DEATH AND SETTLING FOR LESS
DEATH AND SETTLING FOR LESS
Stan Goff
There’s been a lot to remind me of mortality lately. Close calls. Three friends with cancer. Our son going back to Iraq. My mother’s voice in the absence of my father’s. The increasing number of dead animals in the road where Raleigh is trying to become Atlanta.
Yesterday, I was driving down the I-540 outer beltline on my way to run an errand, and there was a huge deer corpse right between two lanes, mutilated by serial impacts and rollovers – no doubt from surprised drivers who reacted to slowly – that has splashed blood-and-flesh patterns down the highway in a kind of grotesque expanding fan-fractal, like an abstract painting – Mandelbrot in blood and flesh. People swerved around it, worrying no doubt about broken bones and punctured tires, each deploying his or her own dissonance-defenses against this collateral damage of urban development.
Just like the old Medieval lithographs, that deer was telling us, “As you are I once was; as I am, you shall be.†But you can’t stop to hear that in the course of a day, or you risk morbid paralysis.
We mark the passage of time with wristwatches and oven timers and – as Eliot noted – with coffee spoons. But even our basis for time, the rotation of the earth, is slowing down, approaching its own death. Even the world’s official timekeepers, with their cesium clocks that measure time in the billionths of a second, have to add leap seconds periodically to compensate for this slowing in the rotation of the earth. The earth itself will die, as surely as that Ococoileus that was being pulverized into the asphalt of I-540.
All the vanities in which we engage to transcend death, like writing, are but a temporary reprieve. These vanities merely leave behind reminders for other mortal homo sapiens that we were here, with only the slightest capacity to really represent the totality of a former existence that has now been swallowed up into a stone-deaf infinity. And as sure as tomorrow, the time will come when the last homo sapiens will go out with that whimper, and the earth’s rotations will decelerate as the planet is dragged by gravity back into the decaying sun.
Never and forever are real. We will never be back; and that is forever. Our lives, our families, our civilizations, our history as a species, the very existence of the earth, will become an invisible footnote without a reader. There is one merciless god and it is the Second Law; and out of that we are able to exist; and out of that we are destined for extinction. No form survives. Ever.
It doesn’t matter how we try to retreat from this – whether into the magic of religion, the soothing delusion of Gaia, or the frantic quest for sensation – the arrow of time travels in one direction only, and it carries us along with it only very briefly.
The passage of time, the god of the Second Law, requires no meaning; and so it bears no meaning. None whatsoever. Meaning-making is confined to its makers, and with their extinction, meaning disappears. It’s no longer necessary. Infinity does not require it. Only human beings ask the question, “Why is there something, and not nothing?†Infinity is in-itself. It requires no outside referent.
The same Second Law exists as a wall before our last-ditch fantasy of escaping the planet. We will never escape the planet. We will die here. Every last one of us will die, and when the last of us goes, we will still be living on earth. You who read this now will not care when that happens, because you will have already ceased to exist… as will I.
Our vessel is so small, and the ocean is so vast.
What’s the point, then, after all?
Well, the point is, even in our universal non-significance, we do exist. It matters a great deal, in the material reality of things, that we are composed of the stuff of dying stars, that the great clock goes only clock-wise, and that we are born and we die according to that Second Law which existed before we ever gave it its juridical identity or a sequence number. It matters to us, if we are writing and reading this.
And it matters, to us, that we exist, so it matters, to us, how we exist.
Infinity doesn’t need an outside referent, because it doesn’t require meaning. But we are meaning-makers because we have to be. It’s our nature every bit as much as it’s the nature of a potato sprout to reach toward light. In the same way that sprout is heliotropic, we are semiotropic. We are compelled to seek and share signs and meanings. It is essential to our very (temporary) material survival.
But it is only through each other that we do this. There is no more basic rebuttal to the myth of individualism than that. You can’t tell the moon it’s the moon. Whatever we sign, signify, give signfi… cance, we must signify for another and in a common language, because we require signs to construct meanings.
Even death itself, or Death, almost a proper noun, a personification, a signifier making something out of the absence of something: Death is more than the absence of life, but the end of life; it says the life happened. I was dead for an infinity before I was born, but I’ll only be called dead, only be assigned a Death, after I have lived – just between us – even though another infinity will swallow that meaning and us with it.
Somewhere in all this is the whole riddle of consciousness. I’m sure someone somewhere has made it all empirically intelligible, with descriptions of us as organisms and descriptions of all the biochemistry of awareness that sets us apart in the world as individuals with the world itself to mediate our intercourse. But that does not explain the experience of subjectivity. It does not. And the physical explanation of subjectivity does not capture the fact that there is still this I-ness and you-ness that exists as a moment-by-moment gestalt, as the mix of memory and movement and reflection and action and affect that exists as a single evolving whole of Experience.
It also doesn’t capture that knowing, that knowledge of time, and that something will take us. Maybe not an externality like a truck on I-540. Maybe an embolus in our cardiac artery, or a set of cells that won’t quit hyper-replicating, or a spontaneous pneumothorax.
The Knowing makes us different, and we couldn’t know were it if not for our symbolic sociality.
We are remarkable really, even prior to the operation of The Knowing.
Ten trillion cells growing out of two, each cell composed of a membrane, cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi complex, mitochondria, lisosome, vacuoles, et cetera. Two cells differentiating into epithelia, connective tissue, three types of muscle, fascia, bones… perfectly organized to make a biped… erythrocytes, leukocytes, vessels to transport them… heart, lungs, kidneys, an alimentary canal, liver, pancreas, diaphragm, reproductive organs… and neurons… can’t forget neurons, because they make up the most remarkable piece of all – a brain.
This is where the real mystery, the deepest paradox, and the greatest sense of cosmic injustice, resides. The brain.
