Month: March 2022

(originally published by Terra Incognita No. 5 2004/2005)

I was lying in bed, trying to get back to sleep when suddenly, tap tap… tap tap… I recognized that sound, though it took me a moment, from two or three years ago, when the current super was on hiatus in Brazil. It went on, it seemed, for months, and then stopped unaccountably.
I tore myself out of bed and scurried around the apartment until I could think of what to do, finally grabbing a pot from the stove and placing it on the ground where most of the water seemed to be landing. I moved the old pillows I’ve been meaning to throw away, and brought three books back onto dryer ground, but alas, poor Nadja was soaked through and would never be the same again. At least the Tractatus was somewhat intact.

*

Breton told me the best way to deal with the fact of war was to not talk about it, in that way refuse to participate with its desire to consume all things; but my friend Paul walked offstage, more perplexed than angry, when he found I had erased or distorted his lines. And so, what do I do, sitting here in relative comfort, trying to get the word to spin worlds, while the one that is supposedly real, before me, brought to me through a box of light and the talking box, as well as my friends and the people I meet (talking like boxes)—what am I supposed to do about that brutal patch of map where I am told there is a lot of noise, many fleshy, conscious its, like this me that sits here, as they screech in convulsions, or—in an instant—are coming to an end. What am I supposed to think?

*

This: lean forward and touch the air: it wasn’t for several days you could buy that package: the sweater and the mountain gear: and all across the street, of course: and there was a welcoming party and a big parade.

We walked into a sideshow, or a side street, and came upon a broken mirror. Forget what we called it. We called it name of dog. We called it and it came to us after dampening the ground around the rocket launcher. After a while there are others like us, and after lunch they were gone. This year the celebration had gotten very loud and our homes had become mounds we could climb on.

*

There is a treatment of the text something like midnight, which I had an hour to misconstrue. She snapped like a Venus Flytrap, and immediately we were hurtling over Morocco, in a more or less salvage-quality carpet—unreliable textile, frayed (or perhaps afraid) at the edges. But she sent us along with a collection of bologna sandwiches we were to research until we landed one day in Bangladesh, where George Harrison was having some sort of new electric guitar built out of balsa, and a wood that grows only around the Ganges. That’s if we make it through the air strike. Perhaps it’s not actually wood at all, but something imagined by the dead as they float shrouded and stiff as canoes. Wait, I’ll have mine with mustard. Maybe we could get a new one before we start off again.

*

The news arrived at the crime scene, just before the party started. It came wearing a plaid ascot and a daffodil through a button hole, but no one was allowed to decipher it. He tried to break a sailor’s neck, but the sailor just went ahead sawing away at the furniture. Soon there were two of everything, and the next thing we knew it was time for breakfast. Or nearly. We still had a half-gallon of vodka to finish, and a pint of paint thinner we had been using to remove our clothing, or the lines we had drawn beneath out eyes while we were still awake. But the news was still at it, though it had changed into a woman in a slight bathing suit, covered from head to toe with black & blue marks. Finally, I found out how to work the remote.

*

The chief imbecile recorded himself falling off the stage. We were astounded by his recreational abilities. Where did he put the microphone and where was he flying to? I had coughed up a piece of burnt linoleum after he had given me the go-ahead. What stage of life was that? It seemed like a miracle that he swallowed the audience—I remember living in an altered state for several years after that, something like Wyoming, but with less fuss over the antelope. I don’t remember what I had eaten but it disintegrated my esophagus. Whole villages made of mayonnaise, living quickly, rotting in the sun. At his instructions we catapulted ourselves against the wall behind the curtain, ran like broken eggs down-field toward the goal line, where we were each handed a number two pencil and a book of boxes.

*

This summer unrest: but why winter again, just like that? We are moving with the speed of CNN through manifestoes of circuitry. Electrical impulses gouge my brain, but I know how to enjoy it. I snake my board through the refuse of countless New York Times book reviews to meet you here, where you wipe the spittle off your dolls and building blocks, preparing for a nose bleed.

*

Who’s been playing with the air again? Sharp hot moments, three of my friends already melted, but they were only made out of plastic. I wonder if the moon is made out of stuff like this. The pavement so broken up over last night’s party. Hard to tell from your facelift. Let’s drip wax over everything. I’ve got some aroma therapy candles. You’re not going to be using that eye anymore, are you? Everything’s dropped back to two dimensions. Take what you need, and take a little more. I heard there was a formula for making lots of money. Take your fingers out of your ears. You won’t be needing them anymore.

