all too human and not enough animal

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils – all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams – these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of our species' existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happen to focus upon. All could speak , articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied – whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. The color of sky, the rush of waves – every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and fed with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting – with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.

Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations.

via The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

If the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live.

An arial photo of economic disparity in Mexico city. 

"The city, as the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is: "man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself."

If Park is correct, then the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."

David Harvey "The Right to the City"

Questions From a Worker Who Reads

Oral historian Studs Terkel was inspired into his work by this poem.  Here is a quote from a 2007 interview.

“If I were to ask the audience now watching this Web site, ‘Who built the pyramids?’ the first reaction, reflex, is ‘pharaohs.’ The pharaohs didn’t lift a finger. … No, slaves, the anonymous ones through the centuries built the pyramids. … I’m interested in … those millions and multi-millions of people down through the centuries who made the wheels go round but never made our traditional history books. We hear of generals, we hear of kings, we have industrialists, great statesmen. But who are these others?" -- Studs Terkel via 

Questions From a Worker Who Reads

- Bertolt Brecht 1935 

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? 

In the books you will read the names of kings. 

Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ? 

And Babylon, many times demolished, 

Who raised it up so many times ? 

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ? 

Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. 

Who erected them ? 

Over whom did the Caesars triumph ?  

Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ? 

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, 

The drowning still cried out for their slaves. 

The young Alexander conquered India.

Was he alone ? 

Caesar defeated the Gauls. 

Did he not even have a cook with him ? 

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. 

Was he the only one to weep ?  

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War. 

Who else won it ? 

Every page a victory. 

Who cooked the feast for the victors ?  

Every 10 years a great man. 

Who paid the bill ? 

So many reports.  

So many questions.

SHAME

SHAME

- Vern Rutsala 

    This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides
    her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand
    self-hate that leads some to razors or pills
    or swan dives off beautiful bridges however
    tragic that is. This is the shame of seeing yourself,
    of being ashamed of where you live and what
    your father's paycheck lets you eat and wear.
    This is the shame of the fat and the bald,
    the unbearable blush of acne, the shame of having
    no lunch money and pretending you're not hungry.
    This is the shame of concealed sickness--diseases
    too expensive to afford that offer only their cold
    one-way ticket out. This is the shame of being ashamed,
    the self-disgust of the cheap wine drunk, the lassitude
    that makes junk accumulate, the shame that tells
    you there is another way to live but you are
    too dumb to find it. This is the real shame, the damned
    shame, the crying shame, the shame that's criminal,
    the shame of knowing words like "glory" are not
    in your vocabulary though they litter the Bibles
    you're still paying for. This is the shame of not
    knowing how to read and pretending you do.
    This is the shame that makes you afraid to leave your house,
    the shame of food stamps at the supermarket when
    the clerk shows impatience as you fumble with the change.
    This is the shame of dirty underwear, the shame
    of pretending your father works in an office
    as God intended all men to do. This is the shame
    of asking friends to let you off in front of the one
    nice house in the neighborhood and waiting
    in the shadows until they drive away before walking
    to the gloom of your house. This is the shame
    at the end of the mania for owning things, the shame
    of no heat in winter, the shame of eating cat food,
    the unholy shame of dreaming of a new house and car
    and the shame of knowing how cheap such dreams are.

- via

Work doesn't block the doorway it pretends it is the destination.

Waged work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems; it is, of course, the way most people acquire access to the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. It is not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, it is also the basic means by which status is allocated, and by which most people gain access to healthcare and retirement. After the family, waged work is often the most important, if not sole, source of sociality for millions. Raising children with attributes that will secure them forms of employment that can match if not surpass the class standing of their parents is the gold standard of parenting. In addition, "making people capable of working is," as Nona Glazer notes, "the central goal of schooling, a criterion of successful medical and psychiatric treatment, and an ostensible goal of most welfare policies and unemployment compensation programs" (1993, 33). Helping to make people "work read" and moving them into jobs are central objectives of social work (Macarov 1980, 12), a common rationale for the prison system, and an important inducement to preform military service. Indeed, enforcing work and the other side of defending property rights, is a key function of the state (Seidman 1991, 315), and a particular preoccupation of the post welfare, neoliberal state.

-- Kathi Weeks "The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries"

Babylon Revisited

  

Babylon RevisitedBy Amiri Baraka

The gaunt thing  

with no organs

creeps along the streets

of Europe, she will

commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown

with no organs

with sores on her insides

even her head

a vast puschamber  

of pus(sy) memories

with no organs

nothing to make babies

she will be the great witch of euro-american legend

who sucked the life

from some unknown nigger

whose name will be known

but whose substance will not ever  

not even by him

who is dead in a pile of dopeskin


This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson  

a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced

to a pitiful imitation faggot

full of American holes and a monkey on his back  

slapped airplanes

from the empire state building


May this bitch and her sisters, all of them,  

receive my words

in all their orifices like lye mixed with  

cocola and alaga syrup


feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your  

hysterectic laughs

while your flesh burns

and your eyes peel to red mud 

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere..."

