Learning to Tango: an Anarchist View of Relationships

I remember taking a Tango class last year when one of the teachers instructed the males, the leads, to treat our partners like puppets, “puppets to maneuver in whatever way we pleased”. Besides being politically incorrect to the extreme, the advice seemed to go against the instructions I’d received in earlier classes—instructions that we “invite” our partners to move by opening up a space for them to step into. The latter instructions seemed, at the time, much more useful and agreeable to me, so I wrote off the puppeteering recommendation to sloppy word-choice and ignored it. But maybe I reacted a little impulsively. In practice, I have to admit, the latter instructions never really worked for me. What’s more, I seemed to dance best when I worried less about what I was doing and focused more on what I wanted from my partner—in other words, when I treated her a bit like a puppet.

If truth be known, although I never became a skilled Tangoer, being an assertive lead came quite naturally to me (as my partner Constance indicates HERE). For that matter, I rarely have trouble being assertive in any part of my life, especially when it comes to offering my opinion about something (just ask my housemates). But, despite the stereotypical misunderstandings about my political philosophy, being a sometimes-assertive person does not make me a bad anarchist. Anarchists are not composed chiefly of bandana-wearing, gun-toting, chaos-loving, mayhem revelers who oppose all forms of order and leadership. That’s a misconception. In my understanding, anarchy not only accepts natural law and order and reasonable leadership, it embraces them. It implies a state in which the freedom of self-determination is increased rather than decreased, even when the expansion of one’s freedom comes, as it often must, by way of imposed restraint.

True freedom, like true creativity (which is really a synonym for freedom), can’t exist without restraints. Our current capitalistic culture has convinced us otherwise, of course, by equating freedom with having a plethora of choices. But true freedom and honest self-expression can only arise under conditions that promote clarity and cohesion—not extravagance. If you’ve ever engaged over a long period of time in any creative endeavor then I don’t need to tell you this. There’s a reason that writing a haiku poem or a sonnet often releases much more in-depth thoughts than writing in less restrictive genres. Form matters. The imposed restrictions entailed in writing a haiku require the mind to go in directions it wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It forces you out of your box. Put another way, it forces your mind to explore—to seek different methods of expression and understanding. And it’s in that explorative process, I believe, that we find our freedom.

That isn’t to say, however, that the world would be a better place if society were more regulated. I am, like any good anarchist, opposed to all forms of obligatory hierarchy and governance. But unlike the laws that regulate human society, the rules in writing a sonnet or haiku were not put in place by force or coercion. No one ever said that writing in Iambic Pentameter is the only way to write a poem. The rules were put in place and adopted because they proved useful. And when the rules deterred self-determination rather than deepened it, they were abandoned—brilliantly abandoned in the cases of Shakespeare or John Donne, for example. The imposed restraints of writing a sonnet are meant to enhance individual expression—to allow one to break out of the constraints imposed by social engineering—and as such they are followed voluntarily—so long as they’re needed and out of complicity rather than obedience. Voluntary restraints serve more as guides—guides in constant flux as situations change—than as eternal laws or commands. They don’t determine our behavior, they challenge us. And without challenge, the mind—the whole person, really—is dulled by habit and turns to stone; it becomes fixed and confined, a stereotype. Challenging restraints are put in place to stretch the imagination and to goad us into a clearer and less rigid vision of who we are—to push us past ourselves—not to limit our potential.

There’s an old Buddhist koan which says that if you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him. The idea is that you shouldn’t cling to anything, not even Buddhism, in your quest for self-realization and enlightenment. A Buddhist may subject herself to the most rigorous and confining disciplines imaginable, but when the disciplines no longer serve her interests—when they no longer expand her awareness but instead hold her back—she abandons them. Both her submission and her renunciation are voluntary. In Buddhist philosophy, you’re taught never to cling to anything, because clinging implies ownership, and ownership, in an ego-free/self-free world, is a delusion. At the same time, the disciplines of Buddhism aren’t meant to be discarded or devalued (not too soon, anyway); they are, in fact, essential tools of the practice. The same is true of the rules of Tango.

