despotic philanthropy

i saw my first Salvation Army bell ringer of the year yesterday, standing outside of one of the big box drugstores that inevitably sit directly across the street from one of those other big box drugstores. his arm flailed wildly, and i thought to myself: already?

my ire with these non-professional noise polluters stretches back to childhood, when my grandparents would take my cousin, brother and i to do our annual Christmas shopping in Kingsport, Tennessee. it was nothing more than an aging industrial town with a third rate mall, but to us it was like shopping on Fifth Avenue. our small town back in North Carolina didn't have toy stores or book stores or record stores or anything so grand as the Hallowed Consumption Kingsport Mall, and when we got old enough our grandparents would let us go off on our own. hijinks ensued.

the hijinks are beside the point.

the point is that my recollection of Kingsport is inseparable from those clanging bells. the sounds tormented me, coming and going, back and forth, fort and da.

(have you read your Freud lately?)

over the years of trips to Kingsport, i gradually developed a fantasy, a way to finally silence those bells, and to this date it is stands as one of the only times i have ever considered the acquisition of money a virtue. my plan was this:

first, obtain a vast fortune. next, approach a bell-ringer on his first day of work and offer $50,000 to the Salvation Army if he would refrain from the racket. the bell-ringer would have to maintain his post and could not explain why he was failing to fulfill his dharma. (the same rules would apply to female bell-ringers, only with the pronouns replaced.) at the end of the holiday season, i would write the check and drop it in the bucket.

seeing as how i've yet to amass a sufficient fortune, the plan has thus far remained purely hypothetical. it has given me time, however, to streamline and improve the plan. for example, my initial formulation would require me to loiter in front of malls and drugstores and goddess knows how many other miserable sites of consumption. doing so would likely drive me to the brink of suicide, but i now realize that i could just hire someone else to do the stalking.

likewise, my plan would require some research. i have no idea how much loose change gets dropped into those buckets, and my promise of money would have to be substantially greater to make it worth the shame to the Salvation Army. to address this shortcoming, i imagine i would need to embark upon some sort of burglary-by-proxy, not unlike that perpetrated by our 37th president:

a man after my own heart?

best of all, i've even come up with a name for this method of charity, despotic philanthropy, and i believe it could become the latest trend in the world of nonprofits. only time will tell...

4 years + 1 day ago today...

sunrise

i awoke in a motel room in St. Augustine before sunrise and ran to the beach. i had not seen the ocean in years, and at that moment nothing seemed more important. three weeks earlier i had experienced a vision of myself as a toddler, sitting on a bench looking out over the water.

morning

my father and i, both history buffs, visited the Spanish forts that overlooked the bay. walking around the ruins, i wondered how much blood had been shed, how many lives had been lost. i thought about the men who died in sight of the bay, the men who never touched the water.

midday

we stopped at Cape Canaveral and took a tour of the grounds. i was surprised by the amount of wildlife surrounding the launch pad, and fascinated by the sheer scale of the operation. i thought about the men and women who touched the sky, and the perspective that must come with experiencing one's own body as weightless, one's own planet as distant and small.

evening

i arrived in a strange town with everything i owned, or at least everything i wanted to own, in a single bag. it was not unlike my move to New York seven years earlier, except that the sturdy green canvas had been replaced with a flimsy blue linen. that night i purchased a college-ruled composition pad and a new pen. i had been using ballpoint for ten years at that point, and i decided it was time for a change.

night

to my knowledge i wrote nothing on November 9, 2006, and in retrospect i find it a beautiful coincidence that that day now exists as both a metaphorical and indexical limbo. the chain of signifiers was broken on that day; it exists between these journals:

__

and these pens:

__

there is nothing more important than the space connecting one moment of our material existence to the next. it is empty, yet full; present, yet absent.

the pens and journals and sentences left behind are merely the sedimentation of memory, artifacts of a past that (n)ever existed, monuments to the life that was. meaning does not come from words;

but from the silences between them.

