post - "nod" ernism in the dreams of the dead

(thanks to j. chadwick for the title)

"In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind."
The Lotos-Eaters, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

As archetypal human dilemmas go, none captures the insistent insouciance of the crumbling western consumer dream quite like the lotus eaters in The Odyssey. At once aware of the world's cruelty but determined to fulfill mythological promises of paradise, Odysseus' men gathered in their war weary, fatuous circles to reaffirm their delusions, stoned to the rafters on the plant of bliss. There amongst the oblivious, they tried to assuage the cognitive dissonance grumbling from the memories of victories gained at the cost of so many dead. They whole heartedly embraced the lie by opening themselves unequivocally to whatever mental contagion would bring them peace. What harm is there, I hear myself repeating with them, to take a brief respite from work, weariness and the knowledge of inevitable death? I, too, have been raised to believe I deserve some happiness.
Hence I have run not walked from the culture of which I knew too much. The growing brown shirt movement and racial intolerance of Canada, the pro-war, anti-socialist, blame the poor, shoot the hippo, jingoism of recent memory has walked me quietly and quickly to the nearest exit. Yet, nowhere is lotus bliss more apparent than in the escapism of an ex-patriot community. On the one hand we are proud and self congratulatory for having perceived and rejected the evil doing of our homelands, only to demand a contradictory anti-intellectualism towards anything that would disrupt our pleasant dream. It isn't uncommon for people to misinterpret local law, that foreigners are not permitted political involvements, as justification for not discussing politics at all. As such, social, political, economical or ethical acumen can be read as deplorable and deportable dissention. Far beyond murder it is to point out the palm fronds crashing down amongst our idyll.
In the house across the way there is no activity. This is sufficient to confirm something is wrong. I have come to the street of big houses to tend the Voltaire-ian gardens of some fellow escapees and have become accustomed to the rhythm of this little pseudo suburban road. My neighbor moves and shakes, comes and goes, like the steady wash of waves on our seemingly happy beaches. But not this week.
The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that he was taken from his restaurant by men with guns.
When the police assaulted the zocalo in Oaxaca during the last teacher's strike they apparently captured some 500 people who they then deported to the state of Nayarit in a recapitulation of Guantanamo Bay. Some of those people were just unlucky enough to have chosen that particular moment to go shopping for eggs. They were tortured of course. I only know this because one of the locals is a psychologist who was involved in post traumatic stress treatment for the detainees. Most refused the treatment because they had already seen psychologists in their Nayarit prison and had been made aware of the intricacies of "treatment" by their captors. They were encouraged, in the midst of what must have been one of the most horrific moments of their lives, to see their discontent as a skewed perspective, to see their grief as the product of their improprieties.
For the new president, Felipe Calderon, the biggest problem Mexico faces at this moment is the transportation of drugs up the coast. Of course, only drug users would also be dissenters in the beautiful dream that is green and pleasant Mexico. That the teachers of Oaxaca and the APPO are dissenters, trouble makers, surrenders them to the inquisition of Calderon's anti-drug army. That Calderon's anti-drug army may be involved in the drug trade is an irony that has certainly fried the sensibilities of the Mexican public.
