Last March, the first thing Michael McClure said at a lecture he gave at the Rainer Valley Cultural Center, was how good the water in Seattle tasted.
It does. This has been one of the enduring rewards of living in this city. Turning on a tap and getting some of the freshest, sweetest water I have ever tasted. This is water you would not want turned into wine. It is that good.
Though turning it into coffee on occasion can be highly rewarding. There is a reason Starbucks got its start in Seattle, and that reason is water. Coffee made with Seattle water is pure elixir. Strong, dark, electric.
Where does our water come from? It does rain a lot in Seattle. Its ultimate provenance is the sky: fronts that blow over the north Pacific, dropping a lot of precipitation on the Olympics and adding to the density of the rainforests, then continuing east to Seattle where it arrives in what is usually a steady drizzle, though sometimes a torrential downpour. The clouds drift onward to the Cascades, where precipitation flutters down as snow in the winter, creating lush packs that in late spring begin dripping and trickling and feeding the thousands of streams silvering the sides of cliffs and gliding over granite and schist in emerald mirrors that converge into rivers.
Seattle’s specific source is the Cedar River Watershed. The Cedar River is about 45 miles long and empties into Lake Washington. But before it gets there pipelines maintained by Seattle Public Utilities at Landsburg reroute approximately 100 million gallons per day for 1.4 million people in King County. And it is the snowpack in the central Cascades whose melting in the spring and summer months keeps the Cedar River boisterous with water. You would think a snowpack, like space and gravity and other natural phenomena, would be a pretty stable occurrence. It’s not. Due, ostensibly, to climate change, the snowpacks have been dwindling. This year the snowpack is just 56% of normal.
Worrisome? Hell yes.
Annual water withdrawal is capped at 22%. Salmon require a minimum of 78% to swim upstream without getting caught in dry gravel beds. 78% is required for the Ballard locks to move up and down from sea level to lake level, and 78% is required to keep the floating bridges in Lake Washington afloat. If the lake level drops past a critical point, the bridges will crack, break, and sink. Current consumption is close to 20%. Meanwhile, population in King County increases by approximately 18,000 per year.
And so I get pretty pissed when I see people power-washing a sidewalk or driveway, or sprinklers keeping a golf link green in the middle of summer. This is stupid, scandalous waste.
And God forbid if the water becomes privatized.
Tap water costs about a half penny per gallon. A pint of bottled water is about $1.40.
Bolivia gives me hope. In September, 1999, Bolivia’s dictator Hugo Banzer signed a contract with Bechtel to privatize the water in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city. A contract was awarded to Aguas del Tunari, a consortium in which Bechetel held a 27.5 interest. Water rates skyrocketed. People had to withdraw their children from school and stop using doctors. Protests ensued. Martial law was declared. Bolivian police killed at least six people and injured over 170. But the protests continued. The Bolivian government withdraw the water contract.
More recently, Michigan has been battling Nestle. In 2001, Perrier, which has since been bought by Nestle Waters North America, was welcomed by Michigan governor John Engler, who let Nestle open a plant for a licensing fee of less than $100 per year, and threw in some tax breaks worth millions. Nestle purchased the groundwater rights to an area known as Sanctuary Springs in Mecosta County and began pumping 100 to 300 gallons per minute out of the local aquifer and bottling it for sale as Nestle’s Ice Mountain brand. A grassroots movement of local residents and activists coalesced to protest. They formed the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation group and filed a lawsuit in Mecosta County Circuit Court against Nestle, seeking to prevent the pumping, arguing that it was not a legally defined "reasonable use" of water and violated state and federal regulations regarding water rights. Judge Lawrence Root presided, and ordered Nestle to stop pumping, on the basis that it impaired the local resources, lowering water levels at lakes and streams, causing the water temperature to change, and irreparable havoc in the entire ecosystem.
The commons has been under continuous assault since unbridled predatory capitalism gained serious momentum during the Reagan administration. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States, as the recent riots in Greece and France have shown. The conflict, as Seattle’s WTO protests gave earlier evidence, is now global. When speculators play the market, people starve. When the commons is privatized, people starve. As it currently stands, 1.1 billion people do not have access to potable water.
Roberta and I sometimes talk about moving to the Midwest. Life is cheaper than in glitzy, software-addled Seattle where Microsoft’s affluence continues to offset a more modest approach to living. We could afford a house in the Midwest. But having grown up, partly, on a farm in North Dakota, where I continued to have strong family connections for many years and reasons to visit, I can attest that the water there is hard and acidic. My father spent his retirement years in the Turtle Mountains, living in a cottage on a small lake near the Manitoba border, and made his coffee with bottled water, so that it wouldn’t taste so bitter.
It isn’t entirely the water that keeps us chained to Seattle. It has quite a few other amenities as well. Microsoft isn’t entirely to blame for its inflated real estate. But while our dreams are often abutted by the hard realities that go with living in an expensive city, it is the water that keeps them afloat.
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capitalism. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Evil Is Going On Wrong
On Evil, non-fiction by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2010
Thirty years ago if the word ‘evil’ cropped up in conversation I would think immediately of late night movies, Frankenstein, Dracula, zombies, mummies, werewolves, and man-eating blobs. Giant ants, giant sharks, giant lizards, giant women, giant men. Creepy-crawly hands, disfigured serial killers, mad scientists and evil wizards. Except for the implications of social malaise in movies like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or nuclear technology gone awry in movies like Godzilla Vs Mothra or Them! evil had only one unequivocal political dimension: Nazis. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, et. al. But even they seemed contained. Their example had proved so horrific that everyone felt safe: humanity had learned an important lesson. There would be henceforward safeguards against such atrocities. Those who dared could watch footage of the holocaust, turn off their TV, and breathe a sigh of relief that humanity had come to their senses and were now committed to never allowing that evil to occur again.
But it did. It has. And it will continue to.