3 days in Gainesville

day 1

my yin and i drove up to Gainesville on Friday morning so i could present at this conference at the University of Florida:

she had returned from India only two days earlier, and being a true trooper (a trueper?) she agreed to come with me in spite of her jet lag. our drive was uneventful, and we arrived in time for me to catch the final afternoon session.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the keynote address was given that night by "mumblecore" director Andrew Bujalski. i was wholly unfamiliar with his work prior to his talk, and he spoke for about an hour or so before finally introducing his latest film Beeswax:

this film blew me away: 16mm, understated, and permeated with a wonderful tension of what lies ahead of us, just beyond our field of vision, on the other side of the morning. the characters themselves remain largely unknowable, not in the Brechtian sense of distantiation, but in the same manner as our everyday encounters. the film is a fascinating exploration of the forces that structure quotidian, and it begs the question:

how well do we really know what motivates the actions of those around us?

Bujalski spoke to this in his keynote, telling us that he like to keep his performers confused because real people rarely have the same clarity of intent and purpose as the images of people we see on the screen. this made sense to me, and i thought of a playwright friend of mine i had seen the week before. we were once in a seminar together, and she had written of Brecht and Godard. i wondered what she would think of Beeswax, or if it was any of mine.

day 2

i presented a paper on Chris Marker's Sans soleil on the second day of the conference:

my paper dealt with memory, which is unremarkable given its author, but i was caught off guard by the questions that came at the end of the presentation. i had prefaced my talk by referencing my interest in Vedic thought, and specifically mentioned smriti vritti, a thoughtform of the past that imposes itself upon the present.

a number of questions arose from this brief aside, which was intended as nothing more than window dressing for the paper proper. and yet, this was what spoke to people – this was what people wanted to know more about. it reminded me that one can never know the karma created of our words any more than we can know the reason why we speak them.

this is the sublime space of not knowing what comes next, when we speak from our hearts and rely upon the mind only to provide the words that others might comprehend.

but this, too, is beside the point.

the point is that i saw one of my best friends from high school that night, the one who introduced me to Nancy on a cold January night in 2000. we reminisced our various exploits in the company of two dogs with eight legs and three eyes between them. he apologized for that fateful introduction, and i told him there was no need, that she remains my most important teacher to this day.

day 3

the third day was more relaxed; everyone knew each other, and my own anxiety regarding my presentation was no longer corrupting my consciousness. the panels were excellent, and the midday keynote helped to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the one the night before. the man was humble, soft-spoken, and had the self-assuredness found so often in those who have less life in front of them than behind.

he spoke of stasis and silence, and their ability to communicate knowledge in a way impossible with words. he described a barrier as "that which can be crossed," and of all the speeches and presentations i head over the weekend, his was the only one that approached the realm of poetry:

but this, three, is beside the point.

the point is that my yin and i left after his lecture, and it was the perfect way to close out the weekend. we both had to teach early the following day, and on the way home we saw one final notable sight, something that made me wish i had my camera.

we stopped at a rest stop somewhere south of Orlando, and out of the corner of my eye i saw two Buddhist monks walking inside. the one on the right held a small white box in his hand, and i rushed ahead to see if my imagination had commandeered my visual cortex:

it didn't, and my mind flooded with questions, all of them an attempt to resolve the contradiction in front of me. why? how? but– maybe... there were a million broken utterances lurking in the central Florida night, but i decided to do nothing. as we were leaving i told my yin, "maybe i should have talked to him."

