and other)-awareness. Acknowledging reality in all its ugliness, however, doesn’t have to lead to guilt and nihilism. It can be fulfilling, too.

Awareness, no matter how disturbing, doesn’t produce unhappiness. It may produce sadness, shame, gravity, remorse, or indignation—in other words, it might put an end to our superficial good time, but it doesn’t produce the inane and nauseating depression that typifies life in our culture. A good time in our culture is nothing more than a flight from discomfort, not the eradication of it. We prefer escapism because our society’s problems are seemingly so insurmountable that we can’t bring ourselves to confront them—so awareness of the disease, not the disease itself, becomes the agony we run from. When not acted on, awareness strikes us like a lost love. It hurts. It hurts in the same way that remembering the good times of a spoiled relationship hurts--it emphasizes everything that isn't. By the same token, it reminds us of the freedom and camaraderie with others we might create if we give up on having a good time—if we stop hiding behind intoxicants, religion, popular media, and Halloween costumes and face up to the suffering of our species and ourselves—a suffering wherein we might learn to be honestly happy and exceptionally sad and serious at the same time.

What isn’t conscious, can’t be consciously expelled.
Robbe Grillet (I think)

Clarifications

2005-12-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

Due to some recent confusion by several of my friends, I thought I should clarify my use of a couple terms:

Civilization:
As defined by Derrick Jensen, civilization, which is characterized by the development of cities, is any settlement of humans requiring the importation of resources. Anthropologist Stanley Diamond adds: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” That's what civilizations do--conquer and repress. They couldn't exist, otherwise, because they're fundamentally unsustainable. Being opposed to civilization, for me, means only that I'm opposed to societies that can't survive without exploitation; it doesn't mean, necessarily, that I'm opposed to all of civilization's constructs (i.e. art, technology....)

Anarchist
There are all kinds of anarchists out there--anarcho communists, situationist anarchists, anarcho feminists, anarcho primitivists, anarcho syndicalists, etc. The only common thread they all have is that they don't believe in artificial hierarchy and artificial laws (nature's rules are enough). Anarchists are NOT wild-eyed, impractical dreamers trying to create Utopia. Anarchist communities aren't perfect. Contrary to popular belief, however, they are efficient and they are sustainable and they are, or have been I should say, widely practiced by human beings--especially during our early history (Don't take my word for it, though. Do the research). When I call myself an Anarchist, I'm not advocating violence and mayhem; I'm advocating democracy and revolution. In other words, I'm neither for or against violence, but I am for bringing down civilization by whatever responsible and well thought-out means possible. Moreover, I don't believe the system (Civilization) is capable of reform--not to the degree that real democracy and freedom are achievable.

liger

2005-12-04T10:57:00.000-08:00

I just found the perfect metaphor for modern human beings. Apparently, when you cross a male lion and a female tiger you produce what’s called a Liger—an animal three to four times the size of either of the species that produced it. The reason it’s so big is that a gene present in the male lion for increasing appetite (and growth) is not balanced by a gene typically passed on by the female lion for decreasing appetite. As a result, the Liger doesn’t know when to say when. Having such a large appetite is an obvious disadvantage in the wild where you run the risk of depleting your food sources (or becoming too slow to catch them), so these sluggish and unwary creatures can only exist within zoos and protective sanctuaries—kind of like us.

quote

2005-12-01T19:48:00.001-08:00

Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can’t then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

quote

2005-12-01T19:48:00.000-08:00

I would rather shape my soul than furnish it.
Michel Montaigne

poem

2005-12-01T19:44:00.000-08:00

Rejection

I had no questions when she left
In silence I defected
A light beteemed by eyes of seraphs
Was all that I detected

And now outside chimeras dance
And every sound becomes
A voice that speaks another’s instance
Another’s fate undone

