MINDFUL FACSIMILES

MINDFUL FACSIMILES

The tail end of my last entry as led me to this one. I’ve always had a “postmodern” fascination with simulacra, since the world seems to have become a place of imitations without originals. A crisis of identity is, to me, what underpins most crises today. The theme comes up so much now that eventually it will no longer be as abstruse and opaque as it’s been for so long. It’s almost a daily mantra now hearing someone whisper, “Damn, who am I?”

For some it festers just under the skin, barely conscious. For far more it’s an existential moment, but for even them it’s pushed away like a bad dream – like postmodernist theory itself. While throwing out the bath water, why not the baby too. It lends weight to that other problem – denial.

Denial or not, the fact is that we’re so deeply cemented into the problem of imitations that it’s become as “natural” as artificial turf, false teeth, monikers, hair dye, contact lenses, sunglasses, and “selfies.” No one notices, no one cares. And even if they did, they’d deny that these are prosthetics. “This is me!!” is an almost expected response.

The fact is, we need to constantly reconstruct ourselves. And why? It seems we’re on an eternal mission to find authenticity. And it seems that it simply doesn’t exist within. First we seek it from without, by validation from others. Then we look for it through projections of ourselves (which we’d like to substitute out in society). What validation we don’t receive from outside we fulfill by ourselves via mental projection.

Some say Narcissus was the first to try. Others say it came much earlier, in all of us – congenitally – through the twin archetype. There’s the argument that single fetuses are conceived as twins, and another that twins are conceived as single fetuses. Who’s to say? But maybe the whole fascination with doubling starts here. And when twins become inseparable in mythology, they often become legendary monsters to one another. They become codependents and objects of fear and loathing at the same time.

Whatever its origins, we’ve become a civilization obsessed with doubling. Self-portraits have always been efforts to extend ourselves either for identification or indemnification. Either way, we’re enamored with mirror likenesses. At the same time, we’re never satisfied because our projections always fall short. So we keep making them.

Then there are puppets who take our names or nom de plumes for the purpose of mutual identification. The author of Pinocchio lost his father as a child and struggled all his life alone. His alter ego seems to have been an effort to re-parent himself. And the fact that we can read four-hundred versions of Pinocchio today (in over 70 languages) says that child neglect and abandonment is not uncommon – nor are a variety of ways in which to attempt re-parenting.

Puppeteering goes back to ancient Rome, used as a literal extension of oneself. Marcus Aurelius mentions “this which pulls the strings is the thing which is hidden within.” There’s even a Biblical reference about “Thy voice shall be as of one that hath a familiar spirit” And thus begins a long tradition of doppelgangers which initially went so far as to bleed into wandering spirits (dybbukim) and graven images.

We might say it was all about preservation and restoration. But restoration is actually a modern term. In ancient times what was preserved was the sense of wholeness. One “forgot” himself in the sense of becoming empty, to then be filled again (replaced) by his projection. It was a path to psychic completion. The idea of “restoration” itself didn’t begin to take on meaning until more centuries (and history) had passed, where there was sufficient memory of times which had lived and died. In time, a consciousness began growing about (nostalgic and cautionary) comparisons. And with that came the cases for anachronisms, trompe l’oeil, false premonitions, and pseudo-remembrances (“cryptamnesia,” deja-vu, etc).

This is another way of saying that as time progressed, the present became less as less complete on its own. It became measured by the past, by memory, by pressures to return to older ways. Preservation became restoration. And as this transitioned the experience of “fully lived” literal extension shriveled.

By the 18^th century it had disappeared completely. Portraits, statues, and puppets lost their capacity to extend us. No longer divine, their voices were now taken over by ventriloquists. They began appearing on stage, no longer making efforts to hide the difference between the puppet and the puppeteer. It became prototypical vaudeville as audiences enjoyed watching mechanical figures being worked with strings and comic “companions.”

The idea of the parrot “parroting” us was more than just entertainment. Humans talk through the larynx and shape words with the tongue and palate. Parrots talk through the lower part of the trachea which, one could say, made them “the first ventriloquists.” This was the earliest version of the tape recorder – having voices spoken back to us on command. And again, it was an unconscious drive to fill a void through our own sounds.

It approaches the condition of irony just knowing that the first human mimic was not a human at all, but a bird. Perhaps we anthropomorphize animals because our own sounds just aren’t enough. We go back to the primal rain forest to hear “the most natural and most frequent habitude of human nature,” said James Boswell.

The obsession with doubling moves on. Why do we see “double?” Why not in triplets? Why do we “ditto” things? Why are there “parallel” universes?” Why do we experience deja–vus? Deja–vu is an intersection of two points of view – past and present, actual and virtual. Why is it never an intersection of three? Perhaps because of double-helixes, dividing cells, and twin planets encircling distant stars. Or maybe because ours is a time of great fragmentation and alienation, and we need to keep our searches down to “one” projection at a time.

It seems to be all about the effort to transcend our voids and trying to get to a higher truth. Which means it’s also about stubbornness and self-preservation, hence the humbling need to reexamine what “preservation” means. There is no instinct more powerful and determined than the need to get back to who we are.

Simulation and virtual extension has its darkest and most dangerous manifestation in warfare. Battles are played out over and over almost like a dark angel trying to understand its purpose. And consider the instruments of modern projection: video monitors, radar systems, infrared gun-sights, nighttime visors, electronic tracking systems, sonar, and satellites – all so realistic that, as many facing computer screens (in “virtual” combat) confess: one can’t tell the difference between a real target and a screen image. Human beings are reduced to inanimate targets in video game format. No remorse, no compunction, no afterthought to killing crowds of people (innocent or not). All that matters is the “score.”

And then there are the museums – going from “wax” to “real-life animatronics.” Not too long ago wax figures were all about the “dead and gone.” It was a necropolis. Now it’s organic. It breathes and responds to stimuli and questions from visitors. It engages people with breathtaking movements. The “living museum” may be the newest oxymoron, but it makes no difference to the visitor/seeker unconsciously in pursuit of something. Lifelike figures are really built to convey and deliver the penultimate message, like a messiah, even if we’re oblivious to what it could possibly be. Absent a messiah, we replace him/her with as many prerecorded alter-egos as necessary to hear a transforming logos.

This is all about a mounting desperation to “touch” something deep. The impostor is less and less fake today, just as the real is less and less real. The ratio between them is in an unnerving free-flotation. And we’ve finally “crossed over” into that space where no one knows where “real” ends and “imitation” begins. The effect has taken us into a free-fall. “What is a fake?” and “who/what is it asking the question in the first place?” So now we’re questioning premises of premises, proofs of proofs – and the whole universe is finally deconstructing.

Ventriloquism, “joyful impostures,” endless contradictions/conundrums — maybe it’s all about backing up instead of moving forward. Maybe backwards IS forward. Maybe the answers lie in the questions, and even more so in who asks them (and why). Who am I to say that I’m not an imitation of an imitation who once went in search of a fool’s errand — an original? Maybe there are none. Maybe there are no answers – not if the question(-er) isn’t even real.

Maybe doubling is about doubling back. The more we try to tell things apart, the deeper we get stuck, the more we search for self-portraits, replications, and mechanical voices – substitutes expected to give us answers about substitutes. And we find ourselves right back where we were – at some place that was supposed to be “of no return.”

Hello! I think I’ve just reintroduced a school of thought we’ve spent the last forty years desperately trying to debunk– postmodernism. Maybe there’s something to it after all.

All that said, we can only appreciate the confusion of identities in the midst of the most mundane of mundane worlds – politics – a universe of cover-ups, hypocrisy, “factual untruths,” and legal legerdemain. Where honesty, trust, and justice are just facades/covers for “winning at all costs.” Where elected leaders are the biggest liars and frauds of all time. And speaking of doubling, I think Richard Cohen (columnist for the Washington Post) described well this world of fake doubles:

“The Washington leaker, a poltergeist with a phone, is sometimes good and sometimes bad but is almost never caught. He or she disappears into the Washington souk, an exotic marketplace where information is traded, character is assassinated and the air is redolent with hypocrisy.”

Washington – where Pinocchios, imitations and fake reconstructions surface every day and without existential worry. Proof that leadership requires absolutely no accountability for “negative” projection: If our own projections are perfect (positive), others must be imperfect (negative). And when projection becomes the American people themselves, citizens had better meet up to the politician’s expectations, or else they’re doomed. They become the evil twin deserving of nothing. One step removed from “self-perfection” is the Pygmalion effect – visualizing/expecting perfection in the negative/ imperfect other.

The press are no different. They are the minions and messengers of everyday projection. Hence they’re also the architects of secrecy which impugns their own character and credibility. And as Ted Gup said in his book Nation of Secrets, “”Today, more than ever, the husbanding of secrets is used not to keep information from America’s enemies but to keep it out of the hands of Americans.” I would go a step further and say it’s to keep secrets about ourselves from ourselves – as we are the enemy.

