THE MONTH OF THE DOG and HOW TO BE A MOUSE

THE MONTH OF THE DOG – and – HOW TO BE A MOUSE

“Socrates gone mad” is a fitting phrase as insanity approaches the precipice of reason. When we’ve assimilated into the world as members of a real cosmopolites, a term only Diogenes could invent, then we begin to “know that we know” the line between sanity (sophos) and insanity. We also know the hell that awaits us as wandering outside boxes stigmatizes the wanderer and exposes him to the most vicious disparagements affixed to the expletives “outcast” and “exile.” It’s why the homeless and desperate scare us so; they mirror “us” ex post facto of having told society “where to go.”

It’s a new and ancient sanity which finds Darwin’s family tree topsy turvy. And drawing that out requires a Diogenes-like shamelessness – a breaking with the rules of convention and protocol in order to let nature speak. It’s hearing the Oracle at Delphi’s instruction, as Diogenes heard it, to deface the “political currency” as much as possible. We begin with formal acts of civil disobedience but then discover that it goes much deeper. It means sinking into a level of barbarism known to Tolstoy, Burckhardt, Proudhon, Baudelaire, Thoreau, Marx, London, and so many others who looked ahead at what was to come. They all visualized an age of serious decay. Marx’s own warning was mitigated by the possibilities of socialism, and Burckhardt by the possibility that Europe could still see transformation in a few more decades to come. But they could not escape seeing an enormous darkness coming characterized by a dictatorship of the masses with the seeds of fascism and Stalinism. They predicted an era of brute force and wholesale contempt of moral principles.

But they saw something else just as dark. Baudelaire said “The world is drawing to a close…. What is left to the world of man in the future?…. we shall perish by the very thing by which we fancy that we live. Technocracy will Americanize us, progress will starve our spirituality so far that nothing of the … dreams of the utopist will be comparable to those facts.” Tolstoy spoke about a “medieval theology, or the Roman corruption of morals, poisoned only by their own people….” Thoreau spoke about the genuflection to money and “life without principle,” “[T]here is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business….” – This, in contrast to what they advocated as artists: the meaning and purpose of liberated beauty which was not so much as idea or theory but “an irreducible sensation … a distillation of apprehensions and traditions and drives and desires and avidities, at once inevitable and serendipitous” (Jed Perl).

They saw that “reversing” what was repressed with what was allowed freely in society could stand sanity and insanity on it head and, in the spirit of the dialectic, produce a new spiritual synthesis. The performing artist, a dancer for instance, knows that the “suppression” of certain human impulses can affirm what is most deeply human.

There is something in the unnaturalness of all these images … that accords with our natural yearning to behave in a certain way in the world, to behave in a way that has a saving simplicity, a basic logic. I’m thinking of those times when you are walking down the street, your body moving clearly and cleanly, almost involuntarily; or sitting at a table with one or two or three other people, engaged in the simplest geometry of conversation; or lying in bed, side by side with another person. Sometimes, in these quotidian moments, we feel that purity of which Kliest speaks, we are freed from the naturalism of our egotism and our anxiety – we’re quite simply, transparently there, we achieve a certain grace…. (Jed Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet).

Alas, playing with “polar reversals” in the 19^th century as our predecessors did still looks too futuristic and progressive, even by today’s standards and sensibilities. Hence, the beast of real insanity is now dangerously armed. Only the appearances of sanity now survive. We go through motions. It’s as if we don’t see real people, real faces. We see masks – volte-face faces – with no affect or understanding. There is no texture and nothing is tangible – simulacra – substitute of substitutes – an endless continuum of imitations with no originals.

The primal response to this is nature’s rebellion, the Diogenes within who taught by example, action more than words: rejecting the rules of decency, urinating in public, acting out in full view, entering public facilities inappropriately (ignoring codes, disrupting crowds), sleeping in boxes and on heating grates – some behaviors voluntary, some obviously not.

There is a primal statement here apropos of Diogenes’ radical contempt for hypocrisy, convention, and “rascals and scoundrels.” The philosopher-Cynic of Sinope searched vainly for the “true human being,” and when Plato (whom he despised) claimed to have produced one, Diogenes produced a chicken (some say a owl) that he plucked which he also claimed as “human” by Plato’s own standards – “animal, biped, and featherless.” Diogenes lived in a ceramic jar, paraded in the nude, spat on citizens, gave everything away, and after giving his only wooden bowl to a peasant boy, said, “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time.” — Whispers of St. Francis here, an eternal madness facing down hypocrisies which always seem to transcend space and time.

