American Serfdom

The future composition of the Supreme Court is the most important civil rights cause of our time.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/scalia-death-2016-implications

In the times of Nikolai Gogol, one could work for the State and by doing such become eligible for hereditary nobility. I want you to imagine being a serf then, in Russia, around 1835. Be a serf and imagine you had a voice, and with that voice, imagine that you could bring about change in the way the Regime worked. Imagine that you and other serfs, all of you together, could with your collective voices change the way the Tsar went about affairs of the State. Imagine all of you felt you had had a say in that.

When I read articles such as the one forwarded to me by a dear friend of mine—(see above)—all I hear is an all too familiar bout of petty narcissism—the delusion of a human being who actually believes he (or she) has a voice that matters in the affairs of the State. It’s a benign narcissism—not a malevolent or a malignant one by any means. And all I mean by this petty, benign narcissism is that it is the voice of a human being who falsely believes in the importance over both his place and his effect in and on the world. The reality is this man, this voice, this human being has no more effect in and on the world about him than did a serf over the Regime in the early 1800’s in Russia.

What, however, is particular and even perhaps singular about this American version of serfdom is the fatuous and altogether narcissistic belief that one has, that one is a “stakeholder” in the play of power—be it legislative, executive, or, as in this article, if but once-removed, judicial. And it is this con that keeps down, keeps away any real threat of any real revolt of any kind. So long as people in the United States feel that they have a voice, or a vote, or a measure of selfhood that matters elsewhere—and by ‘elsewhere’ I mean the government or the State that ‘governs’ them—any possible sense of revolt or rebellion is quelled ipso facto. It is that feeling of ‘having power’ versus that feeling of ‘feeling powerless’ that keeps the gristmill going. Really, it’s like gossip—possibly true, but so what? Possibly false, but so what, too? So this guy has loosened his belt a notch, or tightened it up a notch, so what?

The effect is that this man is quieted down, and everybody reading it nodding their heads up and down is likewise quieted down, likewise shut up. Who cares that the peasants, the serfs, the “yeoman farmers” as Jefferson so elegantly put it, grumble? Let ’em grumble and mumble all they want. What matters is that the serfs and peasants, the slaves and servants keep on working; and, moreover, believe in this System, which except for a few who do turn rank and begin—let’s say like Cruz or Obama or Rubio, as well as Clinton 1.3 or Clinton 2.7 (no matter which)—to work now for the State, (and thus become eligible for this inheritance of nobility which they will under no terms ever forsake), are for the foreseeable future permanently kept in their places by. And it is this extant or consequent ‘nobility’ which the Supreme Court, as it pores through any number of pages of any numbers of cases and causes brought before the Bench, will jealously guard and preserve like a dragon in its lair overlooking its treasure.

Robin Ames

There had been tiny, little, baby praying mantises clinging to grass in the swamp. I had watched them. Protected by the government, I learned in life later that it had been a crime to kill them, if I had. I did not. At the shop, the chemicals they had used way back when, did babies ever really eat the paint chips off the window sills? Did this ever happen? Today, there are no toxic emissions at all. Beijing became what Detroit had been in America in the 50’s. People die going to work, die breathing in their own apartments. Rock n Roll died. Buddy Holly died. RFK died. And so did the others. The fen and swamp that became St. Petersburg, too, killed thousands and thousands of Russian peasants. People who used to live just like human beings in medieval times who just expected themselves to be used up like stones and that was it for a human lifetime used to live like that. That’s the way it goes. It would seem to be that that’s just the way life goes sometimes, anyway. The codes I follow from the catalog just for the customers: R6 B14 C42 W13. Then shake it up on the mixer, dab a bit on the lid wet for later, blow it dry with a blow dryer, tap it down. And you’ll be good for the next seven to ten years, ma’am, sir, I tell them. And my thumbs which are turned out and are only good for milking, just like my mother’s, were never used that way for milking for thirty years in the field for that now.

 

(read & experience egbertstarr.com)

Kaspar Levanti

Most of my neighbors past had moved to Bécs. It seemed like a particularly empty place to go. After all, in December the capital is quite empty. Mozart’s little memorium lies in the grass or in the snow unnoticed in the park. And all the buildings with their inhabitants fled to the villages and towns outside the main must be even colder over Christmas, even with leather gloves on both hands. Boulevards would be more deserted than usual. I stayed in the meantime near the Elbe on one side of the nearby brook where a small wooden ferry pulled pilgrims from one side of the water to the other, watching the ferryman plying his almost silent trade. That was the work of a ferryman: awaiting travelers needing to move themselves from one edge of the land to the other without having all their belongings soaked. Aeroplanes soared overhead. Wayfarers from hordes in faraway cities sought their escape between one border and another. I would hum a folk tune, one that Liszt, who had fingers reaching across fourteen keys on a piano, had re-set. The old empire he came from had been quickly divided into a table-puzzle between other sovereign nations at hand, once it was swept away. I lay in the sloping grass of the shallow hills singing to myself memories of Arabia in the 1890’s many green summertimes ago.