And though I didn’t stay with the Tango long enough to come to any dependable conclusions about what learning methodology works best, I imagine successful long term practitioners see their art as something akin to writing a haiku poem or practicing calligraphy or jazz or any of the other improvisational arts. All improvisation requires boundaries and limitations. So whether you’re leading or following in the Tango, you have to limit your freedom—limit your freedom to find your freedom, that is, through improvisation. For me, leading never felt like bullying or controlling. It felt like a constraint, sure, but a constraint that forced me to focus, to be more in the moment and thereby more myself and more in tune with my partner—more free—and more free of myself. And I imagine following requires a similar intensity of concentration and self-abandonment—an opening for reinvention—and feels equally as liberating. In both cases, the constraints allow for more not less freedom of expression. When you watch the Tango experts, you don’t get a sense of one person leading another. Expert couples seem to move together without any conscious will to be regulated by and with each partner giving to the other as much as he or she receives. Neither does there seem to be any loss of individual expression. Both followers and leaders have distinctive personalities and styles no matter whom they’re dancing with. The constraints, once mastered, I suspect, hardly feel like constraints at all. Instead, they suppress the ego so that what really matters—the dance—becomes more prominent. Like carrying weights while jogging, the dance strengthens the body through impediment; it gives one the strength to move as the imagination desires: both back home to our essential selves and far away and beyond.

It takes years of training to dance like an anarchist.


******

When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas."
— T.S. Eliot

Elk

or
The Pain of Self Examination and the Subsequent Deliverance

Last Sunday we had our ecology book club meeting and one of the members asked the following question: would you be excited if you heard that several dams and cell phone towers had been blown up overnight?

I immediately answered that I would.

She responded with skepticism. “But wouldn’t you be scared?” she asked. “I mean if the system were really crashing down?”

When she first asked the question, it never occurred to me that a few blown up dams and cell phone towers might actually imply an end to the system. If the system really were crashing down, I would be scared, damn scared. But, here’s the thing, I don’t think it’ll come down—not in my lifetime. Deep down I don’t believe it’ll happen. In a really perverse way, I have faith in the system—faith that it’ll endure. What I also realized is that if it did come down, I’d be left feeling a little empty—not because I’d miss the system, but because I wouldn’t have anything left to fight for. I wouldn’t have a purpose anymore. So maybe it’s the sense of purpose that drives my anarchism more than an earnest wish to see my anarchist values put into place. In short, I’m a phony!

That night I had a dream. I was attending some sort of a performance, a performance that had an interactive quality to it and which began with a brief interview. I was asked if I have a car, for example, and a few other questions I can’t remember, but questions that one might hear at a job interview. Later (there’s a gap here that I can’t remember) I was asked by the company organizing the show if my uncle (or someone like my uncle) could use my car for his driver’s test. I agreed and then watched as my car was wrecked pulling out of a parking space. I got furious. Then, when I realized my uncle’s insurance wouldn’t cover the damage and he was unwilling to pay out of pocket and the company who asked to borrow my car in the first place was equally indifferent to remedying the problem—I got even more furious. The dream goes on but that’s all I remember. I know, it seems like a pretty trivial and arcane incident, but I think the feelings it evoked are somewhat meaningful. Here’s why. First, even as I was dreaming, I felt taken aback by my initial response to my car getting wrecked. As an anarchist who’s fully committed to the slacker lifestyle (living outside the labor economy as much as possible), I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to the prospect of losing a little money, especially since my current financial situation is pretty stable. What really bothered me in the dream, I think, is the fact that I felt let down. I trusted these people with my car and they failed me. What’s interesting about that is that I’m not supposed to trust in the system, anyway (I’m an anarchist!), yet clearly I do. So I’ve been exposed, first in my waking life and now in my dreams, as a fraud. Moreover, my uncle, someone with a kind of outsider status in my family (but also a ward of the system, in a way), seemed to get really pissed off at the fact that I was making such a fuss. Maybe he saw through me. Maybe this dream is confirming the self doubt inspired by the question raised at the book club meeting; maybe it’s telling me that there’s more of a rift between my ideals and my actions/emotions than I think there is. Maybe it’s showing me just how enslaved to the system I really am.