These are the people whose journey to discovery, through parrots, puppets and ventriloquism, will be an incredibly long road. Eventually, “leadership” for them will come from those they allegedly lead – who have no need for notoriety or public acclaim, who find their power privately, quietly, and without need of validation from a mirror’s reflection. Tragically, “the led” of this kind are few in number, but I think, as we “put on faces” each morning, as we project our graven images, more and more are seeing the hazards of it all. It’s making us mindful. And it’s turning “reflection” into a whole different thing – something coming in instead of going out.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt

ORWELL ROLLS OVER

ORWELL ROLLS OVER

The United States of America is one enormous 24/7 neon roadside commercial ad. We audition, rehearse lines, and play parts up on a big national screen where we all critique ourselves according to how well we play our designated parts. Whenever we’re in doubt as to who we are, we look to ourselves on the screen.

We salute the flag and stand at attention every moment the national anthem is played or the flag is waved. We’re in lockstep about national pride and “love of country.” We’ve adopted Hollywood’s official version of American history which asks that we quietly remain in a quiet little space between extreme ignorance and mild literacy – where John Wayne (or Clint Eastwood) can still ride in on his horse and solve the national debt. Wayne and Ronald Reagan are still out at Fort Apache fighting heathens in the name of Manifest Destiny, Christian values, and “cleansing” amber waves and mountain majesties.

The screensaver is always the same: Miller beer, Iowa corn, country music, Hallmark cards, Norman Rockwell, and Harley-Davidsons – repeated over and over to constantly renew the pioneer spirit, memories of Iwo Jima, and young people in uniform preserving democracy in places they can “hardly pronounce.”

Yes, we’re doing God’s plan. It’s the Wager of Pascal made into a daily mantra as we impress the Big (White) Man above by doing His will. We’re martyrs for Christ and proud of it. We impress ourselves so much every single day that we can hardly contain ourselves. We simply must go out into the streets and hold parades and sing our hymns. We are without any doubt “chosen,” and anything we do is always blessed from above

At the turn of the century (the fin de siecle before the last one), our culture entered a phase of self-consciousness. Freud arrived, Cubism and Surrealism, the great migration into cities, mass-transportation and mobility, labor unions, women’s suffrage, mass-immigration and integration, and so forth. Society was looking inwardly, existentially, for a new identity which kept shifting. The search has never ended. In fact it’s become an American trademark.

Today, that self-consciousness has us watching and judging ourselves every second of the day. We worry about how we look and act before crowds and critics composed mainly of ourselves. We ensure that we all conform to the rules we’ve made (and remake) posted in big neon letters. Everyday is like a college hazing, an entrance exam, followed by refresher courses. They’re all about conforming to protocols. And part of that mindset includes the notion that we believe the ad. It says that we’re free, which also means “there is no screen” – it’s a “liberal hoax.” We are autonomous beings coerced by nothing, into nothing – because the screen says so. Other cultures are oppressed and indoctrinated, but we are not.

It reminds me of the argument about free will-versus-predestination. Some say “yes, there is free will … in fact we have no choice about it.” A joke some get, others don’t. At a totally different level, regarding “choices,” it exposes another joke as well — cash or charge, paper or plastic, window or isle seat, city bus or car, vote or don’t vote, get sick or go to the ER, menial job or no job, live on credit or don’t live, go to the mall or stay at home. – These are our American “choices.” Meanwhile, we ignore the fact that the really important decisions about death and taxes are made by strangers behind the screen.

The biggest neon commercial today is about patriotism – what it means, how it’s shown, and how we celebrate it obsessively. It’s a freedom which has become a requirement (like “compulsory love” in religion or “required” free will). Of course the screen instructs us to deny this – until we witness someone not being patriotic enough or, worse yet, showing “unpatriotic” signs. Those leaning critical of the status quo, who write or say “subversive” things, are cast in a category along with terrorists, baby killers and child molesters. If someone doesn’t remove his hat and stand for the national anthem or demonstrate a solemn (tearful) respect for the flag, he’s targeted and made to stand out. We might as well shave his head and march him through the village with a swastika burned into his forehead.

We still look for witch-marks on people. The ad tells us to keep a jaundiced eye and a “neighborhood watch” out for traitors and heretics. If Americans are keen at anything, it’s the intensive hunger for scapegoats. The anxiety of it all absolutely must channel somewhere.

Declaring our love of country employs the language of television, specifically commercials. And love of country is now synonymous with the love for guns and renewed hatred for non-whites. Gun-owners are once again describing non-owners as “trolls and commies.” There is a hardening uniformity in the call for images equating the neighbor with a closet full of assault weapons with colonial Minutemen. The makers of news and slogans serve up a “warrior” mythology not unlike children pretending to be Audie Murphy or “the brave, the few” willing to die for God and Country. A popular bumper sticker: “What Would John Wayne Do??!” It sit just below the one asking “What Would Jesus Do?” (the original blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan).

The new patriotism cleverly conflates terms: patriotism with nationalism, nationalism with jingoism, America with white America, men alone for “mankind.” Love of country may no longer be shown by the telling of racial jokes, but it is by what one reads and watches, especially as entertainment. While the new visual effect is to record America “in slow motion,” the national myth also casts us in the ambered glow of yesteryear. Patriots want to believe that the wold is still as it was in 1945, before civil rights, before women’s rights, when a victorious America “called the shots” everywhere in the world. “Inside every heathen there’s an American trying to get out.”

About a decade ago I was in a cowboy bar with a friend. The music was about to begin, when its lead singer announced that everyone needed to first stand up and pledge allegiance to the flag. My mind could not connect with my ears. I watched as everyone quietly, reverently, and solemnly complied. The cowboy band stood motionless, heads bowed. In silent protest, I remained seated and swilled my beer. I was outraged and couldn’t believe that even my date that evening had no qualms about what was unfolding before us. She stood as well. It was in fact an egregious betrayal of a Constitutional and moral principle – religion and politics bleeding into my civil rights. All I smelled that night was the stink of jackboot indoctrination. It was then that I realized how wrong of a place it was for me to tip a beer.

Today I understand that, at least in some movie theaters, they play the national anthem first and display the lyrics on the screen along with scenes of America the Beautiful (the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the New York Stock Exchange). When this little ritual first began all the reports were that audiences did not sing. Now they do. They remove their hats and stand up – like unthinking cows programmed by operant conditioning (action = food = reward). Worse yet, they think it’s by free will, freely examined, freely thought out.

The singing and the showing of national pride is as saccharin and robotic as the prerecorded laughter on network sitcoms. But no matter. The screen image is the face of a nondescript man showing no affect in his expression. His role is to wage ceaseless war against “terrorism” – the newest trigger-word ingeniously designed to evade fixed profiles and appearances. “Terrorism” is chameleon-like and eludes all profiles except for the ones chosen by the powers-that-be. This puts the “good guys” always in pursuit of something which will shift appearances at will. This means two things: first, terrorism will always be with us, thanks to its amorphousness ; second, it will always show up in “aberrant” (subversive, liberal, non-compliant) behavior which anyone is capable of, even your neighbor or second cousin. Everyone is now suspect (who does not watch the big screen). A patriot today can be tomorrow’s villain unless immediately detected and reigned in. “Villains” simply do not love America.

Never has the “freedom” to be who and what one is walked a thinner tightrope. If one fails to join “the family” in all its celebratory rapture and exuberance, it just means he “needs help,” and the officers in white coats and uniforms show up to reset him on the right path – with drugs or jail time. Either way, he is “supervised and watched” for recurrences. He is “normalized.” – We are, after all, a loving and forgiving community wanting only to steer him in the direction of Jesus Christ and American values. What he simply needs is guidance back to the screen.

The new patriotism isn’t really different from the old patriotism – insofar as the old patriotism was a total fabrication out of the minds of movie directors like John Ford (who said that when it came to the truth-versus-legend, “print the legend”). The story-line, the national hero, a divine plan, and most of all the erasure of national guilt over the extermination of indigenous cultures, was more important than historical facts.

Consider the facts: Here our ancestors were, newly arrived immigrants (adventureres and fugitives) here to rape as much of the new land as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary. With few laws and even fewer lawmen, it was a grab-bag of exploitation and opportunity.

That meant that someone had to step forward and, by whatever means possible, make sense of it all. A consistent “divine plan” had to be written up for the new residents to believe and defend, even if it came out of whole cloth. And the biggest irony of all was the fact that the myth-makers themselves were predominantly Jewish immigrants (Hollywood directors, producers, screenwriters) freshly in from Eastern and Western Europe – knowing virtually nothing about America or its history. They literally made it up as they went along (making sure Americans approved, lest being deported back to fascist Europe).

