Quaking in One Form or Another

On the BART platform today, I was knee deep in Rousseau again, trying to consider what's changed in the mind of the citizen since the eighteenth century when it comes to our expectations regarding tax structure. On my left, a strung out bum taking advantage of Spare the Air day, taking a free trip to another neighborhood. On my right, a woman whose face looked like a sudden loss of elasticity at turned it suddenly natural looking, maybe breaking free of a half dozen face lifts, finally at rest.

The thought of elasticity must have traveled to the earth's mantle, picked up by some half-liquid, psychic planetary consciousness. The platform shook a little. Soundlessly, but with a keen lateral vibration. We all looked up and at each other, afraid to venture a guess. It was pint-sized, hardly worthy of notice. A hiccough in the crust. Gas escaping, nothing more. But we all felt it. She said it was hurricane season somewhere else, and we should be worried about earthquakes here. I put the only rhetorical bandage I had onto the fresh psychological wound.

A few little ones are always better than one big one.

Later, I stumbled on this. (Thanks BoingBoing.) The End Times? You're serious? Another scuffle in the Holy Land and you think it's a Jerry Jenkins book all of a sudden? Are we thinking about how often this has happened? Did Jesus offer mass succor during the six days war? You may as well think that Spielberg directing Munich was a sign of the Apocalypse. Here come the four horsemen, buckle up and move to Idaho, kids, the ground's shaking, the streets are flooding and the senate hangs in the balance this year.

I admit I'm the wrong person to ask if you're looking for any kind of reassurance in the spirituality field. I know that these are fringe lunatics, and not an accurate representation of the Christian majority in my country, but still, the fact that anyone is glad that there's a war on makes me cold and angry. I can't accurately put into words the kind of fury I feel at these sentiments. A militarily, technologically superior state with mandatory military service for all adults is hunting down and killing members of a fringe, extremist group over the capture of two soldiers.

Mind you, they didn't kill those soldiers. (They may have since, I've not seen any information on that subject.) Bear in mind also, those weren't civilians or innocents, they were soldiers with an understanding that they were in harm's way. Israel has essentially declared war on all tangent nations by invading and holding land for “defensive purposes.” I won't speak to who is right or wrong on that count—afraid as I am that my bias shows through—but one has to realize that the attack by Hezballah was par for the course.

Earthquakes, then. A few small ones is always better than one big one. I really do mean it when I call that a “rhetorical bandage.” It's little better than sticking an adhesive medical strip to the arm of an uninjured by scared child. A few small tremors can signal the sudden release of a major event. They can also be aftershocks. For a long time now, I've been thinking that these sorts of events—a bombing here, a hijacked bus there—were just two pusillanimous peoples letting off steam, fully aware that the rest of the world wouldn't sit idly by as they quickly escalated against one another.

Or maybe they were tiny scratches. Mosquito bites at a gangrenous wound, building up slowly until the arm finally falls off. This could be the arm. Even the secular crazies are screaming about this. World War Three! World War Three, they cry. We organize emergency meetings of the highest powers in the world to decide what to do next. I hate throwing around clichés like “powder keg” and “fox in the henhouse,” (Mostly because I prefer phrases like “George W. Bush alone in North Beach,” or “Actual girl on a World of Warcraft Server”) but I can't help but think that the world never stops being one Archduke Ferdinand away from seven to ten years of trenches, tanks and racist, Disney-approved propaganda.

Do we worry, then? Me and all you other draft-worthy young men? Do we hope that, yes, Jesus is calling us home and it's time to repent and open our hearts to the man with the holes in his wrists? Or will this all blow over? The earth's mantle is a tricky beast. Thermodynamics on a scale most people's arithmetical expertise can't quite describe. Claustrophobia doesn't begin to describe what it must be like for a stone, under so much pressure it's melted, spending twenty million years rising to the surface of the earth again. Imagine the orgasmic release of the volcano, or the shuddering, sulfurous fart of a fault line moving. Try to feel what the Israeli soldier feels, twenty million tons of anger and jealously grinding down on him from every side. The constant upward motion of training and learning and hereditary hatred, being tooled into a killing machine. Now just let that thin thread of civility and propriety be washed aside for a second by some succession of factors...

Volcanic is a very small word that only shines light on the inability of language to express some concepts. Nuclear war is a better term, but so much less metaphorical that I prefer to imagine Oakland crumbling around me than to let my thoughts wander toward Mecca. The human is not a violent creature by nature. He is, however, wired for self defense. Stressful situations make her likely to lash out. The tiny boxes we put ourselves in for the good of one another are fraying more than nerves. They're fraying the very social compact we agree to so that we can all have the boxes. Pluralism is showing its dark side in the Middle East, and we know that there is a dark side to it here. How far, how fast and how darkly can this shattered peace spread?