100 billion neurons, each neuron networked with as many as 25,000 other neurons, doing brain-things, regulating temperatures, running an endocrine system, maintaining balance, registering sensation… but human “encephalization,†as it is called, includes an extra helping of cerebral cortex, and within that an even more sophisticated structure called a neocortex, and within that again, a super-sophisticated section called the pre-frontal cortex. There may be more complex structures in the universe, but no one has identified one yet.
And it is in the way we experience this brain and the whole body with it that this complexity becomes self-aware… then cognitively aware, as well as emotionally aware. From two cells, we get all this differentiation, topped off, literally, by this complex computing and emoting powerhouse. This highly coded structure, DNA, passes along instructions that allow this complexity to be replicated, even to the point that there are now well over six billion of these brains still getting enough glucose and oxygen to work.
In this organ, these neural pathways have to be opened like the pathways on which we walk, by using them. Things unfamiliar are grasped with difficulty and “will†– another paradoxical notion.
One of the questions that the brain imposes on itself in what we metaphorically refer to as reflection is: Could this level of complexity really exist without any meaning beyond the operation of fortuitous accidents and natural laws?
In existing as it does, for our survival, it leads us to The Knowing that we will not ultimately survive. And so we tend to reach for the most comforting replies to the question above – that this is really too complex to be an “accident†(which is itself a thing that doesn’t exist independent of consciousness). It seems grotesquely unfair that we get to be the tiniest speck of the universe aware of itself in this special way, but only for a while, and in time all that awareness is extinguished. Yet we only exist at the pleasure of the self same natural laws that allow us to be. The injustice is that this organ allows us to wish.
And it is in wishing, and loving, and “reflecting,†and in our inevitable social intercourse – which includes passing our experience along from generation to generation – that this consciousness, however slippery as a concept, makes us both afraid and transcendent.
What kind of creature is this, that exists at the most entropic and evolved corner within the web of biological being on earth – this thing that has to make meanings? What is our essential condition? Who are we?
I might argue that we are, at our most essential, this thing with The Knowing, but that this essentiality is not nearly enough to explain us to ourselves. Because we are not little islands just because our experience is surrounded by this outsided-ness like a patch of land peeking out of the ocean. We know this intuitively, even when we deny it. We are hard wired to care what others think, to seek that subject-to-subject connection, and The Knowing only makes it that much more urgent. And we are embedded in that outsided-ness.
Which means at some level there is no outside, that this inside-outside thing is illusory.
Some of that epithelial tissue I mentioned earlier is devitalized, keratinized into a kind of armor or vestigal tool. Hair and nails. We shear them off with hardly a thought, having grown them out of our vitalized tissue, seen them as dead matter, and we send these bits of our former selves out into the greater generality. The hair actually rains off of us, as do epidermal cells, bits of us in our breath, mucus, urine, feces, all carrying molecules away even as those same molecules were drawn into this organism, this dialectic of form and function. Yet the consciousness remains, even if only, sometimes, as memories of memories.
What we see and hear is a dance between us and the Outside, and exchange of signs. And there is no more engaging something on the outside than others. Without them to acknowledge us, shape us, hold us against The Knowing, we suffer a starvation of the consciousness, a terrible deadly wasting.
Somewhere in all that is a special caring – distorted as it has become by organized power – that we ineffectually represent with the linguistic marker “love.†But I don’t want to give the impression that because this thing we call love exists that I am about to be sentimental, that I am about to sugarcoat this account with “life is beautiful, we are the world†Pollyanna optimism. That’s not true. Life is cruelly hard for many, blindly unfair, a sequence of struggles to escape pain and seek refuge, rest, comfort… and to escape The Knowing too.
Annie Dillard once said, “Evolution loves death more than it loves you and me.†How right she was. It loves pain and deformity, too. It tests a million mutations that end in tens of millions of tiny horrors before it gets something right, matches something successfully to a niche. Then it could be a brighter baby, or it could be a human immunodeficiency virus.
Jesse Helms gets to be an affluent octogenerian, while a four-year-old child is killed in a car by an airplane that overshoots a runway.
Don’t look for meaning there. Definitely don’t look for justice… or karma.
The only meaning is what we make, and we make it in the teeth of blind indifference, and we only make it with each other.
I have to be emphatic about this, because if I’m not it can be taken as an equivocation… another of countless denials. I have to say it as starkly as possible – this is no game.
Because there is no pat answer to the question, “Why bother?â€
Why not just take what you can when you can and do as you damn well please; make your philosophy the philosophy of getting over, getting high, getting laid, getting getting getting… because once you quit getting, the getting is gone for good.
This is a serious question, and it deserves a better answer for serious people who are not buying it when they are offered a carrot and stick bribe of eternity – take your choice, heaven or hell. Don’t tell me I’m not really going to die! I may think I need to hear this, but I don’t. It will make me irresponsible – just as irresponsible as the nihilist who goes on and on about carpe diem while he turns others into instruments.
The universe is beyond vast, and life is trapped in profound indifference, unpredictability, and iron law… all at the same time. And we are what we are, signifiers looking to one another, anchored in the stream of an endless night by these tiny intangible threads of caring and love. The minute we allow ourselves to surrender that, in our service of a world now reified and commodified, the minute we surrender that intersubjectivity and all the potentially painful vulnerabilities that go with it, we are lost to ourselves. We have surrendered our humanity… which will die at any rate, no doubt, but it’s all we have.
I have this grandson, three years old, and I have allowed myself to love him so much that I know if I lose him I will fall apart… I will cease to embrace and defend my own existence… at least, that’s how deep the vulnerability feels.