 

 

The Shaggy Coat Of Banality

I was sitting around in the auto shop the other day and picked up a used copy of The New Yorker that was already folded around and opened to an article that I started reading about who’d won the Nobel Prize in literature. And I stopped reading and took a picture of it on my iPhone not far into it when the winner, Svetlana Alexievich, was quoted as saying, “We live in an environment of banality. For most people, that’s enough. But how do you get through? How do you rip off that coating of banality? You have to make people descend into the depths of themselves.” And I starting thinking about the news I’d read earlier that morning through Google news; and how Douglas Tompkins, I had read about the next day, had been killed the day before that on December 8 in a kayaking accident in Patagonia, an eco-baron who wanted to save hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest by buying them up so that they’d be preserved forever, spared the onslaught of industry, development, and technology.

I read about the daily murders, and the daily bombings, and the blowings-up. And I had looked over noticing how in the last weeks the headlines had shifted from money and earnings and accounts of money and earnings, to the next scene of carnage and murder in California or Paris and so on, and that money and politics had seemed to drop pretty much away from them. And I thought about how the murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, sitting around the auto shop that same day thirty-five years later, hadn’t been anywhere, how when he was shot and killed on 72nd Street and Central Park West then, this didn’t even come up.

A friend of mine and I had been trading newspaper articles that we read online for years. It began with a line I read once by Noam Chomsky that you had to read a news article to the last line of the article, that you had to do this to really understand it. It was there that you got what it was really all about. And last lines we read proved to be great. They were really doozies at times. They spelt out there exactly what the writer meant. Everything worked toward that last line, and if you didn’t read an article to the last line you didn’t get it. For years and years we’ve been sending each other these last lines in emails, with just the smallest and often most obscure commentaries we choose to make on these lines, as well as the links to the online articles themselves.

Over time this had changed between him and me to the reading of news not for the news’ sake, but from our reading these articles from a position of their complete banality. Embedded within news, if you read the news well, we found that there was this incredible preponderance, if you will, of the most unlikely kinds of language being used in places that you would never ever expect language to being used that way actually being used that way. For instance, in a story about a man who’d drowned in a local river, there’d be some friend in the article quoted as saying something like, “He’d been fishing for trouble for the last five years.” How could this happen? We, my friend and I, didn’t want to know that exactly, but we were keen at how often this happened. I mean, beyond just its being a self-conscious easy-play with a cheap pun, as is common and on purpose in sports headlines and articles, we found these totally inappropriate metaphors being used all over the place. So, it made the comedy of the banality of the news worse, in a way, but in another way better. Why? Because we never had to feel it. Why? Because there really was nothing left to feel. Not with writing like that. Left or right, patriotic or terrorist, political or familiar, news was never actually news. It was something else entirely.

So when I Googled The New Yorker magazine at home over the next few days and read the account of a woman describing the pieces of her husband’s body falling apart, which article I had begun and put down in the auto shop, I did feel what Alexievich had meant, I think. (This I let myself feel somehow trying, or at least trying to push to the side that everything printed in The New Yorker is entirely banal and commonplace. This is because first off, the writing reduces everything to a level of coffee table-, or at most coffee shop-banality; and, secondly, the intended readership is the readership of the self-minded, and self-appointed intellectual guardianship of the bourgeoisie, whose lifelong performance of book-and-magazine reading complements and likewise fulfills the living definition—both urban and suburban—of being the very working expression of that banality.) Alexievich simply interviewed people whose life experiences from Chernobyl to Afghanistan, are absolutely true and unimaginable, and copied out longhand, I read, these interviews, and turned them into books.

Some people in Russia, where Alexievich has lived in a tiny two room apartment much of her life for years, don’t say she’s even a writer. Others say she’s invented a new literary form. I probably remember the day John Lennon died because it’s the same day my father had been born, and I remember that, and they had happened to come together. So, for me they were fused, the way realistic irony makes that happen sometimes, not because I have a particular memory for those kinds of things, or a sense of memorabilia for the Beatles. I remember in college a professor of mine had said to me offhandedly one day once that the only place left that people felt terror in their lives anymore was in their dreams. All this, like a fairy dancing on the head of a pin, had also made me think of that, it struck me.