*****
quote (unrelated to poem):
There is no place for great souls in society as it exists. For man and woman both, they must seek their fullfillment outside—in crime and in death.
Simone de Beauvoir

civilian casualties and ethics

2005-12-01T19:37:00.000-08:00

Today it was announced that US casualties in the war in Iraq have reached 2119. That’s an awful lot of people, but it barely merits consideration when put alongside the number of Iraqi civilian deaths (upwards of 150,000 according to some reports). The liberal pundits prefer to focus on the American deaths, thinking, no doubt, that they have to play to America’s xenophobia to rally dissent against the war, but in doing so they fail to expose the main injustice of government aggression—that innocent people are knowingly put to death—and accordingly they spoil a great occasion to challenge people’s blind faith and support of a corrupt system. It goes without saying that the motives for the Iraqi war are beyond dubious, but even if we grant the administration its best rationalization—that we’re fighting this war to help the Iraqi people and to export Democracy and freedom to the world (stop laughing), then does that justify killing 150,000 civilians? (footnote: America represents six percent of world population and consumes almost forty percent of the world’s energy resources. Do you really think that’s an exportable product?)

Think about it. If a person acted in the same way as even the most responsible government, not one in a thousand Americans would approve. If someone blew up an elementary school, for example, in order to eliminate a serial killer who had taken refuge inside, then not even the most callous pragmatist would condone the behavior—even if the serial killer were the most prolific in history (someone worse than Columbus, maybe). And yet that’s exactly what we do every time we declare war. We condone the killing of innocent men, women, and children. No war in history has spared the innocent. We know that. And we also know that every time we declare or support a war we are knowingly making a decision to kill non-combatants. So why do we do it?

Let’s take another scenario. Say I decide to blow up a dam in order to restore an eco-system. I have a noble objective, right? And I take every precaution imaginable to ensure that no human lives are lost. Nevertheless, a group of high school kids decide to go skinny dipping downstream when I set off the explosives at 4 am. How many Americans would approve of my actions? At the same time the mayor of Denver decides to implement a Light Rail transportation system (also good for the environment, right?), but the first week of its inception nine people are killed due to traffic mishaps involving the newly-placed light rail stops. Is anyone calling for the mayor’s head?

I’m not trying to make an argument for non-violence here. Life’s choices are far too complex to be governed by a particular ideology, no matter how well-intentioned the motives that inspired it. But I do hope to show how lenient we are in applying our own standard of ethics to government actions. That’s because ethics are pure hyperbole. They have little to do with right or wrong and everything to do with protecting what is ours or perceived to be ours (i.e. the precise opposite of altruism). Though our own ethical standards condemn our government’s behavior, we continue to honor our political leaders, pledge allegiance to the flag, and celebrate the Fourth of July. We do so, if we do so, because we’re cowards—because dissent and resistance require risk, and risk means potentially losing our status and our egoistic identities, which means potentially becoming something other than, and less than, American.

Civilian deaths during WWII (the good war): 25,000,000.

poem

2005-12-01T19:34:00.000-08:00

On Reading Paul Eluard and Thinking of Gale

She gives me flowers every Winter
Her dry breath in the Spring
Her voice when I hear not a whisper
Her silence when she sings

Alone, her eyes are upon me
Beside her, I disappear
Each thought I have defies me
Is voiced, and dies in my ears

She brings me shade in beams of sunlight
Dreams in the brightest day
Night that prevents me from sleeping
Words when I’ve nothing to say

*****
quote: (unrelated to poem)
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid.
Franz Kafka

solitary confinement

2005-12-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

In 1829 Eastern State prison in Pennsylvania conducted an experiment. They built an underground correctional facility that denied inmates any knowledge of the outside world. Inmates were deprived of sunlight; they couldn’t write or receive letters from loved ones; they couldn’t have visitors, or receive news of worldly events (and when taken out of their cells, they had to be hooded so as to prevent them from even seeing a natural living object). The idea was a puritanical one. You could reform the corrupted by denying them contact with the corrupting forces of society. Everyone, according to Quaker theology, has the “inner light of God” within them, so by replacing social interaction with solitary reflection, an individual might become reacquainted with ‘natural’ concepts of right and wrong and thereby rehabilitate himself.