I could cut myself off, which is a common price paid for living in a reified world, most common for men who are taught to objectify others as a defense mechanism against this vulnerability. And I have in the past. Cut myself off. Reduced another in my own sight to the mere-ness of an insensate object – even taken life that way, objectifying to really objectify. This cutting oneself off to avoid vulnerability is another paradox of our existence. It is only in risking feeling loss that we avoid losing our own humanity. That is a very high price… even in the larger scheme of things, since the notion of a “cost†(there is an exchange metaphor if you ever wanted one) is moot outside our heads and the intangible bonds are between us signifiers and meaning-makers.
This is settling for less than we might experience in this exceedingly brief time to be alive. Not less sensation, but less depth of understanding – because we are pieces of the universe now self-aware.
It may be that the universe as a whole is somehow aware, though I can’t concede that the action of action, the fact that all things at some level respond to all other things is necessarily proof that there is a single one-ness from which we may be divorced for the time we are alive, trapped perhaps inside this organic vessel with our ten trillion cells and our big fleshy , ultra-networked brains, and cut off from some vast unity that is aware of itself simply because it is something and not nothing.
But for what I do know, and that is a very small thing, I believe that there is something tragic (and this is about as human as it gets), tragic… about living a life of perfect obedience to others, to sensations alone, and to mere appetites… when there is this connection that is not guaranteed in a world where we might be one of the casualties of evolution, but where it is possible to make that connection where we look into each other’s eyes and say without saying that we are so tiny and temporary in all that infinity but that together we can “make one out of more than one,†and hold each other in that sure recognition – you are here and I am here with you – in the howling winds of that brief night.
Anything else is settling for less.
This is where politics walks onto the stage.
These relations we have as signifiers and meaning-makers, and as creatures that don’t merely occupy a niche, but construct them by altering the externality, have come through history to be characterized by power… structured power, and power that permits certain groups of people to perpetuate the starkest miseries in the lives of others in order to sustain their own comfort and denial and the triumphal hedonism that goes with this.
There are levels of engagement that embrace intersubjectivity, that “make one out of more than one.†That engagement is taking responsibility for one another and our selves, of being in the world together for one another instead of with one another, or worse, against one another.
The point of reference is not outside us at all, but between us. That the nihilist may win all arguments at the end of the day is irrelevant.
And the reality of life, all life, under any and all systems of social organization for human beings is one in which unpredictability will always be a part, in which The Knowing will always be a part, and in which the highest striving will not be for an unreachable Utopia, but hard, Sisyphean work to minimize suffering, and maximize the opportunity to love.
History presents all its participants with a time and place and circumstance, and our nature as signifiers and intergenerational meaning-makers has made us participants in that very evolution that loves death and disfigurement more than it loves you and me.
We now live in the most reified society in history, a society that in an orgy of commodification has made it immensely difficult not to settle for less. We will settle for alienation from nature, and accept images and commercial fantasies of nature instead. We will settle for alienation from one another, and accept our mutual objectification for superficial pleasure and profit instead. We will settle for alienation from our very selves, and accept the anesthesia of manufactured compulsions instead. In many cases, because we simply don’t know any better… in some cases because our own socialization is so deeply rooted and affectively resonant that we haven’t the strength to fight it.
This struggle, the social combat, to change society, is the highest form of engagement in the general struggle to ensure one can be made of more than one, be that two lovers who’s hearts have harmonized with the merger of their bodies, or in that inexplicable sense of embedded communities, or in the unification and mobilization that is part of the great social revolutions.
In the larger scheme of things, it will cause less than a ripple in the universe, true. But that is not the issue. No meanings are made there. They are made between us…
Sister. Brother. Lover. Comrade.
CL:
Stan,
5 February 2006, 5:42 pmYou’ve beautifully wordsmithed an epiphany about life I had a few years ago that spawned a direction change that carried me away from the road to Iraq to my present path that this afternoon has me going over development/poverty relief indicators for the Lao PDR. Thank you.
V. Maris:
One of two possibilities, either consciousness is the product of purely material entities, a kind of epiphenomenon, or consciousness is situated at an ontological level other than that of purely material phenomena. In the latter case, to bring in the brain as fundamental is to confuse the power or capacity with the instrument. the former thesis is the evolutionist one: material entities have “evolved,” in such wise that their increasingly complex combinations give rise “eventually,” not merely to a capacity to be a vehicle for a mode of consciousness, but to consciousness itself. As a French biologist said, to believe that one must surely have to have been “touched by evolutionist grace.”
As for “investigating” or “researching” consciousness by “empirical” means, what could be more vain? This is classically termed “the eye cannot see itself.” Consciousness–or intelligence–is everywhere, since in essence consciousness and being coincide: the plant turning towards the sun is a form of consciousness, as are the animal instincts; in their own ways, they are infallible. As for human consciousness, it is characterized by reason; but reason alone cannot operate in a void; it requires data. The idea that data can only be empirical, that is, limited to the activity of the senses, is a perfectly gratuitous assumption, and one which in the final analysis leads to absurdity; it amounts to saying absolutely that the real is confined to a perfectly relative ontological “slice”, to a fragment. In reality, it is intelligence in act, which lends all possible certitude to reason, and this surpasses the plane of mental activity and cannot be situated in time as a succession; the act of apprehension is unitary, whereas the firing of neurons is simply an unresolved multiplicity.
Human consciousness is essentially objective, as is shown by the very ideas of truth and justice. If we can objectify ourselves, that is because consciouness is essentially free and unlimited and in no way limited to the human; and it is because a ray of the unlimited real–the universally real–penetrates us at our core. Consciousness is unitary: “horizontally this means that “only I am I,” empirically speaking. But we easily see –thanks to the objectivity of our intelligence–that the empirical experience is belied by the fact that there are countless “only I am I’s.” To be able to step out of oneself, so to speak, in an act of generosity or justice or self-knowledge, is a quintessentially human act. The horizontal multiplicity of egos is like the numberless bodies of water which reflect the “vertical” reality of the sun, or like a ray that seems to follow us as we walk along the shoreline. Consciousness in itself is unlimited, but in relation to a subtle–not material–plane of reflection, it determines an individual being. All this is part of the immemorial wisdom of mankind, but few wish to hear of it.