But it didn’t matter, and still doesn’t. Americans still want to believe it, lock, stock, and barrel, more than reality itself. Hollywood made it romantic and simple, and we like it that way. For another, it vindicated our “white” ancestors and their legacy to us (and if they were forgiven, we were forgiven). We were the “good guys” and nothing could alter that. By that solitary premise alone we love the screen and pray to it each morning as we drink our coffee. We face the sun and it’s “morning in America.”

Our national blindness sometimes finds a patina of light depending on where we’re standing in the country. The “big screen” is front-and-center for some, more oblique for others. I myself sit front-and-center, facing a very large proscenium arch embroidered with bunting and flags, olive drab khaki and marching bands. The place is Colorado Springs, where residents suck up to it like children to an ice cream stand. I liken it to a community of military-booted androids – Ozzie & Harriett meet The Stepford Wives – smiling, carrying on, as if in a trance. “Hi neighbor. Got Jesus today??!!”

It’s a La-La Land world where Orwell’s Emmanual Goldstein shows up on bumper stickers, road signs, window displays, billboards, radio programs, and of course the local evening news every single night. There is literally nothing else in this contained world. Everyone faces a single wide-screen, not unlike an old-fashioned drive-in theater.

People sit in their cars celebrating their “freedoms”: they can have either the hot-dog or the french fries while watching themselves watching themselves. A stunning array of decoys, doppelgangers, digital images, camouflage, parrots, reenactments, alter egos, and screensavers remind them that the french fries are no longer “French” (they’re “freedom fries”). The ketchup is also “more American” than mustard – just for its color.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt

SON ET LUMIERE

SON ET LUMIERE

When I find myself in that slow period of the day when there’s little to do and less energy to do it with, I make the mistake of turning on the news. And when I tune into things like the impeachment performance, I can only think of “lights, camera, action.” What isn’t already scripted is given a very narrow window for improvisation.

I think of the modern techniques used today in staging the roles of leadership. If the definition of artist is that which commands the most power, whether musically or politically, in addition to a knowledge of stagecraft, lighting, amplification, angles, close-ins, shadows, backdrops, and scripted interruptions, then greatest artists reside in (or work for) Congress — not New York, Hollywood, or Nashville. In fact some even say Hitler was the greatest “artist” of his time. He had a keen knowledge of all those things and used them masterfully. Back in the 1980s a Yale student was seen wearing a t-shirt saying, “Adolf Hitler – The European Tour – 1938-1945.” If it came to having to light up a dance floor, Hitler was your man.

If “the artist” is measured by his wealth then this is a language everyone understands. If he earns mega-millions, he is by proclamation “an artist.” It is of course a slap in the face to real artists, especially when hearing the phrase, an “artist at what he does.” It dismisses the entire creative function and exchanges it for anything clever, resourceful, or shrewd. It bleeds into business and economics. But it’s no secret that we prefer that kind of artist anyway. It’s the billionaire (Trump-like) businessman who decorates a palatial home with statues and paintings he knows nothing about (except their worth at auction). It’s the type of individual the media obsess over more than anyone else. He may actually know nothing about politics, foreign or domestic policy, budgets or the national debt, “oh, but look how rich he is.” Somehow, somewhere long the way, money became the sign of wisdom on all things.

What is it about Americans who assign wisdom to irrelevant statuses? I remember a birthday party that was given to me, and about fifteen kids showing up. I was about twelve, introverted, and fought against it, but my mother insisted. We were playing a baseball game and I was playing right field (still trying to get my head around why all these kids were there because of me). I was counting the dandelions when suddenly a play was made at home-plate, too close to call. Instantly, everyone looked out into right field. They wanted an “official call.” I didn’t even see the play and was too immersed in dandelions anyway. It didn’t matter. They awaited my verdict. I shrugged my shoulders, and in a shy supplicating tone asked, “out?!” And the game resumed. To this day the power of a birthday (and status) bewilders me. Maybe they thought I was in charge of the cake.

The artist today makes “copy” for the press, draws crowds, elects presidents, fires presidents, holds hearings, briefings and conferences, is seen in publicity photos, in restaurants with celebrities, enjoys guest appearances on Oprah, and “works the room” at banquets and fundraisers. This is the artistry of today.

During Hitler’s tour he said to his fans that “winning” was the whole point. And winning was all about showing that truth and compassion were “the expression of stupidity and cowardice.” It was also about making lies loud and frequent enough that people would eventually believe them. This hasn’t changed. Nor has the pursuit of wealth as the mark of power. The more there are of both (lies from wealth, wealth from lies) the more thorough the depletion of truth. It’s the fine art of “working the details” that lands the palatial Florida estate, the private jets and security police. — Let’s not forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal.”  

And so, during my “off time,” I sit back watching the Senate hearing and, I must confess, there is the palpable stench of doublespeak, trickery and fraud in this whole theater performance. We’re kept in the dark about the real power-brokers working the mise en scene behind the scenes. The show is just a distraction from what’s really going on with the nation’s wealth and tax dollars. And this, I have to say in protest, is (by their definition) true artistry.

And what is it that’s going on? Human rights abuses, sponsored terrorism, economic and military aggression, corporations selling markets/audiences to other businesses, massive pollution, bribery, extortion, misallocation of public funds, historical lies, puppet regimes, lies about the “national interest,” keeping America in fear (divided, prejudiced, nativist, xenophobic, illiterate, uneducated, ignorant), making wars, and the ongoing (never to change) criminal inequities of wealth and privilege.

Backstage, nothing changes. Our leaders cast themselves as the very flower of humanity, while, quoting Chomsky, “wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain.” The real shock isn’t in the quote itself but in the fact that it raises no eyebrows.

Door Number-1 fights Door Number-2, and we choose one door over the other. Meanwhile, an invisible hand pulls the strings behind both at the same time. Studio executives just look away and say nothing. The same goes for the prop-men, gaffers, lighting technicians, engineers, screenwriters, hosts, and featured guests. I have never seen a more elaborately played out stage-play in my entire life. When it’s all over, we must still ask ourselves, “Who collected the tickets?” “Who ran the cash register?” “Where are the proceeds?”

The players will never say. They take their time following the glacial movements of bureaucracy and jurisprudence, knowing that Americans have short attention spans, get bored quickly (when not entertained), and know virtually nothing about constitutional law. When it’s all over they are not likely to be seen soon anyway. They’ll be off sipping martinis in quiet gated communities, in topiaried gardens festooned with statues and paintings no one knows anything about.

Trump is already impeached, and he may in fact even be “removed” – or not. I await my own entry (and others) on the outcome some weeks from now (if I’m so inclined). But the American voter needs to become aware of a matter which only presses harder, like gravity. If Trump is removed, so what? Does anything change? Nancy Pelosi has already said that she “opposes” universal healthcare, and the Senate is dead against it. Will the fossil fuel industry slow down with Pense or even a Democratic president? Will we get infrastructure, the new minimum wage, jobs, benefits, new gun laws, immigration reform? Again, the questions raise no eyebrows. Perhaps we intuitively know the answer.

There’s one cardinal rule in Washington one is required to defend if he wants a political future. Behind literally “everything” (the pantomime and theater) is the “preservation of the status quo.” It’s about that which serves the few, the powerful, the very people who created it in the first place. So why would they change it? To fight for real reform marks you as as “outsider,” and your career is over. If you’re popular with voters it doesn’t matter. The “insiders” will do everything imaginable (rumors, scandal, infidelity, treason, doctored photos, phone taps, misquotes) to ruin your family’s name and send you home on your ear. It’s no wonder that George Will calls them “invertebrates.”

This is the dark truth about our political system (and most others in the world). We can still fight it, and we must. But “expect” that for every mile of progress desperately fought for and legally won, only a few yards of that ever see the light of day. Just ask the followers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Native Americans. And then, many times, every step forward is followed by two steps backwards – as we see now with white supremacy and immigration.

I’m often conflicted over the argument whether cultures really do evolve – or do we simply learn new ways to repress our oldest instincts? We’re masters at covering up, rationalizing, and applauding ourselves for how “civilized” we are. But allow just one major crisis, or the appearance of a demagogue, and we become shockingly medieval. We’re right back in the primal forest. Armed survivalist camps, phobias/hatreds/myths of all stripes, and warnings of apocalypse spread like kudzu. The only difference is the technology it’s all done with.

I tend to think that “the first” artist, the troglodyte blowing dye over his hand on the cave wall, was far more evolved than today’s “artist” noted for his skills at treachery and cunning.

We’ll see what our so-called “elected” artists do after the Senate trial. Again, I don’t think it will raise eyebrows. There will be no surprises and very little will change even with a new president. The changes we do feel will be drippings from the king’s table meant only to present the “appearance” of change. We will, once again, settle for the two yards of progress left in the wake of scratching and clawing a country mile.

This isn’t cynicism speaking, just reality. This troglodyte is a pragmatist. I may leave my signature on a rock wall no one reads or cares about, but I see things about our future which are just pasts revisited and differently packaged. Like Faulkner said, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”

© 2020 Richard Hiatt

AVANT-GARDE?