Needless to say, the experiment failed. When Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, he declared the psychological effects on the inmates to be “cruel and wrong”. He described the inmate in solitary confinement as “a man buried alive—dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair”. Moreover, studies showed the inmates to be less able to reintegrate themselves into society upon their releases, and, as expected, recidivism increased. Finally, in 1913, the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement was abandoned as a failure.

Since then, numerous studies have shown a direct link between solitary confinement and mental illness—not to mention physical disease and death. As put by psychologist Angie Hougas: The complied research from … models and other studies revealed there are symptoms that can be attributed to conditions of confinement. Some of these symptoms are: perceptual distortions, illusions, vivid fantasies (sometimes along with vivid hallucinations) and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli. Along with these, some people developed observable syndromes which include cognitive impairment, massive free-floating anxiety, extreme motor restlessness, emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies (sometimes along with fearful hallucinations) and in some cases, delirium like conditions. EEG's confirmed the same abnormalities typical of stupor and delirium. It was also seen that there were organic changes in the brain similar to stupor and delirium.

Yet, despite the problems and despite any evidence of ameliorating effects, the current American penal system not only refuses to abandon solitary confinement as a tool for modifying inmate behavior, the practice is now increasing. Currently, more than 20,000 prisoners are kept in SuperMax and SHU prisons, where the use of solitary confinement is widespread. The idea for these prisons began in 1983 when a federal prison in Marion, Illinois ordered a permanent ‘lockdown’ after inmates killed two guards. The concept caught on, and the first SuperMax prison was opened two years later in Florence, Colorado. Today, more than 38 states have similar institutions.

The trend is disturbing, but not in the least surprising. Solitary confinement is, after all, an American idea. It originated here and continues to flourish here in spite of almost unanimous disapproval by the rest of the world. Not even the rationale for it has changed much since the 1800s. While no longer appealing to puritanical doctrine directly, its advocates continue to defend its use as a means of modifying degenerate behavior. Correction officials say they need it as an incentive for good conduct and to maintain order within the system, even while studies point to an increased propensity for violence in prisons where the procedure is commonplace.

One might be tempted to see in such an obdurate refusal to give up a failed practice a uniquely American pathology. The Quakers, though, like the Calvinists and other puritan religious groups that were prominent in early America, were influenced in large part by European Catholic tradition, and the solitary reflection advocated by puritanical thought isn’t at all unsimilar to that practiced in Catholic monasteries. Still, Europeans didn’t come up with the idea of solitary confinement, nor have they continued its practice the way we have in America. So maybe there is something about the American psyche that makes our prison system so hopelessly irrational.

We continue to build new SuperMax and SHU prisons even though most of the inmates in those prisons have release dates, and they’re going to come out a lot worse than when they came in, thanks to our blind respect for failed policy. Do we really want to propagate the number of insane felons let out in the streets or is there some method to our madness?

America is a country of loners (it isn’t just me). We prize individualism above all other virtues. Self reliance, individual liberty, personal achievement. These are the values we live by. Our heroes are rugged frontiersman and solitary, misunderstood supermen. We prefer playing computer games to talking with friends, driving our private automobiles to using public transportation, and watching television to getting to know our neighbors. We’re not a social country. And in some respects, that’s alright. The individualism championed by Thoreau and those like him is admirable. It leads to a distrust of authority, a support of the underdog, self-sufficiency, and enhanced creativity, to name but a few of its attributes. But it also has a dark side, and it’s the dark side of individualism that is frequently encountered in American society and embodied by our prison system.

In many ways, the American prison system is a microcosm for American society in general. In spite of whatever rationalizations are put forward by the higher-ups, the real motivation behind any governmental action is always power and control. This is true in prisons, and it’s true whenever our leaders wage war or raise taxes or hand out parking citations. Our government doesn’t make decisions to protect the social welfare but to preserve the interests of the men and women who own the country—namely, the people who run the corporations.

It’s interesting to note that only five years after opening, Easter State Penitentiary was investigated by the state on charges of prisoner abuse and embezzlement. Testimony indicated that inmates were often let out of their cells to do administrative duties for the staff and to do work that made money for the guards, and money laundering was widespread. The hypocrisy was revealed: the prison wasn’t being run as a sincere effort to reform criminals; it was being run to benefit the people who owned and made money from the prison.

