“It’s not rebellion if they just sold it to you.”
The parable of the great banquet, in which the diners’ arms are splinted and fitted with forks four feet long so that they cannot reach the food up to their mouths, leads to the obvious solution of the diners feeding each other and then hunting down and punishing whoever set up this diabolical torture so that it cannot happen to others. After all, they’re armed. But though we all think it, I have never seen the ‘punishment’ phase of the operation suggested in print. Our manners make for tragedy. The same dulling of character that ensures people turn upon each other instead of an oppressor also ensures their subsequent explanation doesn’t have much reach.
Virgil suggested there’s yelling in Hell but it’s hard to summon such chutzpah in a vacuum, or to spark the transforming liveliness of flames. Those infrequent revolutions we do have tend to install some of the same four or five thousand personality types as the old regime, nothing outside this limited pool being accepted. System is irrelevant when those at the helm are fez-wearing toothfish who treat their own principles like a bouncy castle. It’s like Bill and Joan Burroughs repeatedly raking the same lizards off the same tree.
In another famous fable, a scorpion asks for a ride across the river on a frog’s back, arguing that he wouldn’t sting the frog because that would also be killing himself. Halfway across the river the scorpion stings the frog and both go under. A Talmudic telling has the scorpion conveyed without stinging the frog but then killing a fella strolling by on the other shore. In a Persian version an obliging turtle allows the burden’s stinger through her tough shell. All scenarios are remarkable for the frog carrying the clever scorpion with nothing to gain and much potential harm from the scorpion, which can survive underwater for several days. The blithe lack of reciprocity is accepted by the English, a people with many bosses to feed and placate. But elsewhere too, the system’s defenders assert that it works on an assumption of benevolence. Such benevolence finds no support in observed phenomena. Our ordinary measures of hypocrisy fail us before the operations of government and modern commerce. The sheer proportions of the racket discourage morality. They’ll charge you for being fully inside a room with both legs, while issuing regular edicts as to what must be unthinkable or incomprehensible and what is the decreed emergency in the meantime. There’s no reason why inequality should be any less effective than individually contacted victims. In our more lucid instants we know this is wrong as a ham-coloured piano.
The Soviet principle of employment-as-identity now being applied in the West is the logical conclusion of economics theology grafted over the very short political spectrum beloved of most human beings. A good theory, but try to get it above three miles an hour and see what happens. Capitalism is not a symmetrical affliction. Too often it depends on coincidence and a justice we know of only by report. Should we be more careful amid order or amid chaos? Rand used sustained sleight-of-hand equivalencies as in an optical illusion, and while many people fail to notice all that has been left out to make the composition balance, others don’t call attention to it. By these means they maintain the mullet of philosophies.
Locked-room murder mysteries ask the question of how the victim was killed in a seemingly unbreached room locked from within. To whodunnit addicts laying around in a clue-induced stupor, considerations of power in the universe at large are muted by attention to the absorbing details and parameters of the room, just as 80 years of a human life may pass without seeing its own context. Old people aren’t automatically wise, though all are adept at a judgemental stare as if apprised of souls, even when they’re only thinking about the beans on toast they’re having later. But the eroding effects of time will remove all cultural ornamentation unless distractions are added regularly via the flux and deflux of fashion. Circumstances are not changed but garnished by elections or, as many call it, ‘buffoon renewal’. Years evaporate while quarrying for substance in a society which has forfeited its right to be taken seriously. A billion souls are taken for a ride and made to pay for it, including company cops and the grand project of building a third tier onto the justice system. At the behest of strangers they exist plucked and feeble, depleted by betrayal. Hope is not detrimental to this handy fatigue – it keeps people working in the dream that if they endure these agonies in the correct sequence it will trigger a reward.
These are notions as over-used as a hermit crab with its arse in a tuba and those who restate them must take on a martyrdom of embarrassment. They look adolescent to a species deeply involved in its first attempts at cool. This saturative helterpolitik depends on the idea that everything social moves toward habit and system. A fascist nation is one which has forced itself to a conclusion. In Ionesco’s Rhinoceros almost everyone turns into truculent rhinoceri; in Invasion of the Body Snatchers almost everyone becomes eerily complacent celeries. The first plays into people’s base desire to conform, the second their resigned surrender to conformity, both driven by fear. Dali liked rhinoceri and saw them emerging from the rocks, perhaps because in Franco’s Spain, they were. We can’t choose our dictator any more than we can choose who we fall in love with. The Historical Memory Law enacted after Franco’s death rejected the legitimacy of his 40-year regime retrospectively, in lieu of a time machine and a taser. The right of the people to alter or abolish a government and set up a new one, endorsed by Thomas Jefferson, had the stated aim of ensuring their safety and happiness. Jesus’s strategy, as quoted by Origen from an early version of Matthew, went that ‘If they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another; and if they persecute you in the other, flee again into a third.’ It’s unclear which of these principles Jefferson was following when he forcibly relocated Native Americans. The several occasions of Jesus running away from threatening situations made sense for a man who vacillated between revolution and the only slightly easier road of playing along with prophetic scripture. His suicide-by-cop placed him finally among the Malamatiyya, who take upon themselves the blame for everything, including crimes carried out by others. Most authorities encourage this. Just as K’s shame at being subject to the state’s edicts cripple him to the point of accepting them in Kafka’s The Trial, to admit the truth would require action or shame. Keeping the fraud hidden is a collaboration between its victims and those who benefit. A prodded fool can see through the deception to its bland innards – bland because the motive is boring and the method is crass over a large scale. Defenders of the Bible claim there are no accounts of Jesus’ teachings in the 40 days after his resurrection because he couldn’t stop laughing. But he seems to have mostly sat around speaking in monosyllables. If this was Jesus, he appears to have lost his flare. In fact once the narrative was entirely out of his hands he became the all-purpose Swiss Army Christ we know today.