The numbness of convention is a subtle and clever interloper. A friend once noticed that he could stand before the Grand Canyon and not see it. We don’t see real things in real time; we see the “Grand Canyon” in narrative form and framed in video format. We don’t see a wolf; we see a “wolf.” Nature is replaced with ghost-like symbols and signs of real time. Fabrication is reality; reality is fabricated. When, in rare moments, we are faced with the genuine article the mind protests, freezes, and distances itself – symptoms of episodic shock. It isn’t accepted until remade into an object, sufficiently analyzed and put into a conceptual box. We await the edited version, framed on a screen, safely sanitized of evocative smells and dangers.

A moment in which to pause and take a breath. As “life” passes me like an interminable series of prerecorded vignettes, a genuine sophos rests at my side – thirteen pounds of love and raw honesty in the shape and size of a miniature dog. Looking at me she tells me what’s important right now. Love is seen in such simple and penetrating terms.

Hence the wisdom of Diogenes in yet another sense: his dog-companion, his praising of a dog’s virtues, and the stigma of being “doggish” which he made into a virtue. It should also be mentioned that he served as the template of the early Cynics. The term itself means “dog-like” and the Cynics themselves behaved like dogs – they ate and made love in public, went barefoot, slept in tubs and on roadsides, made a cult of shamelessness, guarded their domain fiercely (their philosophical tenets), and could “sniff out” friends from enemies. A dog shits where it wants, will eat anything (almost), never fusses about where it sleeps, lives in the present, and knows it’s friends. Dogs offer an “honest bark at the truth.”

A Diogenes mantra: “I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.” He stressed that human beings would do well to learn from the dog. “Other dogs bite their enemies. I bite my friends to save them.”

Having watched a mouse he also learned that he had no need for the “dainties” of shelter. The lesson the mouse teaches is that it can adapt itself to any circumstance. This was the whole premise behind his legendary askesis, or training, on how to be true in the face of hypocrisy. In silence and smallness a mouse frightens the largest beasts and gnaws at the crusades of convention. It is the seed of memory that will not go away.

So once again we learn from our quadrupedal, low-brow, furry cousins as yet spared from the “fall into consciousness” by way of the frontal lobe. It is a base- and middle-brain behavior mastered by the canine which we mimic because of the transparency and baselessness of our “intellectual” pretentiousness. We become dog-like because of desperation, from saying out loud that society, it’s customs and norms, do not work, and we are still the animals that we are. It’s the only domain where honesty and integrity reside anymore. The rest is pride and self-praise, sound and fury. This is nature’s revenge for pretending to be above it.

The “emancipation of man” is based on the premise that the movement toward self-alienation has reached it peak. Everything has become a commodity and man has become an inanimate “thing” – like the “Grand Canyon” and the “wolf.” Rousseau said it’s not about changing man’s nature but changing society in ways that allows him his natural powers back. This was the inspiration of the great Oracle that changed Diogenes and made him “bark” at the political conventions of ancient Greece.

Again, this is quintessentially Marxian (and Freudian): Socialism for both was (is still) about a society in which man would be freed from domination by a more rational, just, and more productive (economic, social, and political) reality.

Isn’t it a Diogenes “howl” to protest convention, especially political convention, now? Isn’t it about formulating a workable approach to mental and spiritual life in terms of conflicts, interactions, and adjustments between instinctual drives and moral codes? Isn’t social conflict not only about instinctual and biological reality but conceiving men and women as physical/spiritual beings trying to engage all their faculties in a balance between the opposing powers that govern them? Are we not also alluding to “art” in its purist form – to irreducible sensations, to the distillation of “drives and desires and avidities at once inevitable and serendipitous?” What Freud and Marx (Tolstoy, Burckhardt, Baudelaire, Thoreau, and all the rest) hated was the bourgeois mentality. Diogenes hated the cultural hypocrisies of the polis, virtually everything man did that his canine companion did not, or visa versa.

