Kafka’s Water Hour

Imagine you are on the Titanic, speeding towards a glittering squadron of icebergs, when suddenly a rumor spreads that these icebergs really exist and could well sink the ship. What do you do? Of course, you turn off the lights so that you can get a better view of the glittering bergs, I mean, you turn off the lights so that it will take longer for the captain to hit one.

Now, not everyone is amused. People on the upper deck have a clear view and are begging the captain to ease off the diesel. The captain tells them to get the Hell off the boat if they don’t like it, but they don’t know how, and besides, they actually enjoy much the ship has to offer. Why, they’ve never known anything else.

Meanwhile, whether the ship moves forward or stands still is meaningless, and even the icebergs are redundant. You see, the ship is so bloody popular that millions, even billions, are vying to get on deck and even below deck, so, eventually the ship will find a very short route to land.

Beyond the Box, Organic Structures, and The Amazing Depression

Environmental solutions should never be framed as if they only represented means to survival; they are, just as importantly, means to improving the quality of life. The former works well in an atmosphere of fear; the latter is hardly understood by people who cannot imagine how happiness could grow in a world without money.

1. Finance
We live in financial boxes. Mortgages and the cult of private property keep people apart and perpetuate an unsustainable illusion of independence. If you can’t afford your mortgage, find friends or go scouting for potential mortgage-mates. In fact, since most of our houses can easily accommodate more than a single family of 1.3 children, now is the perfect time for learning to live together.

2. Education
Our children live in day care and educational boxes. Every class is boxed according to date of birth; they rarely mix or help each other, and children in upper boxes often look down on children in lower boxes. These boxes also keep children apart from parents. If you can’t afford day care or private schooling now, consider it a blessing. Take advantage of the chance to try home schooling, and do your best to raise human beings that grow beyond the “Look at me!” and “It’s mine!” stage.

3. Food
Stop buying prepared, boxed and preserved food. In fact, prepare for the inevitable food crisis by getting your family off the food grid. Study permaculture and urban gardening and fight for your independence. With friends, buy a run-down family farm and revive and revolutionize both the family and the farm.

4. Shelter
Get out of your industrial, frame and cardboard, chemically treated box-house and look into alternative, cheap to maintain, heating- and cooling-wise materials like cob and adobe. If maintaining a house was expensive before, imagine when things get worse, much worse. The health and safety advantages of earth-based building materials are reason enough to switch.

5. Entertainment
Get rid of your idiot box and other dispensers of mass-produced junk culture that keep people from thinking and families and friends from living. Encourage your children to use their imagination, to understand the world in a practical way (not the public schooling way), and develop your sense of humor beyond anything you ever dreamed imaginable and learn to make everyone happy, yourself included.

6. Utilities
Most of the above steps will help reduce energy consumption and free a household from the water/power grid. Even if the economy recovers, it’s in your own interest to control your own destiny to the greatest extent possible. Actually, it’s amazing that a country so proud of individualism is the same country in which everyone is dependent on others for even the most basic necessities. Of course, being unemployed will go a long way to providing people with the energy needed for these activities.

Concluding Political Thoughts: The Organic Political Structure

The word organic is now such a powerful marketing tool for the organic food industry that I hesitate to apply the word social and aesthetic structures. The organic food industry has shaped the word “organic” to mean the absence of artificial chemicals, whereas it could denote all the richness of life, the presence of living, pliant cell structures that exchange information, serve no “higher” cells and cooperate for mutual benefit in a radically de-centralized organism. Of course, along with this independence from centralizing structures of inequality (i.e. capitalistic economies and totalitarian politics) is the corresponding principle of freedom from economic welfare systems (as in modern socialism) and simplistic notions of equality (as in modern democracies). Cells that do not work properly are typically removed from the organism, and cells do not vote, they understand, and wherever there is significant disagreement there is disease.

If cells are the universal building blocks of life, why not found civilization on cellular principles of life?

By emulating cellular principles, am I not suggesting that humans aspire to become even more like mindless, microscopic particles? Instead of answering this amusing question, simply consider that we have many assumptions and prejudices about the human mind. We are far more than minds, or, if you will, far less.

Dear Mr Gore,

What’s so inconvenient about the need to stop a lifestyle most people don’t enjoy much? Statistics don’t lie. Job satisfaction rates, public school satisfaction rates (ask the kids if they would quit if they could; I dare you) divorce rates, cancer rates, mental complication rates: all are either climbing or are already at frightening heights. So, a call for change is anything but inconvenient.