Huckleberry Census Bureau Reflux

A rocket scientist who once designed the fuselages of ships that were launched to outer space now sweeps the front sidewalks of village stores during the black mornings when not even the police are watching.

A man who back in the day wailed his way to fame and international fortune twirls the spokes of bicycle wheels upside down and repairs them for nothing, or next to nothing, peddling about on his own, back upright, smile fixed throughout most days.

The hairy, bare-backed lunatic rides in and out of town.

The six hundred pound woman opens her arms and turquoise pieces fall out of her palms.

A depressive takes her little pills over coffee and a twist at 7 in the morning every morning and doesn’t mind the gossip the old geezers are having at the table in the corner where they have gossiped for over twenty-five years before the time they had become geezers.

The merchant from Algeria sells small rugs from his late grandfather’s estate and makes a stream of small profits from the land others are squatting on and taking over in his absence far away beneath his winning smile.

The anti-dote to Dylan plays his lyre and croons still over the death of Bobby in ‘68 when America changed her name, her direction, her being, her place in history and Mankind forever, in dactylic hexameter.

A thin-lipped prep school boy with bowed forehead cannot shake from the mien of his writing heroic couplets he still considers the heart of poetry and is stuck somewhere between Shelley, Hopkins, Hardy, believing somewhere there’s a place called home.

Talismans and trinkets she unlocks her shop’s doors to sell the public her collected wares gathered from tribes and circles and half-known places and groups that somehow still exist in the world yet, and end up on the doorways or draped from the necklines of others elsewhere.

She goes to church and she goes to church too who not so much time ago was fairly mad fairly much on the bar’s sills and fairly beautiful and doesn’t matter then that Christ was despised He makes her better now.

And he’s as coarse as ever fobbing off tarnished silver and lapis in pieces it falls out of for a few dollars or a few dollars more leering and smoking hard as ever.

And he’s as handsome as James Dean who’s sold his body to science that science won’t take his body anymore and so he’s grown thin and old and poor though handsome as old James Dean who’s grown thin and old.

Since early 1970 his repertoire hasn’t grown nor his voice nor his case nor his sidewalk nor his coins some drop in it when playing.

She makes her pictures she hangs them up she deprecates things and makes ironic comments and cracks about leaving the way city folk joke about leaving about Berlin, or New York, or Tallinn.

He drives the truck to where the little red postal flag is turned up and raises his twin girls sings and twinkles past some pieces remembered in the National Museum.

Her kindness shows itself and her temper flares and her unwashed and dirty body smells come out when she appears in one place or another place and heckles those she cares about and is soft or patient around a handful of chosen others.

 

Made-Up Bed-Sick Movies, 1918

It was so bad that he watched Dr. Zhivago four times in three days. Now this film had formerly been reserved only for watching once every five or six years when he was laid back with a bone-aching flu, when everything felt so dreadful that the only possible comfort was to be buried in a Russian snowstorm of melodramatic love.

It was so bad that he made one gigantic pot of it and ate, when he had to, helpings of oatmeal cold. Or, if he had moved to heat it up, heated a portion of it in a small saucepan and scorched the bottom of it over again.

It was so bad that when the fire went out overnight, he did not light it when he woke as was his habit still long before the light of dawn came up. He lay in bed cold or pulled another blanket fallen askew over his body. And if the house stayed that way all day, that’s the way it stayed.

It was so bad that his bones were filled with her screams of death and dying. They were inside his skull, they hunched his shoulders, they closed his eyes to them. Her furniture, her books, her bedside table, her belongings they were all thrashed and thrown about and her little body continued to thrash and throw itself about.

It was so bad he woke to screams that were not his own, traumas that were not his own, cries that were not his own, wounds that were not his own, parents that were not his own, in his own bed faraway from hers that was not his own, in his mind that was not his own.

It was so bad he could not imagine having once lain with her, his arms having ever held her, his heart having for years surrounded her. And her sweet voice was like another’s soft hand touching a green velvet mask behind which she gripped a silver sword; and her coiling naked body an emerald, scaly trap; her raw mind’s pure power, an indefatigably winning finger.

It was all so bad; all he saw were hapless visions of Welles’ Josef K. Notes, and words, and phrases flying by. A screaming, broken cavalcade of pain joined with death. Or, a make-believe, bed-ridden Western. They were horses’ hoofs flying, kicking up dry prairie grass and dust, all whooping and whooping, all the bonnet-wearing women in their wagons all bloody and slaughtered, while the Indians calmly riding upon the escarpment of the nearby mountain looked down at all the madness they do not recognize below them as human.