The first inkling I had that something very ugly had occurred in the zeitgeist was shortly after Reagan had been elected president. The population of homeless people burgeoned. Many of them were psychologically troubled, not your garden variety hobo, or hippy panhandler. There was something very cruel behind their growing numbers in the street. Severe budget cuts and a maniacal hatred of taxation, especially on the rich, had led to some very inhumane conditions.
Vietnam had been a horrible, ugly evil, but had been so vigorously protested by so many people, at least by the early 70s, that one still had a sense of moral victory, a secure feeling that people were fundamentally good. This eroded quickly after Reagan’s immense popularity strongly suggested a very different set of values had taken root in the American psyche.
It did not take long for the utopian triumphs of the 60s to become a trivialized clutter of lava lamps, love beads, scratched Beatles records, and moldy day-glo posters destined for the attic or garage. Martin Luther King’s stellar leadership would become a holiday and the name for a lot of city streets, but otherwise forgotten.
By the late 80s, American imperialism turned very bloody and very ugly in Central and South America. And the labor movement took a near-fatal blow when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981. The effects of that were becoming very visible in the late 80s; wages plummeted and the disparity between the obscenely rich and middle class became stunningly evident. A cute term was coined to describe this new phenomenon: trickle down economics. The reality was better summed up by Gordon Gekko: “Greed is good.”
In the following decades the world has been witness to such a dizzying number of atrocities, from Gaza to Afghanistan, Iraq to Chechnya, Mogadishu to the Democratic Republic of the Congo that ‘evil’ has lost its late-night-movie aura and become a real… what? What is evil? I realized I had no true idea as to what it was. It seemed as shapeless and ubiquitous as the gelatinous blob that blobbed its way around town swallowing everything in sight in the The Blob. Or, for that matter, the black viscous blobs swallowing the gulf of Mexico and the coasts and marshes of the southern states. And I had a further obsession: what goes on in the heads of people like Tony Hayward when, after destroying an ocean, he skips off to enjoy a yacht race, or the CEO of a health insurance company that has denied benefits to someone dying of leukemia or cancer for utterly bogus reasons in order to bolster the profits of the shareholders? Or the sinister market manipulations at Goldman Sachs and other financial giants? Did Henry Paulson or Larry Summers ever have qualms? Doubts? Ethical tremors? What would five minutes in the head of Glenn Beck be like?
It was time to find out just what evil is all about. It was, therefore, with a great deal of eagerness I opened the cover to Terry Eagleton’s opus on the subject, On Evil, dedicated, appropriately, to Henry Kissinger. I chose Eagleton as my introduction because one, I am not religious, and two, I am not given to the occult. I don’t even like Tarot cards. I wanted a secular view, and one with an eye toward current affairs.
Nor did I want to read Hanna Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem. I was already pretty well acquainted with her notion of the “banality of the evil,” and I have had my fill of Nazis. It’s probably a good thing that she is not alive to see them sprouting up again in the likes of the Christian fundamentalist movement. And if she thought Eichman was a clown, I can’t begin to imagine what she would make of Sarah Palin.
Eagleton’s discussion is erudite, vigorous, and refreshingly non-academic. He writes in a completely lucid, accessible, engaging style. He begins with a discussion of evil in contemporary fiction, then segues, in chapters two and three, into treatments of evil in Shakespeare and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. His preference throughout is to cite examples from literature rather than current affairs in order to discriminate between what he deems authentic evil from sheer wickedness, or iniquity. It is not a question of magnitude so much as essence. It is a matter of freedom and self-determination. “Pure autonomy,” he says, “is a dream of evil.”
There is Pincher Martin, “the tale of a man who refuses to die,” by William Golding. After nearly drowning in the middle of the ocean, the central character, Christopher Martin, makes it to a rock where he is most certain to die of thirst and hunger. The bulk of the novel is rendered in flashbacks in which we learn that Martin, according to Eagleton, is a “grasping, lecherous, manipulative naval officer was never really alive in the first place.” Spiritually dead and divorced from the sensations of his own body, his slow death on the rock “magnifies the way he has treated other human bodies all along.” “Evil involves a split between body and spirit -- between an abstract will to dominate and destroy, and the meaningless piece of flesh that this will inhabits.”
There is Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which “the schoolboy’s efforts to build a civilized order on their island are inevitably undermined by violence and sectarianism.”
There is Free Fall, another novel by Golding, which Eagleton cites as “Golding’s most subtle investigation of original sin, a condition which has nothing to do with slimy reptiles and forbidden fruit.” What has to do with “lies in the fact that we are self-contradictory animals, since our creative and destructive powers spring from much the same source.”
Man is Faustian Man, too voraciously ambitious for his own well-being, perpetually driven beyond his own limits by the lure of the infinite. This creature cold-shoulders all finite things in his hubristic love affair with the illimitable. And since infinity is a kind of nothingness, the desire for this nothingness is an expression of what we shall see later as the Freudian death drive.
Eagleton leans heavily on the death drive to explain evil. “Evil, as we shall see, is bound up with destruction in several senses. One bond between them is that fact that destruction is really the only way to trump God’s act of creation.” “The prospect of nuclear holocaust, or of the world being swamped by its own oceans, turns evil weak at the knees with delight.”
He cites, as a literary treatment of this idea, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, “a novel in which we hear the music of the damned,” the story of a doomed composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who “deliberately infects himself with syphilis by visiting a prostitute, and does so in order to conjure resplendent musical visions from the gradual degeneration of his brain.” “If,” Eagleton observes, “the artist seeks to redeem a corrupt world by the transfigurative power of his art, then he or she must be on intimate terms with evil. This is why the modern artist is the secular version of Christ, who descends into the hell of despair and destitution in order to gather it into eternal life.”
