Baptism By Spot

Age six is an interesting age. It’s the age, here in the U.S. in the 1950s, that you entered the world. You got registered in a grade school and had a place to be every day at a specific time in a highly structured environment. It was every child’s introduction to the world of the institution. Some take to institutions well and naturally. Some fight against it all their lives. And others run so afoul of it they end up in prison. Which is the ultimate institution. Institutionality isn’t just a matter of norms and organizational rigor. It’s a force to contend with. It offers security, stability, and turtleneck sweaters. Desks, cubicles, and staplers. I have vivid memories of learning to read, and Dick and Jane and their dog Spot, which somewhat resembled my dog at the time, a cocker spaniel named Pepper. Reading, one could tell immediately by the amount of attention it was given, was a critical element of the institution. In later years, I discovered that language – and books – carried a great potential for staging subversive ideas. Writers like Jonathan Swift and Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing. Language that mocked, derided, or questioned institutional authority. And that was the magic carpet I rode on for many years. So it is exponentially strange to now find myself among a population who mock, deride, and disparage books and reading, print media in general. These are generally the people you now see walking in cities in a zombie-like trance staring at a mobile phone. They’re utterly brain-dead. The irony is that they’ve been far more subsumed by the dystopic technocracy in which most people are locked in, though a few remain locked out. The homeless encampments remind me a great deal of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, and the movie that came out in 1966, directed by François Truffaut. Not surprisingly, the same societies which have embraced all the latest technological advances, particularly the ones that lend themselves most efficiently to surveillance and control, are the ones least inclined to embrace the Socratic spirit, the intellectual agility derived from questioning everything. Vaccines, for example. Especially the ones forced on people with arbitrary mandates, however much the usual paths of science, such as experimental trials and empirical evidence, have been skipped with a view toward profit. Money is the new god. Though here I must question the validity of that statement: how new, and how divine? What is meant by ‘god’? On July 11, 1955, Congress passed H.R. 619, which mandated “In God We Trust” to be included on all U.S. currency, which is currently inflated and losing its value in a global economic environment that is souring on U.S. hegemony. I’m also reminded of how every school day began with a ritual: standing, with one’s hand over one’s heart, pledging allegiance to the American flag. For a lot of us, myself included, it wasn’t till I graduated from high school and entered another world – the world of brutish survival – that I began putting together what all this meant. And writing poetry. Exiting out to sea on Rimbaud’s drunken boat. Imagination is a much more valuable asset than money. I’m not talking about the commodified version that billionaires draw on to build spaceships. That isn’t imagination, that’s exploitation. Imagination is the opposite of that. It’s the realization that the real treasures aren’t beyond the horizon, teeming with cheap labor and resources. It’s the realization that the horizon itself is the treasure: an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.