AVANT-GARDE?

Is it just me, or do others find themselves having to search harder and harder for something to read which doesn’t repeat what (at some level) you already know? Is anything original anymore? Even “new” information sounds like copies of something played out a long time ago. I find myself heading deeper and deeper “into the stacks” for a truly original thought, in hopes that I may then extrapolate something genuinely new of my own. Ideas which haven’t been borrowed are not just rare, most have already made tomorrow’s obsolete.

How odd to go backwards in order to go forwards. But just visit a Barnes & Noble and you see what I mean. Peruse book displays and best-seller lists and all you see are sensationalist biographies and confessionals, secrets about diet, love, orgasms and the stock market, warnings about climatic and political apocalypse, scandal, malfeasance, cookbooks, astrological charts, novels, expensively bound editions of Whitman and Dickens, art books, Oprah’s favorites, calendars, celebrity posters, and endlessly revised translations of the classics. It’s as if we’re in a culture trying to find a flashlight that it dropped in a dark cave. The more we grope for light the further we veer away from it.

Forty year ago the New York Times showcased books that basically followed Newton’s third law of motion: for every motion there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Back then the most alarming threats of change were met with books/articles about the denials of change – just like today’s back-and-forth about global warming. The more bearded radicals threatened us, the more conservative writers rallied to shift the angles of perception and calm the political waters. Writers (of all stripes) were like Valium for America’s nervous system. The trend was not to challenge or introduce unfamiliar modes of thought but to ensure readers that all unknowns were in fact already known and covered.

The so-called “liberal” intellectuals were at it too. Criticism became “literature” as it systematically neutered the creative imagination – no longer art but mere ”texts.” The masterpieces of literature were henceforth “without foundation” and “indeterminate of meaning.” Literature was elitist and oppressive (and sexist). In hindsight, it came down to what everyone saw as a “crisis of confidence” for the writer – the fear of giving offense to someone.

Today, it’s the opposite. The idea is to shake the very foundations of thought with radical, even insane, theories and cognitive realignments. No one pulls punches anymore. And from a marketing perspective, it’s all about shock value. These include books taking virtually every issue on any front to a crisis level. But now even this has gotten so exploited as to become obvious. An awareness grows that it’s more about marketing than even the shock value. The result is, nothing shocks anymore – even books about “how nothing shocks anymore.” It’s about redundant writing on redundancies.

Over forty years ago Harold Bloom said, “The faculties of creativity and originality have come to seem less, and those of imitation, repetition and variation more the norm of psychic activity.” But he also quoted Emerson who said, “the originals are not original… one poet wrote all the poems, one storyteller told all the stories.” There has been a crisis of originality several times over in our brief history during which it felt like no one was ever certain who was quoting whom. The issue of plagiarism reared its head for the first time. However, that issue goes as far back as 1769, when in a famous legal battle (over originality) an attorney asks, “Wherein consists the identity of a book?”

So the problem of redundancy versus originality is not only not original, it cycles around. And now, again today, it makes “cutting edge” information almost hackneyed – not unlike “breaking news” heard every single day, a worn-out tactic to gain ratings. And when something truly is “breaking,” an extra onus weighs on reporters to convince its audience that “hey, this one truly is urgent!!” Originality, then and now, is “belated.” There’s an anxiety of long-term aftereffects, of allowing a certain blindness lead the already blind.

The art of shocking the public (just for effect) isn’t new either. The late 19^th century Decadent movement (artists and writers) invented its epater les bourgeois – a predilection for shocking the bourgeois – just to do it. Scandalous allusions, terms mixed with satire and dark (high brow) humor, made criticisms about “banal progress” controversial while allowing their authors to hide behind the ruse of “innocent entertainment.” The Symbolist painters and writers like Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde were its famous exponents.

Today, America’s response to this are the radio shock-jocks and TV hosts who either do the shocking themselves or invite freaks and low-lifes in to shock for them. In the print media, it’s the tabloids and books written by alarmists who need to be in crisis mode about everything. Virtually every story in the news is a “warning” of something horrible impending – corruption, disaster, crime, disease – followed by the 1-minute “feel good” story – as if to suggest that a) reportage is “balanced,” and b) that it alone will cancel out all the negativity we just heard in the previous half hour.

So today, even with books coming out on themes about over-reach, doublespeak, the loss of commonsense, blowback, artificial intelligence, information glut, and “reality augmentation,” we fail to see the larger commentary-at-large. We’re heading down a wrong road when it comes to trying to see above a systemic dilemma.

The long-term effect, felt by us all today, is that the better things get, the worse they get. We applaud ourselves for new discoveries, technological, intellectual, moral, and spiritual — while sinking into an abyss no one can understand. A good analogy are today’s pharmaceutical drugs. They come out in greater numbers and varieties than ever before (with the dumbest names ever) claiming to be miracle breakthroughs. At the same time, the faster they’re manufactured (no longer sufficiently tested as required by law), the more they’re affixed to twelve horrendous side-effects which may actually include “death.” But no matter. Selling them at costs unaffordable to most while conceding “acceptable losses” (who will die) ensures a profit margin that outweighs the cost of lawsuits.

The indoctrination problem is obvious. We’re born into a marketing culture where nothing makes sense until it’s rendered a numerical value. With all other distractions out of the way, it’s real value is laid bare, a tangible digit and decimal point we all understand. So deep is that indoctrination that every effort to escape it also gets marketed. We have no other understanding of how to disseminate information. If we can sell God (and we do), our souls (everyday), and even our children’s futures (mortgaged off years ago), then everything else is cake.

Besides marketing everything, we might add another problem – which may be the same problem just from a different angle. The original oral traditions sought “wisdom.” The manuscript and print tradition sought “knowledge and information.” But now, in the new electronics universe, it’s simply about storing and transmitting data – which is the new form of information. And that translates to new definitions of “knowledge,” “success,” and “power.” And, as Marshall McLuhan said, it hasn’t just changed the way things are done but has “restructured consciousness.”

Hence, what may start out as a good (truly original) idea is fast-forwarded and filtered into general categories and fitted to the strictures of profit and loss. The validity and importance of an idea gets subordinated to “appearances” (window dressing, jacket covers, distribution costs, reader interest, exposure, and so forth). And finally, by the time it reaches the public, it seems to have been so whitewashed to fit an all-too familiar formula – one which instantly puts it into just another category of genres, shelved among countless other books according to “subject area.” Even “shock & awe” doesn’t work anymore for that reason. It’s reduced to a taxonomy in line with gardening and basket-weaving. Everything is assigned, classified, cataloged, and shelved, and before you know it, it disappears.

In the retail trade there is what’s known as “retail blindness.” An item can be right in front of us and we don’t see it – thanks to so many just like it. Retailers notice this and do what they can to make it stand out again – giving it its own window space, angling it differently, giving it an enlarged photo of the author, or even a life-size poster. But after doing this for so many items the buyer doesn’t even see it. – It’s not unlike car & truck ads on TV. Who can actually remember which ad goes with what car or truck – or even if the ad wasn’t really about toothpaste or deodorant? It’s all white noise getting louder and louder just to “out-volume” other white noises.

We put our trust in book editors and publishers “who know” what the public wants. This is also problematic. First, it stinks of the same problem attached to the information industry in general — that they dictate just as much as they inform, by virtue of what they print. But that aside, even these — the “experts” – have an abysmal track record on knowing what the public wants. Warehouses full of unsold books are so overstocked that it becomes a major problem for wholesalers who need to resell them at discounted prices. And, reversely, all the stories about books rejected (ten, fifteen, even thirty times over) then becoming bestsellers, are legendary. – Again, their blindness comes from the monster idee fixe around marketing. From their side they too suffer “retail blindness.”

All this said, it’s no wonder that the traditional used bookstore (as an institution unto itself) is thriving today. People are returning as if for something no longer found at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. In the old mildewy stacks buyers are reaching backwards to something as if the present and future have already failed them – to beginnings, roots, eras, attitudes, and perspectives which offered a clarity no longer available. It’s not just about saving money on outrageously priced books. It’s about a fait accompli about literary direction, commentary, and trending which has already failed a hungry public. They want more. They want a new tier of honesty about their lives and the world they live in. The used bookstore is about a kind of unconscious backing off, sensing that “less means more.” There’s enough debris, white noise, and junk in their lives (and minds) already. It’s about purging and starting over – amidst the old.

Turning backwards is also a radical move. The word radical comes from the Latin for “root.” It’s also a literary arena – Latin for “sand” – where the blood of gladiators soaked into the earth. And lastly it’s about liberalis – Latin for “the free man.” The blindness to all this is the unwillingness to, again, see above certain horizons lest it exposes what we don’t want to know. Does this mean slumping once again into that complacency witnessed forty years ago with Newton’s third law of motion? Is this to be the next phase in an old cycle whose helix is just a screw digging deeper into a systemic problem?