This is a fascinating idea, but might we broaden it to help explain the baffling waste and futility of persecuting a war in Afghanistan, or killing a country’s economy by outsourcing all of its jobs overseas and gambling away its future on esoteric derivatives? I tend to see it as just plain greed and stupidity, and I’m not sure it helps to frame the destruction of so many lives in terms of a psychoanalytic theory. I don’t see a Pentagon general sitting down, slapping his hand to his forehead and saying “wow, I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we need to figure this thing out, before we kill any more people.” I’m pretty sure the war, like all wars, has more to do with Moloch than Thanatos. “War is a racket,” said Smedley Butler, “it always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
It is hard to believe how any individual could be so callous and egotistical as to make money off of a war and sleep peacefully at night. The devil himself must puzzle over this.
In Chapter 2, titled “Obscene Enjoyment,” Eagleton cites Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of evil, distinguishing it from “ruthless egoism or fanatical self-interest.” “By evil,” says Eagleton, “Schopenhauer meant more or less what I have been meaning by the term. He saw evil deeds as motivated by a need to obtain relief from the inner torment of what he called the Will; and this relief was to be gained by inflicting that torment on others.”
The Will, for Schopenhauer, is a malignant drive which lies at the very heart of our being but which is callously indifferent to our personal welfare. It ordains suffering to no end. In fact, it has absolutely no purpose in view other than its own futile self-reproduction. Men and women under the sway of this force, Schopenhauer writes, find one gratification after another wanting, so that “when at last all wishes are exhausted, the pressure of the Will still remains, even without any recognized motive, and makes itself known with terrible pain as a feeling of the most frightful desolation and emptiness.” Only when we cease to desire something in particular are we overwhelmed by the sheer painfulness of desire as such, desire in its purest state.
Or, as Keith Richards and Mick Jagger put it, “I can’t get no satisfaction. Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.”
It could very well be I’m obtuse, but I did not come away from Eagleton’s book with a satisfactory definition of evil, at least not one that helps explain what goes on in the head of a Tony Hayward, Richard Cheney, Rush Limbaugh or Arizona governor Jan Brewer. Or why Republicans do evil with so much more flare and demonic glee than Democrats. Not that democrats are strangers to evil. Not by a long shot. Or what it is that led seven male American contractors in Iraq to lock Jaimie Lee Jones in a container under armed guard and brutally rape her? And the corporation that hired her and the seven men, Halliburton/KBR, to block legal action, thereby creating a climate of impunity and encouraging further atrocities? Again, I see the devil shaking his head in dismay. What is the point in provoking God with unabashed evil when humans are so much better at it?
Eagleton did not stint on definitions of evil. He calls it “unintelligible… a thing in itself,” “supremely pointless,” “boring because it is lifeless,” “philistine, kitsch-ridden, and banal.” “It defends itself against the complexities of human experience with a reach-me-down dogma or a cheap slogan… If it believes in nothing, it is because it does not have enough interior life to be capable of doing so.”
The opposite of evil, of course, is good. “For Thomas Aquinas,” Eagleton observes, “the more a thing succeeds in realizing its true nature, the more it can be said to be good. The perfection of a thing, he argues, depends on the extent to which it has achieved actuality.” Within this context, evil is “a kind of deficiency of being.”
There are those who feel uneasy about this way of viewing evil. How can one possibly speak of Mao’s monstrous purges, or those who perished in the Nazi concentration camps, as victims of a simple deficiency? Doesn’t this risk underestimating the terrifying positivity of evil? It is here, I think, that psychoanalytic theory can ride to the rescue, allowing us to maintain that evil is a kind of deprivation while still acknowledging its formidable power. The power in question, as we have seen already, is essentially that of the death drive, turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack -- an unbearable sense of none-being, which must, so to speak, be taken out on the other.
I felt unsatisfied at the conclusion of this book. But I think I made a mistake in expecting far too much from it. It is best to appreciate it as a primer, not as a geyser of enlightenment. Its subject is far too large, too complex and too unwieldy to fully comprehend by any author, no matter how perceptive or talented. Maybe what I was hoping for was a rant. Some fire-breathing rage. A passionate slam against the criminality of the Bush administration, which the Obama administration has not only allowed to slither back into the shadows without so much as an investigation, but has gone forward perpetuating, and in some instances escalating.
Eagleton’s tone throughout is even-tempered. His treatment of the subject does more to promote reflection and intellectual evaluation than encourage people to take to the streets with pitchforks, blazing torches, and guerrilla tactics with the hopes, however deluded, of bringing the evil empire of unchecked capitalism and its monsters down. His solutions are sobering, not enraging. This is a book you can bring to the beach without putting yourself at risk, wading into the surf to drown yourself or throw rocks at the first person to come along wearing a conservative t-shirt.
Eagleton cites numerous sources, all of them neatly noted, and so provides a rich vein of further pursuit. And so I will. I will continue my search and no doubt find quantities of the black viscous gooey stuff called evil running in my own veins.
At present, my most fervent hope is to merely understand what it was that went on in Tony Hayward’s head when, after the company for which he stood as captain and CEO decimated X number of pelicans and dolphins and manatees with gooey black oil, polluted for decades, perhaps centuries, the pristine white beaches of Florida, permanently disrupted the lives of thousands of people who depended for their living on the waters of the gulf of Mexico, and killed eleven men in an inferno of oil and steel, all of which could have been easily prevented by using a little wisdom, prudence, and pittance of money, he went skipping off to enjoy his life.
Yale University Press, 2010
Thirty years ago if the word ‘evil’ cropped up in conversation I would think immediately of late night movies, Frankenstein, Dracula, zombies, mummies, werewolves, and man-eating blobs. Giant ants, giant sharks, giant lizards, giant women, giant men. Creepy-crawly hands, disfigured serial killers, mad scientists and evil wizards. Except for the implications of social malaise in movies like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or nuclear technology gone awry in movies like Godzilla Vs Mothra or Them! evil had only one unequivocal political dimension: Nazis. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, et. al. But even they seemed contained. Their example had proved so horrific that everyone felt safe: humanity had learned an important lesson. There would be henceforward safeguards against such atrocities. Those who dared could watch footage of the holocaust, turn off their TV, and breathe a sigh of relief that humanity had come to their senses and were now committed to never allowing that evil to occur again.
