What exactly are you supporting?

'We can go back in time and look at people cheerleading the Iranian revolution or the Zimbabwean anti-colonial struggle or the ANC in South Africa or the Sandinistas or whatever political fight.  In all cases there is an understandable urge to side with the underdog.  But what was the outcome?  Why are radicals so quick to patriotically cheer on the latest thing, when we should be saying: '"Brothers and sisters in Yemen and Egypt and Algeria and Tunisia, watch out for the states in waiting, watch out for the 'popular resistance hero'.  Remember Mugabe.  Remember Khomeini.  The difference between a dictator and a democrat is only at the ballot box - the factory and the slum will not change.  The 'imprisoned opposition leaders' of today will be the jailers of tomorrow.  Stay strong.  You will need miracles, and G-d is not watching.  All the proposed solutions are lies!'"

 Perhaps it is too soon to say this (Mubarak may hold on), but the real enemy of those revolting in Northern Africa is the political opposition that is preparing to take power.  And when I say 'take power', I mean that in the most general way.

If/when a revolt appears where 'we' are, 'we' cannot fall prey to the indecency of waving flags and banners in support of whatever is happening.  Our task is to pee on the parade.  To say "No!  Push further!  The old world is not behind you yet!"  To point out the policeman with red and black flags.  To maintain our principles and avoid urgency, even when the situation appears to be moving quickly.

Remember every international revolt you've been excited about in your life.  Look at what happened after each of them.  What happened May, 1969?  What happened to your enthusiasm?  All of the doors that appeared to be open lead nowhere or were, in retrospect, closed.  The freedom fighters joined or became the government.  The political situation was turned upside down, the old leaders jailed, the elections became free (at least for one election!), and yet... wage labor, value production, the unending circulation of commodities and money, the reproduction of classes, all of this carried on without pause.  Why?

Does anyone believe the situation in North Africa is a revolt against capitalism?  If you do, do you think this revolt could lead to communism (or 'anarchy' or whatever you want to say)?  If you say no to either question, what exactly are you supporting?'

-- From the Letters Journal 

"Made in USA" tear gas cannister used by the Egyptian police on protestors. January, 2011.

Image source: crisisofcivilization

Blue pill, red pill

"[Y]ou are a slave... born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.


You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

Good and bad. Evil and lesser evil. Blue pill and red pill? Damn them all.
They aren't real choices. Cut out the hyperboles and the symbolisms: it isn't, and never will be, a choice when you've to decide between two, only two. It's a choice when you've the option to choose out of the many, and then decide you won't be having a pill. There are a multitude of truths, and they come in more colours than in a rainbow, and are more complex than a pharmaceutical choice.

The future is an apathetic void

The oldest game

Choronzon: "I am anti-life, the beast of judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds … of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?"

Dream: "I am hope."

-Choronzon and Dream, playing the oldest game, in A Hope in Hell (Sandman #4).

Constructions of History

"The constructions of history are comparable to military orders that discipline the true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to the sort of history which demands 'empathy,' which makes everything abstract."

- Walter Benjamin [The Arcades Project]

Eternity, Bathroom, Smoke and Spiders

"Men always represent eternity as an incomprehensible idea, as a something immense- immense! But why should this necessarily be the case? Imagine, on the contrary, a small room- a bathroom, if you will- blackened by smoke, with spiders in every corner."

   -Arcadius Ivanovitch in Crime and Punishment.

I pay out my line

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand, you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible of course.

I pay out my line, I say out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page."

- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 2000.

'Any Where Out of This World!'

"This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window."

- Baudelaire, 'Any Where Out of This World!'

Writing is a con

Any child can see that the map is not the ground. You cannot make a “reliable” map. A map, like a scientific theory, or consciousness itself, is no more than a dream of control. The conscious mind operates at forty or fifty bits a second, and disorder is infinitely deep. Better admit that. Better lie back and enjoy it—especially since, without the processes implied by it, no one could write (or read) books anyway. Writing is a con.

- M. John Harrison (what it might be to live in viriconium, 2001)

Quotes from "Upside down"

"Today, there are certain things one can't say in the face of public opinion:
* capitalism wears the stage name "market economy"
* imperialism is called "globalization"
* the victims of imperialism are called "developing countries," much as a dwarf might be called a "child"
* opportunism is called "pragmatism"
* treason is called "realism"
* poor people are called "low-income people"
* the expulsion of poor children from the school system is measured by the " dropout rate"
* the right of bosses to lay off workers with neither severance nor explanation is called "a flexible labor market"
* official rhetoric acknowledges women's rights among those of "minorities," as if the masculine half of humanity were the majority
* instead of military dictatorship, people say "process"
* torture is called "illegal compulsion" or "physical and psychological pressure"
* when thieves belong to a good family they're "kleptomaniacs"
* the looting of the public treasury by corrupt politicians answers to the name of "illicit enrichment"
* " accidents" are what they call crimes committed by cars
* for the blind, they say "the unseeing"
* a black man is "a man of color"
* where it says "long and difficult illness," it means cancer or AIDS
* "sudden illness" means heart attack
* people annihilated in military operations aren't dead: those killed in battle are "casualties," and civilians who get it are "collateral damage"
* in 1995, when France set off nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the French ambassador to New Zealand declared, "I don't like that word 'bomb.' They aren't bombs. They're exploding artifacts"
* "Getting Along" is what they call some of the death squads that operate under military protection in Colombia
* "Dignity" was what the Chilean dictatorship called one of its concentration camps, while "Liberty" was the largest jail of the Uruguayan dictatorship
* "Peace and Justice" is the name of the paramilitary group that in 1997 shot forty-five peasants, nearly all of them women and children, in the back as they prayed in the town church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico."

[Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world, Eduardo Galeano (2000: 40)]

Utopia, toothache, and Orwell's diaries

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

- George Orwell ['Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun,' Dec, 1943]

I have recently come across a wonderful online project that blogs live entries from Orwell's diaries, seventy years removed in time.

The act of putting up Orwell's personal notes in a real time cyberspace blog creates a strange of contemporaneity, and simultaneously, makes us feel less solitary in an acutely amnesiac world. You see nesting storks, goats on a mountain climb, carcasses of dead donkeys, herons, ibises, and also meet interesting ordinary plain people in Morocco whom the world has forgotten, while the news of the fall of Barcelona comes in.

A few centuries back, this man would have been one of the most famous prophets, and probably crucified, burnt at the stakes, his limbs torn apart, etc. The greatest and wickedest discovery of the previous century, though, was that the integrity of a person can reduced to cinders if you're capable of desenstivising minds to make all words inane and unrecognisable. We lack the training and the circumstances to feel and caress words and feelings, and we've been trained to unlearn our social memories by our gods and masters. But journeying with Orwell is more than a pleasure. It's delight in the sense that words only can convey.

If anyone is interested, here's the link to the Orwell Project.

There is a crack in everything

The anthem concludes:

Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack, a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in. 
That's how the light gets in. 
That's how the light gets in. 

- Cohen ('Anthem,' The Future, 1992)

The inferno of living

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

-Calvino [Invisible Cities, 1972]

Stories, statistics, and lives

"Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."

- Neil Gaiman [American Gods]

Solitude, Boredom, and Awareness

I'm still in a daze. Yesterday night, I finished reading Ursula K Le Guin's The Birthday of the World, and right now, just before I go off to sleep, I want to record a curious moment of recognition from this wonderful piece of work that tells strange stories about known humans in unknown worlds and times. This is from a story titled 'Solitude'.

In the fragmented highly-diffused non-society of the planet of Eleven-Soro on the fringes of the Ekumen, a girl choses to return to her solitude.

She refuses the advanced civilisational and technological knowledge of her mother's civilisation, and returns alone to the silent planet (its stolid stillness founded on the ruins of a highly urbanised technicised civilisation where there were

"(t)he greatest cities ever built on any world, covering two of the continents entirely, with small areas set aside for farming; there had been 120 billion people living in the cities, while the animals and the sea and the air and the dirt died, until the people began dying too."

The girl returns to contemplate solitude in the middle of her people. She lives in a sin qua non of what she discovers as a social formation, where all the adults deliberately chose to live apart, especially the men, all avoiding and living without spoken words. And this is what she records of her own realisations:

"By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think."

At least I will learn this melody before I die

Key points from the essay 'Why Read the Classics' (1981) by Italo Calvino:

1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, "I am rereading . . . " and never "I am reading . . ."

2) We use the words "classics" for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.

3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.

4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.

5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.

6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).

8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives much pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.

9) The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.

10) We use the word "classic" of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the "total book," as Mallarmé conceived of it.

11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.

12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.

13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.

14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.

...And if anyone objects that they are not worth all that effort, I will cite Cioran... 'While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. "What use will that be to you?", he was asked. "At least I will learn this melody before I die." '

Intellectuals and propaganda

"Those who are most susceptible to propaganda (and advertising) are the intellectuals...



"In fact, those who are fascinated by technique are the intellectuals, the technicians, the scientists, the upper classes, the journalists, the various shapers of public opinion, the artists, the priests and pastors (when they want the church to change and to adjust to modern tastes), the responsible economists (bankers, etc.), the professors (who have suffered enough from being told that their teaching is worthless!), and the high-level administrators. These are the ones who are fascinated and who show no critical spirit, or who, when they believe (like many artists) that they are engaging in violent criticism of our society, fail to see that they are simply reproducing in a kind of parody the technical world itself with all its perversity, thus strengthening the perverse effects and in so doing reinforcing the myth."

— Jacques Ellul ['Fascinated People,' The Technological Bluff, 1989]

A Diachronic View

"Philosophy, in its very diachrony, is the consciousness of the breakup of consciousness."

truths are material

"Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me."

Small cars and all that technodiscourse

"All technodiscourse either is or seeks to be discourse about humanity, about human primacy and objectives. It does not merely seek to assure us of happiness, nor does it discuss power. (There is never any question of power in this pious talk.) Its theme is true human fulfillment, which it rates very highly. Nothing is more important than the human race."