Things I want to Learn About Yoked onto a Discussion of the Poetry of Peter Davis

So, most people who know me know that I'm very much interested in poetry. My personal goals very much concern poetry. I try to write it, and I want to be a good critical reader of it. I want to be able to bring a Marxist literary perspective to the study of poetry in a productive way, and I'm currently not sure what that means. As I filled out my applications for PhD programs in English and literature, I was trying to flesh out what this project would look like. At first, I was interested in a notion of pastoralization, as developed by Raymond Williams in his The Country and the City. This book charts shifts in the social ideologies of the U.K. as expressed in their poetry. Ultimately, I think his argument hinges on the proposal he makes about the pastoral, as an aesthetic, that its idealizations "... [serve] to cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of [a] time"(pg 45). This notion is carried through from medieval to Modernist poetry, and is shown with example after example to be at least "part" of what's going on in the poetry of a given time. Williams suggests that perhaps the sort of metanarrative developed is based on the Biblical account of the Fall, when Adam and Eve are forced to leave the garden due to their failure to obey the will of God. Since then, we mortals attempt a return to a garden that no longer exists as it did, and recedes in our collective rear view mirror, even as its loss is felt more strongly in our consciousness. Because this narrative is at the base of our experiences of nature and civilization, our poets evoke nature in overly romantic, idealized ways that have little to do with either the brutality of nature itself, or the capitalist mechanization of that nature represented most clearly in the orchard or dump. The lesson of his book, anyhow, is that we can't possibly assume the innately pristine-ness of nature, or even the existence of a "natural" world separate from ourselves.

The though frightened me, because I think, to a certain extent, I had idealized my own childhood lived in rural upstate New York. You know, undoubtedly that place wasn't beyond the commodification of the market place, but it certainly didn't feel like the city, or a suburb for that matter. Experience is organized in different ways away from urban centers, and those experiences leave one convinced of exactly what Williams exposes as ideology: the "purity" of the rural, the inherent impurity, decadence, and difference of the urban. In any case, interesting as all that is, it doesn't much impact the practice of poetry in the U.S. today -- though I know of poets who would consider themselves "rural," as opposed to "urban" poets -- outside of being an organizational tool for poetic anthologizing, after the collapse of the notion of unique "schools" of poetry.

So, that Marxist theory would have specific and interesting things to say about the ideological mystification necessary to create a sense of difference between geographically marked poetries isn't as interesting to me as a subject worth examining, mainly because I think that the maneuver represented there has a particular, parallel structure that is much more intriguing, and not as often considered: that is, representing labor, itself. If it's true that people tend to valorize the pristine, removed countryside, I think it's equally true that we valorize certain types of labor in the same way. If this isn't an older trope, it's at least a more fully developed trope in the American imaginary. Representation of manual and physical labor is often times run through with notions of heroism and dominance, raw power and perseverance. It's tied into our notion of the Protestant work ethic; that bit of ideology that suggests that our reward is in some next life, and the failure to toil through this one is an inherently moral failure. The moral failure represented by the lack of a strong work ethic is then manipulated by all sorts of constituencies for all sorts of ends: 99% protestors are "lazy," and simply "don't want to work," intellectual labor isn't labor to be respected (I don't think that this is the point of the novel linked to here, but I think it's the platform from which the content of the novel is -- critically -- explored), and on and on. Take with that the complaint of every generations, that kids these days, who, though raised by that previous generation, represent some failure in the perpetuation of that former generations' values.

What I'm interested in, then, is how poetry represents labor, in both senses of that word: what images and contents it utilizes, and how its practice is imagined as labor both by its public, and by its practitioners.

To that end, I'd like to mention a poet whose poems are a rare thing: honestly funny. They're funny in a way one would usually expect from a stand-up comedian. But also, his poems have a serious content at their core: how does one create art in the commodified market place? Anyone who is a maker of any sort wrestles with these questions to a greater or lesser degree. The poems, though, in Peter Davis's Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! takes that interaction between art-as-art and art-as-product to its extremes, in a sort of Shlovskian defamiliarization that challenges us in very interesting ways, at the same time that it makes us laugh our asses off. Not a bad combination.