But it did. It has. And it will continue to.
The first inkling I had that something very ugly had occurred in the zeitgeist was shortly after Reagan had been elected president. The population of homeless people burgeoned. Many of them were psychologically troubled, not your garden variety hobo, or hippy panhandler. There was something very cruel behind their growing numbers in the street. Severe budget cuts and a maniacal hatred of taxation, especially on the rich, had led to some very inhumane conditions.
Vietnam had been a horrible, ugly evil, but had been so vigorously protested by so many people, at least by the early 70s, that one still had a sense of moral victory, a secure feeling that people were fundamentally good. This eroded quickly after Reagan’s immense popularity strongly suggested a very different set of values had taken root in the American psyche.
It did not take long for the utopian triumphs of the 60s to become a trivialized clutter of lava lamps, love beads, scratched Beatles records, and moldy day-glo posters destined for the attic or garage. Martin Luther King’s stellar leadership would become a holiday and the name for a lot of city streets, but otherwise forgotten.
By the late 80s, American imperialism turned very bloody and very ugly in Central and South America. And the labor movement took a near-fatal blow when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981. The effects of that were becoming very visible in the late 80s; wages plummeted and the disparity between the obscenely rich and middle class became stunningly evident. A cute term was coined to describe this new phenomenon: trickle down economics. The reality was better summed up by Gordon Gekko: “Greed is good.”
In the following decades the world has been witness to such a dizzying number of atrocities, from Gaza to Afghanistan, Iraq to Chechnya, Mogadishu to the Democratic Republic of the Congo that ‘evil’ has lost its late-night-movie aura and become a real… what? What is evil? I realized I had no true idea as to what it was. It seemed as shapeless and ubiquitous as the gelatinous blob that blobbed its way around town swallowing everything in sight in the The Blob. Or, for that matter, the black viscous blobs swallowing the gulf of Mexico and the coasts and marshes of the southern states. And I had a further obsession: what goes on in the heads of people like Tony Hayward when, after destroying an ocean, he skips off to enjoy a yacht race, or the CEO of a health insurance company that has denied benefits to someone dying of leukemia or cancer for utterly bogus reasons in order to bolster the profits of the shareholders? Or the sinister market manipulations at Goldman Sachs and other financial giants? Did Henry Paulson or Larry Summers ever have qualms? Doubts? Ethical tremors? What would five minutes in the head of Glenn Beck be like?
It was time to find out just what evil is all about. It was, therefore, with a great deal of eagerness I opened the cover to Terry Eagleton’s opus on the subject, On Evil, dedicated, appropriately, to Henry Kissinger. I chose Eagleton as my introduction because one, I am not religious, and two, I am not given to the occult. I don’t even like Tarot cards. I wanted a secular view, and one with an eye toward current affairs.
Nor did I want to read Hanna Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem. I was already pretty well acquainted with her notion of the “banality of the evil,” and I have had my fill of Nazis. It’s probably a good thing that she is not alive to see them sprouting up again in the likes of the Christian fundamentalist movement. And if she thought Eichman was a clown, I can’t begin to imagine what she would make of Sarah Palin.
Eagleton’s discussion is erudite, vigorous, and refreshingly non-academic. He writes in a completely lucid, accessible, engaging style. He begins with a discussion of evil in contemporary fiction, then segues, in chapters two and three, into treatments of evil in Shakespeare and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. His preference throughout is to cite examples from literature rather than current affairs in order to discriminate between what he deems authentic evil from sheer wickedness, or iniquity. It is not a question of magnitude so much as essence. It is a matter of freedom and self-determination. “Pure autonomy,” he says, “is a dream of evil.”
There is Pincher Martin, “the tale of a man who refuses to die,” by William Golding. After nearly drowning in the middle of the ocean, the central character, Christopher Martin, makes it to a rock where he is most certain to die of thirst and hunger. The bulk of the novel is rendered in flashbacks in which we learn that Martin, according to Eagleton, is a “grasping, lecherous, manipulative naval officer was never really alive in the first place.” Spiritually dead and divorced from the sensations of his own body, his slow death on the rock “magnifies the way he has treated other human bodies all along.” “Evil involves a split between body and spirit -- between an abstract will to dominate and destroy, and the meaningless piece of flesh that this will inhabits.”
There is Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which “the schoolboy’s efforts to build a civilized order on their island are inevitably undermined by violence and sectarianism.”
There is Free Fall, another novel by Golding, which Eagleton cites as “Golding’s most subtle investigation of original sin, a condition which has nothing to do with slimy reptiles and forbidden fruit.” What has to do with “lies in the fact that we are self-contradictory animals, since our creative and destructive powers spring from much the same source.”
Man is Faustian Man, too voraciously ambitious for his own well-being, perpetually driven beyond his own limits by the lure of the infinite. This creature cold-shoulders all finite things in his hubristic love affair with the illimitable. And since infinity is a kind of nothingness, the desire for this nothingness is an expression of what we shall see later as the Freudian death drive.
Eagleton leans heavily on the death drive to explain evil. “Evil, as we shall see, is bound up with destruction in several senses. One bond between them is that fact that destruction is really the only way to trump God’s act of creation.” “The prospect of nuclear holocaust, or of the world being swamped by its own oceans, turns evil weak at the knees with delight.”
