the spoken world

An ancient midrash holds that when God pronounced our world ‘good,’ this implied that God had created and destroyed prior worlds, because how can you decide anything’s good without something that came before to compare it to.

            Of the third creation much has been written. That’s only fitting since the experiment continues to this day and has become self-referential.

But the first two. Of these, little has been recorded. Not for want of trying, but because whatever evidence there is exists only as inference or judgment. To study the first two creations is to map cobwebs. The strands break as soon as we try to trace them.

And yet we are drawn to this unending task. For us, these bewildering attempts hold the key to the already lived in, hand-me-down quality that inhabits our world along with us.

The first creation didn't last long. In the blink of an eye it lasted two million years.

            It came from a dream.

This is only fitting: the act of creation was an inadvertent, casual, unconscious thing.

            And then, quite suddenly, there was a world. Thousands of species unknown to us today existed in the limbo of this un-lived world and were consumed when the dreamer awoke.

            Destruction, of course, can never be complete. There is always a residue, some resin, ash, slag, grease, some slight afterimage like the shadows of things incinerated by the A-bomb blast in Hiroshima.

            Snowflakes are the primary evidence of the first creation. They are crystallized time, condemned to exist for a brief moment and then disappear into drifts or melt on a child's tongue. Also, a reminder of the millions of snuffed out voices can be heard today in the surging and singing of high tension power lines. From these melancholy remnants, we receive the news that the creator was a killer.

            The second creation lived an interesting life. It existed, as it were, backwards. The fundamental principal of this world was disorder and people accepted it. Everyone was born in various different ways, repeatedly, and all animals could understand each other.

            Rats were treated as creatures of distinction. Cows slept on their backs with their feet in the air. Dogs had not yet discovered campfires. Rolling stones gathered moss.

            The earth was smaller then, and you could get places without moving at all. Barnacles grew everywhere, spontaneously, so there was no point in trying to travel anyway. Everything was crusted over, immobile. As a result, the world was a fully imagined place.

            In the second creation, people lived according to no set principles. Murphy's law was the norm. In fact, everything went wrong all the time. People never got anywhere they wanted to go when they wanted to be there. And they never ever got what they wanted. But they didn't care. They had a great time doing it.

            Their pleasure in this unruliness and disorder created a massive disharmonious energy disturbance. Today we call this the big bang.

This charged pulse was made up of billions of voices undertaking quixotic individual acts of desperation – sounds spoken out of nowhere, messages without sender or receiver, and, indeed, with no message.

            Meaning was irrelevant. The important thing was the word, the syllable, the individual atom. There were contests, of course. One eloquent, sonorous, properly-placed word could mean respect, riches, or nothing at all. Talking was a game of chance.

            Each word disappeared as soon as it was spoken, not to be used again. New words were invented every minute. They seemed inexhaustible as forest fires, and consumed themselves just as quickly. Speaking at all was an act of planned obsolescence. The words burned brightly for a brief span, but as soon as they were replaced by new words, they died.

            In this way, to use a word was to challenge God, to engage in a spontaneous act of creation, definition and destruction.

            So words became fetish objects. To have a word and hold onto it for more than a few seconds – this was truly to have lived. There was no Everest, no Kilamanjaro, to match that height.

            A market sprang up. People who needed words could go to the bazaar. It was a place much like Times Square of old – a wondrous cacophony of barkers hawking adverbs, whole department stores dedicated to nouns, attics of pronouns, basements of verbs, presided over by small gray-haired men who guarded their inventories with specially trained Dobermans. Sometimes the merchants even slept with the words, but thefts were still common. Some people became addicts – and they thought nothing of killing for a new word.

            Those who could not afford the market prices bartered. They kept lists of their old words and met once a week or once a month or whenever necessary in the market to find new ones. Sometimes it was a one-for-one exchange. But at times when people were desperate, they'd give two, three, even four of their old words for one new one. Thus words became a commodity.

            At some point, though, an unheralded group of savants discovered a revolutionary sound, unmistakable in its meaning yet always new. Laughter never sounds the same – always a different texture, a different feeling, a varied timbre. Laughter alone escaped the commodity fetish and became the quintessential sound of the second creation.

            In time, the authorities (for there always is some authority, no matter how negligible) taxed laughter and its use declined.

            Today, we can find muted notes of the second creation in the phrases we use to indicate the difficulty of making anything mean something:

            "Words fail me." What does this mean? How can a word not succeed? "Words cannot describe." If they cannot describe, what can?