Contrarily, for too many of the gringos the protests in Oaxaca are about better wages and an inexplicable, culturally endemic unrest. One can practically hear John Wayne's voice pronouncing with no hint of wavering self-doubt that the natives are restless, while completely ignoring just why that might be. The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that mangos fall from the trees like manna from heaven.
We all, surely, have anxieties about how the world could be and have all had our anxieties lured into dreary congeniality by our fear. Uncertainty and the reluctance to speak about what is not sure, what disrupts, has quieted our cynicism, defensiveness and critical judgment. But such "positive" thinking, trying to pass off our muzzles for some kind of zen, doesn't change the world. It just shuts out what is inconvenient about it. And in the confusion criminals of every kind make off with whomsoever they wish as we nod our heads in passive accord.
Despite the fragmentary appearance of the community's reaction to the kidnapping, there is an unsettling theme running through our conversations. I noticed a distinct relief of tension in myself when I was told the victim was involved in questionable business practices. The event was removed from the paranoic dread of random violence and delivered into the realm of justice, cause and effect, good and evil, god. Such specific comings and goings surely have nothing to do with us general rabble. I have rejected the event's suggestion of wholesale human malevolence for the comfort provided by non-involvement.
Yet, I keep thinking of the detainees in Nayarit being told that their dis-ease, their sins against the state, had incarcerated them. I think of a boss who tried to have the only aware person in the department fired for having too much initiative, I think of a co-worker who, after the fact, spoke shockingly well of a job she had hated and with bubbly enthusiasm reminded me that life was all about enjoyment. I think of Odysseus' men rejecting stark life completely for peaceful somnambulism. And I surely agree that life cannot be unwaveringly about fear and pain. And yet it is, in as much as it is about coming to terms with perennial suffering. We have no patience for the process. We hope that there is somehow a quick resolution to our strife and we consume the answers like cigarettes. We consume. We congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment and cluck and strut with our chests puffed out at those who "resist." We go on vacation. We leave.
"What you resist persists" goes the popular Jungian quote that has been used to substantiate the bland inertia of our era. To think is to sin against our safe, shell-like personal truths. Because truth, our truth, is a selfish little, self serving, self created reality, that any real thought would pop like a blister. We dread knowing. We can not go back to the same old strife, the same old pain, the same old same old.
Jung was not offering a solution to our dilemma in his clever aphorism. It is only to our generation of sound byte addled head nodders that "don't think about it" could somehow resolve the confusion of so many years of baffling human cognizance. We want ... no ... we demand the answer now and it is narcissistically easy to embrace the lotus. But Jung also said, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain." Yes, we must be Buddhist and strive for acceptance, but no, we can not be insincere about it. We should not just embrace this or that because it serves our purposes and we just don't want to suffer anymore ... should we?
We have theories about our disappeared neighbor. We dabble in explanation, justification, discrimination to give our disregard the appearance of awareness. Meanwhile, we dream in paradise and offer money, subservience, condemnation. We allocate blame to individual negativity when people are visited by strife, anything to stay in the hidden port, to hold fast to our vacuous, guiltless peace. Yet, should those who stoke the all consuming machine have need of more fodder, they will know exactly where we can be found.

