Reflections on what it is, the crisis which is its cause, and the testing of several experimental cures
Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil
"I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy."
– Robert Burton, Preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy
Much has been written about the social unrest and the endless crises now unfolding all across the world. It has been said by some that “capitalism is the crisis”, and by others that “we are the crisis”. As for me, I have never had anything repossessed, because I have never possessed anything. More accurately, I am – together with you, dear reader – possessed, and write these reflections as an act of exorcism.
I don’t intend to add to the conservative cant and pseudo-progressive catcalls offered up by one and all to the world of the undead by producing yet more inconsequential commentary. This society of spectators is in no danger of going hungry for lack of commentators from the peanut gallery. For once, I will obey the signs – those which read: “PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE MONKEYS”.
Long ago it was pointed out that the modern world must burn what it already knows, that the enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. If we are sharp enough to watch our step, keeping in time with its complex rhythms, the movement of this march may at last allow us to cast off our demons and become ourselves. My study is a contribution towards this beautiful process, or it is nothing. It is also, of course, very much a "work in progress".
Poetry and Misery
“People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. We wanted to break out of our conditioning, in search of different uses of this landscape, in search of new passions. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty. Since everything was connected, it was necessary to change everything through a unitary struggle, or nothing.”
– Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time
A week ago one of my closest friends tried to kill himself by jumping off the top of Table Mountain, and, that failing, slitting his wrists and throat with a broken beer bottle. After the failure of both suicide attempts, he was finally admitted to the emergency psychiatric ward of the local hospital. A few weeks before his admission, another friend of mine had been discharged from a different psychiatric institute after suffering serious drug problems. Some weeks before she was admitted, I leaned from a childhood friend that she had just quit a job which had driven her to attempt suicide, and that she had tried to kill herself several times before that. As these events were unfolding another close friend of mine was admitted to the hospital for overnight observation. He had recently fallen seriously ill but the doctors could find no medical reason behind his symptoms – not surprising since he has the healthiest lifestyle of anyone I know – and after running a battery of tests they put it all down to stress. This too is no surprise, considering what he told me recently: “I find SA extremely stifling – in every aspect of life. My last three months there I felt like I was slowly dying.”
Despite the dramatic timing of these events, I’m not convinced that I’ve been blessed with an unusually high proportion of melancholy comrades.[1] Rather, the co-incidence of these far-flung implosions seemed to me merely to be abundant confirmation of Henry David Thoreau’s acute observation that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
*
A dilettante intellectual called Steven Pinker recently released a book called Angels of our Better Nature where he argued that social violence is declining over time due to the angelic effect on our moral character of a voodoo-like liberal “empathy circle” – embodied in the form of the bourgeois state. Unfortunately, such fetishistic fantasies are not limited to this particular cretin, but run rampant among all sections of the population, which is the only reason they are worthy of any refutation. The assertion that there is a single aspect of this unmitigated disaster of a society that we should be grateful for is a vicious insult to every objectified human-being privileged with a common reality of daily humiliation, boredom, and isolation. Such lies are as dangerous as they are pervasive, and must be dealt with ruthlessly.
For those interested in that sort of thing, a number of amusing critiques have appeared exposing the scholarly bankruptcy of Professor Pinker’s venture into social history.[2] Since such specialized criticism is, though both important and entertaining, irrelevant to the current study, I will limit my contribution to one elementary observation, namely: Pinker does not include suicide as a form of "violent death”. Considering the fact that in the USA, the place where he professes to live, one is on average more likely to die of suicide than murder, this seems a rather significant omission.
This indifference to one’s everyday life, this blindness to what is happening right in front of one’s eyes – this too is not peculiar to Dr. Pinker, and is in fact the primary subject of the current study. In this regard, the brilliant ethnological work of David Graeber, such as his Exploration of the Relation of Power, Ignorance and Stupidity, appears particularly pertinent: “All of this [officially sanctioned social violence] is obvious enough. What’s of ethnographic interest, perhaps, is how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount its importance. This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students [or professors] to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life, without ever reflecting on the fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them.”
In the latest of a series of articles documenting the richly varied species of specious assertions in Steven Pinker’s work, historian Humphrey Clark ends thusly
In answer to one question… Pinker writes: ‘This is a bogus statistic; see pp. 317–320’.
No – if you want to see a load of bogus statistics start at page 1 and keep reading till you get to page 832.
Thus we see that the only decline over time to speak of appears to be the ability of intellectual stooges to think – which seems to have dwindled to a most pitiful level. Verily, it’s undeniable that today “bourgeois” = bogus. It’s thus clear why, when commenting on the campaign of misinformation carried out against her comrades, a young proletarian remarked “There are three kinds of bullshit: lies, damned lies, and bourgeois statistics.”
Worse than the methodological incompetence of his state of mind – which, though detestable, may also be debatable – is the fundamental resignation of Steven Pinker to the existing state of things. If “what is called resignation is”, as defined by Thoreau, “confirmed desperation”, one can only conclude that the thing (or state) Pinker is so desperate to confirm is his own senseless sense of satisfaction. “Every creature in a cave can justify himself”, wrote poet Gary Snyder. “Nine-tenths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”
The evolution of this brain-addled hack from psychologist (his academic specialisation) to moral philosopher & social historian is as significant as it is predictable. In Anaesthetising Consciousness: The Science of Suicide, it is suggested by a young research worker that the modern scientist’s obsession with “objectivity” is a means of escaping confrontation with the hostile and alien force which totally dominates him and his world – in other words, it is an expression of alienation. "The belief in the progressive civilising nature of this so-called objectivity compensates for the tortuous feeling of being an indifferent nothing.”
It is my contention that this obsession is common throughout the entire population and is the result of our collective failure to regain control of ourselves from the clutches of what visionary poet William Blake called the “dark satanic mills” which, in exchange for our daily bread, daily grind us into “indifferent nothings”. Every day, spectacular horrors are presented to us as images in newspapers and on TV in an attempt to divert our attention from the everyday horrors we are all forced to live through. At the same time, we are presented with the pseudo-events of the celebrity[3] world – from the weddings of sports-stars to the sex-scandals of politicians (and vice-versa) – to give the impression that somebody, somewhere, is able to have some sort of an eventful life. The fact that these pseudo-events are only spectacular versions of the tawdry non-events of our own world imparts a cheap glamour to our sordid escapades while at the same time exposing in inescapable material terms the utterly vacuous nature of both celebrity and everyday life.
Furthermore, the spectacle of famous personas acting out monumental versions of our own non-life creates the illusion of a larger community participating in a “public life” from which we are utterly barred and which is in fact entirely imaginary. In a speech which you could hear today from any idiot on the radio blabbering about the scam currently called “social responsibility”, Robert Oppenheimer, a scientific celebrity who took the lead in developing the atom-bomb in the 1940s, spoke about the need for science to “contribute to the integrity of our common cultural life.”