Our obsession with meaning has contributed greatly to the decline of our planet. We want everything to make sense, but can't make sense of it all.

My words don't behave themselves. I want them to stand in size order and let me marshal facts. But they move, they cheat, they bob and sway. I have to prop them up. I build scaffolding. I haul out enormous I-beams. I create infrastructure and superstructure. Yet still my words are sinking.

This spoken world is a leaky boat. We bail but can never bail fast enough. At some point, we will be overrun and slip into the lagoon, and then words, like weeds, will expand through the polluted estuary and choke us out.

The Third Way

Nothing’s truer than fiction, and the crazier the fiction, the closer to truth it sometimes is.

            The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, by Youssef Rakha (published in Egypt in early 2011, just after the Arab Spring brought down the Mubarak regime, and released in English this month by Interlink Books) is a fever journey through the streets of Cairo, with mad detours into the history of the Ottoman Empire, the grand heritage of Arab literature, and the nature of failed relationships. At once a love story (Mustafa Nayif Çorbacı leaves his wife and finds true love – and great sex, though it might only be in his mind – in the following 3 weeks) and a story of crackpot religious fervor (during the same period, Çorbacı, a Western-educated quasi-believer – the book never has him praying or embracing any particular religious positions – has a series of dreams and visions and transforms himself into a zombie with the mission of reconstituting the Ottoman caliphate), this is a work of zealotry that offers a vision of Islam that is broad and inclusive and lusty and fun.

Çorbacı (which means soup-seller in Turkish) is a man of both East and West. His name itself illuminates the contradictions inherent in that identity. Mustafa is an extremely common name that means 'the chosen one' and this chosen one is a naïf who can't help but carry with him the modern world’s not-quite-satisfying multi-culti stew.

Here’s his critique of the system of the West:

Neoliberalism angers me more than anything else. In practical terms, neoliberalism means that life is a supermarket. It’s what you buy at the supermarket that defines your identity. And the more your choices increase—a thousand types of orange juice, for example, or seventy different sizes of aspirin packet—the more the world flourishes and the possibilities for fulfillment multiply. Would you like your milk 1% or 1.5% fat, or fat-free? Which brand of dark Irish cheddar do you prefer?

So you break your head in a daily job that kills any rebellious instinct in you until you yourself turn into a commodity. Your time, your concentration, your enthusiasm. A job whose only purpose is to increase the supermarket’s size.

And here’s his analysis of the dilemma of a modern man of the East:

To be born a Muslim in this age means that you are perforce a different person. Your historical formation is not a logical result of the situation you’re in. I mean, take these silly examples: you’ve resolved to deal with time in a generous spirit; it is in your nature to grant priority to interpersonal responsibilities and feelings over the demands of work; you explain visible phenomena by reference to the supernatural as well as physical laws: and everything  runs, for you, from right to left. This is the complete opposite of the contemporary expectation that time is like an impaling spike, gain is more important than affection, and everything, even emotions and ideas, has a material explanation, in Latin script. So it is quite natural, in a moment of clarity, that you should wake up one day and fail to recognize anything around you, and be surprised even at your own body. There are now only two choices for a way out: either to blend in with the age to such a degree that you forget you were born a Muslim, or to be a Muslim, narrow-minded, extremist, mediocre, in line with the conditions of the age. There has to be a third choice.

The book is, in a wacky way, the chronicle of a man who finds that third way even as he fears it doesn’t exist. Caught between “the mystical forces of history … dressed up as Atatürk, as European colonialism and national independence movements, then as neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism (“the tail end of the same turd,” as Mustafa called fundamentalism in his notebook….),” Mustafa Çorbacı loses his mind – or, you might say, regains it – as he faces the dilemma that “Everything in his life, if he thought about it this way, would be another example of the marriage of East and West, Mustafa Efendi: the most hateful thing that history has allowed.” Or, as he says later, “Everything he’d known in this world was the aftermath of a crime.”

I can draw a connection between things: to have your love of an emigrée defined as a feeling like loss, while you yourself are abroad; and to be where you are—to be a zombie, with all that the term implies, and to have first met this girl at the time you turned into a zombie—while everything is happening to you in an attempt to understand the meaning of being Arab and a Muslim in this age.