Almost all of the poems in the collection are addressed to a super-specific constituency, in a way that mocks (or maybe takes seriously) the debates about "accessibility" that have probably always surrounded poetry. The titles usually name the addressee, as in "Poem Addressing my Past, Current and Future Students Who are Sufficiently Interested in Our Class to Check Out My Work," and "Poem Addressing People who are Reading this Underwater," and on and on. The implicit suggestion is that the poet is working on making sure his book is available for any person who could possibly have some sort of connection to it: increasing its market viability, its prospective audience, etc. The tone of the poems are consistent so that you get the sense that the speaker is the same throughout: an anxious, conflicted and plain-spoken individual concerned with how he appears, his future job prospects, and his eventual legacy as a poet. Each of the poems interacts with its title in a way dictated by the title itself: in one "addressing babies," baby-babble is employed throughout, though the speaker can only mobilize the babble to speak about how great the poem currently being read is,  for a poem addressed to a baby. The absurdity of the poems becomes the content of the collections' message, even when the idea that it has a message is lampooned:

              "... you might want to consider/ this poem and its relationship to: Melville, William Carlos Williams, Emily/ Dickinson, peace, consciousness, ego, psychology, Freud, Gertrude Stein/ hapiness, success, movement, cartoons, Raymond Queneau, Joe Wenderoth, / post-pre-post-modernism, aesthetics, surface, resurface, biography, smallness,/ George Perec.... (pg 68)"

Part of the brilliance of the work is how it capitalizes on the way language works: even though I suppose that there isn't an "intellectual" or "literary" way to link this work to that of Melville, or the idea of peace, the evocation of those people and concepts in the poem itself constitutes that link, and forces the reader to take the possibility of that connection seriously, outside of and against their own desires. In a broader sense, that's the only way these prose poems seem to function as poems at all. They make us see them as poems because they're in a book called Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, and each is titled "Poem Addressing...". The way the language evokes the "aura" of a poem challenges our notion of the ways a poem can be constructed, and how poetry is work. The collection reflects the "meta"-ness of our current cultural moment as reflected in our television shows (think Community, where there are constant winks and nods to the idea that the show is a particular construction that used to be called a "sitcom," and contrast it with historic representatives of the form, like, say The Cosby Show. We couldn't imagine that show getting away with Bill Cosby looking out at the audience, or into the camera, and winking, or for a single episode to be devoted to alternative timelines of similar events, etc, in the way that it seems completely normal to Community) our music (hip-hop sampling and appropriation is the clearest example -- the Ghost Busters theme with a bass-filled club beat under it evokes our nostalgia for the 80's, at the same time it gives us pleasure now), and on and on.

The point is, for me, at least, that this is a particular mode of expression, that must, at its base, have preconditions that make it possible, and realities that make it necessary or, at least, interesting. What those realities might be, I think, have a lot to do with our notions surrounding labor and creativity. I haven't fully fleshed this idea out yet, so let this post stand as a sketch of a longer, more well considered, more well organized, discussion to come at some later date.

Until then, I'm going to do the unforgivable and reproduce one of Davis's poems in it's entirety. I hope you like it as much as I do. It's called "Poem Addressing Fans of Celine Dion":

"I look at myself in the mirror all the time, as you might, and I just think,/ what the fuck?"(pg 90)

Do this guy a favor and buy his book! I'm sure he has a poem in there addressed to you, and that he'd really like your take on it.

Melancholia - A Review

Last night I saw Lars Von Trier's new film, Melancholia, with my ladyfriend. I've been excited to see this movie since I was first exposed to Von Trier's films with 2010's Antichrist. That film seemed, when I saw it, openly misogynistic, locating the Fall of Eden (as does the Judeo-Christian tradition) in women; in this case, particularly in a single woman's sexuality. I don't know anything about film review, so this is going to be a very basic reading of the movie, and, cards on the table, it's going to lean heavily on the book I've been reading most recently, Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End Times.

So, two caveats before we move on: 1) This review will include "spoilers," if that term even applies for a film like this, and 2) This review will probably, consciously or unconsciously, cop the style of Zizek, and apply (read: steal) his ideas.

The film follows two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in two episodes (the theme of duality is important throughout, more on that in a second) presented back to back -- first, a wedding which takes up fully 2/3rds of the film, and then secondly, the return of Justine to the extravagant estate where the wedding was held, and where she, her sister, and her sister's family will witness the end of the world. That's about as brief a synopsis as I can give of the plot, and of course it elides tons of details and doesn't touch at all on the beauty of the shots from a cinematographic point of view. There are, I think, only about 6 characters that need particular mentioning. These are Justine and (Dunst), Claire (Gainsbourg) -- two sisters --, John, Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland), Leo, Claire and John's son, and Claire and Justine's parents, Gaby and Father.

