Originally published on April 30, 1996
Yo Steve, your gnat is gnawing at my forehead. Was too depressed, especially after reading your notes yesterday to respond to anything much. Did get back to Tom Howell. He's a practicing HTML author now, quite proud in his jest, and sent his brag to "Gabriel" just like family. He always brings a smile.
Your job as literary justice in moaning is taking its toll on me however. A small toll, but one I recognize and simply weather, and also moan about afterwards, just to show you I know what I'm talking about despite any argument you or they would bring to your defense, or mine. But that's we price we pay for being ourselves. So here's the grease. High gear, Friday stew, stem, and glabe discharged to slow gear by Monday and on into Tuesday. But I'm feeling better now. Timside brought a puff to a gruff, and the clearly grown clown is clue-driven again.
Wish I could help you in your status search, but this, appropriately, is evidence that I have failed in this department, particularly as I must state emphatically, as it concerns you. Maybe it will take seven years to thaw or two months to germinate, as each thought bares itself in time, and then comes the moment when we all put in a call for mercy. The messianic skids uncoil as we try to separate the body from the mind, or the mind from its redeemer, accompanied by the same long list of equivocating characteristics we've known about ourselves from the earliest years of our precocious lives, characteristics and traits we called them by different names then, or at least, most of them.
A very conservative idea must come to pass. This is the genetic or scientific approach. We know this path, or rather we stumble across it, and figure we don't have a chance to evoke ourselves. This sudden opinion of ourselves reads itself to the world in word and picture, skin and tragedy, speed and oblivion. We clutch for hope that our highest aspiration remains our surest fallback position as we dally with the fires of our own heated disputes with a strengthening opposition.
My own most vicious excitement of the day was Sue allowing, even offering to keep the whole house cool today with air conditioning. Man, what a bosslady, although yesterday there is still some confusion in my head whether she knew her spanky new luggage was due at the house yesterday. It came, but was delivered across the street to 110. Don't even know those people, which hurled me into a mild rage (5.2 on the GT Richter) before whimpering down to a sigh.
Thus, baking in the raw configurations of cause and effect seeking motives & derivations of man, and god, and country I had to face the repeated crisis of being home yet again, just upstairs with only a small fan compensating for repeated delivery failures posting an argument against me. My half-deafness may also contribute. More than likely the air was blasting at that point. I turned it on around 1:30 yesterday in the computer room, and around eight last night as I nodded out with QUE's Netscape 2.0 in the sofa shortly before Sue bounced into the room and removed my glasses. I slept another few hours there in the royal chair before sliding myself into bed just after midnight. A long & heavy dream sequence followed me after I pounced up slightly dazed at seven oh nine. Still depressed. Alienated by having to growl in sweat past the courier's light knocking on my door, yet once more again.
Missing a delivery irks me enough. Knowing that I didn't even know to expect a package that day had me twisted in knotnumbing speeches to myself. She surprisingly got on the phone and gave that piece of mind that almighty customers are supposed to inspire. But knowing a delivery was coming hasn't kept me from missing eight to a dozen deliveries over the past few years. Ah, but what is missing from this picture? Sue must have known it was coming but she neglected to tell me, or remind me because this transaction was initiated on her order. Yes, she surprised me by harrassing UPS (it turns out; I mistakenly thought it was a JC Penney's direct delivery with a glance at the delivery paper. UPS is not mentioned anywhere, but Sue obviously called with knowledge.) Anyway, I've let go of that issue until it pops up again. Her luggage is sassy, and bless baby with baboon oils, it's obvious her Carribbean cruise is shaping and tidying up in her mind as the calendar drills onward.
That brings us full circle back to you. I can't respond to your unSETled or UNsetLING loops except by running it back onto you. I figure you figure Tim, Sue, and I are your set. But while each of us chagrin in general challenges to what appears to be each of our individual, and better or worse for it, our collective fate we are surfing from day to day realizing the overall will take care of itself one way or the other just like you do, you seem bitten by the biggest bug of all of us.
All we are saying is not give peace a chance (although that too), but just face up to the fact that "life" ain't gonna like us if we don't like it. So now let's figure to solve in the equation: Life=x, where x is whatever ONE can achieve. A second equation: (Good)Life=(Good)x may first appear redundant, and needs to be reduced to its simplest form, the linguist feeling unserved by pure mathematics would insist words are self-modifiers, and not to its own finite standards decipherable like numbers in a numbers racket. Seeing goods in stores one once lusted after but which now seem plastic and faraway does not change the relative value of the goods, or does it?
Has x changed, or has the quality quotient changed? What caused us to change?
This is a mystery I suggest the philosophers, the mathmeticians, the psychologists, the theologians, the aarTvarks, the united we piss paragons, and the warbugles get together to solve, but then again, the word fails us also. Until the word can mend as well as melt flesh, we cannot rest as advocates of full knowledge, and replicated consciousness in those who would be anybody's avengers. Do we ever avenge past failures? Agreement, however fragile an agreement, to accept one's bland experimental kinetic placement in this whistling dixie of a world is the only path I can recommend. It's a role. A puzzle. An almighty gig just as big as anything one can't quite figure in aces right now.
To actually have done this over here ain't much different from having done that over there. To achieve anything without factoring in this finer evidence stoolpigeoned up against our biases and our prides is to fool ourselves of our misplaced recognitions. It's not about value or unvalue. It's about both, and there is no separation of state and status. Would Colin Powell really think he would be any different a man whether he is president of the United States or simply a retired soldier, a self-confessed Republican, a busy and influential party member at that, good husband and father, and distinguished symbol for an amazingly broad spectrum of people?
Life=xyz/abc
And communication boils, hot springs
we flock against in hordes still wet behind the ears
from our last visit to the sources of good
riddance and circumstance
lockjaws rifled by the word
timed riddles still waters
flooding our echoes
flames filled and felled
as the woods the would nots
and the teachers resort to tears
comic fears basic hogwash
mister to clean our stripping
canons of doubt
figures in between the couch
the clue and the closet
salvaged for memories
lost pretension
segregated ifs
or something else entirely.
GT
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, August 20, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
SOMETHING I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION
Originally published on October 1, 1996
Hope you don't think that you have figured out the whole of my philosophical slant in these few paragraphs to have blitzed your eBox in recent days. The more I write the less I am confident any real communication can exist outside of fuzzy logic. A thousand pages later, and there is still room for clarification, redundancy be damned. However any aspiring philosophy must start from a foundation of concrete suppositions. The GT foundation rest solely upon a single concept. I am nothing in a crowd, and only something by the gift of God. The concept of God working through the individual rather than institutional flavoring is not unique to me, nor is it universally accepted, but I suspect I can certainly in the face of the de facto collective spirit of this contemporary age put a uniquely 21st century spin on this ancient wisdom, and shed some light on a problem which pits humanity not against itself but against the old demons of the past, and in a word, is sin. In an early poem (circa 1981 of mine) I accuse Lucifer as the author of time. All of nature's manifestations are both inspired and corrupted by the torque of time's perspective. We work finally within this framework of time, but we should suspect its motives.
