RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,095
(this machine that rides the horse, pt.2)
I never played dice, nor ever
understood it - any of those
tile games always baffled me,
and they appeared exotic or
even 'Oriental,' as the word
used to go, back then. I'm told
one doesn't say that anymore;
now it's Asian. Like saying
Burma instead of Siam? But
they are swell to use it for the
saying of 'Asian Flu,' when
that used to run through the
schools. Mah Jong or Ma &
Pa Kettle, who but a swami
in old Calcutta really cares?
Your Peking Duck is now
Peiping Duck served piping
hot! I don't know who started
all this correctness crap, but
they can suck my wang-doodle.
-
So, as I wasn't saying, last chapter
I worked myself into such a corner
that at the last moment I just
stopped it short, called it 'part 1'
and moved on. Which was fine,
but now I need to do a part 2.
As they say in Rangoon, 'Shiva
my timbers! I've got some work
to do.
-
America, at its founding, was
already late into its own game.
By the time of the Constitutional
Convention, and those aspects of
the regulatory state that were being
put into place, it was already too
late. From the point of view, as I
mentioned previously, of the idea
of a new Eden or a pastoral and
new in all aspects redemptive
land had already been overrun by
profit-motives, land-grubbing,
intimidations and state-sanctioned
land and power grabs. Sure, they
squabbled over the incidentals
and the shapes of the cage, but it
was done. Even slavery, in and
of itself totally stupid, had been
instituted for money - by blacks.
Coastal Africans in Africa chasing
down and capturing their own
inlanders, to drag them out and
have them sold at the dock-slave
round-ups and shipped off. Dahomey,
anyone. (I always thought that to
be funny. Dahomey is a country;
yet a black person will call his
friend 'da homey.' There's humor
everywhere!)....Anyway, every
issue from early America now is
just a story-line made to fit an
agenda.
-
What may have started out as a
newly-trod (by Europeans, in their
concepts of the known world) pastoral
paradise, attuned to the wiles of the
descriptions by Thomas Jefferson (no
machinery, no manufacture), but sunk
by the likes of Hamilton into factories,
sweat-shops, cities and mass and
enforced child-labor practices, had,
by the post WWII years, emerged as
the country with half the world's
wealth and nearly two-thirds of its
machines, and with destructive
capacities unmatched in history. 'It
was creating suburbs, television,
organization men, nuclear families,
the car culture, Brando, McCarthy,
and rock and roll.' People had to
navigate, yes, but unlike the earlier
explorers who brought all this to be,
they had to navigate through the worlds
of sex, work, money, friendship, story
telling, improvisation, hourly wages,
burdens toil, labor and more.
-
'You're not really writing a book until
you begin to take liberties with it.' Jack
Kerouac said that. 'I've begun to do this
with On The Road now.' I immediately
understood what he meant, but the older
world of 1957 hadn't a clue. Back then
people insisted on saying the Jack was
Sal, and Dean was Neal; all mixed up.
But they were only characters, and had
no match for the attributes they'd been
given; not 100% anyway. The USA
wasn't ready for that switchover of
literary consciousness - this was a
new breed of something. It was the
same with America - you're not
really building a country until you
begin to take liberties with it. (From
it too?). Before I move on, I want
to add another Kerouac quote - for
you to think about: "My writing is
teaching. One of the greatest incentives
of the writer is the long business of
getting his teachings out and accepted.
Even if the readers don't get it at first.'
-
The entirety of any American
experiment got booted to the sidelines
early on. You can see, in the previous
chapter, how the dichotomies were
set up; reading Jefferson's words up
against the later intentions of those
on the other side of that divide. Going
back to Thomas Carlyle, we can see how
the alignments were shifted. I can well
recall the NYC streets of that era of 1967
into the 70's, when most often along any
west, or east, downtown street one would
pass the open lofts of machine shops,
foundries, factory lofts, seamstress and
dressmaker operations, carts lining the
street, piles of fabric, metal, raw material,
hides, and lumber, being ferried and pushed
everywhere. The laborers, plodding along
the crowded streets were Puerto Ricans
or blacks; happy for a job, seemingly
immersed in it, their heads spinning
with songs, adventures, ideas. What
happened to it all? It became enfolded
and cancelled, as it was slowly wrapped
into the newer fabric of today's world.
By the year 2000, no one could plausibly
describe all that had fallen away - nor
did anyone care. America had turned
tail on itself. Pastoral be damned!
-
Looking at all this, Thomas Carlyle, in
'Signs Of the Times,' speaks of the new,
'mechanical' aspects of life as the means
by which the dynamism of natural life
was to be replaced with the subjugation
by which men were to be subjugated,
and the 'dynamics' replaced by purely
mechanical, droning, aspects. The
post-Freudian version of alienation.
in fact, much later, and into our own
times, Herbert Marcuse stated it like
this: "the state of psychic powerlessness
is to be attributed to the increasing
repression of instinctual drives made
necessary by the more and more
complicated technological order.
To satisfy the imperatives of the
mechanized society, men are called
upon to endure an intolerable curbing
of their spontaneous, erotic, and
passional selves."
-
Two further things here, before I
close this chapter out: In his book
from 1833-34, 'Sartor Resartus,'
Thomas Carlyle makes an attempt
at describing what we would today
call 'Alienation'; of the despair caused
by the mechanical, droning, world
at work dulling and berating the
psyches of Humankind. As he puts
in, in the words here of the character
Teufelsdrockh's depression about
his modern world: "To me the
universe was all void of Life, of
Purpose, of Volition, even of
Hostility. It was one huge, dead,
immeasurable steam-engine,
rolling on, in its dead indifference,
to grind me limb from limb."
In his turn, Karl Marx had it
this way - "Within capitalist
relations of production, accompanying
the division of labor and mass
manufacturing, the working man's
product may well become his
enemy. The more he produces,
the more danger there is that the
'market' will be glutted and he
will lose his job.' Hence, as Marx
had it, machine technology is
instrumental in creating 'alienated
labor. 'Morally neutral, perhaps.
the 'machine' in such a setting helps
only to transform the worker into a
commodity for sale on the labor
market, his work taking on a
mechanical and meaningless
character bearing little or no
relation to is own purposes.
In the further words of Erich
Fromm, 'the alienated man
experiences the world and
himself passively, receptively,
as the subject separated from
the object.'
-
It used to be THAT was why we
had people in the streets, protesting
and yelling - over real conditions
and issues. Now, by contrast, and
along those very NYC streets I
once trod and here describe, we
get spoiled, biscuit-eating hulks
going on and on and over and
anon about nothing they
understand at all.
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