On one level, it seems like the most important thematic is the duality/pairing off that exists everywhere in the movie: Justine/Claire, Gaby/Father, the aborted Justine/Michael (Alex Skarsgard), Betty/Betty, Earth/Melancholia, Earth/Justine, and Melancholia/Justine. Each of these pairings is filled with it's own sort of automatic content: sisterhood, marriage, excess, whatever. Viewing the film in terms of the successes and failures of each of these pairings allows one reading of the narrative that really is about melancholy, and about the artificiality and tenuousness of our relationships and all that. But, being the dirty, stinking Leftist that I am, I want to push the plot towards a specific direction: that of allegory. It seems to me that what is important about the movie as a political/environmental statement exists not very far into the interior of the film, I think it's there for anyone to see, and that maybe it's even too easy. Whether this reflects the simplicity of the movie or of my mind is debatable, though I would suggest that latter.

What resonates with me about the notion of the impending end of the world starts with something Zizek says, with a nod to Fredric Jameson, in Living in the End Times:

"Fredric Jameson's old quip holds today more than ever: it is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations... All one has to do here is compare the reaction to the financial meltdown of September 2008 with the Copenhagen conference of 2009: save the planet from global warming (alternatively: save AIDS patients, save those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments and operations, save the starving children and so on) - all of this can wait a little bit, but the call "Save the banks!" is an unconditional imperative which demands and receives immediate action"(334).

Seeing the film soon after reading this passage, I was struck with the possibility that our cultural products, as they always do, are working to imagine exactly such catastrophes, on an allegorical level, to either forewarn us of our impending doom, or, perhaps, to do the work of psychologically preparing us for the possibility of that doom. Reading Melancholia in this way, things fall into place really quickly. I think there is a way in which the planet, externalized, immediate, perceivable, becomes the embodiment of all of those smaller disasters that exist in our periphery, but don't interact the way they should: Global Warming, sure, but also over-fishing of the oceans, fracking, oil pipelines, loss of habitat, extinction of species, etc. All of these exist, are happening, and are absolutely lamentable and disastrous. A Marxist analysis of this particular situation would talk about the commodification of natural resources, the drive for profit at the expense of ecological stewardship and all of that, in a way that lets us take Jameson's quip seriously: let us, then, in Melancholia, go ahead and stretch the imaginative apparatus to create exactly the end of the world. When we imagine the film this way, it becomes, rather than a tale of depression and ennui, disgust with institutionalized marriage and all the rest, a film about our current environmental predicament, and a character study in which characters are reduced to types who (re)act as representatives of particular groups reacting to our current crisis. This is the reason for Justine's depression: she knows something isn't right, she foresee's the end of the world, and that possibility leaves her emotionally distraught. This state leaves her, at different times in the film almost paralyzed. Doesn't she, then, stand in for the environmental movement as a whole, always castigated as overly emotional, unable to articulate the problems that face us? How could criticisms of the notion of climate change exist, unless they exist in part by thriving on the doubt people feel when faced with "liberals" and "nuts" who make these vulgar attempts to emotionalize our connection to the earth: "she's our mother, we weep for her, we mourn for her" and all of that shit. Even those more astute critics of our treatment of the earth only know that something is happening, and that maybe we should slow down, step back, or whatever. It's no surprise when we meet Justine's parents, then, to find two opposite responses to the possibility of ecological disaster: her father arrives at the wedding with two women (both named Betty, as if both are really just more of one...), immediately gets drunk, and harasses the waitstaff. In him, we have an example of hedonistic excess: since there is nothing to be done, we should enjoy ourselves, we should indulge ourselves and please only ourselves. This notion is reinforced when Justine begs him to stay at the estate with her because she feels a pressing need to talk (to vocalize the problems as she sees them, to express what she is feeling is exactly what he wouldn't be able to stand, since it would challenge his self indulgence). Later, when she arrives at his room, he's already vanished, leaving a ridiculously short and non-explanatory note. He feels no need to justify himself, he just acts, and that's it. Her mother exists at the other end of that spectrum: she is mourning for the earth, she's overwhelmed with her guilt and disgusted by empty social rituals that she thinks ignore the reality of the situation people are in: life is short, we will be unhappy, and the end is coming. That this registers her attitude towards the earth and ecological matters is made clear when Justine witnesses her mother's morning routine, looking from one balcony to the next: her mother is doing some sort of Yoga-style stretching, an exercise that should bring peace of mind, but instead only delays her having to suffer her knowledge of the reality of the world.