As an author, Rakha is an equal opportunity offender – going after extremes of every sort. And he apparently pisses people off in real life, too: Rakha backed the Arab Spring but has been accused of writing in a kind of veiled support of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former general whose regime has imprisoned and tortured journalists and activists. (Rakha has told interviewers that he is against Sisi: "I'm not sure the question is why intellectuals failed to criticise Sisi," he said late last year. "The question is how society and the culture came to be in a situation where there is no viable alternative to Sisi except for a Sunni Iran.")

Rakha has written this book, so translator Paul Starkey says, in a kind of ‘Middle Arabic’ that mimics medieval texts while welcoming contemporary slang, frank descriptions of fucking (the zombie sex, when it comes, is a one-sided male fantasy – but, hey, it’s Çorbacı’s book and he is male and a self-involved fantasist, so why not?), and a multitude of English phrases. The novel is also peppered with quotes from contemporary and classical literature – and, through it, you’ll meet Yemeni novelist Ali al-Maqri (“The homeland is treason. Every homeland is treason. The idea of the homeland is treason.”), Iraqi Assyrian poet Sargon Boulus (he emigrated to San Francisco in 1968, and, while continuing to publish his own writing, translated the Beat poets into Arabic), plus medieval historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, and many others.

The book jumps back and forth in time, and flickers between the 1^st person and the 3^rd. I felt I could detect the imprint of The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk’s novel of Istanbul, in these pages. And perhaps, subversively, The Book of Questions, Edmund Jabes’ elusive poem made up almost exclusively of quotes from imaginary rabbis.

It’s a riotous high-wire act, grounded by one almost-fatal flaw: Rakha seemed to fear that his story didn’t have an ending. So Part 9, the book’s last section, labeled a “conclusion” and a “confession,” gives the unnamed narrator his chance to plead that, as the very last line of text has it, “the story of Mustafa Çorbacı was not just a collection of fairy tales.”

Fortunately, the chosen one had previously given the book his own ending. At the end of Part 8, ready to embark on the first step of his ridiculous mission to restore the Ottomans as the true Caliphs, Çorbacı hops into a taxi to get to the Plane Yard (‘the airport,’ in his personal cartography of Cairo.) The cabdriver asks, as cabdrivers will, “Where are you traveling to?”

And Çorbacı replies, “I’m going to heaven. Haven’t you heard? They now have a direct flight to heaven.”

What a crushing realization. Çorbacı’s headed to Beirut, the city Westerners once labeled the ‘paradise’ of the Middle East, while tourists, when they fly to Egypt's famed beach resort at Sharm el-Sheikh, understandably feel as if they are headed to heaven – and this is, of course, the same thing Westerners are told the 9/11 hijackers felt when they crashed their planes into the World Trade Center towers and what we assume the Charlie Hebdo shooters meant when they shouted “God is greatest” as they killed, knowing all the while they would be hunted down and killed quite soon thereafter. (see here for Rakha's take on those murders in France.)

Like it or not, our world, like Çorbacı’s, includes all these things. There is a third way and it’s a hard way. It emerges from looking at things as they are.

With its zombies and fanatical fever dreams and crackpot conspiracies involving everyone and everything, The Book of the Sultan's Seal does exactly that.

written 60 years back, by James Baldwin

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955:

to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply a the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people.

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans--lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession--either to come to terms with the necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that "the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men."
     In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man's motive was protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in this country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him--the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the face that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance and a voice.

The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally, without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, of the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

‘All I see is his head and that’s what I shot.’

This is the awful phrase that sticks with me from Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony before the Grand Jury on Sept. 16, 2014.

‘All I see is his head and that’s what I shot. I don’t know how many. I know at least once because I saw the last one go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.’

“The threat was stopped.” It’s a war-movie phrase, a video game phrase, a comic book phrase, a dehumanizing phrase. The target was destroyed. The enemy was neutralized. The threat was stopped.

It’s not the only shoot-‘em-up, caricatured reference Wilson used in his testimony. He described grappling with Michael Brown as “like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” To him, the teenager’s face was twisted. “It looks like a demon,” he told the Grand Jury.

Here’s another version of those fateful seconds, from a Grand Jury witness who testified on Oct. 13, 2014. He saw the incident from inside his car, which pulled up just behind Officer Wilson’s SUV and he initially thought that Michael Brown had a gun and was engaged in a shootout with the policeman. He saw Brown run away, then stagger, stop, turn around, and take “three, maybe four steps” back towards Wilson.