Needless to say, I started to get a little down on myself. And by Wednesday, my birthday, I was pretty depressed. Since my birthday last year was ruined by a psycho girlfriend I had at the time, I decided that this year would be a private affair—and I went hiking. The weather, though, suggested I should’ve made other plans. The clouds got darker as I got to the highway, and by the time I left the city boundaries, I was hydroplaning at every curve. Nevertheless, I was determined—determined and also quite contemplative about aging another year, so contemplative in fact that I missed my exit and wound up taking an unfamiliar detour where there were no marked hiking trails. But, like I said, I was determined. So, even though there wasn’t a trail, I pulled off to the side of the road and made my way into the trees. By this time, it had stopped raining. As if by miracle, I had found the only square mile in Colorado where the rain had, at least for a moment, stopped.

As soon as I got to where I couldn’t see the road, I slowed my pace and started to take in my surroundings. The cloud-darkened skies, the mist, and the shade from the pines gave everything a soft obscure glow, and, just like that, I was enchanted.

I made my way to the top of a ridge and looked down. Suddenly, from about twenty feet away, a rock stood up and looked at me. It was an elk. A beautiful, tall, regal, chestnut-brown elk wondering if I was a predator. Seconds later, another twenty rocks stood up, and, being led it seemed by the elk in front of me, they galloped away. They were moving too fast for me to follow, so I sauntered along what was left of a deer (or more likely an elk) trail, which took me several times away from the ridge’s edge and then back again. Though I took my time, enjoying the solitude of the pines and stooping every now and then to run my hands through the dew-tipped grass or to ponder my mortality in front of a pile of old bones, I kept running into the elk every time the trail led back to the spine of the ridge. By the time I reached the crest of the hill, the elk were a mere ten feet away or so, their eyes searching below the hill for me while I spied from behind a clump of trees. They loitered for a minute, then fell off the opposing hillside and disappeared. I tried to follow, reaching the edge of the hill only seconds later, but they were gone—vanished, it seemed, into the earth. I was awestruck. The deftness with which they leapt the barbed wire fence at the top of the hill, the sheen on their hides, the easy grace of their trot, the apparent poise they showed in the face of danger, made me feel as if I’d chanced upon a secret witch dance, but without a movie screen to protect me. The effect only increased as I descended the hill, now in a gentle quiet rain, and got back into my car.

I no longer questioned whether I’d miss civilization if it came down. I wouldn’t. I was in love with the outdoors, with the elk, the trees, the mist, and the rain—and with every person I met that day. And I felt no fear. I wasn’t fighting for a “cause”; I was fighting for something I loved. (Art—the theater, I realized—was a mere substitute for what I missed by not being in contact with the beauty of nature). And that makes all the difference. I would still be afraid if the system started crashing down around me. Transitions are difficult, no matter how necessary. But, right now, at least, I’d be more excited than afraid. Kind of peculiar how loving life makes you less afraid to lose it—less afraid to die.

Maybe the most inspiring thing I saw in the elk was their courage. For all they knew, I could’ve been a hunter with an easy shot. And, while certainly not laying down to let me take better aim, they didn’t seem overly panicked. Their black eyes were alert, but still soft, ingratiating, accommodating, and unknowable—like temperate pools of confidentiality—like the natural world.

Seeing elk in a zoo or even on a free-roaming ranch isn’t the same as seeing them in the outdoors, especially when you’re alone. Seeing them in the outdoors is like seeing the flash of fin in the waves as opposed to the flogged octopus spread out on the sunny asphalt (see “Link”). It’s like seeing the woman of your dreams stop on an anonymous street corner, look at you knowingly, smile, and then rejoin the crowd.