Sustained resentment was a precursor to the modern calendar. Revolutionaries have been putting on preparatory warpaint for so long, many have suffocated. Most elect to keep their rage safely online, just as the most innovative and beautiful architecture is allowed expression only in videogames. Others pretend they are being merciful to their oppressors – better that than acknowledge impotence. Debord settled for telling the truth above the roar of luxury. Many make do with China Mieville, quite simply one of the science fiction writers in the UK. Extreme sport, one of the passive traditions, serves as a field bandage for monotony by venting energy and profitless screams into the upper air. Fierce as a radish in the ground, all serve to change the window rather than the view. Upon perking up, they are generally intent on turning the tables 360 degrees. Blame is a bird happy to perch anywhere. The poet Andre Chenier was guillotined for sitting around eating an orange in the wrong house. Legend has it the mob played football with his head for several minutes before realising that no one knew who was on which side. Voltaire was not the revolution’s father but served as a placenta to one small rebellion. It took his devotees 10 years of missed beats to accept he was really dead and wouldn’t be doing it for them, and a further 10 years to fuck it up royally. These patterns persist like those of the knitters at the guillotine. Che Guevara’s legend ripened into the dense synthetic classicism of cigar label art.
Yet the freedoms some populaces do have were fought for – always by people outside of government and commerce – and would not exist otherwise. Not everyone has the patience and mental fortitude to struggle and organise over a lifetime for something that should very obviously exist already. Articulate noticers like Bourne, Russell and Debs – or Peggy Duff who protested the post-war concentration camps in Britain – were among those who commented simply by presenting. Hogarth’s works were not satire but early experiments in photography. It’s said that by late life the lines of his forehead were so elaborate in character he simply blotted the area with ink and slammed it forward onto a sheet of paper. These ‘scorn stamps’, surely impossible to authenticate, fetch a pretty penny among connoisseurs of the passive aggressive. Oppression burlesques such as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow work on a similar principle, crowding together scenes of goons under pressure, dregs in police motley, coercion lacking exuberance and sycophancy intense enough to drive mutation, all at play in the polluted waters of nationalism. Certain vampires are said to be particularly active on St George’s Day. To kill one you must cut out and split its heart, nail it in the forehead, shove garlic in its mouth, smear it with lard and dump it in a trench. Coincidentally, this will also kill a human being.
In the Chinese board game Go, some stones are alive, some dead, and some ‘unsettled’. The unsettled are not uncollapsed waves in the quantum sense but soldiers whose lives a leader has claimed as its own and whose fate is not decided yet, or the cat in Schrodinger’s faulty fantasy, who obviously knows whether it is alive or dead but whose views are deemed irrelevant. Not all battles are fought to be won and there are those who profit financially irrespective of the outcome, greeting the survivors with tilted heads and terminology. Neither the confessions between wars nor its heroes are any recompense. Art never won any wars, nor started any. Peace is not often spectacular. Elaborate compromises become superfluous as forced tolerance gives way to plain comprehension. Nothing to hide on either side, nothing to fear.
The bull was once treated as sacred because it might jab you with a horn or snort suddenly in your ear when you were least expecting it, adding to the many stresses of early civilisation. But the ancient Egyptians, capped by spectacular authority, learned enough about that condition to worship cats due to their casual imperviousness to orders or approval.
Many argue that long ago the interpreter between intention and practice went inconspicuously insane. But the notion of an institution being ‘corrupted’ sneaks through the assumption that it was not structurally designed to do what is referred to as ‘corrupt’. Early humans created language by voicing the synesthetic sound-shape of the object they referred to, a direct process requiring no calculation. Many words retain these shape matches despite massive drift and decay. Synesthetically the word wolf presents a wolf whether you’ve ever seen one or not. But spoken and written language reduced the synesthetic state in humanity so that many people now think in sentences – and not often their own. Some scholars believe malice played a part and that the prehistoric impulse toward spoken language was the desire to be able to lie. Hundreds of landlines came crawling up the beach.
Those who still perceive synesthetically may tend to take people at their word, such as the woman told to repay her debt to society who did so by embarking on a trail of scorching vengeance, or the man who heard for the final time the advice to ‘turn that frown upside down’ and did so by dropping headfirst out of a window. There are many ideas of what the Singularity may be and one candidate is the emergence of a genuine democracy somewhere in the world. The energy released by such an event might resemble nothing before it. But unlike the fabled discovery of a new colour, it would require no new terms.