 

(read more & play around @ egbertstarr.com)

 

 

 

 

The Native American Girl*

John Rolfe’s uneasy letter regarding his troubled wishes to marry Pocahontas, seeking approval from the Governor:

http://libertyletters.com/resources/jamestown/john-rolfe-marry-pocahontas.php

Early European settlers here in this North American continent had in their homes Bibles, and Bibles, much like guns, were the even more forcefully effective weapons of Christianity, mechanically-produced inventions of Gutenberg whose coming into being not merely put into permanence words spoken, but rendered them in an orderly and composed way of thinking particular unto itself—and thereby, too (like phalanxes once upon a time), had both formulated and were the formulation of a very peculiar ordered system of Systems; one which was vastly more powerful than anything any previous cultures of “mythos” (etymologically meaning to be “of legend, of fable; what is murmured, what is spoken”) had hitherto created or could create—these latter being civilizations whose origins were rooted, rather, in a sense of “the immemorial,” “of Nature,” “ancestors,” “old as the hills,” and so forth, and which were not by definition inscribed, engraved, carved, cut into stone.

More important, then, than the issue of “personal agency,” which is generic, is the one that is genetic or historical in scope; and, in particular, when one culture does not take the place of another as a successive replacement, but destructively displaces one as the Other. Essentially, in the grand arc of history, this has come about in just the past several thousand years with greatest effect and increasing frequency because of “logos” used as the preeminent instrument and sometime weapon of the West—which translates roughly from the Greek as “order,” “meaning,” “logic,” and most notably in The New Testament, “the Word.”

Regarding the celebrated marriage of John Rolfe to “Pocahontas,” John Rolfe represents this: the European mind whose very foundational essence is instrumentalized weaponry, representing unto himself the Good a priori; and all else dissimilar, unlike itself, must in contradistinction to itself be construed  as snares, traps, insidious evils (it being no accident of metaphor that Rolfe describes himself in his letter—after acknowledging the libidinous over-charge of his “unbridled desire of carnall affection” for the teenage Indian girl while he closed in on the age of thirty—as being “so intagled, and inthralled in so intraicate a laborith,”) only to return to these same maso-erotic images of capture, slavery, and torture later in that very same letter where he refers to the “many other imperfections wherein man is daily insnared,” (emphasis mine); which, in spite of whatever charm or “agency” one might impute or rather ascribe to “Pocahontas” (meaning “the mischievous one,” “the playful one,” “little wanton” “father’s favorite”), this rather charming and fanciful nickname itself just an epithet for her actual name Matoaka, she is still no match for her already once-widowed husband—differences of age and correlative maturity & experience notwithstanding; nor, of much greater significance, for the cultural performance that Rolfe, like a bizarre sort of anthropomorphic metonymy of his particular historically determined or genetic agency, plays and must play out.

Rolfe’s is the difference of a cultural  mindset that is barely decades away from discovering calculus, a stone with which to count or reckon, paving the way from Newton onward, to all future higher mathematics; and Matoaka’s autochthonous culture whose is, if it is to be compared to any outside of itself, much more akin to the great Sappho’s that drifts and values the majestic and the poetic “having come from heaven wrapped in a purple cloak” also seen in the beautiful trade-pieces of an indigenous people’s purple-colored wampum.

The individuals—John Rolfe and Matoaka—themselves are unimportant except insofar as they represent the nexus of an ineluctable historical massacre, of one culture’s lapidary mindset over another’s, of the Bible Reading God Fearing John Rolfe as agent of one culture armed with memory-tools of de-scription against which a re-named, re-scribed Rebecca as wife qua opponent was powerless to be anything but overwritten by the logic and the Word of the Christian West.

*for who but her own father and her own people really had the right to call her that?

For further consideration, there are these (among many) movies to watch:

Navajo Joe, a brutal spaghetti western, starring Burt Reynolds; in particular :59 in the film where Joe asserts his being American and refers to his many generations past born, as well as his own, in what is now the United States, unlike the newly arrived white Indian killers who deny him citizenry.

Duck, You Sucker, a sophisticated Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, among other greats) epic starring James Coburn and Rod Steiger. As formidable commentary on the ills of early Western technology used against indigenous people as you will ever see.

Walking On The Moon

How property rights in outer space may lead to a scramble to exploit the moon’s resources

Even the Moon is no longer safe. The foot of mankind is everywhere. The quest for future ownership does not abate. Digging and scratching, we lay waste not just our world, but another. One more plot of land, one more survey to complete, one more war.

Here on Earth we are no longer safe. Ice caps melt. Plastic islands bestir the seas. Cities crumble. Infections spread. As if it matters, some distinguish between these as cycles caused by Nature herself, or Us ourselves.