soap and education

"Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be." Eric Hoffer

"...a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself." Medium is the Message, Wickipedia

The conceit: Weathermen scare the crap out of me. I don't mean what weathermen say scares me; that nightly wind whipping of sunami, tornado, hurricane, when the levi breaks, depletion of the ozone layer, scare-mongering twaddle that attempts to lend hyper-significance to reports of sloppy weather in Moose Jaw. Oh no. What the weather actually is has rarely concerned, much less interested me. This morning as I struggled to keep my attention on the message gurgling forth from the well lipsticked mouth of CNN's most recent climate attendant, I suddenly realized I was being swept up in a Mcluhanesque dalliance; I was finding the medium, the manner, the jaunty professionalism, the rehearsed imperfection, the dichotomous insouciance swirled among overly-earnest perturbation, impossible to listen through. I could see and hear only the performance and nothing of the message. She wrung her hands as though suffering from a great personal anxiety, promising to keep us all abreast of developments regarding that hurricane off the coast of Madagascar, despite the cost to her marriage and the well being of her children, then gave a very human smile to finally ease our tension, said "uh" a couple more times, let us know that although we should remain vigilant, keep one eye on the gales blowing round the Cape, we could relax a little, that professionals were on the job, that she would take the burden. It was an oral presentation intended to say, "I'm human, I’m organic, but I'm a well practiced pro. I'm a little distracted, I say "uh" a lot, but that's just because my mind is always where it should be ... on YOUR weather, on this most important of jobs. Yes, I smile, but that's because I can handle the pressure, handle it with a little inoffensive quip and a gentle calming demeanor. I am first and foremost a professional, baby. I'm a freakin' pro."So why should someone being so into their job give me the willies? Why should shmoozy friendliness and a humanized presentation full of rehearsed inconsistencies, inconsistencies that change the disembodied babbling head and dry cackle of electronic media into a pretense of a deeper, more imperfectly organic humanity, strike fear into the soul? The first reason I can think of is that so much time must have been spent to discover and orchestrate this professional demonstration of being human, only to tell us about precipitation.Medium is the message point one: we are profoundly preoccupied with the banal and constantly trying to pass it off as something important, something worth televising, something worth becoming a for. This is the first topic in the job description of our era: make your job look like it's worth doing. The task at hand, making widgets or what have you, is no longer on the agenda in the postmodern miasma, nor is doing anything well. It is the deliberation with which one attacks the mindless, meaningless project that makes a success of vacuity. This is from where the shiny spoon wrests opportunity, exhorts the untapped excitement hidden in the hollow. As we say in the music business, it isn't talent that makes success, it's gall. Thus we have mediocre talents like Madonna and Britney Spears defining feminine strength and skill; overweight porn star Ron Jeremy as a TV sex pundit commenting on the world wide significance of Mr. Bobbit's reattached member popping up in triple X films; the late Timothy Leary taking drugs and being enthusiastic as a professional pre-occupation. And when the audacious egomaniacs finish convincing themselves, coworkers, wives, children, friends and most importantly bosses that the drone of obsequious tasks is somehow of monumental importance, the work is still not done.Medium is the message point two: We are deeply confused and are not permitted to admit it or seek answers. Work is not a soporific, soul sucking, repetitive grovel. Work is a fun and fulfilling giggle and god help us if that's not what we make it look like. We must appear to be having fun, to not be straining. But we really haven’t the slightest idea what our job really is, and though we are practiced at looking like we know how to do it, it is all form without content. We are trapped in a postmodern feedback loop, trying in vain to show: we care but that we are casual; that we are earnest but cynical; that our ethics and our think-outside-the-box, rebel-with-a lot-of-fresh-ideas attitude doesn't care about the job; that doing something well is more important than the paycheck; that we are very much aware that money is the most important thing to the shareholders and its foremost on our minds too; that it's only our paycheck that substantiates our worth; that the job is the most important thing in the world; that the money is the most important thing in the world; that the job is where excellence will shine; that being recognized for our work isn't the most important thing in the world but why do we get so little praise from our boss; that we need to be arrogantly confident; we need to be humble; we need to be human oh so human, but oh-so-good at it. When we appear flawed that is all it should be: appearance and never the real, baffled and distraught little creature with not a single clue as to what is really going on, struggling to hold on to -isness while the bedlam of cirrostratus, altocumulus and the arbitrary dialectic of whimsical, whirling historical events once again betrays our uncertainty.Where is the weather person to say it's not in our control? We have tried to use chaos theory to predict the stock market and when exactly Christ will show up again but to no avail. We have tried to perfect being alive but we simply can not get the hang of it. Being real is not something you can actually practice. Instead we end up acting like a lying lover, all show of heartfelt affection, but making winks to the younger sister when the oblivious and trusting valentine turns her back. We are reality's whores and we take it where we can get it. We believe we have learned something when we watch a weather report because why else would it be there and why else would we have watched it. But it’s all subtext. It's like watching Hamlet to see what Claudius will do. The reality is the desperation with which we cling to the weather. Caring about weather is sophistication, the end of the ignorant hunter-gatherer, the commencement of prehistorical agriculture, the beginning of science and religion and philosophy and caring about more than having a full belly and a flacid penis.Medium is the message point three: I prefer the construct. When it comes right down to it, the truly terrifying thing is that the image that we try to pass off as being human is by all means preferable to the foul, backstabbing, delusional creature that is the hu-man. We don't want to be free to think what we will. If we were truly free we would run over babies and charge admission. As Freud notes, and as Neitszche notes, freedom involves responsibility but the act of being real is without cost. Illusions, Freud continues, commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure. It is paradoxical, I know, that we have created a pretense of reality where we allow ourselves to be hedonistic and shallow and free of responsibility and wherein we may hide from our hedonistic and shallow and irresponsible humanity. The weather lady may very well be the best that we can muster or, at the very least, the next best thing to some kind of good person. That is what not only scares, but horrifies me. These ideas that we have filled the gaping emptiness of our existence with do not fool us as much as they provide us the means to fool ourselves. And that tells me just how awful the truth must be.