As Joseph Weber pointed out, this is nothing but “bad conscience and apology” caused by a life of irresponsible action:
The gem in this empty phrase is (a) our “common” cultural life, (b) its “integrity.” It contains not one iota of knowledge about our social existence (which strictly forbids common culture as well as its integrity) but much know-how of how to produce good-sounding nonsense (the lubrication that keeps the machine from running hot).
It is no surprise that, when they are not slinging mud at one another or trying to wash their hands of one or another banal scandal, this kind of drivel is practically the only thing that those who occupy the roles businessman, cop, politician, scholar & entertainer manage to let ooze out of their mouths. How often have you thought something similar when confronted with your own complicity by the questioning eyes of a child, a lover, a colleague, a dog, or a sister?
*
“He who does not realise to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance has separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man gives rise to the illusion of several distinct species who cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.”
– Simone Weil, The Iliad: A Poem of Force
Dear hypocrite reader – You! My comrade! My twin! – your inattention – and the inaction that accompanies it – regarding what is closest to you mirrors your attentive indifference regarding what is most remote. Like scientific and cultural specialists – the sham shamans of the modern world – your faithless faith takes precedence over all other moral considerations. Like the superstitious ideal of “pure science” which allows scientists who work to find new ways of killing & poisoning those around them to “pursue their work in complete indifference to its social and ethical consequences”, your own ideals of irresponsible responsibility (“a man takes care of his own” – which is just another way to say dulce et decorum est pro familia et patria mori) drive you destroy yourself, your world, and everything you love. This is tragedy. Oscar Wilde knew it well, and sung it in The Ballad of Reading Gaol “All men kill the thing they love: by all let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word.” Yet you will not acknowledge this, nor understand its causes; so you build the prison of social ignorance. You take it for granted that corporations, state officials, and union bureaucrats are corrupt, and mistake your cynicism for sophistication. Successively disillusioned, you end up believing in nothing but the illusory nature of everything. You console yourself with contempt for the “criminal” whose crimes blind you to your own, and for the “activist” whose caricatured submission is presented as a foil precisely to make you forget your own submission. You separate yourself and your life from society as a whole. You are even telling yourself right now that this applies to most people but not to you. Even so – though all evidence points to the contrary – you secretly hope that your life will somehow partake of the privileged world of the stars, whose pseudo-meaningful activity is made to mask the meaninglessness of your own actions. The spectacular horror and glamour you fixate on burns like a sun whose bright light blots out the sight of the horrors you put up with daily, which, like the moon, glows in the reflected rays of that star even as it is obscured by it. Rather than reflecting a “down to earth” indifference to the absurdities of power, both your indifference and your fixations are merely absurd reflections of your own absurd powerlessness.
On the rare occasions when you are forced to directly confront the consequences of the organised irresponsibility of your world, you relinquish all power to an abstraction – economic recession, mental illness, the incomprehensible passions of youth, political turmoil, racism, the list is endless – which allow you to clutch onto your threadbare life without having even to think of doing anything significant about it yourself. When the warning-signs all around you clearly point to the wisdom embodied in the ancient Zen koan
Beware of falling markets! Beware of rising markets!
Better to have nothing at all than to have something good.
You act as if you are illiterate and continue to put your hopes on a gradual “improvement” whose every movement is merely a step closer to the grave. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You vaguely imagine that somehow your life will get better. Do you really have any reason to believe that? Are you going to continue as you have until you die? The world you and your actions work to build is an historical, temporary form of society and must give way to a higher form or collapse into new barbarism, but you insist on its “eternal” validity. Its past is bloody and vicious, its present is even worse. Its future, even in times of a “boom,” has nothing attractive to offer. It is full of fears, doubts, insecurity, problems and troubles to which the professional ideologists, trained and paid to confuse you, give vent. Ideology too has been privatized – “to each his own”. The modern democratization of irrational ideology allows everybody to accumulate their own “unique” blend of mysticism, agnosticism, idealism and religion, and populate this vacant real-estate with the appropriate décor, clothing, slang, sexual standards, leisure activities, “culture”, aspirations, etcetera. If you took the trouble to think about your own existence, you would see that all of this can only lead to one or another form of self-destruction. The courage to face this sober fact is lacking — you refuse to recognize the future and prefer to live on unfounded hopes and the elements of God’s judgment. Both spectator and actor of your own life, you idly watch yourself play out a bit-part in a script written by an invisible, inhuman, irresponsible, irrational and insensate idiot.
*
"The study of written words is to understand the purpose of written words."
– Dōgen Zenji, Instructions for the Cook
This digression into the second-person, though perhaps not very pleasant, accomplishes a necessary task. As has been said earlier, the primary subject of this study is the almost religious blindness of people to the things going on right in front of – and around, and inside – them. As Dōgen noted, this blindness has everything to do with wilful ignorance regarding one’s actions and their consequences. “If you are confused about the step you have just taken, then you will slip up and pass by that which stares you in the face.” It is thus vital to continually bring everything under discussion back home, as it must be acknowledged that “To study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable even to grasp anything of its object, if this study was not expressly for the purpose of transforming everyday life.” (Guy Debord, Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life) Essay writing and reading, being quite a commonplace form of human interaction in a rather large sector of society, is itself part of the everyday life that must be criticized. By slightly shifting the focus and making it clear how intimately everything under discussion has to do with the reader, the writer and their lives together, the form of the study refuses all separation between its from and its content.
The point is to study the sources of misery & powerlessness – which have been projected into a spectacular realm outside our own experience (the economy, history, politics, law, religion, science, culture, etc) where they then seem to operate with the inevitability, inexorability, and inexplicability of acts of god – as they exist in our immediate experience of life. Only once they have been put back there “within spitting distance” can we put our hands on them and begin transforming them into their opposites: sources of empowerment & joy. Discussing the atrocities committed by the military dictatorship of his time, Argentinean journalist Rodolfo Walsh, in his Open Letter to the Military Junta, was well able to state the case:
These violent crimes do not represent the greatest suffering that has been brought upon the Argentine people, nor the gravest violations. The necessities of economic exploitation provide an explanation not only to the political violence but also to the greater atrocity: the lifetime of planned misery with which all people under the capitalist mode of production are punished.
At the same time as this misery is planned, it is privatized. In the absence of a socially radical (i.e. revolutionary) situation, most people under the dictatorship of Capital tend to experience the passage of time as an immense accumulation of private disaster, filled with brief, empty hope and monotonous shame. “Thus” explains prisoner George Jackson, “if I or any of my kind should suffer the final hurt, it would be by accident, heart attack instead of poisoning, malnutrition instead of beating, suicide by hanging instead of being shot, or legal proceedings instead of foul play.”