The painted bench I sat on labeled “Wet Paint” did not ignore me, nor did it invite my body. It was apart from me, as I was apart from it. And when I rose from my cartoon folly, we were both a little bit a part now of each other.

The desire for minerals in Outer Space somehow exceeds the call for groundwater here on this planet. The yearning to find life elsewhere, too, seems to excite possibility beyond life being right here.

Dumbbells get up, left or right, and say whatever slogans and mottos they feel and have been instructed to utter behind wooden podiums will advertise themselves best in the most popular way, hoping to sell themselves as the sweetest slice of apple pie to the stymied American electorate.

Others out of circuit are free to blow our little systems to smithereens. It is not the rebellion from time to time anyone asked for, or could ever conceive. It is rather queer how these folk are labeled masterminds, which formerly had been the province of fictional folk like Sherlock Holmes, and honorable military commanders, not villains.

Why not blow apart the Moon instead? Why not unhinge the rings of Saturn? Were we to find life on our specious sister planet Mars, we would claim, register, patent, and copyright it. Any legal means would be enacted to possess and carve it up like a gigantic turkey farm.

Seas rise. Volcanoes spew blinding ash. Plates shift. The noble idea of being the trustee of the people rather than the immediate agent is gone. Nobody who is anybody alive can be permitted to care beyond an expiration date one day after the numbers branded on the lip of a carton of milk in any refrigerator anymore.

It is rather sad to see our DNA being its own sword in this lifetime alone. Some defect in our nature, I suppose, unapologetic and a bit obtuse. I’d like to blame it on Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton, or Albert Einstein, but don’t.

I’d like to banish from my mind the impulse to self-destruction; I’d like to pin blame on quickened religion, or the avarice of technological progress, but can’t. Instead, I slump back, lay my antiquated pith helmet to its side, and meekly admit the horror that it’s just us.

Our vanity for immortality, for life to be everlasting, this self-minded trip, a dystopian drive par excellence, has been our undoing, whichever be our political or theological party or faction. Mindig ugyanaz. It is all the same. And that’s the wry paradox—must take my leave now, dismissing far more important issues that bedew the Earth for a toasted bagel, a schmear of cream cheese, and several fine slices of Nova Scotia salmon.

Songs Of The Sea & The Earth

Everything I had known, and everything I had held dear had deserted me. And, unlike Yeats’ circus animals whom he claimed had deserted him, what remained for me was an incandescent flame, a vivid, hand-held torch with which I had always and will always hold aloft. And it is by this light of God that I will see the paintings on the wall where for fifty thousand years people haven’t since traveled before. By this I will even view the perfect moment John Wilkes Booth saw like a red maple leaf fluttering down while shooting and killing Lincoln in his theater box. The crimes and sacred moments of humanity, life, and sometimes glimmers of my own death, I have caught these like melting snowflakes falling into my autumn fingers.

To me, I have felt the sorrow of being the common cook whose food had accidentally poisoned the great Buddha. But I have also felt the rope breaking the neck of a bewildered Saddam Hussein. That I have no friends to turn to, nor scarcely any possessions, even an empty dresser drawer to slide in and out, I don’t even have that simple enough human pride of such wooden ownership to stand beside and claim as “mine.” My destiny had become to be a shipwrecked sailor to be cast upon another sea, to drift without craft, and to all my life wander from land to land in search of a numberless people who do not exist, whereupon, like the curse of Odysseus, giver and receiver of pain, my oath was to plant my alien oar.

Leftover Ancon Sheep Rocks

These stones had been here for almost two hundred years, maybe more. Cleared by a farmer’s hand, he laid them atop another much larger one he could never move, to clear his pasture land for grazing Ancon sheep. These short-legged, wooly animals were a genetic aftermath of some Massachusetts mistake permitting low stone walls and shallow fences around the countryside to be built. These stones I had found here and there about these woods were leftover afterthoughts of some greater task. No Giza in the desert. No Chichen Itza. No Stonehenge. Just a practical doing away with a bit of solitary labor. For me their anonymity was a great relief. Unless some reckless body troops through these woods again long after I am gone, they were there. Unless a Wrecker of Mead Halls, some outlandish, wanton arm of purposeful carelessness comes by, these rocks must remain lovely and pointless as the backside of the illumined moon, dust upon some forgotten shelf of being, a pair of wings fallen off a nameless angel. Long after we ourselves had been allowed to fade away like nothing, like that hard-working farmer’s breed of sheep, all our sunken thoughts were still awaiting some rising of the great Ocean’s long forgotten seas.