"Kapa is a fabric that is made by Native Hawaiians from the bast fibres of certain species of trees and shrubs in the orders Rosales and Malvales. It is similar to tapa found elsewhere in Polynesia but differs in the methods used in its creation. Each kapa manufacturer used a beater called an ʻiʻe kūkū, a beater with four flat sides that were each carved differently. Another way to carve the kapa is by starting on the four-sided affairs, with the coarsest grooves on one side used first in breaking down the bast, or wet bark. Then, the beating continued using two sides with finer grooves. Lastly, finishing touches were accomplished with the remaining smooth side of the beater. The carvings left an impression in the cloth that was hers alone. The process of making kapa was done primarily by women. Young girls would learn by helping their mothers, over time doing the majority of the work, and when older she could make kapa by herself."
Introduction, in which the difference between monologue and dialogue are jauntily illustrated by means of a homely parable
The practical purpose of this project is of a twofold nature: first, as a resource for the student of history; second, as a means of propaganda for the invention of the future.
The first facet needs little comment, as the vitality radiated from contemporary issues ceaselessly fades from the published material with every passing day. As their immediate value to present concerns rapidly dwindles, so, slowly-slowly, grows that ambiguous quality called 'historical value' whose character Francis Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning, succinctly summarised: 'Letters of affairs from such as manage them, or are privy to them, are of all others the best instructions for history, and to a diligent reader the best histories in themselves.' It may be strange to present my own letters to the world this way, which could be perceived both as an example of extreme humility or extreme arrogance: humble if I think myself so insignificant to that my affairs should possess no special interest to others for their own sake, but solely some general interest of an historical nature; arrogant if I think myself so significant that my affairs possess unique historic value which the shenanigans of others do not. The truth, of course, lies beyond such false oppositions.
The final facet is what most concerns me, and is also aptly summarised by Sir Bacon: 'It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but leese of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. So that if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other?'
Correspondence, the written equivalent of conversation, has to do with all the most important questions of life and death that face us today. Moreover, this is true not merely regarding its content, but involves the intimate secrets of its basic structure. The content of historical narratives, whether they be fictional, such as Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook or non-fictional like Guy Debord's Proletariat as Subject and as Representation, describes the passage of a certain number of people through a particular period in time. Their content determines their structure. The structure of a letter, on the other hand, determines its content: because they are purely occasional products, expressions straight from the fountain-head of the fundamental need for communication which defines all living things. In an age where art and culture no longer fulfill their traditional role as media of direct communication, but rather function as mediations of human separation ('capital is a social relation, mediated by images') the basic structure of correspondence -- its practical basis in the real, equal participation of corresponding individuals -- remains appropriate to its original intention as a tool to satisfy the everyday need for direct person to person interaction whereas the structure of artwork -- its one-way format which allows only imaginary participation by the spectator at the level of appearances -- is today fit only to contribute yet another set of noisy monologues (alongside those of the newspapers, televisions, classrooms, radios, lecture-halls, movie-theaters, religious pulpits, political platforms, sports arenas, et cetera) to the spectacle of non-communication & non-participation in which our jailed desires, instincts, demands and dreams contract foot-and-mouth disease under so perverse a diet.
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| Audience at an enthralling church sermon, or political meeting, or concert, or peep show, or poetry reading, or... |
'As human beings grow more remote from one another, they become more like things than persons to each other. As this happens the individual becomes remote from, loses, himself. First alienation from comradeship in the struggle with nature, then alienation from each other, finally self-alienation. A great deal of our communication is not with persons at all. It might just as well be a machine to which we say “Pass the butter.” What we want is the butter. This is what people mean when they say the communication of the arts is of a different kind. But this is not communication at all, it is verbal manipulation of the world of things. “Reification” an American philosopher once called it. The arts presume to speak directly from person to person, each polarity, the person at each end of the communication fully realized. The speech of poetry is from me to you, transfigured by the overcoming of all thingness — reification — in the relationship. So speech approaches in poetry not only the directness and the impact but the unlimited potential of act. A love poem is an act of communication of love, like a kiss. The poem of contempt and satire is like a punch in the nose. The work of art has about it an immediacy of experience of the sort that many people never manage in their daily lives. At the same time it has an illimitable character. Speech between you and me is focused, but spreads off indefinitely and immeasurably. What is communicated is self to self — whole “universes of discourse.” When we deal with others as instruments, as machines of our desires, we as well as they are essentially passive and limited to the end in view. My relationship to a horse is more active than my relationship to a car. Something happens but it is outside of us. In the arts — and ideally in much other communication — the relationship is not only active, it is the highest form of activity. Nothing happens. Not outside in the world. Everything is as it was before. We react to things, we respond to persons. In the arts we respond to the living communication of a person, no matter how long gone the artist may be. In a sense, out into unlimited time and space, say from the studio of an Egyptian sculptor, the artist is speaking, alive, to us, person to living person. Of course it is this which is the subject of the great poems by Horace, Shakespeare, and Gautier: “No thing will outlive the living word.”'