Here in this country, where so many a prisoner has died by “accidentally” slipping on soap, the significance of this explanation will not pass unnoticed. However, the fraud of representative democracy serves today to separate legitimate and illegitimate power – not in fact but in people’s minds. The corresponding fraud of meritocracy[4] has transformed everyday poverty from a political into a personal evil. Despite the real power of these lies, the personal is always political; power always works to legitimize the illegitimate. Everyone living through a radical situation comes to realize that though “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen”, as Woody Guthrie sang; and though they may wear suits and ties or badges and uniforms; businessmen, politicians and police are no better than thugs in a gang. In such situations everyone, once they wake up and smell the roses, knows a thief is a thief is a thief.
Deprivation is deprived of privacy. The false separations of what in reality are fused – which are used to falsely defuse real antagonisms – are refused.
This is why one of the most important tasks of any attack against the domination of misery, whether in theory or in practice, has always been “to make shame more shameful still by making it public”. It is to say legal proceedings and foul play, suicides and shootings are merely two sides of a single coin minted from the melancholy of all our kind. It is to openly acknowledge that as long as society is structured the way it is, all our small personal gains will always be followed by bigger losses just as surely as “any who make revolutions half-way only dig their own graves.” It is to affirm that these personal failures are, far from the result of our inadequacy to adapt to the world, rather the result of our collective failure to adapt an inadequate world to ourselves – what Christian visionary Jacob Boehme would call the “perverse inversion of making spirit nature's servant."
It is to recognise, together with another Christian visionary, Martin Luther King, the necessity to “always maintain a kind of divine discontent”. It is to proclaim itself “proud to be maladjusted” to a rotten world not worth adjusting to, and to join him in his call for the establishment of an International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment in order that, “through such maladjustment, we emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”
We are not inadequate. We are human treasures, systematically buried alive generation after generation by ten millennia of malicious dirt.
Revolutionary Therapy
"When I was finding my way as a young psychotherapy student, the most useful book I read was Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth. And the single most useful concept in that book was the notion that the human being has an inbuilt propensity toward self-realization. If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree."
– Irvin Yalom, The Gift of Therapy
Today, any revolutionary social movement will have to define itself as both immediately therapeutic and therapeutically immediate. Individual blocks can only be removed by the social, the social only by the removal of individual inhibitions. Thus, when Italian revolutionary Amadeo Bordiga asserted “One does not construct communism, one only destroys the obstacles to its development”, he acknowledged that the creative self-realisation of society as a whole, as well as of its individual parts, involved a therapeutic break through any and all personal and social blockages which would to the carriage of new times admit impediments.
Radical situations both produce and are the products of this therapy. In all times and places, oppression is naturalized.
“Have nots” are made to believe that they “have not” because they are lazy, uneducated, and stupid; their children, when they fail to succeed in acquiring that very education, are made to believe they fail for the very same reasons! Suffering is made to seem like either a mysterious product of God’s will, or a natural result of the sufferer’s shortcomings. During one fairly extensive unity of time and space – throughout South Africa from the mid ‘70s to late 80’s – this tendency was turned on its head. Since, in the various states of emergency, all public gatherings of more than three people were banned, people used funerals to highlight the unitary nature of the struggle. Whether it was a child shot by a cop or killed by malnutrition, a granny dead from hypothermia or a lady killed by her rapist, all were seen to be products of the system of social separation – a word which, translated into Afrikaans, literally means “apartheid”. More important than the murder of the dead, the misery of the living was seen to be directly rooted to that same bloody rock.
Naturally, the misery brought about by the domination of all life by a demon hell-bent on “the production and consumption of commodities” tends to produce a lot of aggression in those of us forced to live under such a regime. Normally, however, there is block between the direct cause of our misery and our feelings of anger and aggression.
The misery resulting from our objective oppression is seen through the lens (otherwise known as the spectacle) of our subjective subjugation, which tends to displace direct aggression by directing displaced aggression towards, firstly, ourselves, and then those around us (lovers, family, individual bosses & politicians, foreigners, gays, kids, etc): thus our very experience of distress, due to the total domination of capital, is totally displaced and focused on mere fragments (or details) of that domination.[5]
The flip side to these aggressive fragmented forms of focus is provided in passive form by psychiatric “therapy”. The somewhat simplistic article Suicide or Revolution sketches a straightforward description of how this works:
Desperation unarmed makes proletarians hope to be rescued by shrinks in order to avoid the immensely difficult task of confronting, bit by bit, the totality of their alienation. Society has to provide the miserable with the illusion of hope provided by experts because without such hope they’d either slit their own throats or confront the material bases of their misery. In fact, disappointment with such forms of external hope, without struggling to affirm yourself against the objective bases of your misery, is often the reason why people crack and give up the ghost.
Although it would be difficult to argue with this, one must keep in mind that the article achieves clarity at the expense of oversimplification. The power of “normality” lies precisely in the fact that it transforms the lived reality of everybody into a spectacle to be contemplated but never controlled, serving us all a rich diversity of false-choices which create an illusion of freedom.
So while a few people choose suicide, most never do. “For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.” Rather they decide to hustle in stock exchanges, court-rooms, corporations, or street corners, make underhanded deals in state offices or in non-governmentally organised crime in the hopes of riches & status; they slum it in urban squats or rural communes, hustling away in some marginal occupation in the arts & crafts or charity industry in the hopes of achieving “authenticity” & an “alternative” lifestyle; they perform acts of brainless physical hooliganism or equally brainless intellectual provocation in the hopes of gaining notoriety, or acts of cultural arse-licking and academic banality in the hopes of gaining fame; they drink themselves comatose or savour fine wines on weekends in the hopes of blotting out the memory of the previous week and the steady approach of Monday; they patronise literary magazines, mosques, bars, meditation halls, churches, soccer-matches, yoga-classes, movie theatres, concert halls, night clubs, art galleries, museums and other spiritual and cultural ghettos in the hopes of finding some of the passion, excitement and beauty – not only in the holy or arty: for many, soccer is “the beautiful game” – that has been forcibly removed from their everyday lives; finally, after painful experience has taught them how illusory each of these hopes are, they submit to one final illusion in the family, hoping to find in the arms of a lover or the laugh of a baby the satisfaction so absent everywhere else.
One could describe each of these and the many other unlisted roles people choose[6] for themselves as forms of suicide – others call it sleep[7] – but one would then of course be speaking metaphorically. They are all, however, literally forms of escape whose passivity is only the flipside to the actively aggressive forms of escape known as racism, homophobia, xenophobia, war, religious fundamentalism, ageism, domestic violence, sexism, state and non-governmentally organised terrorism, which collectively make up the totality of “normal” everyday life.