He cites, as a literary treatment of this idea, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, “a novel in which we hear the music of the damned,” the story of a doomed composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who “deliberately infects himself with syphilis by visiting a prostitute, and does so in order to conjure resplendent musical visions from the gradual degeneration of his brain.” “If,” Eagleton observes, “the artist seeks to redeem a corrupt world by the transfigurative power of his art, then he or she must be on intimate terms with evil. This is why the modern artist is the secular version of Christ, who descends into the hell of despair and destitution in order to gather it into eternal life.”
This is a fascinating idea, but might we broaden it to help explain the baffling waste and futility of persecuting a war in Afghanistan, or killing a country’s economy by outsourcing all of its jobs overseas and gambling away its future on esoteric derivatives? I tend to see it as just plain greed and stupidity, and I’m not sure it helps to frame the destruction of so many lives in terms of a psychoanalytic theory. I don’t see a Pentagon general sitting down, slapping his hand to his forehead and saying “wow, I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we need to figure this thing out, before we kill any more people.” I’m pretty sure the war, like all wars, has more to do with Moloch than Thanatos. “War is a racket,” said Smedley Butler, “it always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
It is hard to believe how any individual could be so callous and egotistical as to make money off of a war and sleep peacefully at night. The devil himself must puzzle over this.
In Chapter 2, titled “Obscene Enjoyment,” Eagleton cites Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of evil, distinguishing it from “ruthless egoism or fanatical self-interest.” “By evil,” says Eagleton, “Schopenhauer meant more or less what I have been meaning by the term. He saw evil deeds as motivated by a need to obtain relief from the inner torment of what he called the Will; and this relief was to be gained by inflicting that torment on others.”
The Will, for Schopenhauer, is a malignant drive which lies at the very heart of our being but which is callously indifferent to our personal welfare. It ordains suffering to no end. In fact, it has absolutely no purpose in view other than its own futile self-reproduction. Men and women under the sway of this force, Schopenhauer writes, find one gratification after another wanting, so that “when at last all wishes are exhausted, the pressure of the Will still remains, even without any recognized motive, and makes itself known with terrible pain as a feeling of the most frightful desolation and emptiness.” Only when we cease to desire something in particular are we overwhelmed by the sheer painfulness of desire as such, desire in its purest state.
Or, as Keith Richards and Mick Jagger put it, “I can’t get no satisfaction. Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.”
It could very well be I’m obtuse, but I did not come away from Eagleton’s book with a satisfactory definition of evil, at least not one that helps explain what goes on in the head of a Tony Hayward, Richard Cheney, Rush Limbaugh or Arizona governor Jan Brewer. Or why Republicans do evil with so much more flare and demonic glee than Democrats. Not that democrats are strangers to evil. Not by a long shot. Or what it is that led seven male American contractors in Iraq to lock Jaimie Lee Jones in a container under armed guard and brutally rape her? And the corporation that hired her and the seven men, Halliburton/KBR, to block legal action, thereby creating a climate of impunity and encouraging further atrocities? Again, I see the devil shaking his head in dismay. What is the point in provoking God with unabashed evil when humans are so much better at it?
Eagleton did not stint on definitions of evil. He calls it “unintelligible… a thing in itself,” “supremely pointless,” “boring because it is lifeless,” “philistine, kitsch-ridden, and banal.” “It defends itself against the complexities of human experience with a reach-me-down dogma or a cheap slogan… If it believes in nothing, it is because it does not have enough interior life to be capable of doing so.”
The opposite of evil, of course, is good. “For Thomas Aquinas,” Eagleton observes, “the more a thing succeeds in realizing its true nature, the more it can be said to be good. The perfection of a thing, he argues, depends on the extent to which it has achieved actuality.” Within this context, evil is “a kind of deficiency of being.”
There are those who feel uneasy about this way of viewing evil. How can one possibly speak of Mao’s monstrous purges, or those who perished in the Nazi concentration camps, as victims of a simple deficiency? Doesn’t this risk underestimating the terrifying positivity of evil? It is here, I think, that psychoanalytic theory can ride to the rescue, allowing us to maintain that evil is a kind of deprivation while still acknowledging its formidable power. The power in question, as we have seen already, is essentially that of the death drive, turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack -- an unbearable sense of none-being, which must, so to speak, be taken out on the other.
I felt unsatisfied at the conclusion of this book. But I think I made a mistake in expecting far too much from it. It is best to appreciate it as a primer, not as a geyser of enlightenment. Its subject is far too large, too complex and too unwieldy to fully comprehend by any author, no matter how perceptive or talented. Maybe what I was hoping for was a rant. Some fire-breathing rage. A passionate slam against the criminality of the Bush administration, which the Obama administration has not only allowed to slither back into the shadows without so much as an investigation, but has gone forward perpetuating, and in some instances escalating.
Eagleton’s tone throughout is even-tempered. His treatment of the subject does more to promote reflection and intellectual evaluation than encourage people to take to the streets with pitchforks, blazing torches, and guerrilla tactics with the hopes, however deluded, of bringing the evil empire of unchecked capitalism and its monsters down. His solutions are sobering, not enraging. This is a book you can bring to the beach without putting yourself at risk, wading into the surf to drown yourself or throw rocks at the first person to come along wearing a conservative t-shirt.
Eagleton cites numerous sources, all of them neatly noted, and so provides a rich vein of further pursuit. And so I will. I will continue my search and no doubt find quantities of the black viscous gooey stuff called evil running in my own veins.
At present, my most fervent hope is to merely understand what it was that went on in Tony Hayward’s head when, after the company for which he stood as captain and CEO decimated X number of pelicans and dolphins and manatees with gooey black oil, polluted for decades, perhaps centuries, the pristine white beaches of Florida, permanently disrupted the lives of thousands of people who depended for their living on the waters of the gulf of Mexico, and killed eleven men in an inferno of oil and steel, all of which could have been easily prevented by using a little wisdom, prudence, and pittance of money, he went skipping off to enjoy his life.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Adventures In Aphasia
Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, a novel by Leslie Scalapino
Starcherone Books, 2010
“There is no lid or limit on sensation,” remarks the mysterious narrator of “zoom in black,” a chapter in Scalapino’s mind-storm of a novel. This occurs during a horrific scene of poachers bringing down silver antelope in the Himalayas, “four or five hundred corpses on the floor of night desert are skinned at different times, their rib cages illumined in the pool amidst feeding buzzards.”