5 February 2006, 9:55 pmStan:
Is it part of the immemorial wisdom of womankind, too?
5 February 2006, 11:15 pmJ. Jacobson:
At Deathbed
Life is like a bubble–
Some eighty years, a spring dream.
Now I’ll throw away this learhger sack,
A crimson sun sinks on the west peak!
(Chinese Poems, T’aego, 1301-1382)
================================
Sir, have you forgotten the promise
you made in your mother’s womb,
to die before you die?
When will you remember
what you intended?
Don’t let your donkey wander loose!
It will stray into your neighbor’s
saffron garden. Think of the damage
it might do, and the punishment!
Who then will carry you naked
to your own death?
Lalla Yogishwari
=====================================
Madness, the way they gallop off to foreign shores!
Turning to the One Mind, I find my Buddhahood,
Above self and others, beyond coming and going.
This will remain when all else is gone.
anzan (1819-1892)
5 February 2006, 11:16 pmConsumer:
Isolation of the individual and the “every man for himself” mentality not only keeps the superficial consumerism running smoothly, it also atomizes us and makes us less caring. Less caring of those around us and ultimately of ourselves.
People try to fill that gaping emptiness in their hearts by any of various means, be it mind-altering substances, pornography, or fashionable consumerism.
It’s so easy to feel despondent, to rue that humanity is barreling headlong to destruction. I feel powerless everyday, and this has affected everything from my state of mind to the decisions I make.
The Greeks said that when Pandora opened the box, all the evils that plague humanity were released. But there was one more thing in the box that was released: Elpitha. Hope. Misogynistic overtones aside, this story always struck me as brilliant.
Sites like this one make me feel hope, despite the cynicism that has infected my heart.
6 February 2006, 12:00 amTL:
E. A. Robinson had captured the inner bankruptcy of the ostentatious idle rich, which he contrasted with the despair of the people in their factories:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace;
In fine we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
E. A. Robinson -
When the Israeli bulldozer operator purposefully ran over Rachel Corrie as she stood between it and a Palestinian home, like others worldwide who saw that picture briefly flashed in the news, I was struck by her bravery and dedication to peace and human rights. She stood fast in the face of death, hoping to save that home. Last night, the memory of Richard Cory rose up through the mists, and the irony of two people with names so similar standing for such different values and messages prompted me to try to paraphrase E. A. Robinson:
When Rachel Corrie came to be a shield, we people under the occupation loved her:
She was a gentle person with nerves of steel, a visionary with common touch allure.
And she was always modestly arrayed, and she was always human when she talked;
She gathered friends when she said, “Shalom,†and she sparkled when she walked.
And she was rich - yes, richer than a queen…rich in spirit and full of inner grace,
In fact, we thought that she was everything, for she was helping us to stay in place.
So we hoped and prayed all through the day…feared for wells and homes… lived in dread.
Then Rachel Corrie, crushed by a brutal dozer blade…left us, with a halo round her head. tl
Simon and Garfunkel expanded on the poem and further established Richard Cory’s legacy with their haunting lyrics set to music. Would that a current artist would do the same for Rachel. tl
6 February 2006, 1:17 amV. Maris:
Re: Stan’s comment: Yes, it is part of the wisdom of womankind as well. The V. in my name stands for Veronica, by the way. Personally, I am not touchy about the word “mankind.” It is clear it refers to all human beings. I note with pleasure the poem by Lalla Yogiswari, submitted above. She was a great Kashmiri woman saint, revered to this day.
6 February 2006, 1:39 amelaina:
Dangit, Stan, ya made me cry.
6 February 2006, 3:42 amLinda Shaw:
Stan,
It is in each of us both to question and despair. Ever since man began to despair, he began to question why he was despairing. The older we become, and the more we learn to love, the more we question.
Sometimes we make great claims of understanding, and then we question ourselves anew and realize, to our horror, that we are capable of obliterating ourselves and everything we love.
What awesome power…so dangerous. Is it foolish to step out of that and make a new pact with Faith? What is foolish about simply accepting the day we have been given like a child accepts it? To do with all our might what is put before us on this one day?
That “child-likeness” that you see in your grandson is the only purity that any of us has. It should cause a great fear and trembling in each of us.
Reality: I’m an old woman…rambling and fearful for my children. Forgive me.
6 February 2006, 10:18 amElliott:
>Dangit, Stan, ya made me cry.
Seriously.