Since this has focused mainly on Justine's family, it's important to note her sister, Claire. If Justine and Claire are the offspring of this older generation, who represent the reactions of the old Left of '68 to ecological and political disaster, then they have synthesized these reactions, Justine becoming our paralyzed, despondent ecologists who try to tell everyone the end is nigh to no avail, and Claire trying to make her peace with Capitalists, looking to the wealth and reason of our Capitalist system to allay her fears. That's why she is with John, the wealthy individual who throws the wedding, funding the maintenance of cultural rituals and reacting with glee at the approach of the planet (think here of statements about the possibility of Arctic ice melting, that it would present new opportunities for exploration and trade: don't worry about ecological disaster, our system will appropriate even these disasters for the continued accumulation of profit and exploitation of the Earth). As the wedding closes and it's clear that Justine wont stay with Michael, all of the sociological drama of the film fades away (I'm not arguing that level of the film isn't important... it was incredible), leaving us to the final section of the movie, leaving us to contemplate the end of the earth.

When Claire asks John about the planet, she asks him what his scientists say about it. She doesn't ask it in a way that suggests he employs scientist, but in a way that suggests he looks at particular opinions and particular attitudes about the approaching planet: isn't this exactly what happens with global warming skeptics, who would rather listen to the <2% of scientists who question the data on human-made climate change? His scientists tell him that everything will be fine, disaster not only will be averted, but isn't a possibility in the first place. This leads to one of the most beautiful metaphors of the film, and to scenes I found particularly fascinating, in that they reveal some level of optimism. This metaphor exists in the absurdity of the tools surrounding the observation of the planet. John, the ur-Capitalist of the film makes these vulgar displays of moving his telescope around to get the best view, even going so far as to yell at his butler (if there isn't working/owning class tension here, I don't know where it is), "No, you don't touch this!" The point is, his tool is one of appropriation, distanced observation. It's his way of "having" the planet, or having the experience of the planet. Contrast this with the simple device his son creates: a coil of metal wire at the end of a stick that reveals very basically which way the planet is moving: if it moves towards you, it will soon get too "big" to be seen inside the loop of wire, if it recedes, it will be seen within the loop of wire, a circle getting smaller and smaller. This imaginative tool measures rather than observes the planet, foregrounding the relationship between that planet (again, the figure for our impending ecological doom and apocalyptic disaster) and our own. This is where I think the film, though it ends with the end of the world, is optimistic: the young boy -- the "next generation" -- isn't interested in idly watching the impending disaster, instead, if he can't control or avert the disaster, he wants a way to observe it's scope, he wants a means of warning others about it. As the disaster becomes impossible to avoid, John takes his own life, abandoning his own family to experience the end as they will: he robs them of the possibility of a painless end in a final act of selfishness, taking the sleeping pills Claire procured for the family when she knew the end was nigh. This, I think, stands as a statement about what will happen when all cards are down on the table...

Incidentally, I have an uncle who sometimes argues with me about environmental damage and Capitalism and all that. When I posted a video about overfishing he sarcastically replied "Oh no, fisherman catching fish, what a problem!" I responded that the problem wasn't that they catch fish, but that by-catch makes up 99% of what they haul in, an incredible waste of life, since it's thrown back in, and habitat is destroyed. Confronted with this information, his tactic suddenly changed: "Who cares, we'll destroy the world and people will die and natural balance will be restored." The rhetorical differences in these two responses show the ideological milieu from which he emerges: first, of course the fishing catches fish, that's their job, this is merely an issue of work, making money, all of that. When that information is yoked to the possibility of ecological disaster, he retreats in the opposite direction: of course we're destructive, we're guilty of being destructive and that's why we deserve the impending punishment of starvation and ecological disaster. Never a position between these two poles: perhaps fishing should be regulated in ways that make such by-catch impossible, perhaps we should short-circuit the economy before we short circuit the planet!


It's important, too, to note how the movie ends. Claire, displaying the Freudian death drive (at least, my oversimplified understanding of it) requests that the three remaining people in the huge, obscene estate ("How many holes does my golf course have Justine?" John asks. "18 holes." "That's right." John smiles, and leaves the room) -- Claire, Justine, and Claire and John's son, Leo -- go out on the balcony, listen to music and sip wine. She wants control over how they die. Instead, the unimaginable becomes the object of their final fascinations. Justine tells Leo that she can create a magic cave, in which they'll be safe. This is the final optimistic moment of the movie: in the face of absolute, certain death, Justine and Leo build a teepee looking structure out of sticks, and sit inside their "cave," where Justine instructs Leo to close his eyes to more fully "occupy" the imaginary cave. Now, the three people who foresee the doom, the disaster, and who emotionally respond to it, try to measure it, and try to control their death are in an imaginary space, where, the viewer is left to think, they imagine their way out of the end of the world.