No lid or limit on sensation explodes the opium of reading into a peregrination of liquidationists, paregmenons, and the Melbourne tennis opening. Reading ceases to be reading and morphs into something else: a deeply focused meditation. A lexical gymnastic maneuver. A cerebral activity akin to mountain climbing, or bronco riding. It is, at once, difficult and exciting. But please. Don’t let the word ‘difficult’ put a crease in your brow; Scalapino is a dish served with piquant flavors, not all of them familiar. But it is tasty and it is digestible. And it’s good for you, too! It is high in protein and low in carbohydrates.
Scalapino has revealed that she based the writing of this novel on a form of language disorder called alexia, which refers to an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness, or visual aphasia. I find this deeply ironic, considering the richness of Scalapino’s text, and the inherently futile task of devoting one’s writing to a form of aphasia in which reading has been seriously incapacitated, but one cannot help be mindful also of the social, ethical, and political blindness by which we find ourselves surrounded here in the 21st millennium. And that reading, even among the population of people who do not suffer an aphasia, or illiteracy, is at risk.
Alexia may not mean total blindness. Sometimes comprehension is ok, but there may be some difficulty matching semantic interpretation to a sentence. An example is a sentence like “the water gushed from the pump,” which may be interpreted as “the pump gushed from the water.” In other words, an unintended poetry emerges. We see the world differently. Subject and object relationships become discombobulated. Control of the words feels tentative. They feel dazed and unsteady. Consequently, we find relationships between things and ideas that are often bizarre, creating novel perceptions, extraordinary images, such as “laced with swine jelly,” “flexing blue metal water,” “crocodile teeth spread in hatred,” or “an ear unfolds in hot night.” As bizarre as the associations can be, a peculiar, unexpected vividness arises, grips the attention, shows the world in a flare of brilliant hyper-reality.
Neurolinguists refer to a phenomenon called N400 (Negativity at 400 milliseconds) discovered by Marta Kutas and Steven Hillyard in 1980. This was a measure of how people respond to unexpected words in sentences. The N400 is characterized by a distinct pattern of electrical activity that can be observed at the scalp. Kutas and Hillyard used sentences with anomalous endings (i.e. “I take coffee with cream and dog”), to test their subjects. A positive or negative deflection in voltage indicates how the subject is responding to stimuli. A negative deflection indicates a delay. The subject is confused, and pauses to assimilate the semantic anomaly. The mind is hard-wired to make sense of things. Everything. This is what makes art, good art, so challenging and stimulating. And this is what makes Scalapino’s writing such a difficulty, and hugely rewarding.
We are not talking physics equations here. The sentences are odd, aberrant, screwy, the syntax eccentric, the words often large, exotic, and orchidaceous, but there is nothing so enigmatic it throws you off entirely. He peculiar phrasing very often has an exquisite sapience, a sharpness of perception that drives into you with the burning suddenness of a jalapeño pepper, or electrifying cold of an alpine lake. A phrase like “nerves inside muscles,” for instance, embodies a very real, proprioceptive circumstance, or “Anything has once been memory and can be placed beside anything” sends swirls of reflection spinning through the brain. Frequently, she will disrupt the waters by tossing a difficult, rarely used word into an otherwise familiar or pastoral context, such as “orexis is the waterfowl.”
Orexis is a male sexual enhancement product with “guaranteed results.” These must be very busy waterfowl. Or possibly frustrated male fowl and very pissed off female fowl.
Quite frankly, I’ve never read quite such a strange and invigorating book. We are beyond surrealism here. Scalapino appears to have figured out a way to access the entire world and make all of its beauty and hideousness, its violence and sublimity, its joys and indiscriminate burs, its pompous bureaucrats and toxic bullshit, euphoric buoyancies and defiant meadows, simultaneous.
Simultaneity is at the core of this book. It is a collage, but a very dynamic collage that feels harnessed to a team of very powerful horses. Consciousness rides each sentence with a handful of mane and the frenzy of unbridled energies. Each pulse of existence achieves its fullest expression as a part of the overall synthesis of creation, but without a concomitant incongruity, synthesis turns stale. We don’t know we’re moving if we don’t move against something. Hills, fences, mailboxes, doors. Simultaneity means everything happening at once which is what life is. All things are interrelated. There is propinquity between a milkweed and a swordfish. "But," observes Whitehead, "though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level."
Simultaneity also means there is no plot. Not a linear plot anyway. Scalapino has taken Gertrude Stein’s aesthetic of a continuous present to its maximal level of synchronicity. “Synchronicity,” the narrator remarks, “as determining characteristic doesn’t exist in that all actions are random as synchronous anyway.”
This is an aesthetic that begins, at least in the western world, with Cézanne, and was developed to its fullest in the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Stein was Cubism’s most salient literary exemplar. Tender Buttons stands as one of the first examples of literary Cubism. In four years it will be one hundred years old. That makes me feel old. For me, Tender Buttons is still a very new and modern work.
Tender Buttons also makes me grateful that such an accomplished writer as Scalapino has carried that Cubist aesthetic of simultaneity into further excursions, and has left so many wonderful books behind her.
However enigmatic its plot may be, and I do feel there is something of a plot plotted among its pages, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows does read very much like a novel. It has characters, many with strange, colorful names: “powder monkey,” “Chrysanthemum,” “Detective Grace Abe,” “Fujimori,” the “orphan girls,” “Violet,” and “Sister Serena,” who appears to be the tennis champion, Serena Williams.
