Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all of these things, the artist with that which flows.
Noted: Ezra Pound
From his preface to his book, The Spirit of Romance:
Crazy
Not surprisingly, Stan Goff had an interesting take on the recent shootings in Tucson, as well as the kinds of responses they elicited:
Let’s start with the premise that Jared Loughner is crazy, not coherently political. [...]
I’ll leave the DSM-IV acolytes to put labels on what kind of crazy Loughner is. The fact is he wasn’t crazy on Mars or in a time warp.
He was crazy in Tucson, Arizona, United States of America, in January 2011. Jared Loughner could read and write in English. He watched television, listened to the radio, saw movies, and read newspapers. He knew how to buy a gun and call a cab. When he couldn’t get his ammo at one Wal-Mart, he had the wherewithal to head to the next one and try again.
Jared Loughner may have some problems with dissociation, however that is being defined, but he didn’t learn to load and fire a Glock 19 via some synaptic disruption in his cerebral cortex; he learned it from a culture. Last I checked, there is no evidence of a Glock 19 gene, though I expect the DSM-IV people to come up with a Glock 19 Disorder soon enough, and Searle will invent a drug to control it.
This may sound like I’m trying to make the US case against him, given the narrow legal definition of insanity; but I’m not. The legal definition of anything is always inadequate, because law can never anticipate the complexity of context.
The case I’m making is that Loughner – in his own mentally fractured way – was behaving exactly the way his culture demonstrated he was supposed to behave.
Indypendent Reader
I've been remiss in not posting about Aimée's involvement in the semi-moribund but now revitalized Baltimore Indypendent Reader. This is taken from their site:
Also, check out Aimée's interesting interview with David Swanson, author of the book War is a Lie.
The Indypendent Reader is a progressive quarterly newspaper that aims to serve Baltimore’s more than 200 neighborhoods through research, communication, and organizing. We encourage people to “become the media” by providing democratic access to available technologies and information. We seek to bring to light Baltimore’s rich tradition of social and political activism.The website will cover ongoing social justice stories, with a responsiveness to current local politics, while the semi-annual print version is more, shall we say, essay-ish. Though still media, let's call it a form of working-class propaganda. Anyway, it's worth a look.
The primary goal of the Indypendent Reader is not merely to produce a newspaper, but to start a collaborative project in which people dedicated to social justice in Baltimore can participate in the production of local media, tell their own stories and continue to organize forums, workshops, and other events. These events disseminate ideas, build solidarity, and help promote and increase the reach of the paper itself. The Indypendent Reader Editorial Collective is autonomous.
Also, check out Aimée's interesting interview with David Swanson, author of the book War is a Lie.
"Little else is worth thinking about"
The cheerful posts come fast and furious. Robert Jensen's words, excerpted in the last post, reminded me of Philip Goodchild's preface to his difficult and fascinating (and as yet unfinished by me) book, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. He describes the book's origins:
This book emerged from the tension between four powerful insights—insights bringing problems, not solutions. The last insight to arrive was the contemporary truth of suffering: a growing awareness that current trends in globalization, trade and the spread of technology are not only leading towards a condition where the human habitat is unsustainable, but the urgency and responsibility announced by this preventable catastrophe mean that little else is worth thinking about. Prior to that, research for this present work was initiated by the realization that the encompassing framework delimiting the production of thought and values in modern life, and exerting increasing influence, was simply the impersonal and self-positing structure of money as the measure of values. As a whole, however, my work is grounded in an 'idea'—or perhaps I should say an 'experience'—of what I will call 'God'. This 'idea' was so overwhelming and so distinct from our customary ways of thinking that, while intelligible in itself, it remains incommunicable until it has called into question and reformulated all existing categories of philosophy and theology. Finally, the work of the revaluation of values which may lead to the cessation of suffering was developed in the form of the 'murder of God'—the actual work of calling into question the fundamental concepts and values of the European tradition.
Each of these insights fractured my self-consciousness, exposing an abyss beneath all my thoughts and relations to myself, to others and to the world. I became a stranger to those closest to me as well as to myself. Each issue imposed itself as a dynamic force on thought, a problem of unlimited importance that I feel barely equipped to begin to address. Moreover, these are not personal but universal and global problems, imposing the responsibility on each person to find an appropriate way of addressing them. In the case of each problem, however, there is only a minority who feel the impact of its force, and those who are concerned with two or more of these problems are much fewer. The public consensus is engaged in a vast enterprise of evasion, sheltering in a wicked and lethal complacency. Yet each of these problems calls to and awakens the others. Anyone who carefully attends to the significance of these issues—and this book is an attempt to communicate their significance—may risk having their world shattered. Thinking is nearly as dangerous as complacency.