“Q. What happens then? A. The officer unloaded on him.

"Q. What do you mean by that? A. I mean, he fired four or five shots in rapid succession. He gunned him down.”

Perhaps the actuality of what happened in Ferguson that sunny day was so horrific that the cop and the witnesses could only fall back on sentences that seem scavenged from SVU or Scarface or Grand Theft Auto. Those words offer the possibility of a more heroic, storybook, uncomplicated reality.

But there’s nothing heroic or storybook about what went on along those twin yellow-brick lines running down the center of Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri.

Michael Brown needed prosecutors and the Grand Jury to serve as his executors. Not simply to assign blame, but to face head-on, unblinking, without comic book language, the implications of the awful event that spun so wildly out of control.

That's now our task.

Karl Polanyi vs. the Koch brothers

For some authors, books seem heavy, as if the responsibility for having something big to say crushes their ability to say things clearly. I feel that way about the humanist economic historian Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation, his courageous, crusading work questioning the ideology of the free market, sometimes seems like it was deliberately written to blunt the force of his argument. It reads as if Polanyi couldn't quite bring himself to jump across the ever-widening rift his analysis created in the world’s economic thinking. (To be fair, Polanyi wrote the book in a great hurry during World War II, and the shadow of that conflict probably made it hard to venture as far in words as he had in thought.)

So it’s great news that Polity has released For a New West, a collection of Polanyi’s unpublished essays and lecture notes. As a young man, Polanyi started studying law but dropped out, instead becoming an economic journalist and commentator for Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt, the leading German-language financial weekly in Europe. The pieces in this collection, culled from an archive of his papers at Concordia University in Montreal, are refreshingly clear – perhaps because they were never intended for publication. In these essays, we can watch Polanyi as he teases out the implications of his arguments. The book’s title, taken from the title Polanyi gave one of the essays, doesn't capture the scope of his work. Polanyi wasn't only blowing the dust off the West’s self-image. His thought required retooling many of the economic nostrums that have come to dominate the entire planet and wresting politics and culture from collapsing into economics. He wanted a gut renovation of almost all the conceits of economics and a renewed commitment to freedom, justice, and the concept of the people ruling themselves.

Here he is, questioning whether the need for food and the desire for gain should be considered economic matters:

     We…are surrounded by plenty but freeze our economic life in terms of scarcity. That is why we are able to accept the fiction that millionaires are actuated by fear of starvation.
...  We rightly assume that our market economy appeals to what we call “economic motives,” that is, fear of hunger and hope of gain. But, by calling hunger and gain “economic motives,” do we not prejudge the very possibilities of adjustment of the economic sphere of life? Let us consider the point. In one sense, the answer must be yes. Since market economy takes care of production and distribution of material goods, and hunger and gain (as we define them) are insuring the working of that system, it is justifiable to call them economic motives, since they happen to be the motive on which the economic system rests. But are they economic in any other sense. Are they intrinsically economic? In the sense in which aesthetic motives or religious motives are aesthetic or religious, that is, as the outcome and expression of an experience the quality of which is self-evident? Not at all. There is nothing economic about hunger: if a man is hungry, there is nothing specific he can do. Being hungry is certainly no indication of how to go about production. It may induce him to commit robbery, but that is not an economic activity. Neither is the cerebral drive of gain specifically economic. Its idea, and maybe its urge, if such a thing exists, have no connection with the production and distribution of material goods.

Nonetheless, while he questioned the value and values of capitalism, Polanyi had little sympathy for orthodox Marxism, which he thought involved economic absolutism:

Marxist determinism is based on some kind of railway timetable of social development: Upon slave society follows feudalism, upon feudalism capitalism, upon capitalism socialism….It was such a mistaken belief in economic determinism as a general law that made many Marxists – not, to my knowledge, Marx himself – prophesy that our personal freedom must disappear together with the free enterprise system. Actually there is no necessity for this whatsoever.

Still, he noted, under the laissez-faire system, the economic and the political meld together in a marriage that also tends towards fascist intrusions on freedom:

A point is reached where neither the political nor the economic system functions satisfactorily. A feeling of general insecurity takes hold of society as a whole. There is [a] fascist short cut to safeguard production at the price of sacrificing democracy. Democracy can continue only with a change in the property system. Therefore the destruction of democratic institutions is a safeguard for the continuation of the industrial system.