Perhaps the best model I can use to relate what I mean when I unilaterally dismiss collectivism as the prime mover of spiritual and physical matter, and thus, an unrivaled conductor of truth is the marriage, or lover's problem. I suggest that no matter how close we want to become the mirror of our partner, or merge dissonance to create a more diversified whole, an irreparable separation is evidenced against us. While ancient teachers suggest that the two become one, this metaphor has rarely been illustrated in fact. History as failure in this regard has shown a bigotry against this unification of two into one. And if two cannot become one, how can dozens, thousands, millions, billions simply and without fracture? Thus my point. Even the individual is plagued and ultimately corrupted by opposing forces. One may argue this diversity strengthens the individual, and thus the whole of thousands can thus be strengthened by this diversity, I hold with the old proverb that a house divided cannot long stand. This approach say other, less insightful accusers, steers me into the traditionally conservative camp. I will not reject the label out of hand, but I hardly think anarchism the way I define it can be held up to the conservative light without displacing a few fundamental concepts of both.
My slant of personal responsibility leads to acceptance of a status quo. I am not talking about doing nothing to change the world in which we live, but I am talking about unholy alliances to the threat to personal autonomy. We are not born with natural or civil rights outside of the social contract. Too many folk presume on the basis on envy and tokenism that what Joe Blow possesses (however gained, and true, evil has laways lent a helping hand to so-called progress), Jim Jackoff is entitled to the same. The conspiracy of universal equality while a feel good aspiration is not played out in reality bytes either. None are free from the taint of evil, and yet we struggle for greener grass in precisely the same spirit that made the grass seem greener to begin with. Competition and greed. Nothing satisfies us when we know someone else has something that seems better than what we have. The marketdriven culture (just as Marxism predicts) is a vicious line of defense against human nature and natural forces from the outside. But the "clock" can never be turned back without catastrophe. This is human nature corrupted by greed and envy. Doublespeak and unmasked falsehood crowd into every arena stealing from the human spirit every good motive as time's own author extracts a token penalty for every semblence of progress. Confusion multiplies itself with human numbers. We do not argue good versus eveil. We argue me verus them. Confusion versus confusion. Good and evil.
Here's a clarifying sidebar. The year,1982. Mid-summer. Midtown Atlanta. A few days before I had been approached by two strangelooking womenabout my own age just outside the Omniplex. I was 26. Teresa was defiantly overdressed in several layers of streetdrag wool skirting and sweater. I do not recall the other woman's appearance anymore because it was Teresa who gave me her phone number and the Moonie tract.
For the next two weeks we saw each other daily. I visited the Unification House in the quaint residential Little Five Points neighborhood. She came by the Howell House highrise apartment I was then sharing with my mother for tea and crackers. It was actually my mother's place, but I stayed with her for six weeks upon returning from Corpus Christi where I lived for twenty months prior. We traversed the city on foot for five or six hours every day, she in low keyed proselytizing mode, me in a gentle informative resistance.
On this particular day we crossed West Peachtree and turned down Peachtree Main along the infamous corner now revitalized but on this day was still marked by the Dunkin Doughnuts and just beyond, the Christian Science Reading Room. Teresa I knew already, was a product of the 1960s subcultural elite. I knew for instance that she had spent her adolescence in a nudist camp, and that background emerging from the fog of unbearable shame had driven her to the neurotic devices of concept-defying heavy clothing and long frizzy hair in which she hide her dark but very attractive facial lines. I knew she confessed great comforts in the teachings of the Moon organization even when she found them lacking, evident in a few details I will save for another time.
But on this day she was questioning me had I read the two or three theological booklets she had given to me a day earlier. These rather thin booklets were published in a very simplistic styling, oversized footprints, large typefaces, and hordes of colorful pictures. This literature literally reminded me of the kiddie biblestory volumes I had voraciously gobbled up as a child, only thinner. They were workbooks, with a quiz at the end. I had not read them. Confident I already knew all the answers I had simply put them aside meaning to take a half hour to skirt through the topics just to meet my obligations to Teresa, but at this point I hadn't. Besides I had loaned Teresa a thousand page theological tome called the URANTIA BOOK that had been given to me by a former lover a couple of years before. I never got it back, but of course after admitting that I had not read the booklets but I intended to do so, Teresa countered with predictable and similar remarks.
These confessions led me straight to the point I wanted to make to her. Everybody believes their own version of the truth is self-evident and required for everybody under the sun. "Oh but if you would just read these..." she countered. I again repeated the premise that all works claim the truth, and great works have great legions of followers. Nothing is proved right or wrong except in the minds of believers of this or that truth. Whatever Teresa might claim, Johnny Can't Read has a contradictory truth. Jimmy Can Read has another. Evereybody's running around in this crazy attempt to convince everybody else that they are wrong. Teresa smiled at this empasse. Just then we were rounding the corner. I spied the Christian Science Reading Room and asked her if she wanted to dip into there for a few minutes, cool off, rest our feet...
She acquiesced with a sweet okay. We strolled to the reading room. This was not a very large place, fitted into a space nestled in the vee between two major thoroughfares converging at roughly a thirty degree angle, but it was airconditioned and pleasant and waiting for us. I found a chair a few feet from the bulk of the library. Teresa sat in a chair on a perpendicular wall where she was soon approached by an old woman of the faith. They were soon engaged in conversation that barely rose above a whisper. I thought nothing of this, and heard only occasional snippets as I dug into a random book I had pulled. This was a libraaaaaaary after all. Bits and pieces of their chat floated over to me. I was surprised to learn Teresa had been born a third-generation Christian Scientist. Seemed this was a girl with quite a checkered past. They argued in ever polite tones. The woman persisted. Fifteen to twenty minutes into this routine I overheard the words good and evil, and some reference to the edenic tree of knowledge of good and evil.
That was when I spoke up. "Does not the tree of the knowledge inspire knowledge of the DIFFERENCE between good and evil? I inquire of the old woman who to this point had only nodded a respectful hello to me upon entering the room. "Yes, you can say that. Different translations render it a little bit differently, but you can read the CORRECT rendering in OUR books." I replied that I had to confess that I did not know the difference between good and evil. Fire immediately plunged into eyes. "Oh you certainly do, and if you do not, you can read it in our literature. You only have to READ it to understand," she growled. I countered again that men for thousands of years have argued over these things.
I am not sure what I said next but I drew upon current ecological and ecopolitical concerns or some matter such as this, to give a few examples of what I meant by my own confusion with this complex issue of good and evil. She flew into a unmistakable rage, "Oh you are just a troublemaker. You'd better leave. Right now I say. Just leave, and don't come back. I mean it. Don't come back!" I returned the book I still had in grip to its rightful place, and said not another word. Teresa was ushered out alongside me. As the glass door swung close, the pinchedface woman, probably in her late sixties, muttered the word troublemaker one more time just in case I had missed the point.
On the street again I immediately sensed what had just happened and inquired of Teresa, "Do you know what just happened?" She didn't know what I meant. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before we stepped inside?" Again she couldn't piece her memories together. I played it out for her. "We were trying to convince each other to read each other's books. I told you that everybody believed they already had the truth, IF ONLY OTHERS WOULD READ OUR BOOKS."
Teresa's face was beginning to show a glimmer of recognition, but I continued. "Then we step inside and you are barraged by yet another somebody who does exactly what I predicted. It's in THEIR book, THEIR truth, THEIR certainty that all life must bow..." Was this the stroke of God himself drawing us into the Christian Science Reading Room for an example of divine truth, I put to her as we strolled on toward downtown on this sweltering summer afternoon.