This review elides all sorts of details and ideas I wanted to touch on, but I feel like it's going pretty long already. Whether this is a conscious part of the writing and shooting of the movie, I feel like the details are persuasive enough to allow us to read the film this way. At least, I hope you found something interesting or persuasive in this. If this acts as nothing else, maybe it can illustrate the way an idea or perspective can be used to read a film in a particular light. The notion that it's easy for us to imagine the end of the world is one that is, to me, striking and interesting. I'm sure the next time I see the movie, that these themes wont be so dominant in my mind, and I can see it a whole new way.

The Godlessness of my Worldview.

This will be quick and not at all scientific. I'm about to get whiny.

If you know me at all, you know that I'm not afraid of the nonexistence of a god, gods, god-like creatures, or their earthly manifestations. I think it's too late in the human game for that, and anyway, it's vulgar to believe in the validity of one over the others in the ever expanding pantheon of deities.

So, bracketing that initial assumption ([there is clearly no god]), all that is left to attend to is the rhetorical existence of a god, gods, god-like... etc. Due to my particular context, let us also assume that all future references to God (who I will call god, or "a god") refers specifically to the one of the Abrahamic faiths (as much as practitioners of each are willing to disparage the others, the continuity between their traditions is indisputable, and from my secular, heathenish standpoint, in the most literal sense of the word, remarkable). This is precisely where the trouble begins for our wanton, stupid, excitable species. Remember, after all, that as god recedes from the realm of the "magical" (Zeus is a god of lightning, gods bring us crops, gods make mountains explode, they oversee our celebrations -- Bacchanalia anyone?), he must operate in even more shadowy, even less quantifiable realms: now, god makes us who we are, we are his hetero or queer creations, or, he spookily knows the entire future of the world, all of our individual identities, but will not intervene on behalf of a single sinner who, after all, he created in his own (debatable) image, because his test of our free will is more important than a decent, livable existence on earth. At this point in this little rant, I'll mention the catalyst for it as a means of moving forward: I got in an argument. (Not uncommon for me...). The argument was, at first, about gun laws, and then the nature of the United States' relationship to Israel, and eventually, about god. The points I want to explore are twofold: 1) This is a backwards way to go, isn't it? We sort of swim upstream if we start from various political positions and trace them back to their (allegedly) religious undergirding. And 2) I think one of the dominant issues of our day will be our navigation of exactly this nexus between religious and political beliefs.

Let's begin.

1)The Chicken,The  Egg, The Christ and an AK-47.

At the point in the conversation in which my interlocutor invoked her belief in god, I stepped away. To me, it is useless to attempt to carry on a conversation about real, material circumstances in the world when the other individual assumes that all of what we experience was manufactured, first, in the head of one invisible, non-present, (specific to this case) biblically represented being. Let us not be derailed by a conversation of world, universe, or all-of-existence origins: I don't give a shit where it came from. Much in the same way it would be absurd to argue who the architect of the burning building you're standing in might have been, it seems irrelevant to conversations about the nature of gun laws in the 21st century United States whether the universe blinked into being for the fuck of it, or was snot-rocketed into existence by the big man upstairs.

The important thing to think about is the rhetorical nature of her invocation. At a point in which all of our cards were down on the table, where we could either agree or disagree based on any single policy point whatsoever, she bracketed and set aside our entire conversation and said, (paraphrasing) "Whatever the policy problem, at base, God is the solution." So, in some sense, god not only created the impossible-to-comprehend physics of the universe, but he's really concerned that Obama might regulate gun ownership before his four years in office is over! This is a powerful (thought content-less) argument. I can't possibly disagree with you about what your faith tells you god wants for our country (because he gives a shit about invisible lines on the map): this would be reckless, insensitive, condescending, and a whole lot of other pretty negative things. Fine. What I can do is put god back into the historical context from which he arose, and point out that your invocation, and the invocation of others are completely at odds with each other. We're certainly used to hearing the religious themselves talk about this very point: Islam is a religion of peace, Islamic terrorists have perverted the message (I do believe that's the case), Christianity is a religion of high moral standards, child-raping priests and their subsequent coverups don't really represent the mainstream of religious thought (again, I concede the point, and in this case, it's the nature of the coverup not the crime itself that is...  fuck this will be misread... so reprehensible. By that I only mean statistically, child sexual abuse doesn't happen at greater rates inside the church than it does outside the church, what varies in the case of the church is the scale and duration of protection granted to known pedophiles). So, if in those cases, the nature of the religion doesn't determine the nature of the acts done in it's name, why should we assume anything different for the case of rhetorical deployments of religion for political ends in the United States? The easiest counterpoint to today's rabidly free-market conservative evangelicals is the existence of the liberation theologists of South and Central America. In that it would be impossible to argue that either one or the other represents a truer representation of the will of god, the equation deployed by the religious conservatives here is flipped on its head: it is not that Individual A <believes in god> and therefore <holds these specific political values>, but that Individual A <holds these specific political values> and this determines the means by which they <believe in god>. My own sense is that there is much more scriptural evidence to support the notion that god (and his kid, born of a virgin on exactly December the 25th, at which time a Christmas tree was erected in a stable and Joseph received a gift card to Macy's from three wise uncles he never sees but, whatever, at least he can get that kitchenaid now, amen) is a dirty redistributionist ( I don't remember how much Jesus charged for the loaves and fishes, or how much he put in stock with the moneylenders in the temple, do you?) rather than an American individualist. That's neither here nor there. Here comes a random paragraph break!