You fail to offer a vision that goes beyond environmental sustainability and ecological hygiene. You do not address the need for a complete cultural revolution; your emphasis on inconvenience and catastrophe fails to address the convenience and the eu-strophe.

Everything, from the clothes we wear to the way we speak, is wasteful and in need of a very convenient change.

We must go beyond a discourse based on renewable energy fantasies to a discourse infused with cerebral energy. Forgive my mischievous cryptogram—: I beg you, stop wasting time installing solar panels on the Titanic; the sooner we stop having such fantasies the sooner we can learn to imagine the way down to the land beneath our feet.

The Silent Revolutionary

From Ancient Greek Drama

Ancient Greek tragedy is a lost world to me. I cannot feel its anguish. In fact, I honestly sense something comical about it, the Oedipus trilogy included. All that fear and dread of fetid family revelations. Sure, it’s no delight learning that you killed your father—but by Jove, cut yourself some slack Oedipus! After all, you killed him without intent to kill him, and he certainly intended to kill you when you were just a babe. So, his death was due punishment, and what could be sweeter than executing the very man who intended to execute you? Of course, I make bad jests, and all this blood makes a poor comedy. But then consider incest: a harmless deed, and—I say this without blushing (sorry mom)—hopefully his mother enjoyed the deed. Oops, I killed the man who tried to kill me; oops, I slept with the woman who gave birth to me. In short, Greek tragedy resembles comedy to me.

As for Agamemnon, please, he left his wife to fight for a strumpet for 10 years, and we expect his wife to chain herself to chastity? If you love a woman, but cannot please her, let another man do better, love says. As for the murders that followed her adultery: what else can one expect from people who know nothing of education?

Only the xenophobic, narcissistic, interbreeding, nepotistic, chauvinistic Athenians could see the tragedy in Greek tragedy. Nietzsche’s flattering appraisal that the Greek taste for tragedy evinces strength of spirit is just half of the story.

What about Athenian comedy? Why, with all its cruel parody and bile, it seems to warrant more tears than tragedy. Even Plautus could not write a comedy free of witty barbs, treachery and deceit born of greed. Reading such comedies, I sometimes feel like I am overhearing the crude invectives of a dog.

There’s much progress from ancient Athens to Elizabethan London. Shakespeare’s tragedies are not half as fantastical and funny as the Athenian tragedies, and his comedies are much less cruel. Sure, S. helped the upper classers laugh at our Bottom and at all the poor tradesmen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it’s farcical rather than mendacious.

With Jonathan Swift satire is unleashed upon the world… for it was a world ready to tolerate some criticism, though not yet criticism of religion. Was Swift funnier than Shakespeare? Perhaps not, for with satire, tragedy and comedy are conjoined and consolidated into a form bearing little resemblance to its parents.

With Mark Twain, satire softens and turns towards comedy, though the comedy, or humor, remains chained to satire, social criticism, heresy and even philosophy.

Today, in the civilized world, high tragedy has evolved from the first mythological monsters into an open critique of the world, while low tragedy–both horror shows and tear-jerkers–remains half of Hollywood.

The future has no need of tragedy beyond what we can find in every thought. The future comedy will be what we shameless ones create.

Chekov’s Proposal

Chekov’s “The Proposal” is a good example of how a master writer promoted the liberal values of his time while being careful not to advocate the entirely anachronistic values of the distant future and thereby deny himself a readership. In this ironic tale about class power, a woman of the upper class attempts to teach a lesson to the poor, meek governess of her children. She wants to root out her meekness and teach her to be assert herself and defend her right to be paid fairly. This plot, or plan, is very topical. In Chekov’s time the Russian lower classes were already growing bold and whispering about a revolution. To present us with a representative of the upper class who actually encourages the poor to assert themselves—well, that is rich, that is delicious, if only because it is deliciously ironic and rather preposterous.

Does the governess learn to be “strong”? Of course, Chekov used the word ironically, to imply that the strength of the upper class was is not strength in the highest sense of the word. Therefore, the governess had no reason to learn her lesson—even if she could have, for it was a lesson that was poorly and cruelly taught. Had it been taught better, the lesson would have spoiled the literature, and the story would never have been published.