Like a wildfire? Like all the news that's fit to upload? Or like the earth itself shrugging us off its core? I leave you with that, and I leave you with hope.

A Plea for Occasional Boredom

Editing has made life a long series of pauses. Empty gaps between the moments of action. PRESS the button, POUR the coffee, take a SIP. SLURP. Closeup on the smile, curving like a Muslim dagger. I imagine that the feeling I have waiting at the bus stop (or collating faxes, or walking to the store) is akin to the sudden jaw snapping slam that light feels sinking into the atmosphere, going from the endless grande jeté of travel through a vacuum to the rude deceleration of a seventy percent nitrogen chemical bath. Imagine sprinting into Jello. Falling through a succession of paper towels. Obeying the speed limit in a school zone.

And thanks to clever film editors, I feel this way all night and day. I shake off the curdled moments each time I find cause to run, to jump, to somersault. The pace of the music and the rumble in the tires buttress my high spirits, but soon enough there will be a line. Standing behind a woman with four neatly wrapped portobella mushrooms. “It's very simple, today,” she intones with a voice like icewater being stirred. Today, she says, implying that she and this cashier are intimately familiar, like she's just been here, but neglected to purchase fungus, or like she noticed they were on sale and had been meaning to stock up, but at $6.25 a pound, who can find the spare cash... four dollars, though, that's a fucking deal! Don't even get me started on how portobella mushrooms and simple don't belong in the same sentence. My mind squirms like a claustrophobic rubber band ball the entire time, but then I'm snapped free and almost trip over friction, my head moving before the thought can get to my feet.

Editors, though, like a high school karate competition, chopping bricks and boards and blocks of time into manageable moments. Chewing the visual image until it is nearly digested, and feeding it back like some fricassee a la mother penguin. Is it true what they say? That the youth raised on rapid fire images and seventy cuts a minute will have damage done to their eyes and minds? Is the heritage we share mental framework not dissimilar from attention deficit disorder? Tennis-match-eyes and Vietnam nerves. Reflexes trained to the heights of Halo and Half-life, while our parents strain to keep pace with Ms. Pac Man.

Even now, having exhausted my jokes and clever references, I feel like things have slowed too much. I'm going to stop writing now.

Worker, Consumer, Revolutionary.

“We've been desensitized by the frequency of the attacks.”

Krys, going on a rarely seen soapbox. (And more power to you. It's sexy and exciting when you do that, you know?) Powerlessness isn't a simple matter of give-and-take or oppressor vs. oppressed. It's endemic to the system we live in. The powerful are so deeply ingrained, the lines of enforcement so ancient as to be instinctual. Rulers no longer rule, because their titles and positions do it for them.

What do we do but follow along? Wait for someone to fix the problems? As we know our places and playact these roles we're stuck in, all that we do is reduce our ability to act outside them. You cannot stop the bombings in India, the oppression in China, the occupation in Iraq or the rape and murder and starving children in your own fucking backyard because you are not the person who does those things.

I belive that we are capable of changing the world through group action, but even in my most upright and conscientious moments I feel myself weighted down by the fetters of my role. Worker. Consumer. Producer. Police officer? Hero? Revolutionary? The change is so hard to make. The factors piled so high against us all. And even if you were to break free of the damning, all-powerful fates of the status quo, you'd be alone. What would you do?

In this way, we all exercise power on one another. We deliver an ataxic energy with expectations and reward repetition of behaviors with aplomb. Some of us have children. Some have fragile dreams. Presupposing parents. Consuming naivetés. There is always a reason to lay back and take the ride that everyone is offering. Our aggregate concern for the right and proper way of things creates a force that damns progress and retards cohesive effort to alter the course of history. I'm certain these bombings, the ironhanded law of the Taliban, and even the inhuman determination and pitiless cruelties of every genocide were buoyed along by each and every mind present.

What we expect is often what we get, and as more and more expect the same outcomes, they begin to be nearly assured.

Phoenix Business

This is the first time I have gone a full week without smoking in as long as I can remember. Not to imply that I track my smoking, or that I tend to have perfect recall about these things, but just merely that I tried not to smoke for a week and successfully kept from doing so. I smoked last Monday night after drinking myself silly with Nat and Dave. I remember we were discussing a breadth of personal topics, our evening drunk extending into the giddy hours—the choppy ones where nothing of substance is said, but everything swells with importance. These nights have been ripe on the vine, lately, even among the friends who don't drink; tiredness and being lonesome together pinch-hitting for aqua vitae.