In this light, solitary confinement makes a lot of sense. If you’re making money exploiting people it pays to not only keep those people from communicating to each other and with the outside world but to silence them altogether. In Turkey several years back, the government implemented a policy of modeling its own prison system on America’s SuperMax example. In defending the policy, officials (off the record, at least) didn’t make any duplicitous claims about reforming the inmates or cleaning up the community; they justified the new f-type prisons, as they were called, as providing a necessary secrecy to the officers. No doubt, this is why the practice of solitary confinement persists in America, too.

And if officials could get away with it, I’ve little doubt that they’d implement the practice on the country at large. In a way, our leaders have been promoting solitary confinement as the ideal lifestyle since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. This is what American individualism really amounts to, not a confirmation of the self as the subject and creator of one’s relationship to the world, but a veneration of private fantasy and separatism—the triumph of ego and desire over responsibility and awareness. In America, our heroes don’t represent the creative individuality of the artist or the lover, but the perverse individuality of the sociopath—a private omnipotence in which the self is held aloft and separated from the outside world. Americans don’t prize individualism, we prize secrecy. The reason our secrecy is so important is because hierarchy and consumer capitalism can’t exist without it. Secrecy is promoted as a catalyst for insanity, because only the insane can take seriously an economic and political system that pretends resources are infinite and some living things are more entitled than others. We exchange the complicated truth for simple insanity. And the truth is that the pie can’t continue to increase forever (the primary excuse for consumer capitalism) and the pie isn’t getting bigger for everybody, only for the rich (the very rich, I might add. According to the Federal Reserve Bulletin, since 1973 the net value of income has increased for the top 9% of Americans and decreased for the other 91%, in spite of a decline in worker benefits and an increase in the number of hours worked. And the gap has widened even more in the rest of the world). The truth is that consumer capitalism is built on exploitation, and we can’t let ourselves admit that our privileges are paid for at the expense of the Third World and other minorities. Exploitation is a double edged sword, too—it leads to lies and denials by the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The oppressors have to lie about their motives—claim that they’re helping the less fortunate, and the oppressed have to lie about being oppressed—deny the fact that they’ve come out as the losers in the game. So both sides collude in maintaining the delusion. They do so because neither side wants to give up the dream of private egoistic fulfillment. We want to believe we really can have it all.

What’s interesting about the effects of social isolation is the way they’re covered up. When inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, they don’t exaggerate their symptoms in an effort to get attention, they turn surprisingly evasive. They attempt to rationalize the effects away, or deny they’ve been adversely affected at all. This is in sharp contrast to the behavior inmates exhibit when suffering from so-called physical diseases. In those cases, the symptoms tend to be highly exaggerated or even made up, and great care is taken to secure drugs and other remedies to reduce the sufferer’s discomfort. Not so when it comes to the damaging effects inflicted on the mind.

For whatever reason, no one, not the victim or the perpetrator, wants to acknowledge insanity. We don’t want to challenge the apparitions in our own heads, and we don’t want to face up to the fact that our system of government is fundamentally irrational and psychotic, probably because facing up to that would mean admitting that possession doesn’t lead to fulfillment--that the self has limitations and that we can’t have everything we want, which means the system isn’t in service of the ever-consuming and insatiable individual but the other way around. Only if we buy into a false concept of individuality based on private accumulation and refuge is it possible to believe otherwise. On the other hand, if we can satisfy ourselves that egoism is essential to human nature (the true private self), then irrationality becomes the norm. That’s the big secret right there. It’s a secret we keep from each other, but especially from ourselves. If you believe the lie, it’s easier to perpetuate it. And once you begin lying, the lies have to pile up in defense. Before you know it, you can sell yourself on the idea that Native Americans are less entitled to live on the land than Europeans (who make better use of it), that Blacks are happier on slave plantations than on their own, that women are dumber than men because their brains are smaller, that Iraq is being invaded to promote democracy, that globalization is good for the Third World, that a corporation deserves all the rights of an individual but none of the restraints, that solitary confinement is necessary for the public good, or that consumer capitalism is sustainable. And to believe all that you have to believe that whatever happens to individuals in the public arena is somehow in their private best interests and that American individuality isn’t simply a myth designed to ensure control—a false concept that pushes people into private fantasy worlds to prevent them from knowing or admitting to knowing that their life is a lie. Put simply, you have to believe and live in an intensely solipsistic world that’s been detached from reality; you have to be insane.