His analysis of the tendencies of the free market alliance between economics and politics seems incredibly prescient in light of the rise of the Tea Party and the battle to tear down Obamacare or any new form of government-backed health insurance or social safety net:

While the action of the market called forth widespread reactions and helped to create a strong popular demand for political influence of the masses, the use of the power so gained was greatly restricted by the nature of the market mechanism: isolated interventions, however urgent on social grounds, could often be shown to be economically harmful, while economically useful interventions of a planned type could not even be considered. In political terms, while piecemeal reform could be discredited as a damaging interference with the working of the market, outright socialist solutions, which would have been economically advantageous, had to be excluded altogether. Under conditions such as these, the striking power of the forces of popular democracy was necessarily limited.

Finally, he asked what might be called the ultimate economic question: what’s the use of having the great wealth and abundance produced by modern society unless it goes to make people’s lives better:

An industrial society has one thing in abundance, and that is material welfare more than is good for it. If, to uphold justice and the freedom to restore meaning and unity in life, we should ever be called upon to sacrifice some efficiency in production, economy in consumption, or rationality of administration, an industrial civilization can afford it….we can afford to be both just and free.

Contradict that, Koch brothers! Occupy Wall Street couldn't have said it better.

Today every militant must feel profoundly that he is not called to coerce humanity to its salvation but to restore humanity to its freedom, and he must have the inner conviction that what will save the world is freedom -- and nothing else.

Polanyi was a man of his time ahead of his time. We need him more than ever.

*** 

One caveat:

For a New West focuses on unpublished or draft writings and lecture notes. But, in her preface, Kari Polanyi Levitt mentions some additional essays that sound like winners -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Is Freedom Possible, Economy and Democracy, and The Mechanism of the World Economic Crisis. They previously appeared in various German-language newspapers and, in one case, in an Italian translation – and thus are not technically unpublished. But so what? It would have been great if they had been included here. I hope the fact that they were left out means there’s more Polanyi yet to come.

Andre Gorz on the sharing economy

André Gorz’s prophetic analysis of the sharing economy, from 1988 –

At the very point when a privileged fraction of the working class seems to be in a position to acquire multiple skills, to achieve workplace autonomy and continually widen their capacities for action – all of which are things that were ideals of the worker self-management currents within the labor movement – the meaning of this ideal is thus radically altered by the conditions in which it seemed destined to be fulfilled. It is not the working class which is achieving these possibilities of self-organization and increasing technological power; it is a small core of privileged workers who are integrated into new style enterprises at the expense of a mass of people who are marginalized and whose job security is destroyed – people shunted from one form of occasional, unrewarding and uninteresting employment to another, who are often reduced to competing for the privilege of selling personal services (including shoe-shining and house-cleaning) to those who retain a secure income.

the secret sharer

A 10 question pop-quiz about the sharing economy

1.      If a four-star restaurant auctions its unsold daily specials on the internet half an hour before closing time, it is

A: sharing food and doing its part to feed the world

B: being environmentally friendly by making use of food that would otherwise go to waste

C: earning at least a little from what would otherwise be a total loss

D: doing what it always does: selling meals

2.      If someone rents out an unused corner of their basement so someone else can store things, he or she is

A: sharing an unused space and making the world a less cluttered place

B: providing a needed service to a neighbor

C: getting some added income that can help them avoid foreclosure

D: operating a self-storage business with one storage locker

3.      Renting out your apartment for a week on Airbnb for more than you pay your landlord per month is

A: sharing your home with others

B: helping tourists feel at home in your city

C: natural capitalism that is boosting your income

D: simultaneously raising rents and ripping off visitors.

4.      The San Francisco service that sells public parking spaces online is

A: an excellent service to all people

B: a great opportunity for elderly folks on fixed incomes who spend all day staring out at the street to make money from what they do naturally

C: privatizing the street

D: making money off the public domain, like the railroad barons of old

5.      What’s the difference between picking someone up at the airport for a fee and picking up your grandmother for free?

A: none; they’re both extremely generous acts

B: there’s no middleman taking a cut of the cash your grandmother gives you on your birthday – and that’s the only reason you’re waiting for the old bag anyway.

C: your grandmother is an über-baker and makes much better apple pies than anyone to whom you've ever given a Lyft.

D: there’s no profit in pimping your ride for your nana—and anyway, she’s too old to slide into the Maserati you bought with profits from picking up people in your beat-up ’89 Toyota.