Ashes and Snow

This is beautiful:

filmclip

(If you get redirected to a myspace page (as I am on my computer), just copy/paste this url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8nSiQgtjkk
or go to Utube and punch in Ashes and Snow).

Constance's Blog

My friend Constance (whom I introduced to the Tango) has now started an all-Tango blog here
Needless to say, she's left me in the dust where Tango is concerned.

Applying Adorno and Marcuse

While back in Utah over the holidays I heard a remark about the Mormon church that I used to hear a lot when I was younger: “The Church is true (or good, perfect—there are several variations), but the people in it aren’t.” I remember a friend of mine reciting that same phrase and I answered by saying that I felt the exact opposite—“the Church isn’t good, but some of the people in it are”. He took offense. In other words, he found it okay for non-Mormons to dislike individual Mormons or even the entire Mormon community, but intolerable to critique the church itself—the institution. At the time, my friend’s reaction surprised me, but it shouldn't have. It makes sense that if you put your faith in systems rather than people—and if your sense of selfhood is contingent upon that faith—you’re bound to blame the latter when things go awry. (Other people are “other” but the system is part of you). Consequently, it’s deemed okay to insult your equals—the people—but an extreme act of hubris to take on your superiors—the system and its caretakers.

As a result, it’s PC to hate individual Muslims—I mean terrorists—but not okay to challenge Islam; the problem of obesity is linked obviously to lifestyle “choices” rather than systemic environmental manipulation; and every problem from illegal immigration to drug abuse can be solved with disciplinary police enforcement rather than structural reorganization. The problem isn’t with the machine; it’s just a few bad parts. Accordingly, we have hope. If we can just teach individuals to act a little more responsibly, the problems will go away; progress will continue unabated, and our potency, and thereby our autonomy, will be preserved. The belief that we truly can shape our own destinies and have all the things the system tells us we desire--and the belief that the system is capable of reform--is kept intact. Simultaneously, our authentic self is buried beneath a pile of false needs and false hopes, and the status quo is protected. The victim, not the system, is to blame.

This past summer, I saw a movie called The Secret, which touts an idea called “the law of attraction”. The law of attraction states that… dramatic music please … our thoughts influence reality (that’s the secret). Put another way, what you attract to yourself is a manifestation of what you think. Think about being rich, and you’ll be rich. Think about having sex with lots of alter boys, and you’ll have sex with lots of alter boys. It’s that simple. Another premise of The Secret is that you really can have it all; we live in a world of infinite possibilities, so there’s no limit to what you can achieve. So don’t sell yourself short by thinking mere millionaire thoughts when you could be thinking gazillionaire thoughts. Why limit your potential?

The implications of The Secret philosophy are that you can’t blame anyone but yourself for being poor or for being obese or for being depressed or for being an addict or for contracting aids. On one level, the idea has merit. Of course our thoughts and attitudes influence what happens to us and of course the individual has some responsibility for his/her condition. But to suggest that ONLY our thoughts influence what happens to us is absurd. For one thing, our thoughts are influenced by our environments—environments we didn’t create by ourselves. Moreover, we don’t live on an island. If I choose to rape an alter boy, it isn’t because the altar boy was thinking about being raped. It’s because I gave him no choice but to be raped. Likewise, I can’t very well visualize being a millionaire if another New Ager trumps my wish by visualizing ownership of all the money in the world. In an interdependent universe, we can’t have without taking; we can’t realize without limiting. We can’t have it all.

I know. That’s pretty obvious. Painfully obvious, in fact. Yet The Secret and the book that inspired it have made millions of dollars. Larry King and thousands of other non-retarded adults claim that it changed their lives for the better. Sequels abound. Certified teachers of The Secret’s doctrine are ubiquitous. The public, it seems, is eating this stuff up. Are people really this adolescent in their thinking?

I should be surprised. But I’m not. The law of attraction is no more ridiculous than the mythology endorsed by most religions, certainly no more absurd than the Joseph Smith story the Mormons tell, and it reiterates what all mainstream ideology is intended to reiterate: rebellion should always be personal and private rather than political; if you desire self-realization then distance yourself from social engagement and criticism.