And it’s the insanity that makes the practice of solitary confinement so horrific and damaging. As one inmate put it, “it’d be a lot more caring to be taken out to the desert and locked into a 5’ by 7’ tin cage and left to rot. At least then you’d know that you’re there to be punished.” Hate is something we understand; it’s human. Mechanical torture is something else entirely.

Mechanical torture is the unique specialty of modern government. In our modern prisons, computers have become the primary tools of operation: the cell doors open and close automatically, the food is delivered automatically, and human beings are needed only for the occasional emergency and to monitor and trouble-shoot the computers. It’s very efficient—efficient like a machine. And efficiency in America is another way of saying increased profit and consumption, and when profit rules, you need to preserve secrecy before anything else; you need the other to be just like you—automated and objectified, and thereby as much in service of your private desires as you are of his--like a fellow machine--a machine with no scruples and no natural connections or vulnerabilities--a completely private entity whose appetites can't possibly be in conflict with anyone else's because it isn't connected to anyone else--it's alone. In a private universe, you can’t be held accountable for your actions. You have license. And that’s what we mean by democratic freedom in America; we mean that you have license to act without consideration of the other, that you can have whatever you want and do whatever you want—in isolation and in secrecy.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/
http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/98-09%20FALL/solitary.html
http://northstargallery.com/ESP/easternstatehistory01.htm

casual sex and consumerism

2005-12-01T19:08:00.001-08:00

I met someone last weekend—someone who is smart (or well educated, at least), sexy, and … well, that’s all I know for now. She definitely perked my interests, but if she were to call me up right now and ask me to go to bed with her, I’d say no in a heartbeat. I might change my mind in the next few weeks or so, but for the time being I seem to have lost my interest in casual sex. In fact, I haven’t been interested in casual sex for about four years. For that matter, I’ve been less interested in sex overall. I’m sure that has something to do with the aging process (on the back side of thirty now) but I also think it involves my self-imposed exile from society—my deliberate withdrawal from the workforce and from popular culture and popular uses of power and appearances (to the degree that I’m able).

For one thing, my diet has changed. I’m no longer eating as much meat and I’m eating almost exclusively organic foods (but still tons of refined sugar). I’ve also decreased my work hours, my TV consumption, and sworn off pornography. In addition, I’ve made efforts to be more emotionally accessible, both to myself and to the people I care about, and to keep fewer secrets. I go hiking more often, I exercise, I meditate, I’m more politically active, and, in general, I take more risks. By that, I mean I try to act more on the things I believe in (or think I believe in), even when doing so might result in public shame or ridicule. All in all, these changes have made my life more fulfilling. Where my life hasn’t been enriched, though, is in the area of romance. Where that’s concerned, the last two years have probably been the worst of my life. I’ve dated maybe three women and I’ve only had one brief—and long distance—relationship.

Every one tells me that I’ll meet someone when I no longer care about meeting someone. But if that were true, I would never have been in a romantic relationship in my life. In fact, the ONLY times I get romantically involved are when I’m actively seeking a romantic relationship—when I go looking. Lately, though, I haven’t been looking at all. I’m “on the look”, you might say, but certainly not actively looking. The reason, I think, is that I’m happier—I’m less needy. And that might also explain why I haven’t been as interested in sex of late.