The author of Suicide or Revolution provides a far fuller treatment of this subject in the excellent essay The Strange Case Of Dr. Who? And Mr. Bowdler, this time discussing the function of crowd psychology. It fully merits extensive quotation:
Reformist psychology speaks of ''empowerment'' as just a momentary feeling of power, which derives from being part of a crowd. The crowd having departed, the task is then to get into some other immediate feeling. This is a bit like the dominant taming of the originally fundamentally critical concept of “alienation”: in this now common usage, it has nothing to do with an objectively imposed social relation, merely an individual feeling. In the same way, the struggle against alienation is reduced to merely a feeling of empowerment, not a subjective force against the alien world where proletarians refuse to alienate their powers to an external authority. So it aims to limit this ''empowerment'' to firstly fitting into the social straitjacket of this society's notion of social acceptability and only then loosening some of the belts so as to be able to wriggle around within the tiny margin of freedom this loosened straitjacket allows. This is the social acceptability that represses rage...
In this margin of separate ''freedom'', art therapy, music therapy, primal scream therapy become forms of anger management: painting, playing with ones musical talents, screaming etc. have to be compartmentalised by this society because this society - sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously - represses all tendencies to break out of separations. These aspects of self-expression only become forces of a tendency to a unified expression when people overcome their avoidance of confronting the material social relations that make them depressed and isolated. The best graffiti, the best music, the best screams are in uprisings.
*
The role of consumption in the production of the whole society cannot be overlooked. Many of the alternatives to suicide listed above appear at first to be actions rather than roles. However, the activity common to each – the consumption of commodities – plays an active role in the production of the passive roles people fulfil from day to day. Like the “working-class hero” John Lennon sang about, a “spiritual person” is something to be. However, just as “militancy” is reduced by this society to the consumption of literature, films, music, speeches & artwork by “revolutionary” celebrities; the buying of a membership to a “radical” organisation; the purchase (through voluntary alienated-labour such as attending boring protests, boring meetings, and boring lectures – “paying your dues”) of status/street-cred in the eyes of “comrades”, etcetera; so too “spirituality” becomes reduced to the consumption of courses in yoga, meditation, massage & eastern medicine; the buying of philosophical books, spiritually uplifting music, movies & artwork; the purchase of good karma through donations to monks, gurus, priests & other spiritual specialists.
Being is reduced to having (having read, having bought, having put up with, etc) which itself is reduced to appearing – as in the case of the apparent militancy of the ANC’s “guerrilla army”, which actually carried out no military operations whatsoever in South Africa for more than 10 years (‘64 –‘ 76) and was far more violent to its own soldiers, who mutinied after realising they’d been tricked into believing they’d ever get to go home and fight, than it was to the soldiers of the apartheid state[8]; or the apparent “bling” of gangsta rappers – many of whom were never gangsters – whose music-videos present an image of false affluence: often, almost everything about them, from the girls to the expensive cars and mansions, are rented from agencies. Appearance is produced for the consumption of spectators; their consumption produces the people and the society which populate the world of the spectacle. This world of appearances, with its totalitarian colonization of “normal” everyday life, itself takes on the appearance of being totally normal.
The normal has thus become a spectacle that falsifies reality but is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of this spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. This reciprocal relation is the essence and support of all existing melancholy.
*
“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.” So said would-be revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky shortly before shooting himself in the heart. When fellow poet Gary Snyder wrote, echoing the great Tang poet Du Fu, who was himself probably referring to the great painter and exiled Ming prince Bada Shenren:
The brush
May paint the mountains and streams
Though the territory is lost.
May paint the mountains and streams
Though the territory is lost.
He was – unwittingly of course – illustrating the tendency of all forms of representation, whether they be artistic or democratic (where politicians supposedly ‘represent’ the interests of their voters) to act as compensation for the theft of the real thing. When art and politics become autonomous, and paint their world in dazzling colours and promises, human self-control has been lost. Such control cannot be recovered by dazzling colours or promises, which can only evoke it in the imagination. If the “anti-apartheid struggle” for a liberation which was never achieved – and hence liberation itself – tends today to suffer its own apartheid, forced into the ghetto of a “heritage” which is wholly separate from everyday life, it is only a counterpart to the apartheid which forcibly removes all that makes us human from our everyday lives and drives it into the ghetto of a separate “culture” where the vultures (actors, poets, musicians, directors, designers, novelists, critics, painters, dancers, composers, etc, etc) squabble over its decomposing corpse.
Culture as an autonomous entity grew out of a history that dissolved the old ways of life, but as a separate sphere within a miserable society, its understanding and sensory communication will regrettably remain miserably poor. Alone, it can only be the melancholy meaning of miserably meaningless world.
The end of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: its trancendence in the creative destruction of a society which not only blocks its growth but survives by consuming its vital-organs – or its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency has linked its fate to practical social critique, the second to the defence of normality. This is particularly apparent in South Africa, where the “preservation” – in a segregated, reactionary tribalist form – of traditions and identities which had in reality been destroyed by the development of the apartheid economy and its state became one of the central cultural projects of that very state. The cultural production of the modern proletariat has never been able to provide a cohesive framework to replace these traditions once they ceased to be a living reality, despite the best efforts of the working-class and its intellectuals (“Black Consciousness” & “Pan African” cultural-specialists, et cetera).
The rich diversity of genres which come and go at an ever faster rate (marabi, kwela, mbaquanga, ghoema, jazz, kwaito, house, etc ) represents in local form the continually shrinking cycle of pseudo innovations occurring in the art of all bourgeois society: western classical music took centuries to develop before becoming a dead tradition preserved solely for commercial purposes, jazz little over 50 years, rock and roll less than 20 years, hip-hop little more than 10. The electronic music genres that now come and go every couple of years (disco, techno, drum n bass, rave, house, dubstep, etc) are neither possible nor profitable for grown men and women to keep up with. These sadly limited creations represent the best segregated cultural developments the proletariat has to offer itself; while there is plenty of beauty to be found in them, their fundamental poverty – their inability to transform themselves and their society into richer, wider and deeper forms of adventure – signals the abject failure of art in the modern era to provide the cohesion, meaning and passion of a living culture – its failure, in imagination as well as in fact, to function as anything other than the opiate of the working class. The very economic basis of this class – beginning from the means of its own reproduction and extending to the competitive commercial concerns determining the means of its artistic production and distribution – renders such cohesion impossible. The proletariat, like the bourgeoisie (whose pathetic parroting of its primitive predecessors, as documented in the classic work of sociologist Thorsten Verblen, constitutes the extent of its cultural powers), is by necessity a class without a culture.