caesar hath wept

It is customary here in Puerto Escondido, when the need to extend one's visit arises and the infinite bureaucratic bludgeoning of immigration becomes impossible, to venture forth to the mysterious border of wild and wily Guatemala. Here, it is said, one may renew one's vows with green and pleasant Mexico and return to her bosom with a minimum of border guard abuse. Seeing as how the crucible set before me by immigration was unquestioningly beyond my grasp, on Monday at 5:30 I set out for the southern reaches of Chiapas to try my luck at the quick frontera exchange.
As Murphy pointed out, nothing ever comes off without a hitch, and this seems to be especially so for me in southern Mexico. Many might point out that according to nouveau esoterica my bad attitude makes such things happen, to which I blow my nose in their general direction. I try my best, like every good monkey, to take the ill tidings of life at their own sway. I simply don't try to lie to myself about how romantic it all is, or that the stupidity of people who suffer under poverty is somehow an enobling simplicity. As Nietszche says, " ... aware of life's terrors, (a person) affirms life without resentment." It is only when we expect the disappointments of life to somehow edify us that their inability to lend more than pain leaves us feeling poisoned.
The truth is that the border of Mexico / Guatemala is a nasty several mile wide example of everything that is wrong with humanity. Poverty, greed and its accompanying lack of imagination and hope when it comes to the problems of existence combine here with the vapors of brimstone. OK, they're just people doing their best and if that means trying to get as much as they can from stupid tourists like myself, then that's the way it is and I shouldn't be resentful.
I can only plead that stupidity is something insidious and contagious. If poverty makes low IQs, and the spread of poverty and low IQs and rampant population growth among the poor makes the world stupider and stupider, the reactions of those who should know better are becoming more and more in concert. I was raised to not categorize, to give each individual an even break, to give each person the opportunity to be uniquely stupid. But as I am judged by those with what I believe is a myopic point of view, I lash out with my own vindictive stupidity. As I am gawked at like a three headed dog dressed in golfer's attire I find my tiny mind taxed to the limit of its patience. It's that look WE get from THE OTHER, that look that says WE really don't know anything about what's going on anywhere at anytime otherwise why would WE behave in any manner than that of the OTHER, that gets my back up. One believes the other is stupid and the stupid are incredulous.
Amidst the stumbling rabble of which I too often must count myself I met a man named Nehemias, named after the biblical character assigned to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. While the cambistas crowded round me to try to steal my passport and dole out bad exchanges on pesos and quetzales, Nehemias, in no extraordinary way, offered polite conversation. And returning from Malacatan I was offered a fair price for a taxi, and after braving the cambistas one last time, was given a six month tourist visa when all I asked for was three by a joking and laughing immigration officer. As a matter of fact, almost all the immigration officers were decent, helpful people. But despite such small kindnesses, it's the belief in getting the better of that other's ignorance as a sign of one's own cleverness, and seeing apparent cultural unawareness as a sign of stupidity that leaves enduring bone chips in one's joints. It may be that in the absence of truth the rules that we invent and have the strength to uphold will be the laws of existence. We might be persuaded to believe that the thoughtless money grubbing of the cambistas is something more in the nature of necessary evil, the cruelty of survival, natural law. But I cannot help but be petulantly and, yes, stupidly resentful because I want individual strength to uphold the chimeric niceties of a respectful social contract. However, as the saying goes, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Stupidity, not cruelty, is survival's paradigmatic quality; to survive at all costs without a thought as to why is the nihilistic footnote to the world's folly.
And I, sir, have a full belly and the pretensions of a garden to guard my vanity.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." - Arthur C. Clarke

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche

coming off cool and self obsessed

This is the way the job ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Never do anything for money that you can do for any other reason.