I’m also less interested in certain types of food since changing my diet, less interested in sports since I stopped watching ESPN, less concerned with making money since I decreased my work hours. The point I’m trying to make is that my decreased interest in casual sex isn’t a weakness; it isn’t a choice made for me and it isn’t a sign of my lack of manly virility or my fear of the opposite sex. It’s a healthy adaptation to circumstances. It may not be ‘normal’, but it isn’t unnatural, either. It’s a rational, positive, and willed response to consumer culture. Indeed, the only feasible way to affectively resist consumerism—to avoid being smothered by its dull perfunctory embrace—is to learn to do without—to do without excess food, excess energy, excess work, excess money, excess drugs, and excess sex. That’s what dropping out of our culture means—not participating in its consumption. And make no mistake about it, casual sex is an element of our culture, not a threat. Promiscuity may exist as an ideological prohibition, but as a practice it has never been scorned or seriously devalued, leastwise not for men, and especially not for men in positions of power. To characterize promiscuity as an act of liberation or revolt is no more than a bourgeoisie appeasement—a means of turning revolution into style.

Recently I read about a case of schizophrenia involving a Vietnamese man who had immigrated to the U.S. in the late sixties. The diagnosis was attributed to severe culture shock. Being ill at ease with American language and custom, the patient found himself reduced to a utility—“a mere category in another person’s system”. His relations with the opposite sex were particularly bewildering, because women, if accessible at all, didn’t treat him with the respect of a real man but as an exotic diversion. They didn’t take him seriously because he hadn’t been able to adapt to the environment he and they coexisted in—and he wasn’t thereby integrated into the same social reality. As a result, sex for the patient became a “segregated, obsessive, detached and, in both reality and fantasy, autistic activity”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the precise definition of casual sex? Detached? Obsessive? Segregated? Autistic? Isn’t the unfamiliarity and anonymity of the casual sex act what distinguishes it from sex within a loving relationship? And if so, isn’t our whole society schizophrenic when it comes to sexual relations (even within most marriages)? I don’t know. I suppose you could argue that both forms of sexuality can co-exist, but to say that desire for more than intimate sex is unhealthy or abnormal seems a little like arguing that some measure of schizophrenia is a requirement for normalcy. And, in a certain very real and frightening sense, I suppose it is—in the same sense that consuming more McDonald’s cheeseburgers—or any food beyond what’s needed for survival or that’s detrimental to health—is a normal response to increased advertising. But it isn’t a requirement for happiness or masculinity. Being apart from society might make you lonely from time to time, but it doesn’t have to make you feel unhappy or inadequate.

Being unwilling, or maybe even unable, to indulge in casual sex doesn’t make me less satisfied with life. Nor do I think my declining interest in sex is related solely to the aging process. If I were in a loving relationship (which is not to be confused with a monogamous relationship), I’m sure the ‘quality’ of my sex life would rival any twenty year olds. For now, though, it’s possible that being a eunuch is the only way to preserve my sexual health and sanity within an insane world. One thing I’m certain of is that artificially altering my libido to conform to social expectations, while it might make me more popular and more desirable and more sexual, won’t make me any happier—too preoccupied and obsessed to realize my misery, maybe—but not any happier—nor any manlier, either.

*****
**Incidentally, I’m not condemning casual sex (I said I’m less interested not uninterested)—in the same sense that I wouldn’t condemn myself for eating a cookie made entirely of refined sugar and preservatives—like I just did. I’m merely challenging the societal attitude that equates casual sex and conquest—and which implies that quantity of sexual experience, irrespective of meaning and intimacy, determines your sexual value and degree of manliness. I’m not being a prude.

***

There is a crisis facing sexuality. The signs are everywhere, from the saturation of public space by sexual imagery to the proliferation of Viagra. Quantity has replaced quality. The number of sexual experiences is now the criteria by which sexual fulfillment is judged, and casual sex invitations are everywhere. You can’t shop, eat, ride a bus, or see a movie without being exposed to it; as each day you are inundated with it to encourage your consumption of other products and services. Like the replacement of essential nutriment by junk food, casual sex lovers are expected to surrender real feeling and consume the phony McSex that can be more effectively controlled and used for profit than the genuine article.
A paraphrase of an article by Pete Seeger on music. (I replaced the allusions to music with sex to get this.)