Which brings us to the “political currency” of the moment. Let’s call this November the “month of the dog.” We will either yelp at the incorrigibles, bite rascals, and return to barbarisms already seen in the streets. Or, the beast will lie down and sleep knowing it can trust a higher, more honest (primal) faculty. Are we condemned to our species? Or will we arise to a spiritual cleansing, a new Imperium Romanum, not seen for a long time?

© 2016 Richard Hiatt

POLITICS THROUGH THE ARTIST’S LENS

POLITICS THROUGH THE ARTIST’S LENS

The progressive mind sees beyond structures, phobias, and interdictions. It embraces unknowns because it sees past the fear which sets limits on human intelligence. It’s domain is humanistic which means it sees, as Goethe did in 1790, that “the man who thinks without prejudice and can rise above his time is nowhere and everywhere.”

In other words, for the progressive there are two paths to life: a constant regression backwards into ossification and repetition, horizons safely subdued, exploited, converted, and structured along the contours of human fear – and the Thanatic death (willed ego death) reaching for the ultima thule. Every act is an offering of choices. We are free (and burdened) to choose given the limits of our cultural allowance, and it’s the fear of choosing that allows life to rule us. Erich Fromm said, “the fate of many is that they do not make the choice. They are neither alive nor dead. Life becomes a burden, an aimless enterprise, and busyness is the means to protect one from the torture of being in the land of shadows.”

Fromm is timely, just as Marx is omnipresent, in this political-cultural moment. “The times” seems to have rendered many the choice of no choice, hence regression, hence the familiar “shadows” of disillusionment. As an artist and progressive I sense freedom being confined to parameters once experienced in non-free societies like the former Soviet Union – kept to writing, reading, thinking, and private conversations. Outside that purlieu a heavy sense of censorship weighs heavy beneath the illusion of freedom. Not unlike the narrow spectrum of ideas and thoughts allowed in the political dialogue, intellectual and artistic freedom (especially the freedom of ideas) is celebrated daily inside a rigidly monitored space. Proof of this is in its own negligence – when one is mistakenly allowed to venture outside those lines and suddenly confronts critical status quos (political, religious, and philosophical) which are simply wrong. We dare not go there; we choose instead to be “neither alive nor dead.”

I’m thinking of a passage written by Sarah Bakewell in her book At the Existentialist Cafe (Other Press, 2016) where she explores the meaning of freedom:

We find ourselves surveilled and managed to an extraordinary degree, farmed for our personal data, fed consumer goods but discouraged from speaking our minds or doing anything too disruptive in the world, and regularly reminded that racial, sexual, religious and ideological conflict are not closed cases at all. Perhaps we are ready to talk about freedom again – and talking about it politically also means talking about it in our personal lives.

This is why, when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology, or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news. Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? And what should we do?

Some things we can change, others we cannot. Marx saw the dilemma as an analogy to essence and existence – one natured, one nurtured in the outer world (L. existere – to stand out). For Marx alienation is the same as “estrangement” which happens when man no longer experiences himself as an agent of his own world, as one who grasps his reality. He’s lost his essence which forces him to lose personal meaning. The world stands outside against him; he experiences it passively, as a victim, as a subject opposed to its object.

Once upon a time this was the real meaning of idolatry – not the worshiping false gods or many gods, but conditions (“idols”) made by man which he makes larger than himself and subordinates himself. This is when man, says Marx, reduces himself to a “thing” and transfers the power of creation to it. Freud picked up the conversation at this point explaining the reason: the need to be rescued (from oneself, from self-alienation) and from “too much freedom” which requires too much responsibility.

Hence, for Marx, history is the story of self-discovery and self-creation. For him self-liberation is mirrored in the concentration of labor and production. For Freud it’s mirrored by personal conflicts surfacing through instinctual drives, social conditions, and moral codes. For Marx material reality is caused by social oppression; for Freud, social/personal oppression is caused by the material world – a dialectics in two directions. Hence the reason scholars have so frequently paired these two intellectual “siblings” when discussing man’s search for himself. One begins where the other leaves off.