If true strength is not the strength to demand one’s due wages and possibly risk unemployment, poverty and death, than what is it? The question of true strength could not be addressed by Chekov; to the masses it was and remains unthinkable, and though it is both the secret spirit of every revolution it is also the spirit that will never have its own revolution (in the narrow sense of the word).

Huckleberry Finn

In Huckleberry Finn we have the soul of America’s fears and — especially — its desires. To be like Huck, an unlucky lad but still luckier than unlucky; healthy and smoking cigars without a care in the world, unemployed and yet never hungry or miserable, living a life of adventure, too young to understand much about global problems (like racism), just a pirate living on stolen money. Ah, that’s the life, America, the World — that’s the vision Mark Twain gave us over a century ago. It wasn’t just a portrait of desire, it was a prophetic portrait, as today, more than ever, we live among pirates. I do not speak of Somali pirates who teach us small lessons about human nature, I speak of the revolutionary lessons about white collar criminals taught by submarine monsters who finagle entire countries into penury. Huckleberry Finn is not primarily about racism, it is, first and foremost, a book about money, deceit, hucksters, hecklers and fin-agling. Though I have savored Twain’s humor, one cannot read this book without tasting his vomit too, for it is no pretty portrait he painted.

Oh, it’s hard not to envy Huck Finn’s fishy life, all fins and free in the Mississippi.

Art History or Art Progress?

Progress—it’s a tiresome notion, a day-dreamers potion; it’s a word that “gets a lot of mileage” in political and economics discussions. I don’t want deprive anyone of progress, I just want to know  why progress is not part of intellectual dialogues on art, literature and music. Dear God! All this time, and no progress in the arts? Political progress has been won through sacrifice and blood; scientific progress is won by candlelight in laboratories, but the arts? Who dares to speak of progress here? It is blasphemous to suggest that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dante, Milton, Mark (of the Gospel) and other masters of literature produced inferior works compared to more recent authors. Furthermore, what fool dares speak of artistic progress when we don’t even have clear criteria for artistic quality? Technological and political criteria for progress are easy enough to define, but the arts are a domain of the blind and deaf.

What then, are we to believe that no qualitative change has been accomplished since the most primeval gibberish? since the first flourishing of folklore? since the first novels? Are we stuck with the West’s Euro-centric belief that the best works of literature, music, and art date from West’s “Golden Age” (to use the term loosely to refer to the last 550 years)? But this would include a variety of works belonging to many different artistic developments or styles: works from Mozart to Schoenberg. Are their works great in their own, unique way, but not qualitatively different? If so, if this repugnant idea is true, I fear artists have suffered much in vain and are merely in the business of producing novelties.

Artists have also fought on political fronts and should therefore enjoy the same confidence in the political path they have and continue to clear. The Greek comedians were perhaps the first to stage performances about the demos, the common people; after them, it remained taboo. Lessing and Hugo caused riots with works about common people; Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro was censored. Shakespeare did not dare to write a play about peasants, and had he done otherwise, the peasants themselves might have lost interest. In any case, my point is that the arts have participated in and contributed to the West’s democratic form of political progress.

In addition to the political dimension, and in tandem with it, the arts have seen massive aesthetic developments. But surely, where there is development there is also progress, right? Few bother to ask, and the lack of interest both aestheticians and artists have in developing or at least clarifying basic goals for the arts demonstrates some sort of intellectual shortcoming. Surely change in the arts is not random, and surely we don’t have to settle for that plebeian and democratic notion that variety and artistic plurality is a measure of progress, which would imply that we have triumphed now because today different styles are equally represented in museums. Now, after centuries of prejudice and inequality in museums, Michaelangelo’s painted angels can finally stand toe-to-toe with pre-historic sub-Saharan master-pieces and 20^th century achievements and we can finally celebrate the outstanding achievement of our time, that being the widespread appreciation of art from diverse eras and continents, so that, what we have is a form of political equality for the museum. Hoorah for equality.

Of course, we happily distinguish good works from bad works within individual artistic movements; but we hesitate to even dream of a criterion for quality that transcends individual movements. Perhaps we are too humble; perhaps we respect our ancestors too blindly. Still, all politeness aside, I’m fairly certain that if we could measure the pleasure and mental stimulation enjoyed by such modern masters as Hofmann, Thelonius Monk and Joyce, and compared it to the measures enjoyed by Rembrant, Cervantes…