***

The competition for economized love changes us. We lose our spontaneity, our free and playful self-expression. It doesn't do to act as we truly feel. We must make ourselves desirable. If we are good-looking by cultural standards, we have a big advantage, for appearance is a major part of what makes a desirable sexual commodity. But there are other useful traits--strength, sexual prowess, "good taste," intelligence, sparkling wit. And, of course, knowledge of how to play the social-sexual games. The better actor wins at these games. Knowing how to put across the right image, knowing just what role to play in what situation--this will buy you economized love. But at the expense of losing yourself.
--Feral Faun

On Instinct and Intelligence

2005-11-29T12:25:00.000-08:00

Today I went hiking. About halfway up the trail I had a moment. It happens a lot when I hike. I turn my head and see something out of the corner of my eye—a swathe of snow dotted by small yellow leaves, for example. And when I stop for a closer look, it hits me. I wouldn’t describe these moments as happy, though I certainly feel a sense of elation when they happen, and I wouldn’t describe them as sad, either, though “lacking sadness” is just as inaccurate. Neither do I feel any fear at these moments, yet my mortality is in the fullest sense palpable. No doubt I’m talking about experiences of a spiritual nature, but I’m not going to assign that label without first divesting the word spiritual of all its New Age and religious connotations.

In the Western World when we say something is spiritual we mean that it’s transcendent—in other words, that it’s divorced from nature and from the body. This isn’t what I’m talking about. And I’m not talking about the New Age sense of being at one with the universe, either. When, and if, I use the word spiritual, I mean that I feel the full weight of existence. I feel empty yet full of longing, alone yet surrounded by company, sensual yet free of desire. There isn’t any transcendence and there isn’t any joining—just the intensity and grace of being alive at that moment. What’s more, these moments are accessible at any time. That’s something I’ve come to realize. The reason they’re accessible is that there’s nothing transcendent about them at all. They’re natural. They only seem resplendent and unfamiliar because our current way of life forbids us from indulging in them.

In fact, I’m sure this is why the word spiritual has the connotations that it does. By calling something spiritual we essentially define it as an abstraction. In retrospect the experience is co-opted as a gift from God or from his angels and made to seem supernatural. Spirituality then becomes a euphemism to cover up a basic truth about ourselves—that we’re animals. We haven’t been trained in this culture to deal with the natural world and so we’re afraid of it. Consequently, the epiphanies we might have while hiking are either labeled and explained away as transcendent religious phenomena or avoided altogether. I think Freud was onto something when he talked about artistic sublimation, only I don’t think it explains artistic fecundity, I think it explains religious ecstasy. Because natural feeling has been made practically taboo in today’s world, we project it onto the other. We make it socially acceptable, that is, by relating it to an accepted religious or new age concept. We turn nature into culture. In turn, the experience is murdered, thus the violence civilization does to the environment is also done to ourselves and our experiences.

Consider the smugness with which people proclaim our superiority over the animals. The assumption is that our superiority has already been proven, so it hardly needs stating (just as the supremacy of whites over blacks and men over women was once proven). Anyone who challenges that assumption must have a few screws loose and hasn’t yet learned the proper uses of rational thought. After all, we are the top predators—at the top of the food chain. What is there to argue? But in the animal kingdom hierarchies aren’t as clear cut as we’d like them to be. In a symbiotic world made of finite resources it doesn’t make sense to talk about who is and who isn’t the top dog. Competition doesn’t drive evolution, adaptation and cooperation does (I’ll leave it to John Livingston and K.C. Cole to make my point on that matter). Conquest might help you to survive, at least in the short term, but it won’t make you any happier. It’s like a marriage: if you deliberately deny your partner’s happiness then you’ll deny your own happiness as well, provided you stay together and can’t seek fulfillment elsewhere. No matter how dutifully your physical and material needs are tended to, if your partner is reduced to a slave, he/she won’t be able to give you what you really want—a creative and genuine and stimulating relationship. If our only concern is to subdue and control the outer world, then we won’t have genuinely ‘spiritual’ moments within that relationship. Life will be dull. And unfortunately (for the environment, that is), in our relationship with nature, divorce isn’t an option. And neither is murder, though that seems to be the course we’ve chosen.