Art has failed us; why deny this? Every time you sing Dubula iBhunu at election rallies while amabhunu amnyana shoot, beat, extort, evict and deport your brothers and sisters around the corner, art has failed you. “This is part of what’s wrong with you”, observed Malcolm X: “You do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging.”
That attitude, however, just jumps from philistinism to nihilism. There seems to me to be rather more of a need for work-songs: to sing while you swing. The detournment – or “improvement” – of the outdated struggle song mentioned above, now sung on the burning-tyre barricades of townships around the country: Amabhunu amnyama asenzela i-worry[9], is one salutary example of cultural sublation in action. The vital thing to note is the use made by this change of lyrics, not the mere change of words itself. When men and women can’t change life they change words - and jobs, schools, hobbies, homes, bodies, cars, countries, clothes, lovers, hopes and aspirations, political parties, ideologies, and all the other figments of their alienation. Only in revolutionary social subversion can culture come alive and function as a force able to ignite this “night of the living dead” which constitutes our horrifically dysfunctional normality.
*
Radical situations constitute a rupture in the everyday melancholy of this passive-aggressive normality. They function as an eruption of clarity in the surrounding haze, turning our dazzled gaze from our navels towards what burns us, which is also what blinds us. These situations show everyone how easy (and necessary) it is to accomplish what, under normal circumstances, appears impossible: they allow us to look directly at the sun.
By collectively breaking through social separations such as money (otherwise known as the cash nexus), which normally acts as mediator between all relations, what once appeared concrete is seen to be thin air, and what once appeared thin air – such as satisfaction, liberation, passion, which remain abstract in a society which extracts them from their source in daily human activity and turns them into “pie in the sky” – is made concrete. The world is turned upside down.
From now on, any assault on melancholy, whether collective or individual, theoretical or practical, must take as its basis this reversal of the real, and seek to reproduce it by any means necessary. Whether this be in the form of a letter or a barricade, an occupation or a declaration, a kiss or a kick, is immaterial. Some seek to construct these situations, others to destroy the obstacles to their development. Neither can occur without the other. The individual & societal levels of organization reflect each other’s structures, and they will continue to do so until a mortal wound is dealt to their relationship itself. Destroy just one and the other will always regenerate it. Just as personal therapy must be refracted through the group, so too group therapy must be made personal.
The anguish which eats away at our vital organs like a flesh eating mould thrives in darkness. Only once we rip the scales from our eyes and let the light of social revolution flood into us will this disease be obliterated. Only when these antibodies begin to seize a hold of our hearts and brains, hands and feet, tongues and ears, eyes and genitals, and we consequently use them to seize a hold of our own world, will the suppressed possibilities of daily life be brought to light.
Only then will we be able to believe brother George Jackson’s beautiful love poems to his mother:
You deserve a lot better than you have had and more than you will have. You don't know it but there is a better life, regardless of what the Reader's Digest says. Believe me there is a better life.
*
Voice 1: Happiness is a new idea in Europe.
Voice 2: Totally dark, eyes closed to the enormity of the disaster.
Voice 1: Lines from a 1950 newspaper: "Popular Young Radio Actress Throws Herself Into the Isère. Grenoble. Twelve-and-a-half-year-old Madeleine Reineri, who under the stage name 'Pirouette' starred in the Alpes-Grenoble radio program Happy Thursdays, threw herself into the Isère River Friday afternoon after having placed her schoolbag on the river-bank."
Voice 2: Little sister, we're not a pretty sight. The river and the misery continue. We are powerless.
– Guy Debord, Howls For Sade (Film Soundtrack)
The present era is one completely colonised by the spirit of its past, like the body of a living host possessed by a ghost. Every area of life, thus occupied in this colonialist sense, from the dreams and fears of individuals to mountaintops and urban-sprawl, can be seen to fall under the presently prevailing system of production whose primary feature is the domination of the living by the accumulation of dead labour known as Capital. What is this monstrosity, capable of such fantastic feats? According to a long-dead labourer, “Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
Most people, after existing in the world for a short will, notice how almost everything they do tends to be directed by the demands of some power outside of them. From the moment they are born they are trained to obey, from the moment they begin school or work they are trained to regard their activity as alien, indeed hostile, to their own desires, and those desires thus become occupied with inactivity. Thus, like every other problem in this upside-down world, “laziness” is a false problem; the real problem is that the only alternative to laziness presented to people – work – is so disgusting as to make anything – even nothing – seem more desirable.
When poet Antonin Artaud wrote, in The Theatre and its Double, “One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live – and which even the most revolutionary among us share – is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted”; he aimed to explain exactly how the colonial reign of dead-labour operates in the separate realm of culture, showing how this works to spread suffocation into every other realm of life. As if Capital were a mass-grave that, rather than lying underground, extends over our heads, constantly crushing necks, shoulders and backs into the dirt under its burden. As a dead wage-worker once said: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
And in many ways that “as if” is no mere figure of speech. My former lover is a woman of majestic stature, both physically and otherwise, yet the weight of this mass grave, each corpse of which occupies one of the insecurity-ridden characters of those around her – colleagues, bosses, customers, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers – bears down on her robust spine with
[...........................] all
The consequences of a
Vast systematic delusion,
Without intelligence or
Mercy or even real being,
But with the power to kill.
The consequences of a
Vast systematic delusion,
Without intelligence or
Mercy or even real being,
But with the power to kill.
The debilitating consequences Kenneth Rexroth wrote of above I saw working on her body & soul daily, as illustrated in the following portrait:
I first realised you were a head taller than I
Was the first night we were together. Then, under the
Roar of an ignored city evening, we faced one another.
Your length stretched a flesh Himalaya –
Valley peak dimple and pore through all of Asia –
Filled me with awe. Later, I saw how you would try
To crunch those sculpted shoulders down, lower
Yourself so the infantile egos of others be pacified.
Years have passed. The thought still makes me shudder.
Was the first night we were together. Then, under the
Roar of an ignored city evening, we faced one another.
Your length stretched a flesh Himalaya –
Valley peak dimple and pore through all of Asia –
Filled me with awe. Later, I saw how you would try
To crunch those sculpted shoulders down, lower
Yourself so the infantile egos of others be pacified.
Years have passed. The thought still makes me shudder.
The reason proletarians revolt so rarely from the thoroughly revolting situation we find ourselves in thus has common cause with the disfigurement of beautiful women in “the crushing of the individual by character.” Character is the accumulation of dead labour within the individual. As a young boy, I went into somewhat of an existential crisis when I realised how my sense of self in fact had no “essence” at all, that my character was merely the sum-total of the habits, experiences, thought and speech patterns I had accumulated from the past, and that these things were in any case all acquired from the world outside myself. From that point onwards the anguished obsessions over “identity” – whether in politics, culture or psychology – which so occupy the ideologies of the modern epoch, have borne no interest for me whatsoever. It has also allowed me to look upon the norms and standards of this era in their proper historical perspective, which has led to the development of a healthy disrespect for the sick values of a terminally ill social system.