Kenneth Rexroth here enlists a fine description of writing as an act of communication in the service of his personal artistic ideal. It seems to me, however, that the description has a far firmer basis in reality when applied to actual correspondence, be it love-letter or hate-mail. The work of art (like the practice of religion, the spectacle of sport and politics, and so on) has cast about itself an aura of immediate experience of the sort that many people never manage in their daily lives. Precisely for this reason it becomes for them an imaginary representation of the enthralling life denied to them by the present organisation of society. It is one more medium through which they experience the vicarious thrills typical of all vile escapism, one more gear that meshes with all the others to ensure smooth progress in the autonomous movement of non-life whose disastrous course we so desperately need to derail.
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| Smokey the Bear Boddhisatva and the young Nina Simone |
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there
He simply failed to take into account the context into which he was speaking, wherein it is not merely difficult to get the news from poems but almost impossible even to get at 'what is found there'. Men and women, starved of direct human relations and all that is produced therefrom, die of undernourishment despite -- because of -- the fact that they look for it in books of poetry, politics and scripture, not to mention all the other more modern dead-ends whose empty promises seduce poor souls into dazzlingly furnished prison-cells. The artist shares the podium with the priest and politician and, though the professed goal of her activity is supposed to be opposed to theirs, ends up fulfilling the same role within the spectacle. This is hardly surprising. Those who pursue the same path arrive at the same destination.
The poet pretends that the context in which she locates her struggles are accidental and that her own activities have “nothing to do” with those contexts. She is wrong. Her intentions are reduced to nothing by those contexts. The context in which the artist or activist seeks a project and a community are institutions which thrive on the absence of what they seek and, unless they accept this in the interests of their professional career, they can never be anything more than an unwanted outsider alternately frustrated and evaded at every turn. Both the artist and the activist are convinced that speakers’ platforms, newspapers and pedagogical institutions can be serviceable to the struggle for a world based on personal human relations. Nothing could be further from the truth; such contexts are antithetical to their goals and hostile to their struggle and by engaging in them they merely strengthen forces whose very existence negates their project and their community.
Communication is the essence of the global struggle for a society that is intimate and an intimacy that is social. In order to produce the results that are intended of it, communication must concern itself with the conditions which suppress communication: conditions which continually tend to turn it into its own opposite. It must contain its own critique. It is necessary for the rebels of today to act appropriately under conditions that have long ago precluded preaching as a form of communication suitable to subversive content, however similar their intentions and sentiments may be to those anarchists whom Voltarine de Cleyre eulogised on the anniversary of the Haymarket massacre:
'Theirs was a burning message, red at the heart, and leaping in flame from lips that did not stop to pick and choose their words. They preached in the common highway, and gathered to themselves all who willed to listen. They preached in the common language; for they were workingmen, who did not study how to turn periods, but wished to be understood. They said what they meant, and all they meant; and that, perhaps, was unwisdom; but if so, it is the common mistake of all the great fervid souls that have ever scorched their way through the callous rind of Man, and touched the torpid heart within, till it beat drum-music.'
It is necessary for the rebels of today to grasp the practical implications of a world wherein the torpid human heart is well protected from the histrionics of rabble-rousers by a formidable suit of character-armor (as illustrated in the work of Wilhelm Reich), where it is shielded from incendiary sermons by a sophisticated spectacle of false-opposition. In this context passionate theatrics encourage submission, not subversion. It is likely to contribute more towards the reinforcement than to the negation of existing conditions. These days the acts able to pierce through to the heart involve more modest means than parades and preachers, less dramatic gestures than slogans and salutes. In fact, the dismal poverty of all leftists -- whether they be liberals, marxists or anarchists -- can be explained by what Debord called 'a certain unfortunate taste for the authority of the pulpit' which runs rampant amongst them to this day.
The fatal blow to the old world will be dealt by the replacement of the economy and the state with universal, uninterrupted dialogue ('When proletarians dialogue, the world shakes in its jackboots'); it will include both animated disputes as well as that silent communication well-known to lovers. Letters between comrades are one example of the former, an instant in the street with a mother on Mumbai pavement furnished me with an example of the latter. Like 'the subversive scalpel' described by Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous, it involved a gesture that
veil of appearances to make an opening, nothing more'
Considering the context of this incisive act it straightaway evoked the words of that witty anarchist provocation, Eat The Rich:
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| Carnivorous kokedamas |
Your baby lies at the feet
of passersby on the street.