But of course human beings are smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom, right? And again, this goes without saying. There isn’t any reason to question it. But what evidence is there that instinct is inferior to conscious thought? And that’s what we mean when we say that we’re smarter; we mean that we’re more conscious—that we consciously regulate more of our natural functions than the other animals do. Not only that, but we have more conscious control of the natural world in general. Consequently, we’re better problem solvers. And we have more power. The last point, I readily admit to. But to say that we’re smarter because we’re more conscious doesn’t make much sense to me. Our instincts perform almost flawlessly when not interfered with. In sports we train to let our instincts take over—to “let our bodies do what they know how to do”. And more than that, natural instincts don’t deter the functioning of the rest of the environment the way our conscious minds can. When the instincts of the Salmon compel it to swim upstream to spawn, it not only benefits the Salmon species, it benefits an entire ecosystem—from the predatory mammals and the aquatic invertebrates and fish who feed on the Salmon to the fauna that benefits from the marine nutrients pushed upstream by the Salmon migration. It would take an awfully clever person to figure out how to provide all that benefit through conscious processes. So why waste the effort? Isn’t the ‘smart’ choice to defer to our instincts? If power increased our chances at survival then it might make sense to take conscious control of our environment, but power doesn’t mean anything in a mutually beneficial relationship. If deer could learn to overcome their predators, it might make them more secure and more powerful, but it would also lead to their extinction. Predictably, the herd would outgrow its food source—get older, more disease-ridden, more feeble—and they, along with their predators, would eventually die off. Isn’t that the fate of our own species if we continue with our current consumption-based way of life?

***
Anyone who chooses to can learn how to regulate her heartbeat, and there are times when you might want to—if you’re in a pressurized athletic competition, for example (i.e. an artificial environment). But would you want to take full conscious control of your heartbeat twenty four/seven? Or how about your breathing? It seems to me that instinct does a pretty good job of handling those functions, and by allowing my instincts to do their jobs I become more liberated. If I had to focus on maintaining my breath and heartbeat, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else. Life wouldn’t be very interesting, either—maybe even less interesting than a life spent in pursuit of money and fame and conquest. And if you value freedom and diverse experience, why would you, if you’re so God damn smart, decide to give it up to become more ‘conscious’? Why would you give up a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in which you could meet all your basic needs with less than four hours of work per day for a lifestyle of forty plus hour work weeks and endless commutes and less healthy diets? Is it a sign of intelligence that we deliberately make our lives more dull and stressful?

Whenever I bring this up to a civilization apologist, I inevitably hear about the satisfactions of hard work (the Work Ethic) and how boring life would be if we just sat around wildling arrowheads all day. And they’re right. Domesticated people like us would get bored. But we’re bored because we’re not very good company. It’s like I tell my writing students when they complain that writing is a boring subject: Writing isn’t boring. YOU ARE! If writing is simply a recording of your own thoughts, then being bored by writing must mean you don’t have any interest in your mind’s own processes. You might have a boring teacher, a boring instruction book, or a boring topic, but writing isn’t boring—not unless the writer makes it so. In spite of our TVs and our sporting contests, our excessive work habits and constant barrage of stimuli, we can’t escape our boredom. That’s not because life is boring, it’s because we’re boring. We’re boring because we’re disconnected from real experience, real emotion, and real relationships. We’re bored because we can’t revert to our instincts, because in the artificial world we’ve created for ourselves our instincts won’t work. We’re bored because even when we have real experiences we have to domesticate them. We have to label them as abstractions and as otherworldly; that way, our true wild selves won’t run us over and exile us from society. To preserve our society we have to kill our natural selves and the rest of the natural world with us. Otherwise, we risk becoming alienated from our incredibly intelligent and civilized human companions. But we can’t maintain human companionship while destroying the natural environment which makes association possible in the first place. In other words, we can’t deny our animal nature and preserve humanity. If we’re serious about connecting to our fellow human beings, then isn’t it also time we got serious about questioning, and maybe even giving up, some of our precious human intelligence?

"Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars -- invest it! And in three years time you'd have 300 trillion dollars!!!"- Valerie Solanas

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."- Philip K. Dick