The cigarette recalls itself to me with a green sky seen through my personal haze and the blinding cityglow that permeates The Bay. The choking vapors had become more noxious of late. Maybe some lost fetal care in my breast awakened... a catalyst or reagent of self-preservation and the long view suddenly introduced. The taste was wrong, and a blighted feeling swept my brain, dismembering the usual feeling of rightness that comes from that intoxication.

And maybe that's what I get from the substances I bestow selfward. It feels just like that. Correct. Cool, even. Cigarettes, alcohol and the more mind-altering chemical pastiches I imbibe. The memory of them leaves me haunted by a longing spirit with transparent designs. A couple of beers and the blur is present, all creation at peace. One tall drink of coffee inspires the next until fingertips rattle, and the effect is oddly calming. Nesbitt's Paradox.

The alcohol I can deal with. The consequences, the missing time, the hurt feelings. They're rarities. Lashing predators, who, caged in sobriety, will always find an escape. The alcohol acts as a steam vent, and as the blackness and bile are dealt with on my own time, we see that those incidents move away. No matter how powerful the drug, your head will still rear. Thus, similarly, the fungus, the weeds.

The cigarettes, though, they have to go. An experiment. Sacrificial bull for the open maw of addiction. Real strength is seen in the men who stand before the vortex, urging a little more out of every muscle; straining for purchase. Those who spot the whorl on the horizon and juke left until it fades from sight... we envy their foresight, but we do not commend them on their accomplishments. Now and forever that little black curse will be there, smirking. I'm a part of it.

Sacrificial bull. Lay the head upon marble, and take the bronze knife in hand. The haft is bone, just like this trussed brute. Slice carefully, a semicircle from vein to vein, loosing a double fountain of scarlet. He moans his last, and you stroke him on the neck. There's a powerful muscle there: strength and honesty. This is your innocence. His heat fades in the cold morning, steam rising from the blood. He shudders. That strength is going somewhere else. It would have died, with or without your hand. This is transfer. This is phoenix business. The brawn of innocence can only be used so many ways. Some of us give it up to carnality. Others violence. But those who let it fester and die, I maintain that they never truly join the rest of us. Never grow up like people who give in to temptation.

Now that I've sucked a thousand tiny fires and dripped ash like a volcano god... Now that I've tread upon the shores of Oligartha and vomited through the night... Now I can take from that strength. Stronger than the desire because I gave it a ride. I can learn, I can change, I can move by steps and stumbles in a direction of my choosing. Phoenix business measured in millimeters. A pinch of ash, a dash of flame, and all the world is within reach of something that's within reach of right now.

Cimmerians Come and Gone

“But when I observe [free people] sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power, and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages that despise European pleasures braving hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.”

--Jean Jacques Rousseau, discussing his fellow theorists on the development of society from a theoretical “state of nature.”


Rousseau strikes me as a bit of a firebrand, probably a dangerous man. He was respected around Europe—his “Social Contract” was the recipient of prestigious awards from as far as Geneva—but his writings were precursor to the French revolution. He is still highly respected as one of the political thinkers instrumental in the creation of the United States constitution, but he was iconoclastic enough to denounce art and science as the pursuits of vanity and the idleness of the rich.

I will not deny that this man was a dangerous thinker. One can scarcely fault a dangerous thinker for having some ideas that look quaint, or downright foolish after two hundred and fifty years of history and learning. It's the nature of powerful, historical presences like his to act as double edged swords. What truly strikes me about his writing is how scant a distance I feel we've come in that time.

He says, “it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.” He applies this term, slaves, to his fellow authors, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Richard Filmer, to name a few. Men of culture, men of letters. These are property owners, men of noble birth and education in their homelands, and Rousseau calls them slaves. He may as well be alive today and calling senators, tenured professors and corporate officers by the same. We're all nothing but slaves to a system. To Rousseau, the death of man's natural state is the end of innocence. It is a black pock mark that cannot be removed. Whatever station we may rise to in this artificial ladder of bodies and names, we'll never have the freedom afforded to the once noble savages.

Leaving aside how it is for Rousseau to argue about liberty, I'm inclined to agree with him on some level. We have all given up freedom. I advocate giving as much of it as possible to everyone. But this is where Rousseau truly confounds me. Despite his meandering, poorly thought through ramblings about the birth of social structures, he is saying exactly what we are learning: the more people there are, the more we need these binding, restricting social agreements to keep us all alive and fed and clothed. If there were seven people on the planet, they could each have a continent, do with it as they pleased and never be concerned with the welfare of another man. They could pump as much secondhand smoke into the sky as they liked, and shoot their guns off in any direction without thinking. Thousands of people could live on the planet. Millions. Tens of millions. But there is a limit.