2) Now, let us use the two assumptions from above -- 1) god? Not so real, 2) In the main, ones politics determines their reading of god, god does not determine ones stance on politics -- to end with a brief discussion of what these things mean for us, as political beings, members of a species called homo sapiens, citizens of individual countries, and eventually, the entire world. Let's examine the list of things god cares about in the United States, right now:

 -- Gay marriage (Against!)
 -- Lower taxes (for "wealth producers," like, you know, Paris Hilton)
 -- Gun Rights (For!)
 -- Bible in School (For!)
 -- Evolution in School (Against!)
 -- Lady Gaga (Against... but secretly For)
 -- Israel (For it whatever the fuck that means!)
 -- Global Warming (Not happening!)
 -- Globe-as-financial-resource (Happening!)
 -- Abortion (Against!)
 -- Muslims at Ground Zero (Against!)
 -- Muslims preserving their social practices (Against!)
 -- Muslims using airplanes (Against!)
 -- Muslims (Come on!)


How has it never struck any of our churchgoing friends that god happens to line up exactly behind Rick Santorum's presidential platform?

In disregarding the various objections to the possibility of god's existence put up by Richard Dawkins and Christoper Hitchens, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton rightly, though, I think, too condescendingly, notes that the problem with their objections is that they take religion at it's word (when Christianity says there is god, and he created the world in 7 days a few thousand years ago, this is exactly what Christianity means to say) rather than recognizing religion as the most perfect deployment of that weighted Marxist term: ideology. As an ideological system, that is, as a system of beliefs that effects your actions in every day life, there probably isn't a more perfect historical example than religion in all of it's forms. How else to explain people kneeling on a rug five times a day, people avoiding certain animal products in combination, people not trimming beards (I thank god for this specific practice. Beards or bust), or playing with snakes and all the rest? Think of how less complete all other similar systems are: even the most ardent capitalist might eventually take their social security benefit, even the most prominent Republican might accept a loan to their state, even the most liberal democrat might eventually vote to keep Guantanamo open, etc. In all of those cases, the ideological standards of the system aren't nearly completely encompassing in the way the standards of any of the Abrahamic religions are.

The problem this poses for us is a complex one: How can we ask the right questions of religious people, if "God is the answer" to questions we've not yet even formulated? How convenient for God that he gets to occupy the space at the outer most limits of our imaginations so that his powers, paradoxically, increase even as they decrease. Wherever I don't understand something, in steps the omnipotent. Politically, the issue is more straightforward: if we leave our politics to god, we're fucked. For whatever reason, he's figured out how to paint us beautiful sunsets each evening, but he hasn't gotten around to a reasonable distribution of food, so that, as we enjoy the sunset tonight (which I undoubtedly will, California has it's  benefits) another day will have closed during which 26,000 children have died because they literally couldn't gather the calories together necessary to sustain a human life. If you're wondering where those extra calories are, look at your Big Mac, Big Gulp, Double Downs and five pounds of grilled cheese. The issue is, in this sense, very material, very basic: god is behind very many causes, ideas, and political stances, but, except through human actors, he hardly ever gets anything done. So what humanity needs (not America, not the US, not the West... I'm an unrepentant universalist -- yes you can have your individual identity, but it is our collective future that is the realm of politics, proper) is to put god's political platform aside, and formulate a different, inclusive, secular, creative one.

The goal then, is to create a rhetoric that excludes god from the sphere of politics.

I promised brevity and instead gave you this rambling (riddled with intellectual errors, I'm sure, riddled with grammatical and punctual errors, I'm sure) bit of psuedo-intellectual nonsense: Whine about it.

That's what I do.  

Blue Bloc, Black Bloc, it's All the Same to me.