“hard, Sisyphean work to minimize suffering, and maximize the opportunity to love.” This goal is rarely trumpeted in political discourse. It seems an obvious conclusion that the less stress and burden one is harnessed with the greater an oppurtunity one has to value their fellow human beings and themselves as the eneffable wonders we are rather than obstacles (and tools) in a cruel game that MUST be played despite the unfair rules. Is this simply the understated goal of all earnest political discussion? Shit… I don’t even know what my point was going to be now. It’s just frustrating to be moved by something, but not gleam any specific plan of action from it. I’ve been falling into the haze of general political skepticism. Not like, “will socialist democracies work,” more along the lines of “will what I and others are doing right now bring about a better society, based on whatever blueprint!” Sometimes it seems quite difficult to “increase the oppurtunities for love” in my own life, how do I do this for thousands, millions, billions of other people? How do we create some kind of grassroots organization, some sort of “meta-cult” of love, that both works joy in the lives of others as well as its dedicated members. Political work is so often performed under the banner of “sacrifice now, reward later”. And even if a life of Sisyphean toil does not reward us now….surely in the lives of “others” we will “live on.” I know, this all sounds like me trying to get out of, well, that Sisyphean work, and it is. But I’m just saying it because this is the excuse that so many won’t even bother to vocalize, the masses of people who have cautiosly jaded themselves to images of starving children and refugess they occasionaly come across. There are two obvious solutions; First is to offer moral absolution to the jaded citizen for the largest donation we can convince them to handover, whether that is money, time etc. This at least causes him/her to admit to themselves that they are not THAT jaded and that they DO CARE. But this method has obvious shortcomings. The other solution… the meta-cult of love…or in other words, a real meaningful community. Not bullshit dogma handed down from above, but a shifting intersubjectivity that nonetheless has one constant goal: “to minimize suffering, and maximize the opportunity to love.” So many political ‘thinkers’, from the mainstream parties to radicals seem intent on building a better mousetrap, when really we need to ‘building’ better people; in the sense that we are continiously being regenerated on cellular and psychological level. Meanwhile what we take into our physical and mental selves determines the quality of that constantly reinventing never static form of our own being. Now that that’s all typed I guess it’s pretty obvious, but my point is, can’t we be honing this process into a fucking Art somehow? Can we do that without looking like some crazy “self proclaimed messiah” jerkoffs? Can we even do it at all? From the little experience I’ve had trying “to make a difference” the best things people have come up with are forever on center stage charismatic leaders (who many people can’t help but become cynical about) and badly written chants. Freakin CHANTS. We could at least sing! (ok, sometimes people sing, but generally not at meetings) Man… I’ve really rambled on, but I can’t post it after all that.
6 February 2006, 11:22 amLinda J.:
Very interesting that I find Stan’s post on a day when I am steeling myself to go to a meeting and argue against endorsing another ANSWER rally on March 18. I just don’t see where another demo will plant the roots we need to have to go up against the onslaught of injustice and violence that continues to bubble over out of the cauldron of the military industrial complex. How can the implicit connections between people who are either outraged or mildly anxious be made?
The vets and MFSO march has left me feeling left behind. I’m sure those folks on the march will make strong connections and some folks up here in the upper left corner of the US are trying to figure out ways to support the march. Guess I should quit whining and help (which I will).
On an individual level, activisim is the way I connect to the outside world, so in a way I have no choice. But The Knowing compels me to search for ways that will guarantee the “minimizing the suffering.” I’m worried that the balance has somehow been tipped so that the guarantee is unavailable; and maybe even just the chance.
6 February 2006, 5:28 pmStan:
Hi Linda,
There is much more going on than a march, and I want to emphasize that.
I’m as frustrated as you with the awful delusion on the left that if we keep stuff stirred up enough by demonstrating that some magical process will take hold which causes eveyone to suddenly see that this or that group is the one true vanguard leading us all to the new utopia.
I’m just as frustrated by the much larger group that thinks everything will be okay if we just get rid of those bad Republicans.
In conjunction with the march in the Gulf Coast, for which the identity of the marchers as anti-war veterans and hurricane survivors is the best guarantor we have of achieving a lot of visibility, we are going to ask other people around the country to locally go after their Congresspeople with something that might be called a “Not One More Dime” campaign. The latest Pentagon budget request is outrageous enough to aise hell about, and the upcoming election is making Congresspeople feel averse to talking about the war at all.
This is why right now, pre-election, is the right time strategically to force the Democrats — the Republicans will be very disciplined in supporting the war — to speak publicly about the war and justify their position with their own popular base. Around 60% of the country is now solidly against the war, and the momentum is still moving in that direction. It will only stop when that wall is hit where no one is left except the worst reactionaries and Islamophobes. If that final count is 70%, just a hypothetical number, then there is little doubt that the majority of those anti-war populations will be predisposed, if they vote, to vote Democrat.
The supreme irony is that they could still lose… in fact, will probably lose.
The power that the antiwar movement has right now we will lose on November 8th this year — this is a very important point for the antiwar movement to understand, we will lose our power over one of the two major parties after November, and then have NO influence on either unless we are prepared for open rebellion (an idea that is not repugnant, but doubtful among an overfed population).
The Democratic leadership is trying to disappear the war. They could actually win on the war issue, but this is also a leadership that I predict will deliver the Democratic Party one of its most astonishing defeats this year. They did exaclty that in 2004 by taking the war off the table as a political issue. They will do it again.
It is a horribly cynical and immoral strategy, in addition to being stupid. Those of us whose loved ones have been ther three times like me know just how immoral this maneuvering with the lives of our children is.
We have one chance to counter it. We have to convince members of Congress to stop voting more money for the war… and we have to mount that campaign BEFORE the election. And it has to target primarily (not exclusively) Democrats. To do that, we have to make a credible threat that enough of the Democrats winning margin will be withdrawn by staunch antiwar voters if they fail to take the high road on this life or death issue.
So the New Orleans march is one component of this campaign. No one is left out. We also need support (grin). We want you to find those fence-sitting or pro-war Democrats and camp on their office lawn, demonstrate in front of their houses, and occupy their offices to the point of arrest if necessary. We want you to shine a kleig light on their hypocrisy.
I will refrain from using my cockroach in the sink metaphor here, because there are a few very principled and antiwar Dems.
On the queston of tipping balances, that’s why this is Sisyphean. No guarantees. We fight the best we can, and that’s all we can do. Che said revolutionaries are driven by feelings of love. Win or lose, we fight for what we love, no?
That’s how we answer the nihilist, who only wins his argument after there is no one around to know he won. We tell him, when he says it is all in vain, that the vanity of it is irrelevant. We are human beings. When we are fighing, we are loving.
Stay well and strong, sister.
6 February 2006, 6:23 pmLinda Jansen:
Hi, Stan. Thanks. I needed that, as the saying goes. We’ll do the best we can at the meeting tonight to think of some creative ways to pin those (blood)sucking Democrats. You were already on the agenda. March on!