She finally burst into a rapt amazement, profoundly moved by my explantions, and was giddy that God had shown her a sign. Otherwise nothing would have occurred to her. No threads ever match up. Nothing is connected. An intellectual zombie I'm afraid is all so many of the most devoted folks on earth appear to be. Teresa didn't suffer a loss of faith with that event, but I was overwhelmed by the finger of God in this point blank proof of what I knew to be oh so true...
We are all fools in this game nobody can win.
Hope you don't think that you have figured out the whole of my philosophical slant in these few paragraphs to have blitzed your eBox in recent days. The more I write the less I am confident any real communication can exist outside of fuzzy logic. A thousand pages later, and there is still room for clarification, redundancy be damned. However any aspiring philosophy must start from a foundation of concrete suppositions. The GT foundation rest solely upon a single concept. I am nothing in a crowd, and only something by the gift of God. The concept of God working through the individual rather than institutional flavoring is not unique to me, nor is it universally accepted, but I suspect I can certainly in the face of the de facto collective spirit of this contemporary age put a uniquely 21st century spin on this ancient wisdom, and shed some light on a problem which pits humanity not against itself but against the old demons of the past, and in a word, is sin. In an early poem (circa 1981 of mine) I accuse Lucifer as the author of time. All of nature's manifestations are both inspired and corrupted by the torque of time's perspective. We work finally within this framework of time, but we should suspect its motives.
Perhaps the best model I can use to relate what I mean when I unilaterally dismiss collectivism as the prime mover of spiritual and physical matter, and thus, an unrivaled conductor of truth is the marriage, or lover's problem. I suggest that no matter how close we want to become the mirror of our partner, or merge dissonance to create a more diversified whole, an irreparable separation is evidenced against us. While ancient teachers suggest that the two become one, this metaphor has rarely been illustrated in fact. History as failure in this regard has shown a bigotry against this unification of two into one. And if two cannot become one, how can dozens, thousands, millions, billions simply and without fracture? Thus my point. Even the individual is plagued and ultimately corrupted by opposing forces. One may argue this diversity strengthens the individual, and thus the whole of thousands can thus be strengthened by this diversity, I hold with the old proverb that a house divided cannot long stand. This approach say other, less insightful accusers, steers me into the traditionally conservative camp. I will not reject the label out of hand, but I hardly think anarchism the way I define it can be held up to the conservative light without displacing a few fundamental concepts of both.
My slant of personal responsibility leads to acceptance of a status quo. I am not talking about doing nothing to change the world in which we live, but I am talking about unholy alliances to the threat to personal autonomy. We are not born with natural or civil rights outside of the social contract. Too many folk presume on the basis on envy and tokenism that what Joe Blow possesses (however gained, and true, evil has laways lent a helping hand to so-called progress), Jim Jackoff is entitled to the same. The conspiracy of universal equality while a feel good aspiration is not played out in reality bytes either. None are free from the taint of evil, and yet we struggle for greener grass in precisely the same spirit that made the grass seem greener to begin with. Competition and greed. Nothing satisfies us when we know someone else has something that seems better than what we have. The marketdriven culture (just as Marxism predicts) is a vicious line of defense against human nature and natural forces from the outside. But the "clock" can never be turned back without catastrophe. This is human nature corrupted by greed and envy. Doublespeak and unmasked falsehood crowd into every arena stealing from the human spirit every good motive as time's own author extracts a token penalty for every semblence of progress. Confusion multiplies itself with human numbers. We do not argue good versus eveil. We argue me verus them. Confusion versus confusion. Good and evil.
Here's a clarifying sidebar. The year,1982. Mid-summer. Midtown Atlanta. A few days before I had been approached by two strangelooking womenabout my own age just outside the Omniplex. I was 26. Teresa was defiantly overdressed in several layers of streetdrag wool skirting and sweater. I do not recall the other woman's appearance anymore because it was Teresa who gave me her phone number and the Moonie tract.
For the next two weeks we saw each other daily. I visited the Unification House in the quaint residential Little Five Points neighborhood. She came by the Howell House highrise apartment I was then sharing with my mother for tea and crackers. It was actually my mother's place, but I stayed with her for six weeks upon returning from Corpus Christi where I lived for twenty months prior. We traversed the city on foot for five or six hours every day, she in low keyed proselytizing mode, me in a gentle informative resistance.
On this particular day we crossed West Peachtree and turned down Peachtree Main along the infamous corner now revitalized but on this day was still marked by the Dunkin Doughnuts and just beyond, the Christian Science Reading Room. Teresa I knew already, was a product of the 1960s subcultural elite. I knew for instance that she had spent her adolescence in a nudist camp, and that background emerging from the fog of unbearable shame had driven her to the neurotic devices of concept-defying heavy clothing and long frizzy hair in which she hide her dark but very attractive facial lines. I knew she confessed great comforts in the teachings of the Moon organization even when she found them lacking, evident in a few details I will save for another time.
But on this day she was questioning me had I read the two or three theological booklets she had given to me a day earlier. These rather thin booklets were published in a very simplistic styling, oversized footprints, large typefaces, and hordes of colorful pictures. This literature literally reminded me of the kiddie biblestory volumes I had voraciously gobbled up as a child, only thinner. They were workbooks, with a quiz at the end. I had not read them. Confident I already knew all the answers I had simply put them aside meaning to take a half hour to skirt through the topics just to meet my obligations to Teresa, but at this point I hadn't. Besides I had loaned Teresa a thousand page theological tome called the URANTIA BOOK that had been given to me by a former lover a couple of years before. I never got it back, but of course after admitting that I had not read the booklets but I intended to do so, Teresa countered with predictable and similar remarks.
These confessions led me straight to the point I wanted to make to her. Everybody believes their own version of the truth is self-evident and required for everybody under the sun. "Oh but if you would just read these..." she countered. I again repeated the premise that all works claim the truth, and great works have great legions of followers. Nothing is proved right or wrong except in the minds of believers of this or that truth. Whatever Teresa might claim, Johnny Can't Read has a contradictory truth. Jimmy Can Read has another. Evereybody's running around in this crazy attempt to convince everybody else that they are wrong. Teresa smiled at this empasse. Just then we were rounding the corner. I spied the Christian Science Reading Room and asked her if she wanted to dip into there for a few minutes, cool off, rest our feet...
She acquiesced with a sweet okay. We strolled to the reading room. This was not a very large place, fitted into a space nestled in the vee between two major thoroughfares converging at roughly a thirty degree angle, but it was airconditioned and pleasant and waiting for us. I found a chair a few feet from the bulk of the library. Teresa sat in a chair on a perpendicular wall where she was soon approached by an old woman of the faith. They were soon engaged in conversation that barely rose above a whisper. I thought nothing of this, and heard only occasional snippets as I dug into a random book I had pulled. This was a libraaaaaaary after all. Bits and pieces of their chat floated over to me. I was surprised to learn Teresa had been born a third-generation Christian Scientist. Seemed this was a girl with quite a checkered past. They argued in ever polite tones. The woman persisted. Fifteen to twenty minutes into this routine I overheard the words good and evil, and some reference to the edenic tree of knowledge of good and evil.
That was when I spoke up. "Does not the tree of the knowledge inspire knowledge of the DIFFERENCE between good and evil? I inquire of the old woman who to this point had only nodded a respectful hello to me upon entering the room. "Yes, you can say that. Different translations render it a little bit differently, but you can read the CORRECT rendering in OUR books." I replied that I had to confess that I did not know the difference between good and evil. Fire immediately plunged into eyes. "Oh you certainly do, and if you do not, you can read it in our literature. You only have to READ it to understand," she growled. I countered again that men for thousands of years have argued over these things.