Anyone who, as I have, has been following the Occupy Wall Street protest was, I'm sure, disheartened by reports from Occupy Oakland of the vandalism and destruction of private property there during their Nov 2nd General Strike. In typical fashion, the Anarchist Black Bloc came to "create trouble," "disturb the peace," and all that. I'm going to take a stance that my liberal friends might not like to hear, but one, I think, that respects the complexity of the situation. I do not condemn the Black Bloc or their actions, and I believe it's time that the political Left own up to their part in empowering and creating groups like these. Not in any direct way, of course -- no "mainstream" liberal personally armed or motivated the Black Bloc contingent in any direct way. But, the ineffectual nature of the Left, the consistent loss of ground over at least the last 40 years has, in fact, played no small roll in perpetuating the idea that real political change comes from outside of the legal framework here.

That's not surprising. Looking at the victories of the Labor movements of the past -- the ones that brought us the five day work week, vacation time, and a slue of other rights-- and, then, looking at the Civil Rights movement, a history of extralegal political action leading directly to systemic reform emerges. I'm walking a fine line here, because I don't know that I consider myself a plain reformist, but I can't consider myself an insurrectionary revolutionist, either. I'm not sure what direction future action should take. The point I want most to illustrate is that after those movements, after the watershed sixties and it's various successes and failures, the political Left was in, if not a full denouement, at least, retreat. The Right Wing reframed every political issue, condemned so-called "Identity Politics ," (even today, the railing against being "Too PC," or what most people unabashedly call "the pussification of the US" stand as monuments to the failure of intellectuals to motivate people to recognize the contiguous nature of theory and people's lives -- more on this in one second), and shifted what communications theorists and rhetoricians call "the Narrative" continuously to the Right.

My contention is that this shift led to the development of two opposed wings of the same ideological position. It can be summed up in the traditional phrase "Might equals right." I think it's true today to say something like "the might of the Right equal right." The two wings are, of course, the militant fronts of the ideological struggles like the ones we see playing out in Oakland. While the General Strike was on, I was not participating, so don't let's assume I know what I'm talking about based on empirical, experienced knowledge, OK? Instead, I was (and now my friends who position themselves to the "left of the Left," far into Anarchist territory will have the ammunition to unmask me as an uncommitted lifestylist) listening to Salon's Glenn Greenwald give a talk about his new book, which posits that there are two separate justice systems -- one for wealthy elites, and one for we unwashed commoners. While the discussion went on, Greenwald was asked by an audience member about his recent abandonment of the US for points south -- He moved to Brazil, with his male partner, a guy named David. His response was (reinforcing my sense that the Left --allegedly the position from which attempts to stifle individual freedom emerge, but usually, actually, the stalwart defenders of that freedom -- had lost the upper hand in the rhetorical battle to define a specifically "American" tradition of freedom, secularism, etc) that he had seen where theory and practice met: Brazil would recognize his union with his partner, and therefore grant him a long term visa, whereas the US would not.

Back, though, to Oakland. Police repression and violence there rose to, by some accounts, illegal levels. Pepper spray, gas grenades, liberal use of batons and anti-protestor violence was rife. But this violence, the ideological extension of the idea that the Might of authority/power is legitimate, is not viewed, in most quarters, as the same as the violence of the Black Bloc contingent among the protestors. Contrast this with the coverage of police violence, that, as usual, focuses on a few bad apples, a couple of "bad guys" going to far, who obviously don't represent systemic problems among the police generally. Meanwhile, as Greenwald noted last night (and, of course, I didn't record it, I only paraphrase, and hope I don't misrepresent his intentions) answers to the political and economic problems of the US are not likely to come from our political class, and that extra-systemic activism is needed to correct our path, to set our ship aright. Everyone on the Left has acknowledged this for years, but the only wing of the left to take this idea seriously has been the insurrectionary anarchists -- those who have freed animals, ruined logging equipment, and broken windows in the name of a, sometimes, ill-defined "liberation." So, to my mind, the Black Bloc are our allies, unpalatable as their tactics might seem to people afraid of "delegitimization" of our common causes.