And they do things. The powder monkey pops “the air of the edge of forest’s flocculation but in his speed on the horse ship the forest-edge almost an osculation of him leaving it closes in its quiet.” “Red chrysanthemum not having a realistic sense of time or mortality usurps it of others wasting them.” “Grace mumbles walking lying in the trees. Looking down she sees, having followed the poachers at night, the forest mirrored in green, red, and black corpses, dermoid without skeletons or organs.”
There are numerous references to cattle, “the black guiltless cattle are like dogs in someone’s description,” “the cattle née dogs with a wah-wah muted bawling sound begin to wander budwoods,” “Guiltless black cattle are only half-winged.” Sometimes an invented species will emerge: “Wallables, some no larger than rabbits, grazed on the orange mail…” The animals, as they do in the so-called real world, feel under constant threat. “Driven to extinction, the few elephant-herds remaining are pressed to the surface the outskirts of cities where the jockeys sleep in trees, in which the elephants feed.” With the exception of a “white wolf,” who has dazzling, hyperphysical powers, the animals occupy a world full of poaching, theft, cruelty, and war. There are also numerous references to corpses floating in the Euphrates, an obvious allusion to the war in Iraq, and drones “cruising and killing citizens née insurgents’ resistances have sounds they halve the people running.”
The real antagonist of this novel is capitalism. “Capitalism’s separating us from reality,” says the narrator. She identities conventional narrative with the noxious delusions of capitalism:
Separated oil burns 4 as another day begins on water they’re speaking it’s seen by being that’s slowed as if they’re removed from their actions’ occurrence and there’s only just as it occurs. Ron had (friend who’s feudist) blistering the hides of others said abridgement or any plot means “transparency” as a negative wherein all interwoven seems real. The individual is consumed in capitalism by their actions being (and seen by them in) the outside’s delusion of a whole reality as the individual sees events fed to them in as [while] [being] the outside’s ordered certainty. The origin as authority. In a given, a plot is or transpires as this transparency, he says silkworm, in which wired only receiving we’re quiet. In mine, a plot is only later, is events to see, a vehicle unplanned any actions unknown [going on] before their being known 2. But he says plot is any action, in it is already description (even if known before it occurs?) and creates this delusion of our being contained: capitalism’s separating us from reality.
How do we regain reality? How do we regain a sense of ourselves being alive, structured in bone, enveloped in skin, capable of movement, closer to our own actual needs rather than those imposed from without by a mechanized, totalitarian society? For “totalitarian,” observes Herbert Marcuse, “is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” To actualize an opposition may entail the employment of a pathology, i.e. an aphasia in the production of poetry. Perhaps poetry itself has become an aphasia. There is a vital element in all artwork that works contrary to the volition of the artist. It is what makes the work alive, a living pulsing breathing entity of words or paint or stone or clay. A Pygmalia. A fast horse. Which carries our sense of inner connectedness. As a being. As an opening. “As one’s waking mind.”
Starcherone Books, 2010
“There is no lid or limit on sensation,” remarks the mysterious narrator of “zoom in black,” a chapter in Scalapino’s mind-storm of a novel. This occurs during a horrific scene of poachers bringing down silver antelope in the Himalayas, “four or five hundred corpses on the floor of night desert are skinned at different times, their rib cages illumined in the pool amidst feeding buzzards.”
No lid or limit on sensation explodes the opium of reading into a peregrination of liquidationists, paregmenons, and the Melbourne tennis opening. Reading ceases to be reading and morphs into something else: a deeply focused meditation. A lexical gymnastic maneuver. A cerebral activity akin to mountain climbing, or bronco riding. It is, at once, difficult and exciting. But please. Don’t let the word ‘difficult’ put a crease in your brow; Scalapino is a dish served with piquant flavors, not all of them familiar. But it is tasty and it is digestible. And it’s good for you, too! It is high in protein and low in carbohydrates.
Scalapino has revealed that she based the writing of this novel on a form of language disorder called alexia, which refers to an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness, or visual aphasia. I find this deeply ironic, considering the richness of Scalapino’s text, and the inherently futile task of devoting one’s writing to a form of aphasia in which reading has been seriously incapacitated, but one cannot help be mindful also of the social, ethical, and political blindness by which we find ourselves surrounded here in the 21st millennium. And that reading, even among the population of people who do not suffer an aphasia, or illiteracy, is at risk.
Alexia may not mean total blindness. Sometimes comprehension is ok, but there may be some difficulty matching semantic interpretation to a sentence. An example is a sentence like “the water gushed from the pump,” which may be interpreted as “the pump gushed from the water.” In other words, an unintended poetry emerges. We see the world differently. Subject and object relationships become discombobulated. Control of the words feels tentative. They feel dazed and unsteady. Consequently, we find relationships between things and ideas that are often bizarre, creating novel perceptions, extraordinary images, such as “laced with swine jelly,” “flexing blue metal water,” “crocodile teeth spread in hatred,” or “an ear unfolds in hot night.” As bizarre as the associations can be, a peculiar, unexpected vividness arises, grips the attention, shows the world in a flare of brilliant hyper-reality.
Neurolinguists refer to a phenomenon called N400 (Negativity at 400 milliseconds) discovered by Marta Kutas and Steven Hillyard in 1980. This was a measure of how people respond to unexpected words in sentences. The N400 is characterized by a distinct pattern of electrical activity that can be observed at the scalp. Kutas and Hillyard used sentences with anomalous endings (i.e. “I take coffee with cream and dog”), to test their subjects. A positive or negative deflection in voltage indicates how the subject is responding to stimuli. A negative deflection indicates a delay. The subject is confused, and pauses to assimilate the semantic anomaly. The mind is hard-wired to make sense of things. Everything. This is what makes art, good art, so challenging and stimulating. And this is what makes Scalapino’s writing such a difficulty, and hugely rewarding.