According to Jean-Pierre Voyer’s Reich: How to Use, “In all societies in which modern conditions of production prevail the impossibility of living takes individually the form of death, madness or character.” The main purpose of character is “defence against anxiety”. The rest of this essay has dwelt in depth on the origins of this anxiety and its miserable social causes. “Character is thus not simply an unhealthy excrescence which can be treated separately, but at the same time an individual remedy in a globally ill society, a remedy that enables us to bear the illness while aggravating it.”
It functions on an individual level as representative democracy functions on a social level – that is, as a vaccination. Vaccines immunise the body against a disease by injecting a castrated form of the virus they are meant to guard against. Just as the sham of representative democracy works to immunise the dictatorship of Capital from the threat of direct-democracy, so too individual character works to protect the colonial occupation of proletarian heads by the living-dead from the threat of expulsion at the hands of liberated consciousness.
The suspicions of attentive readers will justly be aroused by the vagueness of that last term, defined only negatively, in opposition to “character”. To formulate a more precise meaning of “liberated consciousness”, everything previously examined must be formulated more precisely, for the liberation of consciousness from melancholy is precisely the purpose of this study. It is itself part of the process of revolutionary therapy it seeks to bring into focus.
*
Liberated consciousness, like revolution, is not itself desirable (‘good’), but a condition out of which good is able to arise. In the sense of moral good, it is a necessary condition. As a contribution towards clarifying the meaning of its opposite, it will do formulate more precisely how “character” functions as a “defence against anxiety”. In Wielding the Subversive Scalpel, The Council for the Eruption of the Marvellous use the term “personality” in the same way that “character” has here been used. Thus
Marx informed us that capitalism reproduces itself on all levels of organization, both bureaucratically & in the individual consciousness. It is in this sense that he understood neurosis as the product of social disintegration… the chief means of protecting oneself is to accept such alienation as the “natural” state of things. Besides, it is easy to accept an alienation so comfortable, so full of nice things, as ours. Personality is the manifestation of this acceptance, it is the form of alienation; personality/identity can here be seen as an organism’s defense against a hostile environment: “the oyster’s identity is his shell”
The metaphor of the oyster-shell serves as a useful transition towards refining the notion of liberated consciousness. Another thoroughly economically-flavoured Zen koan which young Marx must have known well unfolds thusly: A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan answered, “Three pounds of hemp.”
In his commentary on this gem, Wumen Huikai writes
Old Man Dongshan attained something of clam-Zen. He opened the two halves of his shell a bit and exposed his liver and intestines. Be that as it may, tell me: where do you see Dongshan?
Opening the oyster-shell of one’s own character is one way of wielding the subversive scalpel – the most intimate and necessary: subverting yourself. Scar tissue grows over the cut, it must be broken open again. The moment the hand stops holding it open, the shell slams shut again. In another version of the case, Dongshan is measuring flax-seed in the kitchen. “Three pounds,” he says at that point, then a moment later, “Four pounds,” then, Five, six, seven, and so forth. Character is hard, fixed, positive; one “builds character” like Bolsheviks used to “build socialism”. We repeat Bordiga’s assertion: one does not build a liberated world; it already exists, as Siddharta Gautama said of enlightenment, right now, within everybody and at every moment; one only destroys the obstacles preventing its development.[10] Thus liberated consciousness is soft, fluid, negative; it is not a state of mind to be attained but a real movement acting in the world to abolish the current miserable state of things. Negation is not obstinate contrariness. Now swimming against the current, now hurtling along with it, now floating on the surface, now sinking to the bottom, the principle of change demands constant aware openness of its students if any benefit is to be had: Eight pounds, then nine; ten, then none…
Three Schizophrenic Self-portraits
"The pressure of life is unbearable and the poet in this hazard does not hurl himself against it but finds a safety-valve in song; and existence, that art should have spiritualized, becomes despiritualized in art.”
– Laura Riding, A Prophecy or Plea
It is my contention that both the pressure and the safety-valve – escape, cop-out – which Riding (a great poet herself) ascribes to poets is accurately applicable to all of us and our actions, whose separate petty consequences congregate to form the purgatorial grave-yard of horrific facts known as “the present” just as certainly as, in a freeway pile-up, each additional car-crash adds to the generalised accumulation of disaster.
She continues, in the vein of Jacob Boehme, “Now I am insisting that the pressure is a challenge not to a retreat into the penumbra of introspection but to the birth of a new poetic bravery that shall exchange insight for outsight and envisage life not as an influence upon the soul but the soul as an influence upon life.” And continues, in the vein of Ivan Chtcheglov:
The age of creation that was initiated by the Renaissance extends today to the physical aspects of life alone. For the rest we might as well be living in the Middle Ages. Our minds, compared to the noisy world inhabited by the flesh, are recesses of cathedral quiet. Living is the inspiration, art is the expiration. As such it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of life rather than a creation of it. But it is now life itself that discredits art by leaving it so far behind that both have become meaningless. Mechanics outrun metaphysics.
What does comrade Riding recommend as a corrective to this? We find her to be, though she would hate to admit it, a thoroughly revolutionary materialist. As Marx says of philosophy, so says she of art, considering its task to be that of
turning visions into actualities. The artist, too, much turn producer: and his visions must be begotten not of the darkness that lies behind closed eyes but in the steady light of a life he not only confronts but, because he enters upon it fortified by personal faith alone, even creates. He will not recollect life, so that his art would seem touched with the past, but life will proceed from him as from a champion: Shelley indeed had this sense of initiation, but Shelley's romanticism has the quality of departure, it escapes with its victories to hypothetical heavens and so is ineffectual on earth.
She goes on to praise Francis Thompson, who also tended to express himself in terms reminiscent of Boehme:
Lo, here stand I and Nature, gaze to gaze – And I the greater!
“He seems to me to have the virtue of self-absorption so fully developed that hate is made impossible.” – As William Carlos Williams said of a similar stoic. I cannot claim to have reached such heights in the following three versified self-portraits, but they are my own. The first begins with what I believe to be one of the first tasks in any revolutionary social transformation – that is, with a public transmission of visionary self-affirmation. In my case the vision occurred while I admired myself in the mirror. It all has to do with the spontaneous revelation of the wonderful – to make visible the root of the enthusiastic exclamations of Dajian Huineng:
How amazing that the self-nature is originally pure! How amazing that the self-nature is unborn and undying! How amazing that the self-nature is inherently complete!