I am not sure what I said next but I drew upon current ecological and ecopolitical concerns or some matter such as this, to give a few examples of what I meant by my own confusion with this complex issue of good and evil. She flew into a unmistakable rage, "Oh you are just a troublemaker. You'd better leave. Right now I say. Just leave, and don't come back. I mean it. Don't come back!" I returned the book I still had in grip to its rightful place, and said not another word. Teresa was ushered out alongside me. As the glass door swung close, the pinchedface woman, probably in her late sixties, muttered the word troublemaker one more time just in case I had missed the point.
On the street again I immediately sensed what had just happened and inquired of Teresa, "Do you know what just happened?" She didn't know what I meant. "Do you remember what we were talking about just before we stepped inside?" Again she couldn't piece her memories together. I played it out for her. "We were trying to convince each other to read each other's books. I told you that everybody believed they already had the truth, IF ONLY OTHERS WOULD READ OUR BOOKS."
Teresa's face was beginning to show a glimmer of recognition, but I continued. "Then we step inside and you are barraged by yet another somebody who does exactly what I predicted. It's in THEIR book, THEIR truth, THEIR certainty that all life must bow..." Was this the stroke of God himself drawing us into the Christian Science Reading Room for an example of divine truth, I put to her as we strolled on toward downtown on this sweltering summer afternoon.
She finally burst into a rapt amazement, profoundly moved by my explantions, and was giddy that God had shown her a sign. Otherwise nothing would have occurred to her. No threads ever match up. Nothing is connected. An intellectual zombie I'm afraid is all so many of the most devoted folks on earth appear to be. Teresa didn't suffer a loss of faith with that event, but I was overwhelmed by the finger of God in this point blank proof of what I knew to be oh so true...
We are all fools in this game nobody can win.
CLOSING ARGUMENTS ON MAX STIRNER
Originally published on May 22, 2003
My apologies Mr. Westling,
Without a doubt, I did not intend to tarry so long in replying to your previous dispatch, but life and its shadowboxers are busy as usual gesticulating with grunt and grin, keeping me in other quarters, but I did very much wish to reply with familiar timber. As to the "noisy self-interest" comment and its covering a lot of ground, of course, of course, and THAT was the point. Five or six people struggling each at various stages of life dotted across the four corners of the global landscape while humped over the almighty questions of what exactly to do and precisely when to do it, ended as one might expect, everyone busying himself with his own perceived notions and chores in his own perceived neck of the woods to the detriment of the so-called group effort. No great mystery existed, nothing to reveal. We just sort of drifted away from each other.
You wrote:
For or against Stalin. Three years earlier Breton's Surrealists experienced a similar debacle. There was no bridging the gap between the poet's investigation into experience and the Party's requirements of practical administration. But it arguably brought to light an irreducible toggle at the very core of the revolutionary project: does the collective or the individual have the ultimate say in charting direction of the revolution? The Surrealists never satisfactorily resolved this problem, and even as late as 1952, Breton indicated that his answer to the question "does the revolution require that social liberation must occur before individual liberation can?" was yes. I don't believe he really thought out all the possible implications that attend to this issue. If social liberation is primary, doesn't it follow that individuals are reduced to an instrumental role? This question goes to the core of the entire Marxist project.
I write:
Precisely! Just as a water molecule requires both hydrogen and oxygen atoms, each in obedience to its own individual composition and inertia, the social fabric of humanity cannot exist without freedom first gaining a foothold at the individual level. And yet, the masses great and small tend to follow leaders, whether these leaders are self-appointed messiahs, statesmen or revolutionaries, crowd-anointed stars of the hour, or bad boys (girls, too!) on parade and each grand movement is the articulation of a few wide open mouths apotheosized by the herd despite all intellectual cajoling that is to set men free to the contrary , because, whether this phenonmenon is a matter of personal nature or of social oppression, not all humans are capable much less inspired by an uncompromised divine light strong enough and focused enough to shake loose of the fetters and act as a catalyst for change. As such there will always be leaders and there will always be followers. Hence institutions and molecular compounds, mighty poets, shining lights, and safety in numbers.
You wrote:
My reference to your manifesto being "a little too sweeping" should be explained, I suppose. What I meant was that to assert that nothing of note has happened since the, what? The 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition perhaps? Was going a bit too far. Personally, I find some of Matta's 1960's works a real extension of the Surrealist outlook. Even Pop has a role in furthering our ideas of personal liberation. Of course, I look at the best of Pop as being heavily laced with irony, so that it can be read as a critique of commodity capitalism. I agree with you the balkanization is something we need to transcend.
I write:
But there is no escape from this monstrosity we know as time; time changes all perspectives, hence truth is always in travail. At least none less worthy of our concerns in our current apocalyptic node. We are soldiers called into a life of combat. Each soldier is armed according to whims of the moment. While it is certainly too late to write poems, it is far too early to burn books and paper money on the trash heap of our own impatient imaginations. Socialism will supplant capitalism, but not tomorrow, or the next day. There is much yet to be done in the name of competitive fetishism. Do I have proof of this? Does it matter except along the broad avenues and speculative pitter patter of the chattering classes?
You wrote:
I too am an autodidact, to a large degree. I do have 24 semester hours' credit from Roosevelt University in Chicago dating from 1972-74. My first great epiphany came at attending the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in March 1974. His work and life showed me that formal education provided more obstacles than opportunities. I find academia to be one of the principal obstacles to both individual and social transformation. My second great epiphany came from understanding the intimate connection between Duchamp and Max Stirner in 1989. My course has been set ever since. The bulk of the fruits of my interest in this connection is forthcoming, but it won't be too long now.
I wrote:
Having run willy nilly through all those blackened doors and those well-read windows, what have I gained that will put starch in my speech? Am I not the same dissatisfied sojourner that I was at 8, 14, 18, 22, refusing to memorize the lives and works of others so that I can exercise more freely the haunts withering within myself, only to be mocked as an unschooled ignoramus and a wasteling, no talent fool? What is it that we are really seeking, you and I? Should I yawn or squeeze a peach into my fist? Freedom? Like Pilate, I ask, what is freedom? What is truth? Is the only damned truth I can ever know for certain (because it has been with me the longest) is that every day of every year of my freelanced life has been augured by the truth and the lie shaped like a bonzai tree that encourages me to lose my ephemeral status, my skin, my gender, my race, my stinking unresolved life for the sake of OTHERS and their own unresolved notions? What do I care about others? Do they care about me? What is this truth I prefer to think as the ONLY TRUTH? If my life is nothing but a zen koan, has not my own insignificance been the only path worth noting. Debord was a hard-nosed poseur, just like the multitudes grinning with marmalade teeth, but he indeed invented himself, the poet and raconteur with critical aims. Six billion individuals, or five giant nations under one roof? What are the odds of me inventing either possibility?
You wrote:
You really shouldn't lift whole sections of material from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Stirner and present it as your own thought, although you chose a reputable source. George Woodcock, although prone to some of the same collectivist biases as so many other commentators on Stirner, did do a pretty good job at characterizing his thought.
I write:
Well lad, I hardly presented that chunk as my own writing. Methinks it twas a dead giveaway...
However, I make no excuses. As to Stirner, this is all I know... Notice the all caps, vital dates in parentheses. I suppose I could have pasted myself into the narrative, or simply given a reference. Yawn.