"don't worry," she responded. "you can always ask him next time."

h(om)coming

my yin returned from India yesterday, smelling like Rishikesh and carrying fresh croissants and pain au chocolat from her layover in Paris. (je suis très heureux.) she had been in transit for 24 hours, gone for 3 weeks, and suffice to say it was a magnificent homecoming.

this is precisely the point, but its magnitude and dimension are beyond my present time restrictions. so, for the purposes of narrative clarity, i will confine my ramblings to the following three topics: vertigo, lingering and memory.

topic 1: vertigo

the night my yin returned we sat in bed and looked at a picture of her standing with her arms spread wide, waist-deep in the waters of the Ganges:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

when i saw this picture i experienced the strangest vertigo, as if i couldn't reconcile the image of the divine being in the photograph with the sight of the divine being directly beside me, with the sensation of the divine being in my arms.

image, sight, sensation – all three were there yet not there, and i really don't have the words to describe it except to say it was disorientingly powerful, not unlike the film of the same name:

Scottie, Madeleine, Carlotta. Carlotta, Madeleine, Scottie. Carlotta, Scottie, Madeleine. Scottie, Carlotta, Madeleine. Scottie, Madeleine, Carlotta. Carlotta, Madeleine, Scottie. Madeleine, Scottie, Carlotta. Scottie, Carlotta, Madeleine. Scottie, Madeleine, Carlotta. Madeleine, Carlotta, Scottie. Madeleine, Scottie, Carlotta. Scottie, Carlotta, Madeleine. Carlotta, Scottie, Madeleine. Madeleine, Carlotta, Scottie. Madeleine, Scottie, Carlotta. Carlotta, Madeleine, Scottie. Carlotta, Scottie, Madeleine. Madeleine, Carlotta, Scottie. Carlotta, Madeleine... Carlotta.

topic 2: lingering

my yin told me about coming out of the Ganges, how she dried herself on the riverbank overwhelmed with emotions. gradually they subsided, and she found herself wanting to linger, to hold on to what she had just experienced a little longer:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

it occurred to me that's what this journal is – what every journal is – in some way. these words are an attempt to hold on to these moments in life, to make sense, to create a narrative, to deny the fact that yesterday's homecoming is gone.

every word i write is a memorial to the past.

topic 3: memory

i can't help but feel something has shifted, and it's more than my joy or excitement or contentment regarding my yin's return. knowledge is moving from head to heart, and i'm starting to (non)grasp that each moment is held together not only by memory, but also by the very living-ness of our being:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

there is no need to pontificate lugubriously on the nature of the soul or the socio-historical construction of our identity. there is no need to become too fixed on form or contradiction, or thisness and suchness, or even the unspeakable beauty of the void. notice instead how it feels just to breathe in this one moment:

unburdened by the suicide that is the past.

on the virtues of yesterday's polemic

yesterday, in celebration of the election, i wrote a brief polemic regarding the potential political efficacy of principled withdrawal form the electoral system. this is a touchy subject among my cohort (30-50 yr old, predominately college-educated, predominately white, predominantly 'liberal'); and, as i expected, my tirade provoked a number of comments on one of those pesky social-networking sites. it reminded me of two things:

1) why i rarely engage in political discussions outside of the confines of a classroom; and 2) how difficult it is to talk about structural political change without falling into either clichés that reflect and reinforce the status quo (on the part of my cohorts) or revolutionary rhetoric (on my part).

part of this dialogue was an extension of a conversation i've been having off and on with a lawyer friend in Atlanta for the past two years. we met at a Vice Presidential debate party in 2008, and while we agree on almost every detail of the economy, social justice issues, etc., we also share a fundamental ideological rift that might be described as the distance between my disillusionment (in the most unfortunate sense of the word) and his naiveté (in the most generous).

he is one of the few people i know who seems to not only read about contemporary political issues, but also attempts to integrate the ocean of numbers and opinions and statistics with some manner of historical awareness. this being the case, he brought a smile to my face yesterday when he used the word 'anarcho-syndicalist,' which i have heard only a handful of times since my History of Socialism class in the spring of 1997.

anarcho-syndicalism, interesting though it may be, is beside the point.

the point is that class stands out in my mind, partly due to introducing me to the Frankfurt School, partly for immersing me in the thought of the American Black Panther Party, and partly for the good-looking couple who sat near the back of the room.