Hysterical and apocalyptic
At New Left Project, Robert Jensen (not to be confused with Derrick) writes about the pitfalls of online activism (e.g., the tendency to think that political information = political action) and the challenges facing activism in the face of immanent ecological collapse ("The problem is not just that existing economic, social, and political systems are incapable of producing a more just and sustainable world, but that there isn’t time available for working out new ways of understanding our self, others, and the world"). Towards the end of the piece, he writes:
Though I made no claims to special predictive powers, two things seem likely to me: (1) All human activity will become dramatically more local in the coming decades, and (2) Without coordinated global action to change course, there is little hope for the survival of human society as we know it. When I offer such as assessment, I am routinely accused of being hysterical and apocalyptic. But I don’t feel caught up in an emotional frenzy, and I am not preaching a dramatic ending of the human presence on Earth. Instead, I’m taking seriously the available evidence and doing my best to make sense of that evidence to guide my political choices. I believe we all have a moral obligation to do that.Addressing the role of online activism in all of this, he notes that "we’re used to talking about the people who don’t embrace computers as being the ones stuck in the past. After all, isn’t the internet the key to the future? Not if the future is going to be defined by less energy and less advanced technology." Localism. Sustainability. Less energy and less advanced technology. An altered sense of what constitutes the good life. When do we think seriously about it? And in any case how is my thinking seriously about it going to do the trick?
Brief thoughts on A Language Older Than Words
If the two volumes of Derrick Jensen's Endgame were about, on the one hand, the problem that is civilization itself, the argument against it as such, and, on the other hand, meditations on the kinds of actions that might do serious damage to its ability to continue functioning, A Language Older Than Words is more about the world that we have lost access to because of it. That, in fact, it would speak to us if we would only listen, has stopped because we have lost the ability or inclination to listen. The book opens with an anecdote about the time he asked the coyotes to please stop killing his chickens, after which they killed no more chickens. There is another story about a duck that extended its neck out to be killed by him. There is a fascinating section towards the end of the book about a scientist who has done decades of research into communication with plants; well aware of the reception his work would receive in scientific circles, he doesn't even try to present it. (A question raised by and through the book: Why would the world speak to us in the conditions under which it is usually studied?)
Jensen is well aware that he is inviting your ridicule by telling such stories. He thought he was losing his mind. He tells other stories. He tells of conversations with indigenous writers and activists, recounting their words for how their cultures have experienced the world. He talks about his abusive father and how he learned to disappear when horrible things were happening, to not feel them. He quotes from accounts of the first European contact with North America, about the overwhelming abundance of both flora and fauna. He writes about the inevitability of story after story of our culture's contact with indigenous people. Extermination. Story after story recounting the despoiling of land after land. Desertification. He, again, concludes that we're all fucking crazy.
I'd offer quotations from the book, but I've already leant it out. However, by coincidence, I noticed last week that Skholiast had recently quoted a key passage from the book, in which Jensen reports the following words from Jeannette Armstrong, "poet, teacher and activist from the Okanagan tribes":
Jensen is well aware that he is inviting your ridicule by telling such stories. He thought he was losing his mind. He tells other stories. He tells of conversations with indigenous writers and activists, recounting their words for how their cultures have experienced the world. He talks about his abusive father and how he learned to disappear when horrible things were happening, to not feel them. He quotes from accounts of the first European contact with North America, about the overwhelming abundance of both flora and fauna. He writes about the inevitability of story after story of our culture's contact with indigenous people. Extermination. Story after story recounting the despoiling of land after land. Desertification. He, again, concludes that we're all fucking crazy.
I'd offer quotations from the book, but I've already leant it out. However, by coincidence, I noticed last week that Skholiast had recently quoted a key passage from the book, in which Jensen reports the following words from Jeannette Armstrong, "poet, teacher and activist from the Okanagan tribes":
Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor. It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.Skholiast, incidentally, while admitting that he has "many difficulties" with the book, says that "it is still written the way I believe philosophy ought to be written (with urgency and beauty)". I'm curious about his difficulties. I can imagine what mine might once have been (I agree about the urgency and beauty). Oddly (oddly?), I find I have no difficulties with it now, even if I am unsure how to process many of the stories found in it. I have no trouble whatever with Jensen's overall message about the insanity of our civilization, except insofar as I am already troubled by that insanity. Read his book, but read it with an open mind.
Technologically Advanced
How fucked are we? Pretty fucked. Ten all but ignored stories of further scientific evidence that "human civilization is on the precipice". All depressing, each on their own catastrophic. And still we remain utterly delusional. The introduction to the list closes with a quotation from Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." It may seem impossible? To whom?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)