STIRNER, MAX (1806-1856), was the nom de plume of the German individualist philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Schmidt had a poor childhood (like myself). His academic career was long and fragmented. I am uneducated, while sponging from the world of books and media like there is no other purpose to life than to have read too much to be of any worldly good.
Et cetera. The point being, those who know anything about the "inimitable" unrequited fashion I shove ink to paper, know that I splatter adverbs, adjectives and lengthy unbounded syntax around the page like wood nymphs in search of an unsoiled Grecian urn, and either praise me, criticize me, or shriek delightfully at the joke, but the word inimitable always sets the pace. It was rather obvious to a seasoned reader of this humble bumbler which particular lines were added for personal affect, about four I think, at the very beginning, and the rest which naturally came from a source written in short brittle academic sentences complete with caps and parentheticals for the pure joy of letting a new sparring partner know that those few paragraphs were indeed ALL I knew of Stirner, line for line, having pulled the historical man distorted or not straight out a book that very morning, scanned, OCR'd, dutifully copied and then routinely pasted into context, prompted of course by your own well-appreciated overtures to him. Apologies that I didn't properly reference the jag for you, but I simply didn't realize I was submitting a white paper unto the authorities. Duly noted is your kind exception to my frightful oversight. See Debord, for more insights into plagiarism, although I really wasn’t erecting any such scam.
You wrote:
I guess you're already surmising that I vehemently disagree with your characterization of Stirner as "yet another status quo philosopher". Your evaluation sound a lot like Karl Marx's ideas on the subject, and I am painfully aware that the situationists used Marx as their basic philosophical substrate. Do you know a book that came out in 2002 by Kristin Ross called "May '68 and its Afterlives"? She, too, decries the "creeping individualism" that has seeped into the discourse on May '68 and related phenomena. But that is material for another post.
I write:
Status quo in my book projects an entirely other meaning than the one I presume you to harbor. To me status quo is extended to mean that all life is in flux, and since we have always had shining beacons, artists, poets, philosophers, statesmen, soldiers, con men, whores, zealots, saints, sinners, and the rest of us catawauling among the tall timbers and dry desert sands, to announce that the individual is the primary thrust of existence is hardly breakthrough revolutionary cant, but it is Stirner's rejection of revolution, even as his distrust in institutions is genuine, that interests me, and I thank you for bringing him to my attention, if for nothing more than hereditary concerns.
You wrote:
The thing that is important now is to indicate just why Stirner is not just another apologist for the small-time shopkeeper. The key point has to do with the irreducible toggle in the individualism/collectivism question: can I keep my own prerogatives intact if I allow a collective entity to be primary in my own mind and, by extension, in the world? The answer, I'm afraid, is no, and if this is true, then my own instrumentalism at the hand of the collectivity is inevitable. This engenders what Stanley Milgram (yes, that Milgram) calls the "agentic state", in which I sign away my right of decision in favor of one "in authority". I presume you are aware of the infamous Milgram experiments of 1960. One look at the results of these experiments should be enough to convince that ours is not a world in which "enlightened" egoism rules, only the debased kind, the infantile kind. Where vulgar egoism leaves off, Stirner begins. It is possible to trace a trajectory of an increase in "affective individualism" (as the historian Lawrence Stone terms it), beginning in the late 17th century and continuing up to the present time. Kinship ties have weakened, and individual prerogatives strengthened, in a fairly unbroken progression ever since this began. One of the main problems, in my opinion, is that this process hasonly gone halfway through its cycle.
I write:
Now, THIS is indeed close to the mark! How I have raged raged against the dying of the light when encountering the uncorrected rantings of Ayn Rand and Nietzsche (ditto in spades to leftist scalawags like Marx and his progeny), but yet have been unable to resolve the problem of how to congeal the collective notion, honestly and succinctly, given the range and variations of the specimen. I dare not trust ANY authority, unless I first taste its fruit. But individual tastes change, shift, capsize. As circumstances change, so usually does the hand that feeds them. Bureaucratic strength is corruptible as a result of its authoritarian nature in caricature of individuality redeemed, and thus l'd prefer living on the outside, accepting that isolation, rather than join any movement that coerces me with threats or ill-gotten gains, phoney, inflated, or otherwise. Living in the age of quarrel is no picnic on the high seas, but I think you are indeed traveling the right tracks in pinpointing what ails much of the West, that is the mystery of defining, or uncovering that nexus which balances the rights of the individual with the good of the collective. There has got to be a mathematical proof in this somewhere, but flesh and blood properly inspired is never a game of mathematics where zero and affinity take a stand, and the genetics of sin still rule with transparent and opposing thumbs. The society of the spectacle is no match for the society of dead certainty.
You wrote:
Individual empowerment is what we all need, not a centralized plan of forced income redistribution. This will only result in endless counterrevolution. It is moralism run wild, what confounded the French Revolution and the communist one as well. Collectives that legislate what's good for the others against their consent is no good. Self-directed anarchism could avoid these problems if brutality could be expunged form the consciousness of the millions. That if is so big you can drive a truck through it, I know. But the revolution is impossible without it. Start small, get bigger. Revolution from below. I believe we are not so very far apart philosophically. Breton, as well as Picabia, Max Ernst and Duchamp, all found Stirner to be quite compelling. It is only a question of continuing to resolve all the inconsistencies attending to the implementation of collectively constituted projects that keeps us from moving forward.
I write:
Such is the curse of the dreamer. That revolution from below you declare is part and parcel of the status quo for which I stand. But bullets and bombs, poisons and pride, hand in hand, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, each a lure of fascination, each a stumbling block. The only philosophy worth a nutcracker's suite is that which can be applied to the world in play. On the brink of catastrophic destruction, our world is not a safe place. Psychological warriors must gird their loins as the mighty clash for the sake of their history books. Words no longer make a difference, they have withered in the mouths of the arms dealers. Flesh on the bone will be burnt to bare cinders and those violent screams and sentimental songs of peace will not be heard in the heavens, but will choke on the smoke of the ancestral homes now in ashes and worse. Gentler minds will continue to seek sanctuary, but will find none, but the ones they were born into like the flesh of the moth. This is the age we live to defy, but few, very few, poets of promise and peace poling along a bloody regime have ever made it out alive, and the next generation often fares worse. But we can't stop dreaming, can we?
Munificently yours,
GT
My apologies Mr. Westling,
Without a doubt, I did not intend to tarry so long in replying to your previous dispatch, but life and its shadowboxers are busy as usual gesticulating with grunt and grin, keeping me in other quarters, but I did very much wish to reply with familiar timber. As to the "noisy self-interest" comment and its covering a lot of ground, of course, of course, and THAT was the point. Five or six people struggling each at various stages of life dotted across the four corners of the global landscape while humped over the almighty questions of what exactly to do and precisely when to do it, ended as one might expect, everyone busying himself with his own perceived notions and chores in his own perceived neck of the woods to the detriment of the so-called group effort. No great mystery existed, nothing to reveal. We just sort of drifted away from each other.
You wrote:
For or against Stalin. Three years earlier Breton's Surrealists experienced a similar debacle. There was no bridging the gap between the poet's investigation into experience and the Party's requirements of practical administration. But it arguably brought to light an irreducible toggle at the very core of the revolutionary project: does the collective or the individual have the ultimate say in charting direction of the revolution? The Surrealists never satisfactorily resolved this problem, and even as late as 1952, Breton indicated that his answer to the question "does the revolution require that social liberation must occur before individual liberation can?" was yes. I don't believe he really thought out all the possible implications that attend to this issue. If social liberation is primary, doesn't it follow that individuals are reduced to an instrumental role? This question goes to the core of the entire Marxist project.