Man’s odyssey is that of merging the two polar dialectics into one. When he finally recognizes himself “behind” fixed forms, suddenly, in Hegelian terms, appearance (existence) and essence reunite. Kierkegaard’s claim (and Sartre’s much later on) that “existence precedes essence” is simply wrong – finally; the dialectic refutes causality. There is no linear sequencing because existing implies/announces essence simultaneously. It becomes one note whereby “everything copes with its inherent contradictions and unfolds itself as a result…. The essence is thus as much historical as ontological.”

Here’s where the artist shows up – in the spaces forged by Freud, Marx and Hegel beyond the mere psychosocial and political. “Facts are facts only if related to that which is not yet fact …. [T]hey are only as moments in a process that leads beyond them ….” (my italics). The hieros gamos of essence and existence spark a transcendent function, the transposition of illusion with reality, dreamscapes with waking consciousness. Marx’s “whole man” requires an openness to subjective interpretation since every man, every journey, is different.

The artist is the quintessential dialectician, the accidental Marxist. Penumbra overshadows light (becoming light), inlines overshadow outlines, “full margins” replace the canvass, figure-ground/backdrop-foreground reversals become “essence-existence” conjoined. The artist merely witnesses transpositions whenever and however they may occur and gives them expression. The stream of life is also divided into an infinity of fleeting moments – vignettes never forced, never segregated or fully grasped. At best all is “imagery” based on precarious notions of reality. Observation thus keeps a measured distance and an acute sense of the absurd. There is no reaching for extremees – “nothingness” or “eternity” – Goethe’s “nowhere and everywhere.” The artist offers a third option: to set up shop in the minutiae, the penumbra, the temporal messiness of life itself. It’s there that “nothing and everything” are found anyway, in every declension and shadow.

But all this hinges on one caveat: creativity (the ability too see beyond) only happens when the artist is in sync with his/her world, feels that he is his own creator, when coping with life’s “inherent contradictions” isn’t threatening or diminishing but confirming. The artist is not self-realized until he is given the opportunity, the freedom, to thoroughly explore everything within his grasp.

Now, to switch gears, abruptly – extempore, a l’improviste, piercingly: Where is the artist in the sturm und drang of politics – the lowest possible denominator of human behavior? He does have something to say here because this is where Marx invests himself the most. Marx draws the artist in because he (Marx) is the most powerful mediator between the political and spiritual – between fear and creativity. His insight is the converging of man’s most abominable behavior and transcendent potential. He plays the ends against the middle and at the most unexpected time and place asks the eternal question: “who are we?” Are we first artists and aesthetes searching for our essence; or are we survivors needing to deal with the problems of existence? Reconciled, one becomes the other and the answer is self-evident. Unreconciled, realpolitiks is a battle between fear and trust, conservative withdrawal versus progressive momentum.

Here is where the two Marxes join up, the social scientist and the spiritual man, man imprisoned and the free individual, the laborer and the artist. The current political moment is fertile ground for receiving lessons about the true spirit of “democratic socialism.”

In the political arena we are faced with an old familiar dilemma: voting for the “lesser of evils” (instead of for what we want and believe in), both “evils” representing corporate entities which control the national dialogue and the entire electoral process itself (holding the “kill button” of super delegates). Instantly it becomes clear that bribery and sabotage, false promises and well orchestrated lies, are systemically designed to wipe out any chances of an environment which might nurture personal autonomy and creativity. The process indicts itself by undermining what integrity (soundness, incorruptability) it may claim to have but clearly does not. The whole process becomes impossible to dignify, let alone participate in, as we see nothing but deceit and graft. It is a patent effort to kill our moral right to self-realization.

Real progress is socialistic progress. Our objective is clear: seeing “to the wealth of human needs … to a new manifestation of human powers and a new enrichment of the human being” (Marx). The Hillary/Trump double-bind is the living exemplar of capitalism played out in extenso: “every man speculates upon creating a new need in another in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him into a new kind of pleasure and thereby into economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egoistic need…. Every new product is a new potentiality of mutual deceit and robbery. Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need of money in order to take possession of the hostile being. The power of his money diminishes directly with the growth of the quantity of production, i.e., his need increases with the increasing power of money.”

Real socialistic progress is also “radical.” “To be radical means to go to the root, and the root – is man himself.” Too much of history has been about man’s alienation from his roots. For too long he’s been the object of circumstances. Socialism is about returning to the subject so that “man becomes the highest being for man.” Freedom is not just political freedom but freedom from domination by things and circumstances. Erich Fromm said, “the free man is the rich man, not the man rich in an economic sense, but rich in the human sense. The wealthy man, for Marx, is the man who is much, and not the one who has much.”