6 February 2006, 9:29 pmJulian Real:
Thanks, Stan, for that, and for all you do, dear humanitarian.
As I recall, Alice Walker has a beautiful piece in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, in which she rails against humanity for being so, so cruel, and wishes, in her pain and rage, that the world would just blow up, or be consumed by nuclear holocaust, but then she remembers the smell of fresh peaches, and enough other things to know that life is worth living, even in these dire conditions. She and I are lucky to be able to write of such things, and not be doubled over in sickness due to drinking waste water, or perishing from famine, or having our homes blown up off American shores by U.S. bombs, or U.S. homes being washed out by hurricane waters that would not have come so far inland had wetlands not been destroyed.
Responding to some of the comments above, I was tempted to ask Veronica Maris: if the term “mankind” works fine for you, can you appreciate that when used in public discourse, it doesn’t work so well for those of us who are weary to the bone of seeing terms (and the non-verbal realities out of which they grow), which turn women into men, or make man = human, which makes woman = Other? I grew up invisible, in real ways, as many of us did, particularly for being neither a boy nor a girl.
And my next thought/feeling was “What is the intention of me asking this question of Veronica?” In every action, we can build toward or destroy community (of course communities requiring the systematised hatred of others need not be nurtured). We can create the possibility of love (respect, justice, care, concern, compassion, honesty). We can make a tiny interpersonal space on this tiny Earth, with its even tinier, fragile human beings, and so many other sentient beings, where love can happen. I just kissed the dog I am with for a few weeks, on her head and neck, whispering to her that I love her. She registers this, in some fashion, as she looks at me deeply, and relaxes her four-legged body. The temporary release of one’s soul from systematised suffering or personal suffering (often one and the same, but not always) is sometimes enough for someone to go on into the mysterious and wondrous night of life, for another day. And new days bring new possibilities, even inside systems that will not condone or welcome them.
I am hurt, as from a slice from a sharp knife, when I see man used for human and mankind used instead of humankind. I am hurt because of that non-place of woman-as-human, that oft-maintained gap in the English lexicon, which is but a pale written or verbal reminder of how that really plays out in the lives of women who are not taken as seriously as men, and worse. Every woman I know has been seriously punished for not being a man, and because she has not been seen as fully human by men.
My and their hurt, my and their invisibility, and the harm that comes to women who are seen and treated as something “other” than “man”, is not necessarily made real in asking you, Veronica, whether you care how the use of that term effects me or women I know and love.
Please take this moment to realise that those terms have real effects when used publicly, socially, such as in a space/place like this. And later someone else did that here too: Linda Shaw, used the term “man” to mean “humanity”. So Linda and Veronica, at this moment, I ask you please to not give in to the dominant lexicon which renders too many human lives contorted by patriarchy, through force and words, which are often one and the same.
As someone who was called lots of names in my early years, there is no meaningful distinction I can make between the two: hurtful words are harmful actions. Read “Only Words” by Catharine A. MacKinnon if you question this, or read it regardless, because it is an amazing little book.
I hope your lives are going well, and that your health is fine.
Mine is not so fine, but not so terrible either. I have a lot to be grateful for and, at the same time, a lot to struggle with: such is life for the privileged among us. I have realised that any forms of invisibilising women-as-humans feels like violence to my soul for one reason: because it is a form of violence to humanity. That means many women and I experience a lot of violence daily: but I am currently spared the more horrendous forms of it. That’s one of the things I can be grateful for.
I am wondering if you could help alleviate that suffering in my life and in the women’s lives who also care deeply about this matter, who also see terms like “mankind” as invisibilising or hurtful, or infuriating because of all that abuse that comes along with the ability to say things that mean both men and women, but only say man. It gets clearer when we think of me calling Stan a “manitarian” to mean what I actually did call him above.
It’s a small and large thing to ask–that you care about this enough to genuinely make a change in your speech and writing. It’s a lot to ask. But then we all have a lot to ask of each other, if we are to build and nurture a humane, global, diverse community, where women worldwide are seen and spoken of as fully human.
Thanks for your contribution to this discussion, Veronica and Linda.
Julian
7 February 2006, 12:18 amChris Daniels:
Stan, everybody, how beautiful this is.
It comes at a critical time for me. I’m wrestling with theory and praxis, aesthetics and politics. I’m a poet and a translator of Brazilian poetry. I’m doing my utmost to understand radical politics.
I’ve been trying to understand translation as a practice, trying to work it out for myself, trying to transform my practice through my own struggle against all the lies that were driven into my head from day one. Although I never post comments here, I read 100% percent of every post and all the comments, so I feel a part of things. It’s all been so helpful to me.
Thanks very much, all of you.
In solidarity,
7 February 2006, 7:12 pmChris
Julian Real:
Hey Chris.
I just wanted to recommend a book I thought might be helpful to you, called Sexual/Textual Politics, by Toril Moi.
Good luck with your work!
Julian
7 February 2006, 9:53 pmRobert B. Livingston:
Dear Stan Goff,
Is it any coincidence that one such as yourself who has such a stubborn and powerful interest in the problems of war and peace should compose such a beautiful and thoughtful essay on the challenge of being human? I am naturally reminded of my favorite author, Erich Fromm, who wrote: “today there is only one concern: the question of war and peace…. If we should all perish… it will not be because man was not capable of becoming human, or that he was inherently evil; it would be because the consensus of stupidity has prevented him from seeing reality and acting upon the truth.”
And what is the truth? Possibly a dimension beyond our mental grasp– a function all the great minds have sought — some perhaps coming closer to it than others? (E.F. Schumacher had some interesting things to say about that).
Yet Fromm believed that truth is primarily a matter of character, not intelligence: “the courage to say /no/, to disobey the commands of power and public opinion, to cease being asleep and to become human; to wake up and lose the sense of helplessness and futility.”