James Baldwin at writer's congress, 1962. Copyright Marc Riboud / Magnum Photos

A passage from "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption –which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negros accept and adopt white standards– is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from  Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals.

It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal –an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man's sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man's public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produce by white mans' profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love, is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace –not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy –on the contrary, indeed– and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depth as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man's unadmitted –and apparently, to him unspeakable– private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro.

The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the nights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler's checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should? I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result nearly in his attainment of the present level of American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worth-while if I am now –in order to support the moral contradiction and the spiritual aridity of my life– expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power –and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standard, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in the fruitful communion wit the depth of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks –the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example– especially knowing the family as I do– I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

In short, we, the black and the white deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation –if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create on nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white.  -- James Baldwin 1963

Democratic Vistas

In 1871 Walt Whitman wrote an essay titled "Democratic Vistas". He seems to be aware that keeping women –in his time white women– from the vote was a great crime. He seems less conscious of the flaws woven into our country by chattel slavery. Those are flaws we've only started to mend and often against what seems like the will of the masses. Human rights should never be put to a vote. In spite of this all-to-common blindness I think Whitman's vision of democracy can offer us some hope. He recognizes that democracy as is popularly understood by the white Americas of his time is polluted with a belief that some humans should still be ruled, just in a democratic manner. Not so, says Whitman. The true aim of democracy is perfect individualism of all humans expressed by joining the masses, not ruling them, “Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law? Then merge yourself in it.” Here are a few highlights:


"We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted."

“The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.[...] The political history of the past may be summ'd up as having grown out of what underlies the words, order, safety, caste, and especially out of the need of some prompt deciding authority, and of cohesion at all cost. Leaping time, we come to the period within the memory of people now living, when, as from some lair where they had slumber'd long, accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet active...”

"Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges, and schools -- democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy."

"I think, after all, the sublimest part of political history, and its culmination, is currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election."

"I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the offices themselves. I have found the north just as full of bad stuff as the south. Of the holders of public office in the Nation or the States or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the people, but all have been nominated and put through by little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes."


"Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper, amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and great and little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and over the powerfulest parties, looms a power, too sluggish may-be, but ever holding decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process, to execute them as soon as plainly needed -- and at times, indeed, summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of their pride."

And a few lines that I find are a quintessential example of "same story different era" (NOTE: I do not think all business people are corrupt):

"The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field."

You can read the whole thing here.

Deliver us... from the service of mammon

 (image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder "Avarice")

".... Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men... "

via 1928 book of common prayer

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely; the world offers itself to your imagination...

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

Writing advice that helps answer the question....

... that great question of "what should I do with my life."

“You don't take on subject matter because of an objective sense that one sort of subject matter is more important than something else. You take on what you can handle, what you can transform, what you can make your own, what you can make explicable and clear to somebody else, the reader who might stumble across the poem and recognize his or her life in that cloudy mirror.” -- William Matthews

"We Must Risk Delight"

A Brief for the Defense

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall

I know a women who craves her own suffering. She loves to be needed so she actively believes that everyone is downtrodden and desires her concern. She loves no one, but loves everyone's pain - real or imagined.

THE CRAVING FOR SUFFERING -- When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young Europeans who cannot endure their boredom and themselves, then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds. Neediness is needed! Hence the politicians' clamor, hence many false, fictitious  exaggerated "conditions of distress" of all sorts of classes and the blind readiness to believe in them. These young people demand that  -- not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster. If these people who crave distress felt the strength inside themselves to benefit themselves and to do something for themselves internally, then they would also know how to create for themselves, internally, their very own authentic distress. Then their inventions might be more refined and their satisfactions might sound like good music, while at present they fill the world with their clamor about distress and all too often introduce into it the feeling of distress. They do not know what to do with themselves - and therefore paint the distress of others on the wall; they always need others! And continually other others! - Pardon me, my friend, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.  

-- Nietzsche

My father's advice I have never heeded.

Since I was a little boy my father has subtly, and not so subtly, given me a solitary piece of advice: "Where there are many words transgression is unavoidable". This poem by Rilke is my father's advice that I never have heeded. 

“A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
at most a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind --
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.”

            -Rilke, Part I, The Sonnets of Orpheus

Heinrich Harder