It all cycles around – complacency and shock, shock and complacency – not unlike everything else. But that isn’t the problem. The problem is about not stepping above it, not seeing it through the manner in which it’s all controlled. Alvin Kernan in his The Death of Literature said that literature is “teleological, designed to go somewhere for some purpose.” He also said it was “once poetry and rhetoric, then belles lettres and polite letters, now literature, perhaps soon to be something else as yet unnamed.”

The great challenge then is how to disseminate knowledge outside the gravity of a widespread blindness. Perhaps a socialist system could remedy this, though Wall Street would go (has gone) to great lengths never to allow it. But with socialism the greater question then becomes: Would the need to shock (for its own sake, to simply scare for effect) be needed? Would all news need to be “breaking” every second? Would the general consciousness be different? Would publishers filter what they print according a whole different set of “values?”

Used bookstores would not go away in any case. On the contrary, the new bookstores would follow their lead in terms of what people really want – and not want. The intangible, abstract, aesthetic, intellectual, and even spiritual would seem to come forward as ledgers filled with decimal points recede. Even the adjective “used” might take on a different meaning – as in “of the original source,” (the ancient meaning of synoptic- synopsis), as in “radical,” as in “root,” as in liberalis.

“The Synoptic Bookstore” in fact doesn’t sound so bad.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt

MAGICAL REALISM AND THE COYOTE

MAGICAL REALISM AND THE COYOTE

… sometimes called fabulism, confused with surrealism, found mostly in literature, blends the real world with elements of magic and the supernatural.

And for clarity, this is not surrealism. Surrealism deals with the unconscious. Magical realism addresses mythology “from the standpoint” of reality. Surrealism deals with the imagination, the mind, and doesn’t care at all about the mundane world. – I am personally anchored to the magic inside reality while nearing surreal waters. And I’m having trouble seeing where one leaves off and the other begins.

Magical realism originated in the 1950s in Latin America, its first exponent being Jorges Luis Borges. When described as irrational “leaps” in time and context, erasures, redundancy, discontinuity, dissolution of character and narrative, it bumps into yet another relatively new and broader phenomenon – postmodernism. Insofar as “leaping” happens in multiple mediums, the two are often confused or referenced interchangeably.

Okay. Definitions made and a short history imparted, I find myself reconnoitering “art” as another Borges, a Tolkien, a Castaneda, or anyone else who can’t see the world without its distortions. The lens quickly warps by the simple truth of its achromatic hardness – which only cracks with time. I’m thinking of James Hillman’s old book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg.

And with that I challenge the notion that the purpose of art is simply to produce “understanding” and then “enjoyment.” These are two completely unrelated concepts, but they share the same invalid idea. It’s true that art must have social relevance, but it must also push envelopes and challenge rules. It doesn’t simply serve as “an index” of the times. It pushes us uncomfortably into dimensions not yet understood. This is what transcendence means, going below surfaces. And to go above necessitates going below.

“Enjoyment” is so shallow a definition that it’s ludicrous. Unless it’s offered up as an oxymoron – to include suffering and pain – which shouldn’t sound strange in a sadomasochistic culture like ours. Reaching transcendence means sharing a space belonging to the timeless. One floats in a vacuum of unknowns where we’re confused and challenged. And to the degree that one must “control” that confusion, he suffers. Minus that need, we create the “possibility” for enjoyment.

In my experience this explained why, back “in the day,” one either had an intensely “good” or “bad” trip with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). If you held on to your armchair with white knuckles, you were doomed. Many unfortunately did just that. It also reminds me of people who inexplicably drink coffee and alcohol at the same time (from separate glasses). “Let’s let go, but not really.”

The greatest art, to me, involves inexplicable contradictions, a kind of “painful highness.” To understand (and enjoy it) requires a different sensibility. And combining understanding with the unintelligible is the supreme achievement. An example: an infant’s babbling – sounds we don’t understand but we know what they mean. To recognize the unrecognizable, to sense meaning inside the irrational, is understanding it at a higher level.

Another myth: that the greatest art is “subjective.” If it were true, it wouldn’t be “great.” The transcendent function transcends subjectivity. It reaches a universality experienced and shared by all. It becomes archetypal. And this applies no less to the unintelligible – like the child’s babbling. Magical realists reach for both objectivity and universality. Greatness is measured by going so “subjectively deep” as to tap into some universal current. It follows an old axiom: To transcend something, one must go into it, through it, and almost become it.

And for myself, I must say, though magical realism is not surrealism, it’s understandable why they are so often confused. The differences are subtle, if not negligible. Inside a certain depth, what is “real” versus “unconscious” (or just imagined) overlaps like imbricated scales. The mirror of one to the other makes each mutually relative. Surrealism again concerns itself with psychoanalysis and the unconscious, while magical realism is inextricably linked to the “outside.” This makes even “Marx versus Freud” a good analogy: Marx dealt with the material world, Freud with the personal unconscious. Their lines crossed when both dealt with creative unknowns – “unintelligible” dynamics in society-at-large and in the personal psyche.

All that said, how is it that most of us miss life’s primary function? Is it because similar dynamics mess things up? Are we led along more by the distortions than reality itself without knowing it? How strange when at the same time we deny the distortions. There is however an awareness of both existing side-by-side, and to that extent I suppose we’re on a higher path to “somewhere” together. As Wyndham Lewis said: “Today everybody without any exception is revolutionary. Some know they are, and some do not; that is the only difference.”

Edward Rothschild put it this way: Maybe “we are too deep to be intuitive and not deep enough to be profound…. It is better to cover less ground and to understand and enjoy what you are seeing…. The smaller the area covered, the deeper the penetration; the narrower the pipe, the faster the flow.” – When penetrated rightly, art is life’s “most eloquent expression.”

We approach life too much in a quantitative manner. And quantities cannot measure qualities. Having recently read the essays of Emma Goldman, and in light of the discomfort art brings with transcendence, it seems fitting to use “anarchy” as another analogy. And indeed the unintelligible implies a kind of mental anarchy (to which even Marx would agree): “The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself” (Goldman).

“Progress” is a problematic term. We are in fact still “primitives” despite our progress. We’re still in the primal forest, barely walking upright, dealing with the unintelligible every single day. We’re just as confused and scared as our knuckle-dragging cousins. Each morning we start right “at the beginning,” and along with the morning coffee and newspaper we sense the rumblings of a tribal DNA. We’re still in survival mode. We are, as the yogis say, in “1^st chakra consciousness” – self-preservation, staying alive – our most dominant instinct. “Progress” may mean having more and going farther, but we become less and less as we still feel the earth under our knuckles. As I witness the urban scene and cars in endless gridlock, I see desperation on a postmodern Serengeti, people assessing where they are on that continuum between truth and progress, suffering and surrendering – just like with LSD (white knuckles on steering wheels).

To embrace the journey is the essence of magical realism. The “magic” (in the real world) isn’t readily seen or explained. To borrow Kant’s term, it is numinous – “it cannot be explained but is known to exist.” But one can dance it, paint it, sculpt it, and sing it – and leave it at that. The choreography is so subtle and delicate that it’s dancing on the head of a pin (with angels), on a magical “still point,” said T.S. Eliot.

Hence with spiritual release and emancipation art pushes us into unknowns. As for art’s responsibility to society, to be socially “relevant,” nothing could be more relevant than instructing us on how to extricate ourselves from the mundane. All the while reminding us that though each person does it his own way, everyone is striving for the same thing – some supreme “top-to-bottom” denominator.

We are beautifully unintelligible to one another. And it’s our effort to reverse this, to find common ground, that actually gets us in trouble. Our preferred relationships – groups, memberships, belongings – are our undoing. Our only real commonality is in our opaqueness to one another, our differences. We just prefer to not see it, or accept it as we search for patterns and meanings that simply aren’t there. As Rothschild said, we work too hard, dig too deeply, cover too much ground, in that fool’s errand.

Hence, again, my personal “rooms” and their inhabitants – and all the subtle but palpable vignettes and montages that wallpaper those rooms. The concierge at the door is the first one to tell you, “If any of this makes sense, then we’re all failures.” If everyone agrees on the same thing, then “it must be wrong,” said Oscar Wilde. We’re here to “push things along” – like envelopes.

They say life is more important than art, but art is, again, its “most eloquent expression.” So what’s the difference between them? Art becomes the expression of man when it is expressible – but also inexpressible. And maybe it’s more the latter than the former. The deeper we go in trying to understand ourselves, the more unintelligible we are to each other.

And this is (always) my launch point. — A cobble street veering into the mind of the unsuspecting flaneur on his way home from nowhere. Is he shadowed by something? Does he have a past? Does he suspect things? Is there a guiding intuition leading him down this road? While trying to find words to his own question, he flounders for paper and pencil from the pockets of an over-sized heavy overcoat. He sports the requisite dark-brimmed fedora as well. “The hat makes the man” – pitched into a sculpture, no feathers, angled artfully to obscure the face, making him abstract, mature, weathered.