I write:
Precisely! Just as a water molecule requires both hydrogen and oxygen atoms, each in obedience to its own individual composition and inertia, the social fabric of humanity cannot exist without freedom first gaining a foothold at the individual level. And yet, the masses great and small tend to follow leaders, whether these leaders are self-appointed messiahs, statesmen or revolutionaries, crowd-anointed stars of the hour, or bad boys (girls, too!) on parade and each grand movement is the articulation of a few wide open mouths apotheosized by the herd despite all intellectual cajoling that is to set men free to the contrary , because, whether this phenonmenon is a matter of personal nature or of social oppression, not all humans are capable much less inspired by an uncompromised divine light strong enough and focused enough to shake loose of the fetters and act as a catalyst for change. As such there will always be leaders and there will always be followers. Hence institutions and molecular compounds, mighty poets, shining lights, and safety in numbers.
You wrote:
My reference to your manifesto being "a little too sweeping" should be explained, I suppose. What I meant was that to assert that nothing of note has happened since the, what? The 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition perhaps? Was going a bit too far. Personally, I find some of Matta's 1960's works a real extension of the Surrealist outlook. Even Pop has a role in furthering our ideas of personal liberation. Of course, I look at the best of Pop as being heavily laced with irony, so that it can be read as a critique of commodity capitalism. I agree with you the balkanization is something we need to transcend.
I write:
But there is no escape from this monstrosity we know as time; time changes all perspectives, hence truth is always in travail. At least none less worthy of our concerns in our current apocalyptic node. We are soldiers called into a life of combat. Each soldier is armed according to whims of the moment. While it is certainly too late to write poems, it is far too early to burn books and paper money on the trash heap of our own impatient imaginations. Socialism will supplant capitalism, but not tomorrow, or the next day. There is much yet to be done in the name of competitive fetishism. Do I have proof of this? Does it matter except along the broad avenues and speculative pitter patter of the chattering classes?
You wrote:
I too am an autodidact, to a large degree. I do have 24 semester hours' credit from Roosevelt University in Chicago dating from 1972-74. My first great epiphany came at attending the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in March 1974. His work and life showed me that formal education provided more obstacles than opportunities. I find academia to be one of the principal obstacles to both individual and social transformation. My second great epiphany came from understanding the intimate connection between Duchamp and Max Stirner in 1989. My course has been set ever since. The bulk of the fruits of my interest in this connection is forthcoming, but it won't be too long now.
I wrote:
Having run willy nilly through all those blackened doors and those well-read windows, what have I gained that will put starch in my speech? Am I not the same dissatisfied sojourner that I was at 8, 14, 18, 22, refusing to memorize the lives and works of others so that I can exercise more freely the haunts withering within myself, only to be mocked as an unschooled ignoramus and a wasteling, no talent fool? What is it that we are really seeking, you and I? Should I yawn or squeeze a peach into my fist? Freedom? Like Pilate, I ask, what is freedom? What is truth? Is the only damned truth I can ever know for certain (because it has been with me the longest) is that every day of every year of my freelanced life has been augured by the truth and the lie shaped like a bonzai tree that encourages me to lose my ephemeral status, my skin, my gender, my race, my stinking unresolved life for the sake of OTHERS and their own unresolved notions? What do I care about others? Do they care about me? What is this truth I prefer to think as the ONLY TRUTH? If my life is nothing but a zen koan, has not my own insignificance been the only path worth noting. Debord was a hard-nosed poseur, just like the multitudes grinning with marmalade teeth, but he indeed invented himself, the poet and raconteur with critical aims. Six billion individuals, or five giant nations under one roof? What are the odds of me inventing either possibility?
You wrote:
You really shouldn't lift whole sections of material from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Stirner and present it as your own thought, although you chose a reputable source. George Woodcock, although prone to some of the same collectivist biases as so many other commentators on Stirner, did do a pretty good job at characterizing his thought.
I write:
Well lad, I hardly presented that chunk as my own writing. Methinks it twas a dead giveaway...
However, I make no excuses. As to Stirner, this is all I know... Notice the all caps, vital dates in parentheses. I suppose I could have pasted myself into the narrative, or simply given a reference. Yawn.
STIRNER, MAX (1806-1856), was the nom de plume of the German individualist philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt. Born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Schmidt had a poor childhood (like myself). His academic career was long and fragmented. I am uneducated, while sponging from the world of books and media like there is no other purpose to life than to have read too much to be of any worldly good.
Et cetera. The point being, those who know anything about the "inimitable" unrequited fashion I shove ink to paper, know that I splatter adverbs, adjectives and lengthy unbounded syntax around the page like wood nymphs in search of an unsoiled Grecian urn, and either praise me, criticize me, or shriek delightfully at the joke, but the word inimitable always sets the pace. It was rather obvious to a seasoned reader of this humble bumbler which particular lines were added for personal affect, about four I think, at the very beginning, and the rest which naturally came from a source written in short brittle academic sentences complete with caps and parentheticals for the pure joy of letting a new sparring partner know that those few paragraphs were indeed ALL I knew of Stirner, line for line, having pulled the historical man distorted or not straight out a book that very morning, scanned, OCR'd, dutifully copied and then routinely pasted into context, prompted of course by your own well-appreciated overtures to him. Apologies that I didn't properly reference the jag for you, but I simply didn't realize I was submitting a white paper unto the authorities. Duly noted is your kind exception to my frightful oversight. See Debord, for more insights into plagiarism, although I really wasn’t erecting any such scam.
You wrote:
I guess you're already surmising that I vehemently disagree with your characterization of Stirner as "yet another status quo philosopher". Your evaluation sound a lot like Karl Marx's ideas on the subject, and I am painfully aware that the situationists used Marx as their basic philosophical substrate. Do you know a book that came out in 2002 by Kristin Ross called "May '68 and its Afterlives"? She, too, decries the "creeping individualism" that has seeped into the discourse on May '68 and related phenomena. But that is material for another post.
I write:
Status quo in my book projects an entirely other meaning than the one I presume you to harbor. To me status quo is extended to mean that all life is in flux, and since we have always had shining beacons, artists, poets, philosophers, statesmen, soldiers, con men, whores, zealots, saints, sinners, and the rest of us catawauling among the tall timbers and dry desert sands, to announce that the individual is the primary thrust of existence is hardly breakthrough revolutionary cant, but it is Stirner's rejection of revolution, even as his distrust in institutions is genuine, that interests me, and I thank you for bringing him to my attention, if for nothing more than hereditary concerns.
You wrote:
The thing that is important now is to indicate just why Stirner is not just another apologist for the small-time shopkeeper. The key point has to do with the irreducible toggle in the individualism/collectivism question: can I keep my own prerogatives intact if I allow a collective entity to be primary in my own mind and, by extension, in the world? The answer, I'm afraid, is no, and if this is true, then my own instrumentalism at the hand of the collectivity is inevitable. This engenders what Stanley Milgram (yes, that Milgram) calls the "agentic state", in which I sign away my right of decision in favor of one "in authority". I presume you are aware of the infamous Milgram experiments of 1960. One look at the results of these experiments should be enough to convince that ours is not a world in which "enlightened" egoism rules, only the debased kind, the infantile kind. Where vulgar egoism leaves off, Stirner begins. It is possible to trace a trajectory of an increase in "affective individualism" (as the historian Lawrence Stone terms it), beginning in the late 17th century and continuing up to the present time. Kinship ties have weakened, and individual prerogatives strengthened, in a fairly unbroken progression ever since this began. One of the main problems, in my opinion, is that this process hasonly gone halfway through its cycle.