Case in point number one: the obesity epidemic. Currently about one in four Americans is estimated to be obese and the number is rising at an alarming rate. Thanks to the Mass Media, we know exactly who to blame for the problem—ourselves. We eat too much fatty foods and we don’t exercise enough. And the solution is equally as simple: diet and exercise. That’s all there is to it. What we don’t hear about, though, are the studies linking obesity to metabolism changes brought on by industrial chemicals. Nor do we hear much about the limited dietary options available to Americans in poverty or the accelerated puberty brought about by steroids in meat and dairy products or the potentially adaptive value of extra weight in certain polluted environments or the multi-generational effects of a high-fat diet during pregnancy. And I’m not surprised that we don’t hear about it. We don’t hear this kind of information because it's unsettling. Hearing it might require that we take social action—that we develop our social selves and not merely our private reified selves.

There isn’t a calculated conspiracy to conceal the truth about obesity. The truth about obesity, like the truth about immigration (see last post) or the truth about Islam (that its doctrine advocates terrorism) or the truth about Mormonism (not too dissimilar from Islam) or the truth about addiction (that it’s inevitable as well as necessary in a consumer capitalistic world) or the truth about The Secret (that it endorses an obvious contradiction), is in plain sight if you want to see it. The truth is that obesity is a creation of the System as much as it’s a creation of the individual. And that’s not what people want to hear. If I were obese, I’d much rather hear that my problem can be solved through diet and exercise than acknowledge that I can’t solve the problem at all (my genes/hormones don’t allow it) or that I can’t solve the problem unilaterally—that I can’t be cured until the whole system is cured.

The media is a business, and, as such, they’re going to tell people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. To tell people what they need to hear, i.e. the truth, is, after all, an extreme act of arrogance. It isn’t arrogant to lay the blame for obesity and poverty on the victims—on those deemed lower than or equal to you on the social ladder—but to take on the system itself or its elite caretakers is the highest form of hubris imaginable. So we use the concept of accountability to brow beat victims but not to challenge the status quo. We, in essence, set up a substitute form of rebellion—escape—not to mention a substitute individual identity--so as to tolerate our lack of real freedom, thus preserving the existing social order. Naturally then, by challenging the social order, you set yourself above all those confined to its borders, when all you intended was to stand outside it.

And when it comes to liberation, the philosophy of The Secret ought to be embraced; we shouldn’t limit ourselves. There’s enough genuine freedom for everyone—not the freedom to do as you please, even if it includes the violation of others, but the freedom to self-actualize—to, as René Dubos has suggested, realize "actual biological necessities such as quiet, both interior and exterior private spaces, independence, and initiative". The current forms of liberation are limited to private forms of temporary escape—not to the betterment or the realization of the self but to the negation of conscious involvement.

So of course we find it arrogant beyond belief when someone challenges the system. When we challenge the system, we’re asserting our political selves, without which honest self actualization is impossible. Put another way, we’re asserting our greatness. As Desmond Tutu has said, “it isn’t inadequacy that we most fear but greatness—not the darkness but the light. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”; we fear that by claiming our full potential as individuals—our potential in the public as well as private spheres—we distance ourselves from the human race altogether. Since we’re unable, or afraid, to see humanity as anything more than the system that includes it—as anything more than a bounded and easy-to-comprehend concept—we fail to create an environment in which our better, more natural, mysterious, and genuine selves can exist. And so we use responsibility--the word responsibility, at least--to deny responsibility. We tout the doctrine of individual accountability while accusing the truly accountable--the ones who challenge the real source of the problem--of being arrogant and judmental. The last thing the system can tolerate is individuals asserting their power.

****

It [the publicity of self actualization in Western culture] isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could 'find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. Herbert Marcuse

Link

good article

Immigration Analogies

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

Yes Men

Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

Brokeback Mountain

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

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.

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"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