Long ago, in a restaurant far, far away, two ladder climbing bumpkins who shared the misfortune of stumbling onto burger flipping's secret entrance, sat discussing the joint natures of youthful self gratification, meaningful, gainful employment and what is owed. The two weeks since the one's first day on the job had squirmed by and he had happily just given his notice, just pushed up the restaurant turnover rate a notch, while the other watched after his departure with curiosity and a disquieting longing for freedom. Having just won himself a new job after being asked in the interview if he was ready to come in from the wasteland and get started, the marginally more successful of the two offered the one who would stay behind this gem of wisdom, formerly passed on to him from a distant relative, and I now in turn offer it to you: "If you want to know how important you are to a place, what kind of difference you have made, what you have contributed and what you will take away when you leave, stick your hand in and out of a bucket of water." Such sad words to the vanity of youth. Such sad words to anyone with an iota of pride left after experiencing the humiliating "boot to the prunes" that is WORK.
"In physics, mechanical work is the amount of energy (potential) transferred by a force (force is what causes a mass to accelerate and is experienced as a push or a pull)." Work, in and of itself, is certainly not an evil. We transfer energy and things happen. Work creates, changes, maintains, destroys. There is no moral judgment I can connect unqualitatively to work. Yet a pleasureable past time is so easily metamorphosed into drudgery by the designation. It seems an opposing force stands in the way of work, altering the carefree pursuit of moving through existence into the consternation of conquest and war. Work is not such a simple expenditure of energy when viewed in its social, interpersonal contexts. It can not simply be done in isolation from agenda, meaning and profundity. Work is performed in conflict and is not employed by the innocent. Definitions are always provided, especially for those who do not provide their own, and they are rarely polite. The force, the boss, the bourgeois, the whip, the lord, the capitalist, the goal, the result, the reason, the purpose, pushes the energy, the wage slave, the proletariat, the plebe, the serf, the capital, the oil, the mere man, the dumb animal. Despite all the rhetoric of progress, peace, prosperity, better living through technology, the reality of work is the transformation of energy to maintain the oligarchical kingdoms of the human. It may not be necessarily so, but it is arbitrarily so, and everyone and everything, aware or not is drawn in.
Opposition enlightens, all else is stasis, but we are all also the victims of our experience. We have become neurotic and unsure, not because life always plays out in the way we imagine, but because it never does. The positive thinking enthusiasts seem impossibly naïve in this respect. Anyone who has moved beyond the ignorant egotism of a baby whose shrieking gets him exactly what he or she wants, understands this is not the project of being, that getting what you want is an infantile conceptualization of -isness. Thinking positively to make the world how you want it is a philosophical recapitulation of consumerism, where the universe becomes a shopping mall and your good vibe is the work you will exchange for well being. And well being is having it all your way. However, as both the Christ and the Dalai Lama point out, it's how we deal with disappointments, the closed shopping mall and the bad purchase, that is at the heart of our spiritual dilemma. It seems impossible that epiphany is grasping firmly to the wants of "me" through all these endless disillusionments and letdowns. Rather it is how we come to terms with that mix of loss and enlightenment, the crushing of the self in the face of reality, the egress of selfishness and the whiny needs of childhood. The dis-illusion is that there is nothing but flux and not that we create reality but that the flux and flow of reality does not exist just for you, it is not all about you.
We have come to believe that work is about our car. And when we start to feel that we are not getting what we deserve for the work we are doing, we take the blame like good sinners, like the guilty betrayers of paradise we are ... it is our sin, our negativity, our non belief in the system and what we can get that has betrayed our desire for a better life. We just need to work a little harder, to believe a little harder, to be a little more positive. There is a reason to all of this. It is hidden in the glorious mind of god. Or ... is it the mad and mindless agenda of the despot.
Work has no goal. It is the mind of man that has cursed our movements with meaning, that has obligated our actions, bound our promise, saddled our initiative, abstracted us from our empathy. And the work we do as a result has destroyed paradise and ruined us.
I have been working in hell for the governor of Oaxaca and his evil empire. I have pulled my hand out of the water. I have made no difference. This world is not about me. I am a convenience onto which propaganda regarding the evils of a liberal, thoughtful society can be plastered, an ugly American despite the maple leafs on my backpack, slothful and arrogant and war mongering and aggressive. I am an alcoholic and a drug addict and I am here to steal the babies of the campesinos for medical experiments. There is no need to ask me what I think, because it is obvious by my skin. I am the oligarch and the despot. I am leaving.

"A hundred years of words and war
Have bred the studied sycophantic bore
And the brutal babies of the violent poor
All now crawling off the dirt farm floor."
Sucommandante, API