1. Note to self
Oh my! What big eyes you have! They don’t
pierce or penetrate, solicit
or invite, preferring to sit tight
brown in their white sky, content to be
empty as the moon.
Similarly, ragged freckles speckle
nose and upper-cheekbones below them,
their frayed form torn clouds below the moon.
Glimmer, mirror on the wall! Stare, yes,
at the treasure before you! Of all
the creatures of all the possible
worlds, not one will be more beautiful.
Rest your chin, you lucky looking-glass,
in your left hand and admire… Now: smile!
Oh my! What big eyes you have! They don’t
pierce or penetrate, solicit
or invite, preferring to sit tight
brown in their white sky, content to be
empty as the moon.
Similarly, ragged freckles speckle
nose and upper-cheekbones below them,
their frayed form torn clouds below the moon.
Glimmer, mirror on the wall! Stare, yes,
at the treasure before you! Of all
the creatures of all the possible
worlds, not one will be more beautiful.
Rest your chin, you lucky looking-glass,
in your left hand and admire… Now: smile!
Inherently complete the self may be, but buried under the pressure of this world of “personified objects and objectified persons”, there is an understandable tendency for it to develop a corrosive sense of inadequacy. Songs alone, however visionary and self-assured they may be, do not do much to prevent this development. It will be noted that, unlike the visions of Riding & Thompson which oppose nature to self, in the exclamations of Huineng self and nature are united. It is only by understanding this unity, or interpenetration, of opposites, that the pressures of a miserable world can be practically overcome. In order to thrive, the self (as a separate entity, an entity separate from itself) must be abolished.
Thus the second schizophrenic self-portrait is an attempted communication of Aufheben, a word with several seemingly contradictory meanings including "to lift up", "to abolish", "to sublate" and "to preserve". In the philosophical system of Wilhelm Hegel, the term has connotations of both preserving and changing, and also, eventually, advancement. The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about: In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions. It can be seen at work at the most basic level of Hegel's system of logic:
The concepts Being and Nothing are each both preserved and changed through sublation in the concept Becoming.
So says, roughly speaking, wonderful Wikipedia…
2. Aufheben
By what I knew of moon I knew the mind
– Hanshan (寒山 )
Mother moon is full and I am empty!
Look at her.
This paper, this air, rock
just like me.
We all hold
the combinations of the world:
hear the thud
of my fingers on the keyboard!
Cradle lady lunar in your ear.
How is she today?
Article and preposition dance
and swap position.
Something new is happening: she shrunk
then she grew.
All the expressions on her face –
what brightness! –
the reliable, unstable light
of her sun.
Mother is beautiful! She is empty.
I am full.
Look at her.
This paper, this air, rock
just like me.
We all hold
the combinations of the world:
hear the thud
of my fingers on the keyboard!
Cradle lady lunar in your ear.
How is she today?
Article and preposition dance
and swap position.
Something new is happening: she shrunk
then she grew.
All the expressions on her face –
what brightness! –
the reliable, unstable light
of her sun.
Mother is beautiful! She is empty.
I am full.
The above grew from a vision of the harvest moon and its relation to the “dependent arising” (pratītyasamutpāda) –personified in the Sotho idiom Motho ke motho ka batho babang [11] – that links all existence to a fundamental emptiness. The imperative of Siddhartha Gautama “The constituents of being are transitory by nature. Work out your salvation with diligence” sprung up to meet this lunar vision in my mind. Like the image of the moon, whose shifting surface has as its source an underlying presence – the sun (itself a fluctuating nuclear reaction) – of which it is a reflection, my self too could be seen as a receptacle filled and drained by the tides of the hour – no more than an inconstant reflection of a social, spiritual & material universe which is itself in a state of permanent transformation. In this sense my self is empty as a blank page, or silent air – it is nothing, but becomes itself by coming inside (and being penetrated by) everything else outside of it. But if persons become persons through other persons, they can also become objects through other persons. And in a world truly gone upside down, it is also possible to observe objects become persons through other persons.
The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will… Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1)
Whereas Marx understood the process in which the relation of “person to person” becomes a relation of “thing to thing” in terms of sight, I’ve come to understand the reverse process in terms of hearing. This will be elaborated in the next self-portrait.
*
Discussing the ancient Grecian philosopher Empedocles, Bertrand Russell writes “In the Golden Age, Strife was outside and Love was inside; then gradually, Strife entered and Love was expelled. Then – though the reason is not clear – an opposite movement begins, until the Golden Age returns, but not forever. One might have supposed that either extreme could be stable, but that is not the view of Empedocles.” But the moment the principle of change is admitted – the moment the infinitesimal singularity erupts into the numerous universe of the “big bang”, there can be no stability. Traditionally, Buddhists have seen this hypothetical transcendent nirvana as a desirable escape from the principle of becoming, because they see how much suffering goes on in the realms governed by it. This one of the few fundamentally “ideological”, or “religious” aspects to the doctrine of Buddhism. Westerners, however, from Heraclitus & the stoic philosophers to the revolutionaries G.W. Hegel, K. Marx & F. Engels, have embraced this principle as itself a potentially libratory force from the suffering they’ve seen around them, and have studied it – in an undertaking as deeply rigorous as the disciplines of the east known as dialectics – in order to discover how they may, by their own actions, harness it for those purposes.
Before the time of Marx & Engels, however, the ability of society to liberate itself was limited by the primitive technical tools at its disposal, which required the majority, however egalitarian the society was structured, to toil away at monotonous and back breaking work. Only in “pre-historic” societies has human life been preoccupied with creativity and play. These societies had their limitations however: various forms of natural alienation (powerlessness in relation to their own space-time) which, over time, led to the development of farming, private property, class-divisions and the various forms of social alienation we now suffer. “I don't think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity", says the co-editor of Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. From that moment on, necessity has relentlessly driven quality out of human life, until its very definition has been turned upside down. Today “quality of life” actually means quantity of commodities (“goods & services”) consumed.[12] Thus the laws of material necessity have prevented every dialectician up to and including Hegel from discovering the means by which the principle of change might liberate humanity from the suffering produced by those very laws! This has led each of them to escape into one or another variety of irrational ideology: mysticism, idealism, nationalism, etc – which, rather than seeking liberation from suffering produced by material necessity through revolutionary social change, sought liberation from the laws of necessity themselves through some sort of changeless personal transcendence. They returned, in fact, to the path of Buddhism!
The confluence of the dharmmapada and the materialist dialectic are demonstrated in a famous dialogue found in the biography of Zen master Qingyuan Xingsi, which the young Karl Marx must have known well when he began to shift his focus from philosophy to political-economy: ‘A monk asked, “What is the ultimate meaning of the buddha-dharma?”