My personal sense is that Anarchists are more conservative than they give themselves credit for, since their position relies as much on a sense of the monadic individual as any of the staunchly Capitalist libertarians most recently empowered by the political activation of Tea Party-style conservatives. That is, you know, that the individual is the most basic social unit, our rights as individuals extend beyond the collective rights of the society, so, say, my right to run a fraking business is more important than your right to clean water, as long as I hold the deed on the property where the fraking happens,etc. Leaving that aside, I think one must understand that some involved in Anarchist vandalism don't believe that violence against property is a violence-type. Only violence against other individuals counts as violence, proper. That violence against people should be more reprehensible than so-called violence against property should, I think, be given. But that's not how it plays out in our media narratives. And, in fact, that's not how it plays out in our consciousness. What this means for us as humans is a puzzle. One reading would be that we've so fully imbibed the foundational underpinnings of Capitalism (in it's more opaque cultural sense) that we've created, in ourselves, hierarchies that place some institutions above some people. Witness the outpouring of grief after Steve Jobs died, and the frenzy of adoration in the subsequent days. It's doubtful that anyone would mourn in the same way if, say, one of the underpaid factory workers that made Jobs' vision material were to die, even if it were at their position on the line. Whatever the reason, since they represent the institutions of wealth and of government, the police aren't de-legitamized by violence against individuals -- in fact, it's almost expected. But, violence against those social institutions that represent both our captors and our livelihoods strikes fear into the hearts of much of the American population.

This was quite the rambling report, and I'm sure is incoherent and run through with all sorts of contradictions. The short story is this: for better or worse, we should own up to our part in creating the radicalized, anti-civilizational Anarchists who, against the will of every Occupy General Assembly in the US, vandalized some corporate buildings and a few banks. The ineffectual, diminutive Left has failed to create a Left consensus powerful enough to get the voices of average people heard. The Black Bloc might ultimately be less reprehensible than the Blue Bloc -- the entrenched, militarized police forces able to intimidate, antagonize and injure almost without repercussion. That being the case, Occupy Oakland and all of the contingent Occupying organizations must remain vocally critical of the Blue Bloc, and chastise the Black Bloc -- reach out to them, but make them recognize the necessity for consensus and uniformity of approach to remain legitimate in the public imagination: those, after all, the Black Bloc claims to desire only liberty for. We should not fear the violence of the Black Bloc, but we should actively contrast the response to it with responses to violence by the police. Who gets the benefit of the doubt? I can never agree with the Anarchist position, because they desire an overly idealized, extremely abstract "liberty," whereas my concern remains with the immediate material circumstances of those people in the US I know are suffering from poverty, poor work conditions, and little hope for the future.


Edit -- I've read at least one source that thinks that the "Black Bloc" might have been police agents intentionally creating disruption. This would be coincide with our national tactics that include creating terrorist plots to disrupt them, and has something of Slavoj Zizek's ideas about the necessity of national lies to perpetuate national unity in them. If this is the case, I think it actually solidifies my point, that these are two ideological apparati whose function is identical, no matter the "intentions" of either group.

I haven't touched this in over a year.

Hello.

I'm going to start using this again. I think that I'll talk about poetry, politics, philosophy and the like... You know, the usual.

I think it's part of the ferver around Occupy Wall St, and it's various offshoots that has me most excited right now. I live in San Francisco, and have been closely following Occupy Oakland, and the truly horrific tactics utilized by the police there. I'm excited to see a real populist movement recognize the core of the problems we face, and to see them resisting their reduction to a series of rhetorical figures; the homeless crust punk, the washed up hippie, etc. Those types were what I talked about in my last post, over a year ago: the fear of change dressed as a categorizable person.

I'm also, like many people in the US, unemployed (note that the link posted there, to Shadowstats.com, includes the U-6 measurement, which includes chronic underemployment along with the other, more conventionally seen measures... My next post might be on this phenomenon).

This has a particular effect on a person. I often feel reduced to my 'job-getting' potential. When I receive calls from family or friends, they always ask first, "How's the job search going?" I understand. It's how our economy works. Of course, I want a job. I may be too "privileged," though, (scratch the maybe, I'm sure of it...) because I know I don't want to go back to retail work, or the food industry, or whatever. I received my MA degree. I had the amazing opportunity to teach at MCC in Rochester, NY. I want that! My classes for this fall, though, were cancelled -- low registration. And I missed my ladyfriend, and our little dog.

So, now I'm in San Francisco. I live three blocks from the beach. I walk the little doggy two, sometimes three hours a day. I send out resume after resume after resume. And I read poetry, and criticism, and fiction, and biography. I'm also fortunate enough to be part of the vlog poets, an online discussion group that will discuss topics in poetry over the course of the next year.

I have some poetry being published (along with the one alreayd in Conte) in Caesura, and Pirene's Fountain, later this year (I hope).

I can't guarantee that my use of the blog will be too regular  from here on out. My main goal is to finish my PhD applications in time to submit before the deadlines imposed by the various institutions of which I hope to be a part. So, you know, if you have a friend that loves analyzing SOP's and the such, send them my way.

Goodnight.