The road leads inward and makes the eye veer upwards. In front of him is an immense poly-chromatic landscape – virgin mountains and valleys. The road winds through a vast wilderness of trees and thickets. The path detours around various natural obstacles and takes on a circuitous plan. This is a map of the

imagination. Our compass is our own incomprehensibility. Ignorance frees us of expectations and desires. We are free to wander according to our own rhythms and tempos. This is magical realism.

The weather is warm and humid. Buildings are sterile and cold, characters are fugitive from tragic decisions and unspoken histories. Everyone’s desperate but never romantic enough. Friendships are lukewarm, mere sources of information to places unknown. In the darkness and away from city lights neighborhoods are upscale but derelict of humanity. Inside the city they become their inhabitants – gloomy and torpid.

Then, in the darkest moment, just before dawn, our hero makes a rippling gesture. The moment seizes him causing him to disrupt the night, like ripples on water. He awakens to himself. He senses his own “being.” He realizes he exists, he is alive. And instantly he’s horribly alone. He watches people watching themselves and approaches, saying, “hey, that’s you in there, and this is me in here.” He just gets startled stares and quick departures. His isolation intensifies, the moment compresses into a nightmare.

He finds himself standing outside a neon-lit bordello. The moon is full. In his mind there is no connective tissue to anything. He is alone. He lights a cigarette and puzzles over the enigma of this “membrane” he’s just passed through. He’s “awake” for the first time yet more isolated than ever. He loses himself in the moonlight and catches the movement of a stray animal making its way across the road. The coyote knows where it’s going. He doesn’t.

This is the story we read every day, on the road, in traffic, on the maps of human faces. Our hero feels like an echo returning from dark and ancient crevasses in the earth. The pain of remembering is even worse than being alone. Somehow he must reassemble himself. He knows that there is only one of him, but he also sees himself in the shadow of his species. There is always the two inside the One, the One inside the two. Suddenly he’s conscious of being unconscious, and he doesn’t know on which side he’s standing. The coyote does. He’s pledged to something special and exquisitely, inexplicably ordinary. He just doesn’t remember what it is … but the coyote does.

As he floats in his vacuum, a no man’s land, he summons the vision of an animal spirit. It is both inside of him and outside facing him. He remembers it now – an old companion. He stumbles into a mental space reminding him of “life’s most eloquent expression.” “This is it!”, he shouts. The ultimate conundrum, and it’s beautiful.

Life becomes art, and art is an end unto itself. It has no purpose other than itself. It expresses whatever one happens to see or sense at any moment. Art is not passive and reflective, nor is it merely subjective. It is direct and experiential. It is the void one needs to either fix and control or vanish into with a thanatological wisdom imparted by coyote.

My writing is oneiric, hopelessly lost in surreality and other dimensions – mental phantasmagoria, most often degenerating into absurdity. But also strikingly original in the way that various tangents dilate and veer off into their own dark but illuminating corners. A story-line takes on just enough exoticism for me to encounter myself in the present tense. I become the fabulist and myth-maker of my own saga. I’m an author, but I’m always too difficult to gain any public interest. And this suits me. I hate crowds. I see myself too much.

My home is language, and my language is on paper. Hence my world is conveyed by the pressing of keys and pushing pens across pages. It’s home, but home is frequently foreign. Someone once said “When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.”

I always start with a room. From there it’s like making love – no discipline, no direction, no rules, frequent betrayals, unrequited returns.

Here I am in my later years, preferring to live at home, at a computer surrounded by books, a dog and a cat, peace and quiet, simple food, no rules (the only rule). My wardrobe consists of worn thrift store hand-me-downs – my “rags.” All my footwear are worn out tennis shoes. I am exquisitely “alone.”

My room is crowded with ghosts and make-believe guests. In an instance I have a salon filled with cigar smoke, piano jazz, lilting conversations in French and English, heeltapped glasses, the ionized breath of warm summer air combined with gin. My house fills with luminaries and artists. Almost all from the golden age of film and the war years. They all show up here. And as they are mostly refugees and fugitives, they are, as someone once said, “Hitler’s gift to America.” Hitler indeed enriched the American salon, thank you very much. I’m the only one here who is anonymous.

Many make their entrees in those familiar thick black coats, fedoras, smoking Turkish tobacco – Gitanes, Fatimas, and Gauloises. Some, including the women, wear their own fedoras in order to stay in the shadows, unseen and probing. Instantly and in every room it’s magical theatre enacted with the props of home and the mundane.

This is a world of (ruled by) a genuinely unhealed, unruly imagination. It makes art (and life) intelligent, accessible, and eternally enigmatic. It is also unintelligible and unquantifiable. A language is born which one dares not speak – but it dances, sculpts, and sings. And it goes well with gin.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt

THE FIRST AMERICAN RADICAL

THE FIRST AMERICAN RADICAL

The year is new, though (in my opinion) the decade is not. Are we once again to repeat the confusion of Y2K? I guess our computers say yes, since they control us now. But from where I come from, a decade isn’t finished until the end of the tenth year – not when numbers turn to “00.”

That said, given the unprecedented vitriol and confusion in our politics, it seems fitting to read more about one of the unacknowledged “Fathers” of our country – someone slandered and maligned by many, forgotten by others. And yet it was his “pamphlet war” more than anything that inspired a defeated and frozen militia ready to surrender to Cornwallis.

Another reason is that this moment brings on a question about cycles and redundancies (if not tautologies): Is it me, or does it feel like the tremors of revolution under the American landscape? Not just the kind you think, but in the sense of history “revolving?” Radical times bring back radical (anti-)heroes with the same fundamental messages addressing the very same crises and causes. The fears, complaints, and advocations expressed 243 years ago are as apropos today as then. In fact (another question): Did the American Revolution ever actually end?

Before moving on, I have to say I’ve always been intrigued with buzzwords like “radical” and “anarchy” – mainly because we’re “not supposed to be.” We’re supposed to take their meanings at face value – and so, well, how subversive of me!! Before conservatives ever grabbed onto them and bastardized them to tout their moral agendas, it turns out that anarchy simply seeks “to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, and authority which constrain human development. It subjects them to a very reasonable challenge – ‘justify yourself.’ Demonstrate that you’re legitimate. If you cannot, the structure should be dismantled … and reconstructed from below” (Noam Chomsky). As for “radicalism,” in math it simply becomes a synonym for a root or base (“the root of a quantity is indicated by a radical sign”). It also simply means “affecting the fundamental nature of something far-reaching or thorough.” Politically, a radical is someone who advocates thorough social change. – No harm, no foul caused by either term.

That said, I can’t think of a more “radical and anarchist” Founder than Thomas Paine – someone who was therefore excised from the whole Revolution story while being fundamentally pivotal to its outcome. In fact (for the record) he alone was most responsible for rallying a frozen and demoralized militia at the most critical moment, for questioning the legitimacy of slavery and treatment of Native Americans, pushing Jefferson to double the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase, and advocating for civil diplomacy instead of violence. – And just as phenomenal (or more so) is the fact that, more than any of the other Founders, Paine’s voice is the one arguably more needed today than in the late 18^th century. He needs to be reintroduced to the American consciousness (not Hamilton!!) and brought into the national conversation.

Paine is your ordinary immigrant. He’s uneducated, as are most Americans today (high school educations, “trade school” diplomas, abominably low literacy). At thirteen he leaves school to apprentice himself in his father’s trade – whalebone corsets. At sixteen he runs away from home to serve aboard a privateer and then to become a journeyman. The first half of his life is a period of unrelenting failures. His father’s Quakerism influences his rejection of hierarchies (of any kind) and learns to appreciate the idea of keeping religion out of politics. As a young adult he works as a tax collector and witnesses the inequities of the English Parliamentary system. He feels compassion for the English poor. He begins to attend lectures on scientific knowledge largely composed of religious dissenters and self-educated artisans who also lean toward deism and political radicalism.

He begins an association with intellectuals, clergy, and artisans known as “coffeehouse radicals,”“commonwealthmen” and “radical Whigs.” They condemn the gentry’s manipulation of government and call for balanced elections and the expulsion of “stockjobbers” and “speculators.”

When he arrives in America in 1774, he sees wealthy merchants dominating Philadelphia’s economic, political, and social landscape under a British-style aristocracy. Not unlike today, the richest 10 percent owns over 50% of the city’s wealth. Philadelphia is poised for change between tradition and modernity, loyalty and independence. And what pushes events along is the growing political involvement among the citizenry. What facilitates this more than anything is the borrowed English tradition of pamphleteering – which Paine brings with him. Thus begin the “pamphlet wars.”