6.      I feel your

A: pain

B: need

C: ability to supplement my income

D: wallet getting thinner

7.      Sharing is

A: its own reward

B: a generous act

C: never having to say you’re broke

D: a profit-making enterprise

8.      The sharing economy is different from the rest of the economy because

A: it encourages equality

B: through peer-to-peer contacts it boosts community and connectedness

C: it breaks down overpriced monopolies

D: it allows you to sometimes make a buck, rather than always paying for stuff

9.     
Calling selling sharing is

A: valid and true

B: a natural extension of the free market of words

C: just as logical as a phrase like ‘the internet of things’

D: Orwellian in the extreme

10.  The best slogan for The Sharing Economy is

A: ‘from each according to availability, to each according to depth of pockets’

B: ‘the invisible helping-hand of the market’

C: ‘there’s a profit-center born every minute’

D: ‘Micro-Capitalism Über Alles!’

Aimé Césaire’s non-notebook

Some books inscribe themselves on your bones.

The minute I felt the caustic spray of the first lines of John Berger and Anna Bostock’s 45-year-old rendition of Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, just reissued by Archipelago Books (‘At the end of the small hours…Get away, I said, you bastard of a cop, swine get away.’), I was in its thrall. This translation burns with fresh and righteous acid.

It’s far from a literal version—a fact you can judge from the cover. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal means ‘Notebook of a return to the birth land.’ Berger and Bostock’s tummy tuck on the title seems a sacrilege, but it eats away the pretense that it’s just a miscellany of journal jottings: this poem seethes with raw facts and fancies about servitude, forced migration, colonization, and slavery. It shines an unsparing dry-ice spotlight on our complicity. It’s not a notebook; it’s an indictment.

Return to my Native Land is verbal napalm. Césaire’s words molest your complacency, Molotov your privilege, blowtorch your preconceptions and, generously, just when you’re near death, anneal your already-burnt body and conjure a hard new seed of consciousness. This is poetry both of scorched earth and the phoenix.

Reading this translation, I understood for the first time Cesaire’s complicated feelings about his heritage—the forced journey from Africa to Martinique—and his new journey to Europe, to the motherland of his colonizers, all compressed in a line documenting his “leap across the sweet greenish fluid of the waters of shame.” And, with renewed respect, I perceived his complicated, wishful and ultimately unrequited relationship with the West, summed up in the immortal line, “I have come to the wrong witch-doctor.”

With Berger and Bostock as my guides, I discovered Aimé Césaire as the Walt Whitman of the Americas. Born just 21 years after the Brooklyn and Camden master died, Césaire (1913-2008) is the avenging Whitman, the blaming bard, the wordsmith of coruscating hate and transformative self-loathing—a stance Whitman (“I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness”) would have understood and admired. I have no idea if Césaire ever read Song of Myself, but compare:

C:

knowing my tyrannical love you know

it is not by hatred of other races that I prosecute for mine.

W:

encompass worlds, but never try to emcompass me,

I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

C:

My name is Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San Francisco

Not a corner of the world but carried my thumb-print

and my heel-mark on the backs of skyscrapers and my dirt in the glitter of jewels.

W:

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff. I give them the

same, I receive them the same.

C:

Accommodate yourself to me, I won’t

accommodate myself to you!

W:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself

and what I assume you shall assume,

for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Césaire published Return in 1939, when he was an angry young man, and reissued it, revised, in 1947, and again, more completely bowdlerized, in 1957, when he was a middle-aged politician. By then he was mayor of Fort-de-France (serving from 1945 to 2001 with just two years--1983 and 1984--out of office) and a member of France's National Assembly (from 1946 to 1956 and 1958 to 1993.) Perhaps he deemed the overt and violent sexuality unfitting and unflattering for a public figure. Perhaps he wanted a more didactic and predictable tone. B and B translated Césaire’s authorized version—the shrunken ’57 edition. But no matter. Their English is packed with passion and shot-through with sexuality.

Return ends with a contaminated and corrosive plea for peace:

Dove

Rise

Rise

Rise

It is you I follow, follow

stamped on my eye’s ancestral white cornea

Rise licker of the sky

and the great black

hole where I wished to drown myself by another moon.

it is there that I would fish

for the night’s evil tongue in its seized swirl!

Césaire doesn’t let anyone off the hook. And why should he? We are all equally implicated, the same peaceful patterns stamped on our corneas, the same death-wish moons drowning our hopes, the same descent into defeat, as we are licked and ultimately suffocated by our dense planet’s evil tongue.