The master responded: "What is the price of Luling rice?"’
The final self-portrait, then, brings it all back to the realm of coins, trains, flesh and rice. The quotation about money is from a communiqué from the shack-dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. The role that an attentive study of the principle of change – as it plays out in the here and now – in any trip from alienation to integration is made manifest.
3
There are trips we live among
and to hear them is
to here ourselves.
People make these journeys;
their feet speak
of the travels they’ve seen.
Today I went to see one
close to my heart. The time was short.
I had to run. She was sick
and I went to visit her
at the clinic. I had no train fare
so I slipped through a hole in the wall
that ran along the tracks.
Our hearts, born out of the bitter
loneliness of our parents, beat
pure and sweet
but soon get baffled by the clamour
of the troubles they’ve seen.
Blisters grown over eye and ear
made to migrate year on year
are our feet
as their calluses become soles
shuffling to and fro in all directions.
“The only difference
between the rich and the poor
is money.” None of us
escape remote-control, or
taste and see for ourselves.
But we can hear the rips
in the fabric of existence:
The pitter-patter beat
making change
in pattern and material –
“marking time” as they say.
To listen to them, to feel
the movement
of air, of hair
in cochlea, the wriggle
of thought in scull, the hammer
of I & I’s tear
re-paired under our own control.
There are trips we live among
and to hear them is
to here ourselves.
People make these journeys;
their feet speak
of the travels they’ve seen.
Today I went to see one
close to my heart. The time was short.
I had to run. She was sick
and I went to visit her
at the clinic. I had no train fare
so I slipped through a hole in the wall
that ran along the tracks.
Our hearts, born out of the bitter
loneliness of our parents, beat
pure and sweet
but soon get baffled by the clamour
of the troubles they’ve seen.
Blisters grown over eye and ear
made to migrate year on year
are our feet
as their calluses become soles
shuffling to and fro in all directions.
“The only difference
between the rich and the poor
is money.” None of us
escape remote-control, or
taste and see for ourselves.
But we can hear the rips
in the fabric of existence:
The pitter-patter beat
making change
in pattern and material –
“marking time” as they say.
To listen to them, to feel
the movement
of air, of hair
in cochlea, the wriggle
of thought in scull, the hammer
of I & I’s tear
re-paired under our own control.
(To be continued...)
[1] The wife of my stress-sickened comrade, for example, told me that “Every year for the past 10 years someone I know commits suicide…” As for sociological categories: three are under 25 years old, one over 30; two are black, two are white. The “income bracket” of each is too complicated to get into.
[2] See the publications of Quadlibeta for the month of November 2011, where historians have written a series of articles debunking numerous instances of bullshit in the book (@ bedejournal.blogspot.com) Also see the article “Steven Pinker and Sublimated Violence” wherein the book is compared to a recently released book by anthropologist David Graeber covering similar territory – Debt: The First 5000 Years – (attempter.wordpress.com). Also see DB Hart’s “The Precious Steven Pinker”
[3] It should go without saying that each “sub-culture” or fragment of the spectacle has its own bunch of celebrities, opinions, behavioural norms & commodities, and that each person under capitalism consumes their own “unique” blend of these fragments, which together constitute the impersonal (because objectified) “personalities” of these mass-produced “individuals”.
[4] The lie that those who try (with enough “skills”) are successful. But in this society those who have “made it” never worked hard, and those who work hard never “make it.” The same goes for “crime”. As lawyer Clarence Darrow (among many others) pointed out, those who are punished are rarely guilty, those who are guilty are rarely punished. In a world that is really upside down, rape victims are made to believe they are guilty of having “asked for it”, or “not being careful enough”, immigrants seeking refuge from xenophobic pogroms are arrested for breaking the law merely by existing in the “wrong place”, etcetera, etcetera.
[5] A fuller treatment of this psycho-social process, specifically with regard to what the bourgeois media calls “xenophobia”, is given in my Inquiry concerning South African residents’ perceptions of deportation and the Zimbabwean Documentation Project
[6] As a comrade has said: choices have been, are and have to be made; however, though the margin of choice is defined by our enemies, we are free (thus responsible) to decide how we manoeuvre within those margins. Clearly, not all compromises with the system are the same - some are necessary to survive, others are just self-serving careerist moves that utterly fuck up any understanding of reality. And whilst in this epoch, increasing amounts of people are prepared to justify doing almost anything as being, for example, necessary "for the kids", there are very clearly certain compromises that utterly undermine their kids' future, and their communication with them, in the long term.
[7] “Our era accumulates powers and imagines itself as rational. But no one recognizes these powers as their own. Nowhere is there any entry to adulthood. The only thing that happens is that this long restlessness sometimes eventually evolves into a routinized sleep. Because no one ceases to be kept under guardianship. The point is not to recognize that some people live more or less poorly than others, but that we all live in ways that are out of our control.”
– Guy Debord, Critique of Separation
[8] “The ANC had come close to being completely destroyed in 1963 and 1964 and, 10 years on, it was a near irrelevance inside South Africa… The authority and popularity that armed struggle gave the ANC explains the paradox in its trajectory: the more it failed, the more it succeeded.” – Conscripts to Their Age, Howard Barrell; Also see Revolutionary Times, Revolutionary Lives¸ Bob Meyers (Ed)
[9] Dubula iBhunu is an old relic of the mythical “armed struggle” commonly translated into English as “Shoot the Boers”. It has become associated with a certain influential politician, just as the relic Umshini Wam (“Bring me my machine gun”) has become associated with another influential politician. Both the songs, like both the politicians (whose “controvertial” personas consist in the routine utterance and/or execution of some shrewd imbecility eagerly fulminated over by the indignant idiots of the spectacle’s peanut gallery) were never anything more than hot-air. Amabhunu amnyama asenzela i-worry: literally “The black boers cause us worries”. Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s article ‘Shoot the Boers!’: Deflecting attention from new songs of protest is an interesting examination of the dynamics at play here. Available @ http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/63291
[10] The historical evidence for this exists in the spontaneous proletarian movements rising in a series of worldwide all of which demonstrated how ordinary people practically organised revolution by and for themselves whenever the necessary conditions moved them to do so.
[11] Which can be translated into English as “Persons become persons through other persons”; the Xhosa idiom, Umuntu ngumuntu kabantu, from which the ubiquitous “ubuntu” is derived, means much the same. The concept is in fact common throughout Southern Africa.
[12] This is tragically true regarding food, which capitalist production has drained of nutrition & flavour in favour of maximum energy-content. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in mass obesity. In South Africa, where half the populace lives below the poverty-line, as many are obese or clinically overweight. As many die of “overnutrition” as malnutrition. Globally, one in four adults are clinically overweight or obese.