I write:
Now, THIS is indeed close to the mark! How I have raged raged against the dying of the light when encountering the uncorrected rantings of Ayn Rand and Nietzsche (ditto in spades to leftist scalawags like Marx and his progeny), but yet have been unable to resolve the problem of how to congeal the collective notion, honestly and succinctly, given the range and variations of the specimen. I dare not trust ANY authority, unless I first taste its fruit. But individual tastes change, shift, capsize. As circumstances change, so usually does the hand that feeds them. Bureaucratic strength is corruptible as a result of its authoritarian nature in caricature of individuality redeemed, and thus l'd prefer living on the outside, accepting that isolation, rather than join any movement that coerces me with threats or ill-gotten gains, phoney, inflated, or otherwise. Living in the age of quarrel is no picnic on the high seas, but I think you are indeed traveling the right tracks in pinpointing what ails much of the West, that is the mystery of defining, or uncovering that nexus which balances the rights of the individual with the good of the collective. There has got to be a mathematical proof in this somewhere, but flesh and blood properly inspired is never a game of mathematics where zero and affinity take a stand, and the genetics of sin still rule with transparent and opposing thumbs. The society of the spectacle is no match for the society of dead certainty.
You wrote:
Individual empowerment is what we all need, not a centralized plan of forced income redistribution. This will only result in endless counterrevolution. It is moralism run wild, what confounded the French Revolution and the communist one as well. Collectives that legislate what's good for the others against their consent is no good. Self-directed anarchism could avoid these problems if brutality could be expunged form the consciousness of the millions. That if is so big you can drive a truck through it, I know. But the revolution is impossible without it. Start small, get bigger. Revolution from below. I believe we are not so very far apart philosophically. Breton, as well as Picabia, Max Ernst and Duchamp, all found Stirner to be quite compelling. It is only a question of continuing to resolve all the inconsistencies attending to the implementation of collectively constituted projects that keeps us from moving forward.
I write:
Such is the curse of the dreamer. That revolution from below you declare is part and parcel of the status quo for which I stand. But bullets and bombs, poisons and pride, hand in hand, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, each a lure of fascination, each a stumbling block. The only philosophy worth a nutcracker's suite is that which can be applied to the world in play. On the brink of catastrophic destruction, our world is not a safe place. Psychological warriors must gird their loins as the mighty clash for the sake of their history books. Words no longer make a difference, they have withered in the mouths of the arms dealers. Flesh on the bone will be burnt to bare cinders and those violent screams and sentimental songs of peace will not be heard in the heavens, but will choke on the smoke of the ancestral homes now in ashes and worse. Gentler minds will continue to seek sanctuary, but will find none, but the ones they were born into like the flesh of the moth. This is the age we live to defy, but few, very few, poets of promise and peace poling along a bloody regime have ever made it out alive, and the next generation often fares worse. But we can't stop dreaming, can we?
Munificently yours,
GT
Saturday, July 07, 2007
TAKING A CHARGE IN A ZERO SUM MOMENT
Originally published on May 29, 1996
Hey Ben—dialing for symptoms and synonyms has me spinning doughnuts around my memory. You wrote:
Caught up in words as they are. "Work" means "making money" and free-time is meant to be for recreation. In Germany, in the mid-eighties, when unemployment was a popular discussion, one heard of the "human right to work". This was twisty. I wonder why people need someone to tell them what to work, although they need some money I anticipate. Well I'd welcome NO WORK...
Yes, mt German friend. My wife's mother recently lectured her on the topic. With this common interpretation sharp on her peacewhittling tongue, she was of course probing with ages rich mother-in-law cynicism MY own twisted state of NO WORK. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that I appear to jealous acquaintences quite blessed among men for lack of a regimented work burden, or entitlement, depending one one's perspective. My wife has been convinced finally that I am best kept at home in the privacy of my whirling mind and Dollhouse, near her cold indifferent fingers but warm toasty heart. I admit I feel rather insecure anywhere else, and tend to drink myself into an explosive reproach to the bickering myths of strataculture every time I step out into the bustling city of lights, armed with little but the urgency for escape from any number of circulating yet dreaded theories of night which haunt me.
I am rather, yes, busy making a contortionist's name for myself, or else in the minds of my severest critics, busy hiding names and nuances behind barstools and bushel baskets of cloudy arguments where lightning strikes swiftly and severely against the surface of old arguments whose welcome is long gone, you pick 'em, as they say in the sporting world of betting chances against the winds of the great guffaw.
With only slight exaggeration, I work every waking moment. My wife complains that I cannot find rest, which is only partially true, a fuzzy subset, if you will, within a greater set of misguided certainties and regimented responses we are taught but must toss away as foreign to our means of survival. Fuzzy logic, or educated guesswork, informed interpolation, however, is the grace the unequipped will never face, and for their ignorance they will perish with their lessening winds. My dreamstates are work, are tools, are kids in teh sandbox and I embrace them just as most do at the movies peering into someone else's dreams and ideological documentation.
But back to the idea of work and money. My wife pays nearly all the bills. This is true. She feels the burden of her job, of course, but she brags about what it brings her in prestige and buying power of argument and freedom when dealing with the host of projects at our command, insecurity or not. If I bring in a dollar, I give it to somebody else, usually her, or to the computer industry. I am an accomplice within the digital revolution, a footsoldier, an enlisted tattooed man, a homefront evangelizer as I peer beyond the garbage and confusion from my Dollhouse perch which serves me well.
Surrounded by mediocrity and predjudice, the greatest practitioners of liberal slander slither all around my disguise. My sockets burn sometimes with the urge to fly somewhere I can explode past meaning into the netherland of pure synchronicity. And this rainy season meanwhile is driving all the Dolhouse yard bugs inward, ants and cockroaches multiplying themselves and immigrating to my turf as if they "owned the joint". Fighting against the corruption of the material is the only fight worth dying for, but dying is a losing cause. I hate dying.
WORK IS ENERGY. Money is a contaminating conversion and byproduct, safe only in proper prospective, because money corrupts everyone who surrenders to it. Opinions are always made about money. Even the most discrimating poor among us, myself included, gaze upon it and are corrupted with envy and violence in strident persuasion to obtain it, or saddled with an indifference that leads us into wretched arguments for obsessive compulsive choices as concrete and ugly as money ever was.
Pure work frees man from the analysis of money. Am I a hypocrite for pointing this out? Am I a hypocrite because I love to spend money? Am I a hypocrite because I have argued, successfully it seems, to remain at home, supported by a woman who is hardly Artist or fraud, simply to allow the chips to fall where they may? Am I a hypocrite because I am aging, ugly and fat, conspiring to destroy faith in humanity's surge to crawl up from the tidal mud known as the Anti-Hip instead of being that dazzling, thin, strategically well-placed well-pocketed and quasibeautifully hip? The trickledown economies of Art and Finance are not dissimilar; as Ezra Pound's crackling contentions about art, economics, and war, and William Gaddis in his terrific novel—The Recognitions—have revealed.