Just being able to say this is a victory, a bold statement of life.

Has Don Rumsfeld done Est?

That was my first reaction when I heard Donald Rumsfeld's "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns" press conference. And it's my reaction now to Errol Morris's analyses on nytimes.com.

That's because, what seems like several lifetimes ago, a former girlfriend took me to a very special guest seminar at Avery Fisher Hall for students of EST-the Forum-Landmark Education. I remember it well because the audience was a bit more devout than the last time I was there for a non-classical event--a massively loud and massively stoned Mahavishnu Orchestra concert. This one was a packed house, too--because the big kahuna himself, Werner Erhard, was in the house.

Using a dry-erase board, Erhard analyzed human experience in a four-part matrix:

Erhard put a big circle around that category at the bottom right and declared that that's where his work worked its magic -- on the unknown unknowns.

So, does anyone know if Don Rumsfeld has done Est?

PS: I'm not the first to suggest this: see lgattruth

The Mayor Skedaddled

It was his first big chance to differentiate himself from Mike Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio blew it.

Last week, Mayor de Blasio had a chance to show voters that he was, despite his new Upper East Side digs, the same man they voted for. He could have, in one statement, restored our sense that he was, despite his vague and malleable positions on many crucial issues, one of us.

Instead he ran from the conflict.

If you follow the taboids and TV, you know the story: late one night early in the week, Mayor de Blasio picked up the phone to call police officials to find out what was going on with Bishop Orlando Findlayter, a key campaign supporter, who had been pulled over in his car for making a turn without signaling. Then, when records showed several open warrants (apparently for symbolic arrests at protest demonstrations), the clergyman was hauled off to his local precinct. Since he was arrested at almost midnight, he was probably destined to spend the night and the following day, and perhaps even the following evening, at central booking going through the cumbersome and nasty arrest-to-arraignment process.

When the press queried the Mayor about the ethics of pushing for special treatment for a crony, de Blasio defended his phone call by terming Findlayter’s case “unusual.” Then he clammed up, cancelling a press appearance and vanishing from the public eye. He might as well have flown to Bermuda.

Sadly, though, in that one word the Mayor did say about the issue, he misspoke. What happened to Bishop Findlayter was many things—but it was not unusual. Arrests for things that don’t merit arrest happen all the time in New York City. The only two unusual things here are that it happened to an FoB—a friend of Bill—and that it’s being talked about in the press.

Sure it was boneheaded for the Mayor to phone the police and even appear to interfere on behalf of a friend and supporter. But let’s be honest: during the Bloomberg years, it became alarmingly common for New Yorkers to be given tickets, and even to be arrested, for amazingly petty things. Think veering out of a bike lane to avoid a truck that was illegally double-parked. Think walking your dog in a park after dark. Think being accosted by the cops (stop & frisk, anyone?) and not having an ID with you. Think minor automotive things like the Bishop’s supposed infraction (in some circles, that’s called DWB, driving while black.)

This is exactly the tale of two cities that Mayor de Blasio decried in his campaign—that well-connected people like the Bishop get to walk from the precinct, while everyone else is being processed and prosecuted and treated as if they were a violent criminal in punishment for stupid petty violations.

Sorry, Mr. Mayor: if it’s wrong for the bishop, it’s wrong for everyone, and you ought to say so. Arresting people on silly charges like this is a waste of police time, a waste of court time, a waste of the people’s time. And it does nothing to prevent crime. Indeed, it stigmatizes a whole generation—because a kid who finds himself in this situation (you can relate: think of your son, Dante, who featured so mightily in your campaign) might find that that arrest follows him in his computerized records for the rest of his life, potentially blocking him from getting an education or a job.

The Mayor had a chance to be our true elected representative. He had a chance to speak truth to power. He had a chance to say something meaningful: that he had strong reservations about a criminal justice system that would, even temporarily, incarcerate a person—anyone, not just a Bishop and campaign supporter—for spurious and ridiculous violations like making a turn without signaling and getting arrested at demonstrations for engaging in acts of free speech.

And the Mayor ran away.

the last word on art & politics

Art, if you want a definition of it, is criminal action. It conforms to no rules. Not even its own. Anyone who experiences a work of art is as guilty as the artist. It is not a question of sharing the guilt. Each one of us gets all of it.

--John Cage