Paine finds his niche. Here’s a man no way cut out for political life, but a natural talent at the skills of language. He knows that one of the keys to social change is in the shape of language itself. Language is a product of history but has its own evolution as well. And a full understanding of Paine is less his study of ideas than his skills at communication.

First, urged by Dr, Benjamin Rush, he writes Common Sense, a pamphlet advocating for independence from Britain. It also imbues the common language of the day with new meanings: “republic” in a positive light (versus its historically negative application), expanded the meaning of “democracy” to mean more than just participatory government, and “revolution” to mean more than just planetary motion.

A year earlier (1775) Paine becomes the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine where he refines his ideas. He writes a series of pamphlets in 1776 for Washington’s soldiers called The American Crisis, the first one beginning with “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Paine says, “My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with Common Sense… have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free.” He introduces an eerily pre-Marxist version of the “labor theory of value,” workers rights, and man reflecting the “whole product of his labor.” Marx’s aim was spiritual freedom for man through his labors, his family, equality, and economic prosperity. He argued from nature, from the body(politic), the “body of labor.” Paine says this is the “seed time” for an organic, grassroots movement from below.

In 1791 Paine publishes The Rights of Man (his response to tyranny and the French Revolution, calling for expanding revolution throughout Europe). Then in 1794 he publishes the first of three volumes of The Age of Reason (arguing for deism and challenging orthodox religion and the Bible).

Copies of The Rights of Man circulate in Europe, and his native England does not like it. And yet he makes a gift of his second volume to Marquis de Lafayette. In 1792 he receives a summons to appear in British court for seditious libel. The pulpit orders his writings to be burned in effigy, and he begins to be shadowed by informers and police spies. After a public speech one night the poet William Blake warns him not to return to England: “You must not go home, or you are a dead man.” He goes anyway (reasons unclear). He manages to elude British agents, and the city of Calais offers him full French citizenship if he can survive that far. He does and becomes deputy to the National Convention. All is well – at least briefly.

His experience in France does not go well. First, he doesn’t speak French and is forced to use an interpreter. This is construed by the French as an insult when forced to speak English in their own country. Secondly, he underestimates a surging “Jacobin” fever at this time. He argues the points outlined in The American Crisis and Common Sense – to punish one’s enemy “by instruction,” not revenge. But the French want “blood” and consider his words weak and lame. He also pushes for the abolition of royalty, not understanding France’s allegiance to the centralization of power, a “federal” Republic. He helps draft a new Constitution in 1792, but the tides of war are still running strong, and the Jacobins override it. They want their revenge on a king who has committed treason.

Paine is one of the first advocates against capital punishment. He argues against the execution of King Louis along with public torture and execution, claiming that “avidity to punishment is always dangerous to liberty.” And again, he sounds almost prescient, if not visionary. Such prescience is also felt in another statement: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his own enemy from repression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” This mirrors both ancient and modern wisdom – first from the Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” And then much later from the Lutheran minister Martin Niemoller regarding Nazi Germany: “First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

All of this nearly costs Paine his life. The Jacobins hear none of it. He’s arrested on Christmas day, 1793, and it’s only because a few American friends know where he is that he’s released. – But not before another harrowing moment. He is actually scheduled to be executed, but because of the stupidity of one prison guard (who marks his cell door with chalk on the “inside,” not on the outside) his execution is overlooked. (When the door is closed the chalk mark is not seen). At almost the same time Robespierre is guillotined, and it, at least temporarily, satiates the public’s blood-lust. With the threat of death removed and the timing of a newly arriving American ambassador, Paine miraculously escapes the blade.

Just as miraculous is the fact that almost immediately the French “apologize” and re-seat him on the Convention committee, where he serves “lamely” and with serious PTSD. Later he actually has dinner with Napoleon who, in what seems like a surreal evening, showers him with flattery. They discuss Napoleon’s plans to invade England to which Paine warns that the English “will fight hard,” and he recommends dialogue and diplomacy instead of bloodshed. Once again, his “softness” disgusts the generalissimo.

Paine loses his “softness” on September 9, 1799, when Napoleon arrogates all power to himself, declaring himself Emperor, the nation’s “First Consul,” and announces that the Revolution is henceforth “over.” The French nation is stunned. Paine calls him a tyrant and “the completest charlatan that ever existed.” Finally, in September, 1802, he gives up France and books himself passage back to Baltimore.

Paine has thus seen the levers of politics from two sides (on both sides of the Atlantic, and as a Whig and a Tory – though he rejects labels). In America he is a “radical Whig”; in France he’s a conservative “non-radical” fighting for a more temperate and humane revolution. And now he’s returning home again to a “counter-revolution,” the push-back of royalist-conservative survivors of the American Revolution. These are communities still loyal to monarchy and British Toryism.

Let’s also be clear on another point concerning “radicalism”: One could be a “radical” in those days and a conservative at the same time (to which today’s conservatives turn a blind eye). One could seek political independence while wanting to preserve agrarian self-sufficiency, traditional customs and values (opposing big government banks, corporations, a national debt, and massive social change). — Let’s also remember that the “liberal” in his day was a “classical liberal” (fighting for less government) while the “classical conservative” defended British-style government (monarchy and aristocracy). – This all turned around in the 1930s with the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal.

Paine’s official legacy is what one might expect from a renowned “radical” during a nation’s turbulent birth. First, the American president George Washington knows of his plight in France and basically ignores it. His peers are also angry over The Age of Reason and its attack on religion and the Bible. In return, he is also livid over the government’s policies and treatment of Native peoples, saying, “the theft of their land and the threat to their existence came largely from proselytizing Christianity, which was used as a hypocritical cover for greed.” The meeting between the New York Missionary Society and the Osage Indians precipitates one of his most venomous attacks – equating the Missionary Society’s definition of decency with “drunken Noah and beastly Lot,” “serving” the Indians just as the Israelites treated the Canaanites, and then “justify[ing] assassination by the bible the Missionaries have given them?”

It is also no small fact that it is Paine alone who writes to Jefferson urging him to purchase the Louisiana territory which Spain had just ceded to France. It literally doubles the size of the nation – overnight – at ten cents an acre. It also sparks one last scrape with Jefferson who does not speak out against slavery. In fact the new territory advances the number of slave states as opposed to free ones. And this, Paine intuits, will surely lead to civil war.

Still, Paine’s last years are spent in squalor and bitter decline. His health deteriorates and the fact that his face is becoming inflamed and blotchy is his critics’ chance to cast him as a drunkard (which he is not). On his deathbed clerics try twice to burst into his chambers and demand that he convert to Jesus Christ. And both times he has them tossed out. To the first he responds, “Let me have none of your Popish stuff. Get away with you, good morning, good morning.” To the second, with eyes closing, “I have no wish to believe on that subject.”

Should it be surprising then that not one statue, bust, or portrait exists of Thomas Paine today in the hallowed halls Washington? There’s a “small” inconspicuous placard in New Rochelle and perhaps an occasional out-of-the-way statue erected by private donors. But he’s also the only Founder who doesn’t even have a grave site. He was initially buried on his New Rochelle farm because the local Quakers in New Rochelle wouldn’t allow his remains in the city. Later, an admirer, William Cobbett, decided to disinter the remains and send him to England “to help spur democracy there” – a terrible decision which backfired. His grave was vandalized, and over the years his bones and clothing desecrated. His bones in fact were divided up and sold – a leg bone here, a fragment of hair and skull there. His remains are quite literally scattered throughout the world. However, there is a movement (by the Thomas Paine National Historical Association) to gather what remains of him and finally establish an official resting place and grave site – something he wanted for himself.

Lincoln , John Brown, those in the Labor and Progressive movements, FDR, and many others (even Ronald Reagan) admired him and read his works – though Reagan was too stupid to know the difference between “classical” and “modern” conservatism, using Paine to try and reduce the size of government. (He failed of course and in fact “doubled” it).

Other, more intelligent, people fell in line: Emma Goldman, Eugene Debbs, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, Howard Zinn, and so many others – many still receiving the same vitriol and dismissal as Paine did. After her forced exile, Emma Goldman returned to America and, like Paine, found the nation’s political left compromised: “young people who do not think for themselves,” who “want canned or prepared stuff,” who “worship at the shrine of the strong-armed man.” As a friend said to her, “But you to me are the future they will, paradoxically, hark to in time.” The spirit of Paine continues on.

Goldman on anarchism:

“The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child – a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.

Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthy tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit….

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition.”

Question: How many times have these needs and sentiments cycled around in our nation’s short history? Almost as many times as we’ve waged war – averaging one every 20 years (over 200 years). The national “cause” has not shifted one iota. Voices like “the Squad” (the four Congresswomen “of color”) are case in point: still called “radical” and “anarchist” by the mainstream media, “centrist” politicians, and society-at-large. (The redeeming irony here is lost to most Americans, as they are indeed both). So, have we really progressed at all? My personal feeling is that we’ve fooled ourselves with the appearances of change without the substance of change. Appearances are designed to conceal, and they have.