You have postulated Ben, that "people get occupied in a way, they forget to handle NO WORK. You know that, I suggest, but do you also know that contemplation, the force of passivity, I mean not producing, maybe on a journey? Oh, yes, you are a gardener too. Many people have to work, to ease their artificial bad conscience."
If I say I am a writer, or a painter, am I less so because no mote has called me up on the telephone to offer me a job or a contract? Am I any less a gardener if no one has offered to snap a polaroid of my roses or send me on an all-expense paid holiday to the Alpines to discuss breeding techniques. Does it matter whether I eat poorly like the beast I resemble, or whether I eat like a fat French chef buttering his own bread in Paris? The human right to work and the human right to be hip are not too far apart on the GT scale of impossible tasks among so many and so stupid a population always electromagnetic & naked in the catbird seat, but ever so snobbishly none the wiser...
But we, despite our best attempts to avoid or embrace these symptoms bunkered down in stodgiven ratios of human production and consumption, radix fuzzy but still redicking and drunk from the fountain of fair green idealism, we too succumb to the same pitfalls in one flavor or another as any other poke even as we like to feel superior and just a bit more enlightened in comparison. We struggle against struggle not knowing how to slip the knot that binds us.
Basically Ben, I feel most people desire everything they think they can handle. Most of us don't know when to start OR stop the false lures of desire outside the domain of self-interest. The few who know the ropes either play them to bizarre lengths or avoid them with the meanest of miseries. The rest of us argue ourselves straight into a double-edged niche, and so it becomes us, our sentence for which parole is repeatedly denied, despite any makeshift theories to the contrary, we or some other highly paid or dollar dead genius devises for us in teh meantime.
GT
Hey Ben—dialing for symptoms and synonyms has me spinning doughnuts around my memory. You wrote:
Caught up in words as they are. "Work" means "making money" and free-time is meant to be for recreation. In Germany, in the mid-eighties, when unemployment was a popular discussion, one heard of the "human right to work". This was twisty. I wonder why people need someone to tell them what to work, although they need some money I anticipate. Well I'd welcome NO WORK...
Yes, mt German friend. My wife's mother recently lectured her on the topic. With this common interpretation sharp on her peacewhittling tongue, she was of course probing with ages rich mother-in-law cynicism MY own twisted state of NO WORK. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that I appear to jealous acquaintences quite blessed among men for lack of a regimented work burden, or entitlement, depending one one's perspective. My wife has been convinced finally that I am best kept at home in the privacy of my whirling mind and Dollhouse, near her cold indifferent fingers but warm toasty heart. I admit I feel rather insecure anywhere else, and tend to drink myself into an explosive reproach to the bickering myths of strataculture every time I step out into the bustling city of lights, armed with little but the urgency for escape from any number of circulating yet dreaded theories of night which haunt me.
I am rather, yes, busy making a contortionist's name for myself, or else in the minds of my severest critics, busy hiding names and nuances behind barstools and bushel baskets of cloudy arguments where lightning strikes swiftly and severely against the surface of old arguments whose welcome is long gone, you pick 'em, as they say in the sporting world of betting chances against the winds of the great guffaw.
With only slight exaggeration, I work every waking moment. My wife complains that I cannot find rest, which is only partially true, a fuzzy subset, if you will, within a greater set of misguided certainties and regimented responses we are taught but must toss away as foreign to our means of survival. Fuzzy logic, or educated guesswork, informed interpolation, however, is the grace the unequipped will never face, and for their ignorance they will perish with their lessening winds. My dreamstates are work, are tools, are kids in teh sandbox and I embrace them just as most do at the movies peering into someone else's dreams and ideological documentation.
But back to the idea of work and money. My wife pays nearly all the bills. This is true. She feels the burden of her job, of course, but she brags about what it brings her in prestige and buying power of argument and freedom when dealing with the host of projects at our command, insecurity or not. If I bring in a dollar, I give it to somebody else, usually her, or to the computer industry. I am an accomplice within the digital revolution, a footsoldier, an enlisted tattooed man, a homefront evangelizer as I peer beyond the garbage and confusion from my Dollhouse perch which serves me well.
Surrounded by mediocrity and predjudice, the greatest practitioners of liberal slander slither all around my disguise. My sockets burn sometimes with the urge to fly somewhere I can explode past meaning into the netherland of pure synchronicity. And this rainy season meanwhile is driving all the Dolhouse yard bugs inward, ants and cockroaches multiplying themselves and immigrating to my turf as if they "owned the joint". Fighting against the corruption of the material is the only fight worth dying for, but dying is a losing cause. I hate dying.
WORK IS ENERGY. Money is a contaminating conversion and byproduct, safe only in proper prospective, because money corrupts everyone who surrenders to it. Opinions are always made about money. Even the most discrimating poor among us, myself included, gaze upon it and are corrupted with envy and violence in strident persuasion to obtain it, or saddled with an indifference that leads us into wretched arguments for obsessive compulsive choices as concrete and ugly as money ever was.
Pure work frees man from the analysis of money. Am I a hypocrite for pointing this out? Am I a hypocrite because I love to spend money? Am I a hypocrite because I have argued, successfully it seems, to remain at home, supported by a woman who is hardly Artist or fraud, simply to allow the chips to fall where they may? Am I a hypocrite because I am aging, ugly and fat, conspiring to destroy faith in humanity's surge to crawl up from the tidal mud known as the Anti-Hip instead of being that dazzling, thin, strategically well-placed well-pocketed and quasibeautifully hip? The trickledown economies of Art and Finance are not dissimilar; as Ezra Pound's crackling contentions about art, economics, and war, and William Gaddis in his terrific novel—The Recognitions—have revealed.
You have postulated Ben, that "people get occupied in a way, they forget to handle NO WORK. You know that, I suggest, but do you also know that contemplation, the force of passivity, I mean not producing, maybe on a journey? Oh, yes, you are a gardener too. Many people have to work, to ease their artificial bad conscience."
If I say I am a writer, or a painter, am I less so because no mote has called me up on the telephone to offer me a job or a contract? Am I any less a gardener if no one has offered to snap a polaroid of my roses or send me on an all-expense paid holiday to the Alpines to discuss breeding techniques. Does it matter whether I eat poorly like the beast I resemble, or whether I eat like a fat French chef buttering his own bread in Paris? The human right to work and the human right to be hip are not too far apart on the GT scale of impossible tasks among so many and so stupid a population always electromagnetic & naked in the catbird seat, but ever so snobbishly none the wiser...
But we, despite our best attempts to avoid or embrace these symptoms bunkered down in stodgiven ratios of human production and consumption, radix fuzzy but still redicking and drunk from the fountain of fair green idealism, we too succumb to the same pitfalls in one flavor or another as any other poke even as we like to feel superior and just a bit more enlightened in comparison. We struggle against struggle not knowing how to slip the knot that binds us.
Basically Ben, I feel most people desire everything they think they can handle. Most of us don't know when to start OR stop the false lures of desire outside the domain of self-interest. The few who know the ropes either play them to bizarre lengths or avoid them with the meanest of miseries. The rest of us argue ourselves straight into a double-edged niche, and so it becomes us, our sentence for which parole is repeatedly denied, despite any makeshift theories to the contrary, we or some other highly paid or dollar dead genius devises for us in teh meantime.
GT
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