she had blond dreadlocks, dressed like your typical nouveau-hippie burnout, and said little. he had medium-length dark brown hair, dressed like a gas station attendant, and said the word 'bourgeoisie' with more je ne sais quoi than anyone i had ever met before or since. for me this couple represented the pinnacle of fashionable revolutionary thought, and he would often argue with the professor and cite Mikhail Bakunin:

one of my biggest regrets from this time period (besides my half-hearted engagement with the texts) is that i didn't reach out to people like this more. i felt as if there was an invisible wall separating me from my classmates, and this manifested itself either in the form of petty, pretentious dismissiveness, or in the guise of Romantic ideation of others. this couple certainly fell into the latter category, and i never did so much as say a word to them outside of class.

nearly fifteen years have passed since then, and i wonder what happened to them. perhaps they grew reasonable. perhaps she cut off that beautiful dreadlocked mess atop her head. perhaps he traded in the mechanic's jacket for a suit jacket. perhaps they turned into good little liberals and have a Green house in the suburbs and vote every two years and drive a BMW because it handles well and do criminal defense work at $200/hour with a little pro bono on the side... but i hope not.

furthermore, i'm aware that this whole line of thought is simply more evidence of my ongoing Romantic ideation. be that as it may, the older i get, the more i realize that i've passed the age where those adolescent fantasies should have receded – and yet here they still are. i think that's what gets kicked up for me every time the election cycle runs around, when one can hardly walk down the street without hearing someone say: 'well, i don't really agree with _____ but at least s/he's better than _____.' for me, voting for 'the lesser of two evils' can be reframed in the following way:

i voted for evil today.

this, in turn, reminds me of last night's discussion at my weekly meditation group. the topic was the yamas and niyams, which serve as edicts regulating behavior in yogic philosophy. the first yama is non-violence (ahimsa), and it occurred to me last night that that's really what the issue of voting comes down to for me: faced with the two harmful options, the only ethical decision is to not choose.

the American democracy complex (on the political efficacy of not voting)

today is election day, and the media coverage surrounding the midterm elections has made even my beloved NPR virtually unlistenable for the past two weeks. my mailbox has been similarly assaulted, with a minimum of three fliers stuffed inside each day. i hear commentators commentating and analysts analyzing and pundits punditing about the importance of voting to our national identity, how this election means so much, blah blah blah.

for these reasons and more, i would like to put forth the following argument: true social change is not possible within the confines of the American democracy complex, and for this reason the only responsible political activity on the first Tuesday in November is to abstain from voting.

part 1: the American Democracy Complex

the myth of American democracy is well-entrenched; and, along with our beloved First Amendment, there is no more frequent rallying cry of this country's nationalism. we are taught that our democracy is what makes this country great, and it is the act of voting is what allows this to be "the greatest and freest nation in the world."

we are taught that the great injustices in this country (invariably occurring the past, never the present) are remedied by the ballot box, and that not voting is an everyday form of low treason, a repugnant abdication of our rights and privileges as citizens.

the reality, however, is that the progressive changes in this nation are rarely enacted by the legislative bodies in our nation. it is the appointed judiciary that provides the impetus to the elected officials, and so our Congress and state houses and White Houses are always playing a game of catch-up with the rulings handed down by the court.

a brief illustration , by decade, in the post-War era:

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) - no, the deed cannot read 'whites only.'
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) - no, separate is not equal.
Miranda v. Arizona (1966) - yes, you do have the right to remain silent.
Roe v. Wade (1973) - yes, you do have the right to your uterus.
Texas v. Johnson (1989) - yes, you can burn that piece of cloth.
Romer v. Evans (1996) - yes, gay people have rights.
Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) - no, we don't live in a post-racial society.