You hold your head up high
enough for a knee to the face
by some passerby who had a bad day.
But that doesn’t happen today.
Under the glare of the city
nobody besides me currently
seems to see, or know, or care that
you exist. Sometimes,
seldom enough, probably
by accident, some coin slips
out some wallet, purse or pocket
onto your patch of pavement.
The clink clangs through the air, rings
for a split second,
then slides back beneath the blare
of the city, which is all
we, your anonymous neighbours,
seem to hear, or know, or care
exists. Your response to this indifferent
fall of the loaded dice is
full of unflinching grace.
Mother to child transmission –
milk, virus, or soundless grace
against which fences gape defenceless?
Touts, tourists, taxi drivers –
we whose loud, brisk transactions
traffic in
a pre-packaged, dismembered
satisfaction
(a jangled din of hooters; scooters
slotted through cars; ground gears;
tight-clutched coins; dirty, holy
cows; ficas infested with green parrots)
clamber through a rusted jungle-gym
built of whim & desire,
shuttle, bob
and weave, scuttle
through the shattered hues
of our scattered vectors. But
for those who dare
to tear their eyes
from the end of the road
to travel up your stare, mother,
for a split second
you rip a chink in our chain-link
cl amour, laugh,
and sink your teeth
into the flailing
flesh beneath.
The historical significance of the correspondence collected here derives from the fact that, by their basic structure, they contain a critique of the various forms of 'verbal manipulation' which has colonised almost all the relations, interactions and expressions of almost everyone. As an example of dialogue in an epoch colonised by its opposite, they do indeed posses particular qualities which have become increasingly endangered in this day and age. Their content, on the other hand, is indeed nothing special. It simply describes the passage of a few people through a particular period of time, as expressed through their conversations.
In light of all the above the title of this project can now be explained in the form of a parable.
Once upon a time there was a young woman who saw much misery in the world and wanted to do something about it. Her name was Nina Simone. She saw that everybody was half dead, that everybody avoided meeting each other in the eye for fear of what they might find there, for fear of what they might recognise of themselves reflected in the pupils of others. She decided to combat this through song. She sang in the hopes that she could be that one person with whom all those in her audience did not avoid, she sang to form with her listeners one direct human relation among a desert of objects and their prices. To her dismay she discovered that her spectators were all corpses no matter what she sang or how her music jarred, no matter how her lyrics cut or what anguished antics she foisted on her sado-masochist audience. Then, along came Smokey the Bear, who was on the brink of attaining Nirvana when he happened to observe this unfortunate fellow creature. He decided to forgo crossing over into the realm of infinite unruffledness in order to help her, and so took up the Bodhisattva vow. Descending on a pink cloud during one of her most tortuous performances, Smokey the Bear Bodhisattva showed her the way to ultimate enlightenment. First he silenced her with a roar which caused all who heard it to tremble, and shook the bones of all those who felt it their soles from afar as a distant tremor from the earth. Then he soothed her with a bear hug of indeterminate duration. It is said that empires rose and fell during their embrace, which held-up though the stars shifted in their courses forming new constellations across a sky a-shudder with cosmic rays, sheet-lightning and violent static. Then he sat her down in a cauldron a-bubble with the brewing luminous and gently chanted:
'Rebel till all roles unravel.
Rabble revel: jails turn rubble.
Gavel grovel: proles make trouble,
Dig your graves, your goals dishevel.'
Then he entered into melodious discourse. 'Honey, if you really want to scorch your way through the callous rind of Man and touch the torpid heart within till it beat drum-music, as dear sister Voltarine done said of those nice boys from Chicago, you gotta find the arms needed suited to the task. Show-business only disarms the explosive power of your desires and those of you audience. You have to resort to other measures. The point is to charge with a suitably destructive force that deep urge for community, creativity & dialogue which drives y'all time and again to these terribly dissapointing encounters. If it's drum music that's needed it will have to be articulate, like that of west Africa where messages were relayed over long distences through melodic rhythms capable of imitating the tonal languages of the region. If the heart is what needs to be reached the target will have to be some part of it intelligent enough to understand the message, such as the area identified by Andrew Armour as "the little brain on the heart"'. Surprise yourself. Slip into something less comfortable but more exciting. See what your fellows make of it.
This gave rise to the idea, by turns infamous and obscure over the course of centuries, of translating songs into conversations, sermons into missives, monologues into dialogues, using the still ill-understood heart-brain drum-language.
The End.