As for reform, Fromm added, “There is reform and reform; reform can be radical, that is, going to the roots, or it can be superficial, trying to patch up symptoms without touching the causes. Reform which is not radical, in this sense, never accomplishes its ends and eventually ends up in the opposite direction. So-called ‘radicalism’ on the other hand, which believes that we can solve problems by force, when observation, patience, and continuous activity is required, is as unrealistic and fictitious as reform. The revolution of the Bolshveviks led to Stalinism, the reform of the right wing Social Democrats in Germany, led to Hitler. The true criterion of reform is not its tempo but its realism, its true ‘radicalism’; it is the question whether it goes to the roots and attempts to change causes – or whether it remains on the surface and attempts to deal only with symptoms.”

All things considered, I wonder if revolution isn’t a matter of intelligence as much as one of character. It’s about having the courage to say “no,” it’s about civil disobedience and facing down the system’s status quo. It’s about “waking up” and shedding the feelings of futility that define our self-worth. “[T]he capacity to say ‘no’ meaningfully, implies the capacity to say ‘yes’ meaningfully. The ‘yes’ to God is the ‘no’ to Caesar: the ‘yes’ to man is the ‘no’ to all those who want to enslave, exploit, and stultify him” Freedom is “man’s right to be himself” (Fromm).

Character is in fact being tested like never before because of “the times.” Not to belabor the overwhelming fallout from postmodernity, post-structuralism, virtual reality, semiotics, literary theory, pseudoscience/superstition, infotainment, anti-rationalism, and a world reduced to deconstructed “texts,” the metaphor that best comes to mind in describing the modern human condition is “bulimia.” We move so fast today that we trip over ourselves just trying to keep up. The mind (nerve-endings/synapses trained for short-term memory, operant conditioning, and instant gratification) moves faster than our legs can move. We actually get nostalgic for “times” that haven’t even ended yet. This is Orwell. It’s also Toffler’s “future shock” shifting into Rushkoff’s “present shock” where “everything happens now.”

The bulimia metaphor presents a second double bind on top of the one presented by Hillary and Trump – one of “ingestion-regurgitation”: namely, the unprecedented consumption which stays with us too long (mental obesity, information glut) and bulimia (the neurosis of gorge and puke by fast consumption and regurgitation of images, frissons, shock and awe, and “throw away” junk). The latter is the more fitting cultural insignia: Nothing is real, nothing offends, because it’s puked up and gone before we know it’s there.

So, we come back to the idea of spirit. It sparks a critical need to redress the unconscious manipulation of a very powerful subliminal universe which herds us along like a cattle prod. As Marx said, part of revolution is a revolution of “consciousness,” of contemplating and realigning the relationships between inner and outer worlds (labor and fulfillment). It’s about bringing into focus a revival of Being at a time when our physical survival is at stake. It’s saying, as it does about politics, that things have gotten so out of hand that sanity itself is in question, something which is in the hands of the wrong institutions and the wrong people – those who profit from “controlled insanity” (manipulated, indoctrinated, exploited, marketed). The artist sees insanity, understands it, but through a very different lens than the one which makes it toxic, pernicious, and a weakness to exploit.

Bulimic recovery is about examining what we consume, moving through the sensations it stirs within, and observing what’s felt immediately when the sensation leaves. It’s a matter of weening off old diets while staying keenly aware of the voids left behind. The revolution we have in mind is the very same recovery process – from mass media, “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen), and the political process. Existence currently feeds us with synthetic provender and saccharin doublespeak. One reality mirrors the other, is the cause and effect of the other. This is what effective revolution is about: recovery.

We return again to the artist “self-realized.” Such an individual has no tolerance for forced ultimatums and “lesser evils.” As to the question of “are we artists first or survivors?,” it cancels out if understood that it’s not about labels but what we do with the “estrangement” we feel when we no longer experience ourselves as agents of our world. In the end one is the other (artist = survivor). But whether we fall back into old prologues or not is the litmus test of progress. The “ghost of Marx” is everywhere, and revolution will happen, or it won’t.

© 2016 Richard Hiatt