To have hope rid of illusions. As one commentator here wrote, hope arrived from Pandora’s box with all the plagues.
Fromm wrote c. 1962: “reason cannot be effective unless man has hope and belief. Goethe was right when he said that the deepest distinction between various historical periods is that between belief and disbelief, and when he added that all epochs in which belief dominates are brilliant, uplifting and fruitful, while those in which disbelief dominates vanish because nobody cares to devote himself to the unfruitful.” A little dense, perhaps, but do you see where that is going?
Fromm is a very important writer to me. I wish his books were more popular than they are. After 9/11, his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness took on an added significance for me– it has helped me to feel my way through this benighted and confusing period of time in which we now find ourselves. I would go further to say, that Fromm’s influence on my thinking has steered me to writers such as yourself. (Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that candles burn brightest in the dark.)
Sincerely,
Robert B. Livingston
10 February 2006, 6:31 amSan Francisco
(referenced: Fromm, Erich. “Credo,” Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud. Continuum. pp. 174 - 182.)
Neilcaff:
I started reading this the day you posted it on Monday only to be interupted by the news the young brother of a dear friend of mine had died in an accident. I only got as far as the point about how insignificant we are in the greater scheme of things. I think this point was brought home quite forefully. One minute I was thinking about the mundane things in my life (blank cheques to infinity anyone?) the next I’m struggling with the difficulties of getting a flight to a remote part of Ireland in under 12 hours.
10 February 2006, 11:26 amI’m still surprised by my own feeling at the time. I didn’t know the deceased that well although I am very close to his sister. It was partly because I knew how much his family loved him that I was upset but mostly because he was a young man in the prime of his life, always full of life and energy whenever I met him and now all of a sudden he’d been erased in some random happening.
Since I returned today I’ve read what you’ve said about our relatonships with each other giving our existance meaning. It crystalised things I was feeling at the funeral but couldn’t articulate (I guess this must be what you mean about the difference between knowing things intellectually and viscerally). The funeral was in a small farming community. It sent a shockwave through the town and countryside. The turn out was massive but I could almost feel the bonds between all the mourners. The deceased himself had been well liked around the town and the family were well respected. Not because they were sucessful or influential or some kind of paragons of virtue. Simply because if you needed a hand with anything one of them would surely do what was needed. The beautiful thing for me to see was how so many people in the community broke their backs to help the family in their grief because they had been helped by some member of the family before. I think these bonds were always a latent thing expressed as pleasantries in conversation and such in normal times but it seemed that when everyone had The End viscerally presented to them its as if those bonds sprung to life to wrap around each other.
I hope I’m sentamentalising a tragedy but what you wrote in the second half of your piece Stan really resonated with what I’ve seen in the last few days.
Neilcaff:
Last sentence should say I hope I’m NOT sentamentalising… etc
10 February 2006, 11:34 amBob:
The Nihilist and Theocrat both insist to know the truth about what they have nary a clue. In reaction to the fundamentalists it is easy to think that the only answers are yes, no, and not sure.Here are so many other possibilities and a few are at least partially discoverable.
When we find and answer a previous unknown it is almost always (at least in part) an unexpected possibility, and an incomplete answer that produces more questions than answers. There is no reason to think this is any less so with the answers we do not have. The Musashi “no-style” style of reacting to the reality rather than any preconception or plan (though not without planning and deep understanding)is a difficult path but the one I am trying to favor.
Your Philosophical long view is its own irrelevancy, the moments stack upon each other, but the memories and results in you and others last far beyond their place in the stack. When the earth is gone, no one aware then (another species or planet) will likely know or care. But in the much nearer term there are many who could be affected for good or not.
In a much nearer political reality the democracy we knew (such as it was) has been overthrown. Many liberals are thinking that the next elections will be a slam dunk, the corruption is out in the open, the polls are setting new records.
Just like the last three elections the next will go supprisingly Republican even though the exit polls will again likely go heavily Democrat. THe MSM will tut tut about the inaccuracy of polls and how they should be abandonded. But what are real Patriots to do?
Where elections reflect exit polls, third party ideas are worse than futile, not because the Democrats are good enough, but because the two party system is like the laws of thermodynamics, untill there is not a winner take all, the math is unassailable. Even if the third party got 80% of votes that would be Democrat, both would be split enough to lose. The only option is to become the Democrats, and that means a long fight to reclaim the party. but that is the first step to changing the rules so that such is not necessary.
THe Bigger quandry is when the exit polls are not similar to any vote count. Then there are only two bad options. Both are ruinous for all. The Iraqi way is the way expected by the Bushists and the way they are prepared for.
The Velvet way will be very long against a propaganda drowning of the reality. Both King and Gandi were supported by a free press that was eager to announce the conflict and take pictures. Also now there are technologies Hitler would have wet dreams about.
In short we are truly F**Ked, and will take a long fight by really creative people ready to endure much horror before it turns around. It is small wonder so many Democrats quale in the breech.
11 February 2006, 8:40 pmJorge:
The Feminist Mistake
Heard this morning that Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW), died yesterday at 85.
NPR interviewed Eleanor Smeal who worked with Friedan to start NOW. Smeal of course eulogized Friedan. She praised Friedan’s legacy and lauded her as (I quote from memory) “a giant of the twentieth century.”
Yes, like Joseph Stalin.
And the comparison is not histrionic. Since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared open season on the unborn by making abortion legal through all nine months of pregnancy, 42 million unborn American children have been stifled—with their mothers’ consent. Friedan was one of the voices who helped enable this maternal self-immolation and mass murder.1 While there is more than likely some silver lining to Friedan’s influence (as with almost anything), what can redeem the deaths of so many innocent lives—not to mention the social disintergration accompanying the dissolution of the family?2
I wasn’t surprised when Ms Smeal mentioned Friedan’s support for “gay rights” from 1978. If women are equivalent to men and if sexual differences are exploitative, then why not let men exploit other men sexually? As Marx’s friend Engels said so many years ago: it’s all about power anyway.3
As we all must, Ms Friedan has passed from this earth to her eternal reward. I’ll resist the urge to lead a chorus of “Ding dong! The Witch Is Dead,” but I can’t help observing that her passing inspires hope that her baneful influence will similarly recede into the past, laid to rest among the antiquated ideologies that made the twentieth century such a nightmare.