Despite Rousseau's vitriol and his philosophical agreement with Robert E. Howard's Conan, I do find that he is simply wrong in seeking so hard for each of us to have that kind of liberty. He can want it. We all want it. He can try to live his life in such a way as to emulate it, but so long as we all must be careful not to tread on one another's toes, there will always have to be a government. There will always be assigned roles and specialized labor. I will be forced to sit at a desk somewhere and move numbers around on a screen so that someone else can move prokaryotes from tube to tube with accuracy and precision.

Conan (or Howard, at least) and Rousseau have a great deal in common, with their belief in the superiority and strength of ancient barbaric man. Both say that civilized living makes men soft and week. It "enervates" them. Feminizes. They both hold sacred northern lands-Rousseau wishes he could live among the people of Geneva, and even when he is king, Conan longs for his time in Asgard. They see the confines of walls and parliaments as chains, and that all are bonded to these places as slaves to masters.

Slavery is a relative term, though. As much as I see the beauty and the good in the philosophy they preach, I must disagree. If we were to abandon the structures we have in place, billions would die. I don't know if Rousseau would would approve of the systems we have in place, though clearly his social contract acknowledges that we cannot go without these arrangements. And then he is like Conan upon the throne, all his anger misdirected and misplaced. And so must my own be, I suppose. The anger of every thinking woman or man at what has been lost must be misplaced. We learn to give up total liberty that we might each retain some measure at all.

Play Me to My Grave

I always meant to play the harmonica. I really did. Somehow the thought of a tiny musical world tucked into a pocket, made ready at a moment's notice excites a profound awakening in me. I am a whistler by nature, genetically and by training, I would say. The simplicity of being able carry a tune on my lips, no need for words—or even vocal chords—is the consummate difference between humming along to the tune and being the mind behind the music. People hum because they don't know the words. Whistlers are unconcerned with words and phrases, brashly showing the world what their bodies can do: it is an act of creation.

But the harmonica? Another step entirely. A ratio of range to portability unrivaled by anything else. Surely a piano outstrips it in versatility. Surely. But who can take a piano on the rails? Or to jail? Jail, my friends. The harmonica is the official instrument of jailbirds the world around, soulful and yet carefree, able to join in a blues improvisation or a drunken riverside revelry with equal ease. Hobos travel, whipping down the shipping corridors in style and grace, belting out tunes on an instrument whose sound is almost synonymous with the lonely whistle of the steam engine. This is like a natural enhancement to the whistling organ: the mouth.

That tiny universe of sound should be mine, but again I run afoul and afraid of that same callous contravention, the baldly diminishing former necessity of mortality. The previous evolutionary necessity, an unavoidable end to life, has become an anchor to a species which proves more and more its ability to have a life outside the physical body. But for all the wants and desires and the art, philosophy and the search for truth, we are still tacked to this temporal limitation. The painted spandrels, thus, give us the search for permanence, the decision of one life over another, specialization and nostalgia.

Indeed, without my fear of a mortal's comeuppance, why wouldn't I take hours out of my day to practice such a thing? It's my understanding of my limitations that makes me put down some dreams in favor of others. This essay, the words in it and the skill of combining them into something that communicates an emotion... that's what I want to do with my time. “My Time.” How horrific is that? The tacit way our language condones this degradation and eventual, abrupt corruption of our bodies, I mean. So inimical and profound a part of the way we live our lives that most wouldn't even think to fight back.

I've said often that the one thing that I will always regret the things I haven't done, no matter how many things I do. I regret all the lives I could not live. I want to hold within me the knowledge of every human life, all separate and self-contained. The accumulated understanding of every human life.

But that's only the perfection. Each extra second, each little memento and moment of prescience is worth paying for. Worth owning. This is why the choice between music and martial arts and poetry is so painful. I want to feel what the musicians feel, and yet my mind does not work quickly enough to do all this at once. I'm bogged down now for reasons of mental acuity, in itself a physical defect. Genetic. Hereditary. A function of the kinds of experiences I had as a child. The way my Jell-O brain settled into its mold, now unshakable. It can wiggle and stretch a little, but it can only be shaped so much before it will break. So I'm stuck being a slow learner.

I feel though, that it has not kept me from an ability of mastery. Perfection. Of course, this only magnifies the injury I feel at my brief time here. Were I to live several centuries, of course I could put down the typepad one day and pick up that harmonica. I could nod at my sweet whistling and fill the trainyards and cages with that sad melody. All the time in the world to perfect the skills that escape me, slowly crafting my physical and mental coordination until all that is left is that perspicacity, a laser width focus on a skill.