We are not talking physics equations here. The sentences are odd, aberrant, screwy, the syntax eccentric, the words often large, exotic, and orchidaceous, but there is nothing so enigmatic it throws you off entirely. He peculiar phrasing very often has an exquisite sapience, a sharpness of perception that drives into you with the burning suddenness of a jalapeño pepper, or electrifying cold of an alpine lake. A phrase like “nerves inside muscles,” for instance, embodies a very real, proprioceptive circumstance, or “Anything has once been memory and can be placed beside anything” sends swirls of reflection spinning through the brain. Frequently, she will disrupt the waters by tossing a difficult, rarely used word into an otherwise familiar or pastoral context, such as “orexis is the waterfowl.”
Orexis is a male sexual enhancement product with “guaranteed results.” These must be very busy waterfowl. Or possibly frustrated male fowl and very pissed off female fowl.
Quite frankly, I’ve never read quite such a strange and invigorating book. We are beyond surrealism here. Scalapino appears to have figured out a way to access the entire world and make all of its beauty and hideousness, its violence and sublimity, its joys and indiscriminate burs, its pompous bureaucrats and toxic bullshit, euphoric buoyancies and defiant meadows, simultaneous.
Simultaneity is at the core of this book. It is a collage, but a very dynamic collage that feels harnessed to a team of very powerful horses. Consciousness rides each sentence with a handful of mane and the frenzy of unbridled energies. Each pulse of existence achieves its fullest expression as a part of the overall synthesis of creation, but without a concomitant incongruity, synthesis turns stale. We don’t know we’re moving if we don’t move against something. Hills, fences, mailboxes, doors. Simultaneity means everything happening at once which is what life is. All things are interrelated. There is propinquity between a milkweed and a swordfish. "But," observes Whitehead, "though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level."
Simultaneity also means there is no plot. Not a linear plot anyway. Scalapino has taken Gertrude Stein’s aesthetic of a continuous present to its maximal level of synchronicity. “Synchronicity,” the narrator remarks, “as determining characteristic doesn’t exist in that all actions are random as synchronous anyway.”
This is an aesthetic that begins, at least in the western world, with Cézanne, and was developed to its fullest in the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Stein was Cubism’s most salient literary exemplar. Tender Buttons stands as one of the first examples of literary Cubism. In four years it will be one hundred years old. That makes me feel old. For me, Tender Buttons is still a very new and modern work.
Tender Buttons also makes me grateful that such an accomplished writer as Scalapino has carried that Cubist aesthetic of simultaneity into further excursions, and has left so many wonderful books behind her.
However enigmatic its plot may be, and I do feel there is something of a plot plotted among its pages, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows does read very much like a novel. It has characters, many with strange, colorful names: “powder monkey,” “Chrysanthemum,” “Detective Grace Abe,” “Fujimori,” the “orphan girls,” “Violet,” and “Sister Serena,” who appears to be the tennis champion, Serena Williams.
And they do things. The powder monkey pops “the air of the edge of forest’s flocculation but in his speed on the horse ship the forest-edge almost an osculation of him leaving it closes in its quiet.” “Red chrysanthemum not having a realistic sense of time or mortality usurps it of others wasting them.” “Grace mumbles walking lying in the trees. Looking down she sees, having followed the poachers at night, the forest mirrored in green, red, and black corpses, dermoid without skeletons or organs.”
There are numerous references to cattle, “the black guiltless cattle are like dogs in someone’s description,” “the cattle née dogs with a wah-wah muted bawling sound begin to wander budwoods,” “Guiltless black cattle are only half-winged.” Sometimes an invented species will emerge: “Wallables, some no larger than rabbits, grazed on the orange mail…” The animals, as they do in the so-called real world, feel under constant threat. “Driven to extinction, the few elephant-herds remaining are pressed to the surface the outskirts of cities where the jockeys sleep in trees, in which the elephants feed.” With the exception of a “white wolf,” who has dazzling, hyperphysical powers, the animals occupy a world full of poaching, theft, cruelty, and war. There are also numerous references to corpses floating in the Euphrates, an obvious allusion to the war in Iraq, and drones “cruising and killing citizens née insurgents’ resistances have sounds they halve the people running.”
The real antagonist of this novel is capitalism. “Capitalism’s separating us from reality,” says the narrator. She identities conventional narrative with the noxious delusions of capitalism:
Separated oil burns 4 as another day begins on water they’re speaking it’s seen by being that’s slowed as if they’re removed from their actions’ occurrence and there’s only just as it occurs. Ron had (friend who’s feudist) blistering the hides of others said abridgement or any plot means “transparency” as a negative wherein all interwoven seems real. The individual is consumed in capitalism by their actions being (and seen by them in) the outside’s delusion of a whole reality as the individual sees events fed to them in as [while] [being] the outside’s ordered certainty. The origin as authority. In a given, a plot is or transpires as this transparency, he says silkworm, in which wired only receiving we’re quiet. In mine, a plot is only later, is events to see, a vehicle unplanned any actions unknown [going on] before their being known 2. But he says plot is any action, in it is already description (even if known before it occurs?) and creates this delusion of our being contained: capitalism’s separating us from reality.
How do we regain reality? How do we regain a sense of ourselves being alive, structured in bone, enveloped in skin, capable of movement, closer to our own actual needs rather than those imposed from without by a mechanized, totalitarian society? For “totalitarian,” observes Herbert Marcuse, “is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.” To actualize an opposition may entail the employment of a pathology, i.e. an aphasia in the production of poetry. Perhaps poetry itself has become an aphasia. There is a vital element in all artwork that works contrary to the volition of the artist. It is what makes the work alive, a living pulsing breathing entity of words or paint or stone or clay. A Pygmalia. A fast horse. Which carries our sense of inner connectedness. As a being. As an opening. “As one’s waking mind.”
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