Notes
1. Friedan wasn’t initially pro-abortion (she had to be persuaded by the founders of NARAL of the consistency of abortion with her anti-feminine positions), but she did so early enough in the abortion “rights” movement to have made a substantial difference. The first feminists, who valued the truly feminine, were naturally pro-life.
2. More on Fredan and on the tremendous importance of motherhood: Mothers Know Best.
3. The natural question to ask Engels then is “what power do you hope to gain by this observation?” Logically, the ideology is self-defeating.
18 February 2006, 11:57 pmJorge:
Above from the Real Physics blog.
18 February 2006, 11:58 pmMelissa:
It is good to read your article and then other people’s reactions to it. It makes me feel understood and understanding.
19 February 2006, 3:13 amfrank:
Didn’t know where to post, but I’ll start here; My lady was robbed at gunpoint last night by five little shits who snuck up behind her and smashed her in the head with a pistol. One of them grabbed her from behind and the smallest of them shoved the pistol into her chest and demanded her money. She told them that she didn’t have any cash, so they snatched her purse and smashed her in the face with the gun, like five fucking times. She was talking to me on her cellphone when this happened, while I was two crow miles away, so you can imagine the rage I felt when I heard her cry out. I’m ready to kill.
28 February 2006, 1:51 pmIt won’t happen, but I’ve been jumped twice in ten years here, and never in my life did I think that this would happen to her. She was the one who turned me on to your writing. A little background is in order. She is a brown girl, a writer in grad school, social justice being her prime interest. Her parents emigrated here from Sri Lanka in the 70s and set-up shop in Watts. Her baby crib was the top dresser drawer in her parents bedroom.
I’m a white guy from NJ, spent 4 years with 3/505pir, moved to the west coast a little over fifteen years ago, working in the trades since I was fifteen.
So, what I am I supposed to think about five teenagers who think it’s all cool and “gangsta” to beat the shit out of a 5′2″ girl on her way home from school? How am I supposed to move forward in my perception of this world of color? Why the fuck did these punks have to hit my girl? Why?! Who teaches them that this is cool?! I’m fucking furious about the issue of violence against women by men. What do I do now? Grab my mossberg and go headhunting? Stand outside on grand Ave in oakland and say, “If you commit an act of violence against a woman, then, in reality, you’re just a big fucking pussy!” What? Yell at them-curse out their parents? Break every finger slowly? Cut their dicks off? What is the solution to this. I couldn’t lay a hand on these kids, because I’d wind up killing them. It’s said that violence begets violence, but my lady and I do not deserve this. Easy to see why someone in Baghdad would feel the same way against our country.
Jim Withey:
I don’t believe everything everybody says about alot of things.
9 May 2006, 12:13 pmMy general approach to life is to consider the information and opinions I receive very carefully in order to make the best choices. Let me explain.
I do not agree with everything that Stan Goff or anyone else says. I think this article has many good sentiments expressed, but I am unconvinced that the basic premise (my interpretation) is true.
Even though I am not a scientist, I believe I have enough general understanding of science and our world to be confident that scientists are not infallible, or at the end of their dicoveries. I hope I never foget that.
I am conscious enough right now and hopefully for as long as possible to believe that humans are not relegated to some depressing “fading out” fate that might have been stated in this article. To be honest with you, I think it’s quite possible for humans to eventually leave this planet and explore space. Of course we have to survive our conflicts in order to do so. How long humans can extend life based on their understanding of the unverse we don’t know. I just don’t think we should believe that our efforts to raise children for a better future has somedefinite ending point.
The decisions we make here and now all effect the future progress of human life (and other life as well). To all those who court a future of despair and negativity, I justly say “Ciao”. That being said, criticism adds to our health as we find our bearings on our compass.
I appreciate the chance to contibute to the debate, and for that I thank the open forum you’ve provided. Best to everyone from the Evergreen State. I think I’ll still use the y instead of the ee at the end of my name so potential employers who aren’t progressive can’t google me and reject me.
Emerson:
So much for the infamous and nefarious “death clock” web site. When I had a Myspace webpage I had this self-proclamed “goddess” on there that tried to “motivate” (but it was more like frighten) everyone into “achieving” their dreams before the “clock” ran out like you absolutly HAD to do it THAT day…”or else”. It was absolutly insane. Only very few of us get to have that “one hit wonder”, hit that home run in the World Series, or win the lotto.
It was enough that we won the spermozoa trout race to fertilize our mother’s egg to get born into this world. Some of us have to go through shit to get to the gold, some just get shit and that’s it.
It’s said that by the time you’re 4 years old, you already decide what you’re going to be. I fell in love with music about that age and I ended up being a damn good guitar player, that’s done a few things that a lot don’t necessicarily do, having experience in all types of music. I live in Orlando Fl. and by a silly course of events last weekend I had an opportunity to sit in with a very well known recording act that was in town to promote their lastest c.d. with an unplugged concert set. These guys are young and here I am in my 50’s “on paper” playing with these young hot guns. ..ALL BY CHANCE.
If I never get any closer to “the big time” it’ll be all right, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve lived the life of a “rock star” the only difference between me and them is the money and that, in the end, you can’t take with you. You gotta love your life and stay true to yourself, and that’s it, because it’s a big enough job being a sucessful human being.
22 June 2008, 11:28 pm