I first want to say that you Mike are probably one of the smartest (probably a bit smarter than me) folks I’ve argued with in this group in how you can actually use your reasoning facility. So take a bow. You’re also like 100x more knowledgeable. You definitely have my respect. I will point out though, and perhaps fall in line with Mr. _____ here, that the problem is not that the laws and the notion of due process are available for us to use, but that they are used selectively. This is why the kids are fire bombing police stations – and it has part to do with social media, true, as 30 years ago the same things were happening but no one knew, and now everyone sees the evidence. Cops killing POC has been going on all along, but here you have teens and 20-somethings inundated with the information that proves to them that the real America in no way matches the one that has been marketed to them all their lives. And it’s not just George Floyd and Breonna — there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases in which a white cop kills a black man (it’s usually a man) under questionable circumstances and there is no conviction, not even an indictment or investigation. They also know that historically riots have been a means of communication. The poor have always known this — even Martin Luther King’s famous quote says this: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are actual academic studies that show that after a long frustrating period of trying to promote change, a riot will come along, and once it’s televised, change will happen. Would Derek Chauvin have been convicted without the chaos engendered by the demonstrations? I’m sorry to say, probably not. Rioting brings attention to things when the rule of law is not followed, when it is selectively enforced – that’s the bottom line. And it’s really not even the BLM group or even antifa that cause this chaos, but randomly enraged people who just show up. Believe me, I live in a historically black neighborhood, and the demonstrations I saw running through the streets are a rag tag group of all sorts, not some army organized by democrats. Many of them, especially those on the further left, don’t really see any difference between the parties — these are probably the communist-leaning and anarchists in the group, many of whom really don’t know much about those affiliations to begin with. I’m no sociologist (I studied rhetoric and literature, and have worked in finance) but I also believe there are economic reasons behind this impatience that has people hitting the streets, and disagree with me if you will, but shrinking of the middle class, to get the things prior generations more easily attained, seems to have been severely damaged by the demise of collective bargaining and supply side eco – after 40 years of the varieties of Reaganomics, we have gotten to the point where the gap between CEO and average worker pay has spread 10-fold, while higher education costs of rocketed upward as well. These young people are in crisis. And I think the reason you see people following the cult of Trump is same reason you see people throwing molotov cocktails. I’m not saying I have solutions, but the FDR-type Democrat that I tend to be at times points in the direction we are currently moving in, if my small steps. Private business has no conscience, and though the government is amoral, it has the pressures of the populace behind it.

There are aspects of progressivism that have been influenced by Marxism, true, but no serious person looks at Marx they same way they did during the early part of the twentieth century. First of all, Marx was writing during a time in parallel with early American progressivism, and his audience was supposed to be democratic and parliamentary systems in which industrial capitalism was at work. Applied to feudal monarchies, where you simply replace one totalitarian system with another, since no habituation of egalitarian ethos was in place, you’re going to end up with what happened in Russia and China. Marx was one of many socialist/anarchist/libertarian thinkers in Europe at the time, and perhaps not the best model, as there was too much left of the Hegelian dialectic, and the so-called end of history. The majority of people who see value in Marx, value him for his critique of capitalism, not as a path. And even the anarchists of today — the thoughtful thinkers along the lines of Marx and the Russian folks like the Kropotkins and Bakunins, etc. — are equally critical of totalizing systems like early applications of the things like “communism,” and see their object as the destroyers of despotic systems or subsystems within larger systems. Progressivism today shouts back to early progressivism in this way in that it is an attempt in multiple ways of being a corrective, and yes there are ties to civil rights, feminism, and a host of other things that have come up in the meantime, particularly environmental concerns. It’s really not one thing, but a collection of different groups with different gripes (many of which are aligned with what you call our supposed “core values”) who at some points find cross-allegiances. There are those who overcode all issues as if they were rooted in economics, but there are equally those who feel that economic issues are symptomatic of other things. It is very complicated, and yes, would take a book or several to even address. It’s not Marxism that subverts and destroys societies, as you say, so much, as numerous conditions and pressures. Abolition and Reconstruction were wholly justisfied events that destroyed the society of the old south. The Renaissance destroyed the older medieval order, the American Revolution was the beginning of the end of British Empire, as well as other European empires that fell soon afterward, as in the case of France. One of the things Marx was targeting was the notion of private property, which in some ways was an evolved form of feudal artifact, that was further enforced in the early US documents largely in support of the slave plantation schema, where the property owners were made to feel justified, not only owning the land, but the people who worked it. This has evolved into a formal fixation that has become bedrock to the libertarian movement in the US, I realize, and has been swept up into all sorts of ideology about money, other forms of financial resources, and in industry as well. I think he had a point. We have to understand that the creation, protection and maintenance of private property in the extreme cases as we see in the US is cause for many of our systemic problems, and is really a source of much required government infrastructure, legislation, investment in policing, a large military, and so forth. It’s really gone overboard. It is destroying things. The internet and other technologies are more responsible now for “destroying and subverting societies” than any backroom academic ideology. And that’s much the result of capitalism, and how it devours everything in its path and spits out the new. You might argue that that itself is not wrong or bad, but if you want to look for a root cause of change, look at capital, its innovations, and the way it leads to an unruly and accelerated flux. Social upheaval’s we are experiencing are part of that flux, part of the stochastic effects of social change which will hopefully find some equanimity at some point soon.

If I could have anything I wished for I would of course wish to end this war in the Ukraine, then end world hunger and other wars and loosen the tight grip on people that certain governments and other organizations have on people, socialize all global corporations so workers and other parties of interest benefit and are involved in decision making. Also I wish that my family and all families, and people without families, are safe, healthy and happy, that there is a sound safety net for all. Then some personal stuff – I’d like to be able to turn down a Nobel prize for literature and maybe play lead guitar for a hip hop jazz funk band. None of this will happen, of course. I have very little power. But, when faced with the absurd, one is best to act in the absurd, to meet and be absurd. So where to start?