sadly, this year's big decision (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission) seems to be going in the other direction; and, unarguably, it would just as easy to compile a list of rulings that are reactionary in nature. likewise, appointments to the courts are made by elected officials, but history has shown us that justices tend to outlive (for better or worse) the limited terms of the people who appoint them.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that elected officials are beholden to the money that drives their campaigns on the one hand, and the (supposed) wisdom of the populace on the other. bear in mind, this is the same populace that consistently passes ballot initiatives that curtail the rights of other human beings (see gay marriage, immigration law, etc.).

while i'm not calling for a return to benevolent despotism, it does seem rather naïve to place such tremendous faith in the ability of people to choose in a system that is already corrupted beyond redemption, a system that – from its very inception – has inscribed racism, sexism, homophobia, and greed in its every structure, system, and institution. these tumors constitute our nation's marrow, and it is foolish to believe that a nice strong exfoliation can reach down inside the bones. the question then, asked by V.I. Lenin over a hundred years ago is:

Part 2: 'What Is To Be Done?'

the conscious act of non-voting can be a tool of political action, not merely an indicator of apathy or ignorance. when citizens vote, the individual elected is merely a side effect, a symbolic gesture that provides him or her with the false sense of having "made a difference." if the 2000 presidential election taught us anything (and i don't think it did), it was that every vote doesn't count. the real meaning lie elsewhere.

by voting at all, citizens implicitly say:

yes, this system works.
(Chicago 1968)

this is a valid model for governance.
(Los Angeles 1992)

this nation protects the equality of all citizens.
(Seattle 1999)

i take issue with these assumptions, but history has also taught us that the violence shown in the images above (in spite of their revolutionary romance) is equally ineffective: the riots in Chicago contributed to the backlash that ushered Nixon into office; the burning of Los Angeles only destroyed the communities of the rioters; and globalization has only accelerated since the WTO protests in Seattle.

the problem is that a complete upheaval of the existing regime (representative democracy, the two-party system, our beloved Constitution) is necessary, but it cannot be achieved through working within the system – but how is one to balance the need for political change with the moral imperative of non-violence?

ironically Ayn Rand, acolyte and evangelist of Capital, put forth one potential model in her novel Atlas Shrugged. while not her best work (John Galt is certainly no Howard Roark), it nonetheless presents an effective strategy for bringing down the system: principled withdrawal.

for her, this meant the titans of industry removing themselves from the economic engine of the nation; but in this context, it means ordinary citizens, 'good' citizens who vote every two years, citizens who want to see a more just and verdant nation – these are precisely the people who should exercise their right not to vote.

if enough people withdraw from the process, the true motives and desires that drive this society will be laid to bear: greed, exploitation, and the unequal distribution of rights. these things remain hidden only because people choose not to see them, and civic pride is a subtly destructive vice because it cloaks the fact that our participation in the political system is the very means by which our subjugation is ensured.

what would happen if we withdrew our consent? what would happen if people acted in accordance with their oft-repeated maxim:

"you can't trust a politician"

if this is true, then why do we vote? why perpetuate the dishonesty known as American democracy?

these are preliminary ramblings, and my own political consciousness is admittedly colored by a certain fatalism. it is not nihilism or anarchism or revolutionary socialism, however. i have already been through my own flirtation and disillusionment with the ideologies of Smith and Jefferson and Nietzsche and Bakunin and Marx and Lenin and who knows how many others.

no, my view on these things is coming from a place of sobriety, acceptance, and detachment. i know that this system will eventually devour itself; i know that another system will rise to take its place. my hope is merely that people might pause to consider the next time they close the curtain to the ballot booth: do i really believe in this?

les faux odeurs de l'automne

Combien des heures devant un clavier?
Combien d'acts contre nature constituent notre journée?

Combien de fois ne nous sentons
les feuilles en décomposition
mélanger avec les aiguilles de pin?

Je me souviens cet été quand la distance
entre le point a et le point b mesurait en l'hauteur.

Pas de heures.
Pas de minutes.
Pas de calendriers.

Je bien m'entends avec les montagnes
et regrette l'absence de les odeurs de l'automne.