Still, Paine will not go away. He brings front and center those like 16 year-old Greta Thunberg (Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year,” nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) who bravely brings truth-to-power like no one is willing to do, who calls out hypocrisy and cowardice where it stands. – “Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.” “You say you love your children and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” “Some people… have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.” “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.” “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change – and it has to start today.” And to the United Nations: “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

The painful beauty (sometimes referred to as “grace”) is in realizing that Thunberg probably doesn’t know who Paine was, has never even heard of him. She is after all Swedish by birth. But does it matter? Like democracy itself, “Paine” is not something tangible, not a person or a code of laws, but an essence, a temperament, a “unified field of emotion,” and a “state of mind.” This is his legacy. As Lewis Lapham said of democracy, it “allies itself with change and proceeds on the assumption that nobody knows enough, that nothing is final, and that the old order… will be carried off stage every twenty years.” It “assumes the ceaseless making and remaking of laws” to fit the needs of the times and of the people. It’s never perfect but is always in pursuit of perfection.

Paine’s greatest memorial (even without a statue, bust , or grave site) is his writings, his living spirit. He’s the only one of the Founders who witnessed “two revolutions” in his lifetime and lived to tell about it. So much is owed to him – and barely anyone even knows his name. Tragically, that’s the way of true greatness. It’s literally too much for people to attribute to the efforts of one man – someone who quit school at thirteen to make whalebone corsets.

Perhaps it’s also why Ms. Thunberg did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. They gave it to an Ethiopian instead, “praised” for his efforts to “achieve peace and international cooperation.” Paine would have those very words examined for their honesty, and the UN’s “official language” which, one might argue, conceals more than it reveals.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt

MAGISTER LUDI: MAN OF THE YEAR

MAGISTER LUDI: MAN OF THE YEAR

Another new year. Not a new decade however. Not in my world. Have we not learned from Y2K? I thought a decade wasn’t over until the tenth year was finished, not just because the numbers turn to “00.” But I guess, since computers now rule us, they say when things begin and end.

Each year seems the same, as are the mantras. “Let’s make this year better than the last one.” There’s something corroding and enervating about that, both individually and collectively. It’s the slow inanation of a nation’s will. Is civilization actually, truthfully, progressing? The definition of that word comes into focus, not to mention that it’s arrival seems inversely proportional to “true happiness.”

Maybe it’s age, or experience. I don’t know. But I defer more and more to the poet and less to political “geniuses” and moral philosophers. “Hearts are meant to be broken. This is why God sent sorrow into the world,” said Oscar Wilde. We seem to be performing bears on endless fools errands orchestrated by heroes and gods we invent to play out the most bizarre fantasies and superstitions. Do we mount images on Parnassus just to connect dots we wish would connect on their own – just as we do with the stars? The stars are just there, arranged from one parallax view called “earth.” Change the angle and the heavens change with it – and probably all of mythology and its gods. But, still, we connect this dot to that one, “constellate” it, and write stories about it. Eventually then we mistake the constellation for its symbol, the legend for the truth, and go to war over it.

Is this who/what the real Judas is all about? De profundis (“from the depths”) was Wilde’s letters from prison. And where better to tell the truth than within human bondage? The soul is laid bare, nothing is hidden, and one faces the raw realities of life and death. Suffering is central to everything, just as the Buddhists say in the Four Noble Truths. Over two millennia ago the supreme irony of existence was already made clear: a) suffering exists, b) suffering is caused by attachments/desire, c) suffering ceases when desire ceases, and d) freedom from suffering is found in the Eightfold Path. Minus the fourth Truth, the first three already present the ultimate conundrum. The purpose of everything seems to “be done with it” – to bring ourselves to a place where it’s no longer needed. There’s suffering, until there is no suffering. And then, according to theory, it cycles all around again (samsara – the karmic wheel).

It all sounds rather redundant, man’s supreme folly, which is why Proust says our purpose is to “strip the veils of habit.” Habit is “dull routine,” and the opposite of routine is art. And the worst victim of routine is love. It ultimately fails us, leaving only art to once again show us life’s virtues. Hence, those “Proustian moments”- trying to rekindle the urchin worlds of childhood.

But we’re not a species to let go of routines and patterns so easily. Habits are safe. We fight hard to keep things just as they are, because we know them. The person who challenges that religion, that star alignment, is the Judas. “Each man kills the thing he loves, the coward with a kiss, the brave man with a sword,” said Wilde. And so it’s suffering (with a human face) that we plant on the highest mountain tops to worship. A god that did not deliver on suffering was never a god worth defending. He hides behind a curtain of “love,” the kind which only exists off the reflection of its opposite – hatred/evil/darkness. Understanding the second and third Noble Truth is never made clear. Instead, as Christopher Hitchens said, we cling to “the essence of sadomasochism,” the master-slave relationship, forced to love what we fear and fear what we love (“compulsory love”) – called religion.

Hence, with age we draw more and more to the fascination of sleep, unconsciousness, and even death. From those depths, from prison, Wilde said “death is the brother of sleep.” They are the only portals/membranes we have through which we can elude the trappings of our illusions, and to see the truth as it is. And we gravitate to the arts more (away from hard reality) to learn about ourselves and life, maybe for the first time. Sleeping and dreaming are the windows into what it is that lifts this world up, like Atlas holding the globe. They say to us “its the only reality.” It’s where our real work is done and when we “wake up.” Reversely, it’s during the hours of waking consciousness when we’re asleep again and “life is but a dream.”

This is a phase I happen to be visiting in my 70^th year on earth. I hear the news about Trump, climate change, overpopulation, animal extinctions, water shortages, crime, hatred, poisoned food, poverty, political graft and truly unprecedented (astonishingly creative) forms of human deception, and I’m beginning to understand the message which it’s all intended to deliver. There is no end to this. There’s not supposed to be. There never was, never will be. And it’s NOT to say we need another god/messiah, another religion, or even another faith. It’s a detachment from things so thorough that it delivers us to a different place altogether – one of coming back to it with humility, trust, and above all humor. Art comes to mind, as does grace (as “painful beauty”).

Meanwhile, the nature of things forces us to write letters from holy prisons. The game is about breaking hearts, performing roles, connecting dots, and killing what we love. We reside in a necropolis and write our letters “to whom it may concern.” We need obstacles in our path to make life meaningful and worth fighting. And indeed, this is what we do – we fight life.

Is there a (new year’s) resolution here? Should there be? Are serious resolutions ever really achieved, that is, when they simply don’t involve serendipity or forces beyond our control – otherwise known as “luck?” If everything is “God’s will,” then why do we pray in the first place? (Just to “give thanks?” – bullshit – another supreme lie). If matrimonial love is all about “setting someone free,” then why get married and draw up vows in the first place? If we all vow to end suffering, then why do we protect it so fervently? – We’re afraid of the freedoms we pretend to fight for. We’re afraid of love. And we’re afraid of too much understanding and knowledge. All of which promise to punch holes in our carefully scripted and choreographed vaudeville called “the human theater.” We need to be the worst versions of ourselves.

There is the night’s performance after which Oscar comes out on stage before a filled-to-capacity audience and says calmly: The actors have given a charming rendering of a delightful play (laughter). Your appreciation has been most intelligent (more laughter). I congratulate you on the success of your performance (raised laughter). It persuades me to think that you think as highly of the play as I do myself” (house hysteria). – The sign over this proscenium arch is one I post myself: Coincidenzia Positorum – “All is Perfect.”

If the slough of despond is as deep as it always appears, and it always does, then let my hero – my favorite constellation, moral compass, and dot scrambler – be Oscar Wilde:

“I’ll believe in anything provided that it’s incredible. That is why I’m a Catholic, though I could never live as one.” “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” “There’s no such thing as morality or immorality in thought.” “You get to where you are not by what you believe but by what you don’t believe.” “Always forgive you enemies, nothing annoys them so much.” “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” “Nothing that’s worth knowing can be taught.” “Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go.” Regarding The Importance of Being Ernest: “It’s about the faces we wear as masks and the masks we wear as faces.” “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”And finally (more than ever), “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Wilde, the supremely gentle-man, sensitive, urchin-like, the intelligent and wise renaissance man who tragically lived a hundred years too soon, was also what Mary Shelley called her most famous character. Frankenstein was the “modern Prometheus” because he did damage to the natural order of things. Prometheus was a hero, a rebel, and a trickster. It requires a deep knowledge of the theater, of masks, of irony, humor and tragedy, to find truth and peace within drama. The muses Thalia and Melpomene (the “comedy-tragedy” masks of theater) are understood only when one’s “lunar sign” is discovered within the other. One is the other. (It would also do us well to remember that, of the two, the Greeks revered comedy the most). It’s the “merry prankster” in Wilde from which we need to take our cues.

And with that, as the clocks roll into the new year, may we all enjoy the play – many times more than last year.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt