Personal/Political category archives
Photos and text by Teju Cole
(Sunday, August 22, 2010. West Broadway and Murray Street. There are several speakers.)
Where are the Islamists right now, standing here arm in arm with us, saying that this is wrong? Where are they?
I don’t think it is wrong.
To build a victory tower on the deaths of our citizens? Read more…
I was swimming through the air in my dream, popping in and out of television screens, the coolest talking head since David Byrne. Then all of a sudden, holy shit — things blowing up for no apparent reason, car chases, gunfire, clouds of poison gas choking people in their beds. Nobody who isn’t a psychopath has dreams like this! Except, right, you’re dreaming in service to a corporate titan in order to take down his rival, and we know from The Corporation that corporations behave exactly like psychopaths.
But wouldn’t this movie have been a lot cooler if you were using your idea-implanting superpowers for good rather than for evil, and targeting, say, Dow Chemical on behalf of the victims of Bhopal? Shouldn’t you really have contacted the Yes Men? After all, they share your fondness for abandoned warehouses and scenes with lots of floating and flailing about. They are masters at assuming new identities and making lies seem more attractive than the debilitating truth.
They dream big, too. They had hundreds of oil and gas executives lighting candles ostensibly made from human flesh, and convinced a conference hall full of New Orleans building contractors that doing the right thing was more important than maximizing profits. They embarassed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce into reversing its position on global warming. They led an effort at mass inception in Manhattan that involved printing and distributing an edition of the New York Times from six months in the future, which got over 100,000 people contemplating a world without war and hunger, and how really doable and ordinary that could be.
But you professional dreamers — what do you do? In your matroyshka-doll world of a dream within a dream within a dream, where was the green space among all those brutal modernist highrises? I didn’t spot a single park, not even a tree. You grew old together in the company of phantasms, living only for each other, as self-centered and cut off from the real world as the plutocrats whose yes-men you later became. And then to die without dying — what a fix!
Such an interesting word, fix. It’s what a junkie craves. When the fix is on in a movie about the mob, you know things are about to go horribly awry. A fix is a fundamental alteration, but not necessarily for the better — just ask a dog that’s been fixed. The Yes Men might be out to mend the world themselves, but when they interview a gaggle of free-market economists to see if they’ll say anything revealing on camera, they choose this more ambiguous word: How would you fix the world? And then, more mischievously: How would you like the world to appear on the blue screen behind your head? Which is tantamount to saying: Show us your dreams.
The Yes Men Fix the World was, to my mind, everything that Inception was not: droll, witty, thought-provoking and inspiring. Inception, a movie about the possibility of planting ideas in another person’s imagination, was really rather dull. There wasn’t any laughter in it. Where in the one movie, mud and grunge and empty suits are a source of comic relief, in the other they are mere fixtures, signifiers of seriousness for the director’s fundamentally unserious and impoverished imagination.
If you haven’t seen Inception yet, save your money. If you haven’t seen The Yes Men Fix the World, it’s available for free online. Go watch. And then, if you like, join up. This is one effort at collective imagination that doesn’t need to stop when the theater lights go up.
Having made a career of desertion, we are adept at wailing, failing, falling, walking it off. We juggle buckets & flamethrowers, weed-whackers & metronomes, equal to whatever sinister task. Every third Thursday we serve guilt & sour soup. Mornings leave a gritty residue in our communal sink — think of a hog wallow. If the earth were any closer, we would have to put millipedes on the payroll & rechristen all the cemeteries as recycling centers, because what you call leftovers, we call encore presentations. We believe our enemies to be human, no more evil than we, & we believe in regular upheaval. Like sands in a goddamn hourglass are the lives of our days.
(In response to the recent outburst from President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs.)
Without television, what names would you give the weather?
Without television, would the continent of Africa still resemble a question mark?
Without television, how many majestic carnivores would dine alone?
Without television, when would five o’clock shadows begin to form?
Without television, who would grumble for a flat belly or lust after an immaculate confection?
Without television, how would the couch make change?
Without television, where would you hear the subliminal messages telling you to kill again?
Without television, what circus tout would you pay to belabor your faults?
Without television, who would volunteer for boredom?
Without television, would we become strangers to ourselves?
Without television, do the fish get all their news from the water?
*
Sparked by a phone conversation with Brent Goodman (to be featured in this week’s Woodrat podcast, if and when I finish editing it) and an email conversation with some other friends about the Dark Mountain Project.
I’m sitting with my back to the grove when the sound of heavy wingbeats in the tops of the spruces makes me look around, and seeing nothing, get up and edge my way in between the trees. The intricate skeletons of recently dead boughs snap loudly whenever I try to diverge from the rudimentary path. I crane my neck peering into the shadowy tops of the 40-foot trees which I helped my parents plant when I was a boy. How could they already have grown so full of secrets?
The greatest natural disaster-related humanitarian crisis in a generation, and I have written exactly nothing about it. But this is a place for personal essays and poems, and what do I know of Haiti? Everything is second-hand at best: the Haitian woman in Japan back in 1985 with whom I shared a mailbox and some confessions of homesickness; the Anglo-American friend who joined a Vodun congregation in New Jersey and was ridden by Ghede, orisha of the crossroads. A smattering of histories and ethnographies. The vague sense that if Toussaint had never been exiled, Haiti might have kept its topsoil and some of its forests. An immense sense of guilt, as an American, for my country’s share of blame in its immiseration.
A few days ago, I read Newsweek‘s latest cover story, “Why Haiti Matters,” and felt my stomach turn. It did little but recycle platitudes about America as a force for good: Haiti matters, we are led to believe, because it gives us a chance to show “the character of our country.” The author is Barack Obama.
He does at least quote Qoheleth — wisest voice in the Old Testament — toward the end of the essay:
In the aftermath of disaster, we are reminded that life can be unimaginably cruel. That pain and loss is so often meted out without any justice or mercy. That “time and chance” happen to us all. But it is also in these moments, when we are brought face to face with our own fragility, that we rediscover our common humanity. We look into the eyes of another and see ourselves.
O.K., Mr. President, I’ll give you that. I’ve kept my silence in part because I know all too well the moralizing impulse of my Protestant heritage. Try as I might to anathematize Pat Robertson for his ignorant, victim-blaming remarks, I recognize the temptation, even as an agnostic, to make the world make sense, to pretend that life is or could be fair — or at least redeemable. To accept that it isn’t makes us into monsters, does it not? But the view of God or gods as unpredictable and sometimes violent — that Old Testament and animist view that progressives love to decry — comports more easily with observable reality than any pablum about God as infinite goodness. Even for me to put on my secular humanist hat and declare, as I did on Identica and Twitter last week, that tectonic activity is the price we pay for life on earth seems unduly glib, offensive to the memory of the earthquake’s victims. Their deaths were were not some kind of sacrifice. Stop it! Stop trying to explain. Live with the questions. Make your peace with the unknowable as best you can.
It’s a little past 4:00 o’clock, but the January sun is low and just minutes from dropping behind the ridge. The feathery shadows seem full of possibility now, and I see a picture in every direction where before there was nothing but branches blocking my way. This is the way. I steady the camera in the dim light by holding it out in front of me so the strap is stretched taut from the back of my neck: there’s far less tremor in my trunk than in my limbs. Some kind of large owl — barred, great-horned, long-eared — is hiding in these pictures, I’m sure of it. It’s waiting for darkness so it can begin to see.
UPDATE: Here are the survey results as of noon, 1/21/10 (omitting the percentages of those who chose to skip the question):
Can a houseplant die of loneliness?
Do you see twelve different things through the eyes of twelve different needles?
If mornings came with printed instructions, would anyone read them?
Have you ever torn all the paper from a spiral notebook, page by page, just to get an unobstructed look at the spiral?
Will this be the year they start using prisons for captive breeding programs?
Wouldn’t a truly self-adhesive tape collapse like a star into a black hole?
Do you find it harder to think in a room where you can’t touch the ceiling?
With our fondness for clichés, don’t we risk making the perfect storm the enemy of the good storm?
If your name was Fritz Zwicky, wouldn’t you also prefer to be known as the Father of Dark Matter?
If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?
Note: Since this survey was open to all comers and not administered in a random fashion, the results are scientifically worthless. However, that doesn’t matter too much, since it was really a “push poll” for the Dadaist Party. Ketchup for Shah! U.S. out of North America! Etc.
One with the head of a crocodile, one wearing the fresh skin of a newborn just beginning to lose its glow, one in a trench coat and shoes black and shiny enough to confuse the moon into setting an hour early, one who sniffs and shuffles papers, one with the wings of small bats neatly folded into the clean and green coffin of his pocket, one who claps loudly at inappropriate junctures, one with an extruded plastic handshake and a business card printed with the wrong email, one who seeks absolution in the polite smiles of his opponents the birdwatchers and trout fishermen, one who used to be the most powerful senator in the state and now turns his back on the public hearing — the assembled citizenry with their ignorant concerns — to bark into a clam shell too narrow for the sound of surf.
For more objective accounts of the hearing (at which I testified on behalf of Juniata Valley Audubon) see the Altoona Mirror and Centre Daily Times.
Two days ago, the small pile of qarrtsiluni’s first chapbook still sittting on the end of my desk caught my eye. We’d sent out a bunch of copies of Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Palace to the chapbook contest entrants, and a few for lit mag review, and these were the ones left over from that initial big wholesale order. I had a sudden, fairly obvious idea: Why not try giving them away to bloggers who’d be willing to commit to writing a review of at least three paragraphs? Sure, anyone can review the contents of the book, since it’s all online, but nothing beats having the paper copy in your hands. I emailed my co-editor Beth, and she wrote back immediately to say “Sure!”
So mid-afternoon on Saturday I posted the offer to the qarrtsiluni news blog, linked to it from our Twitter account, and circulated the link via direct message to the 339 members of the qarrtsiluni Facebook group. I said that the review didn’t need to use academic language, and that we welcomed any kind of blog — we weren’t looking exclusively for book- or poetry-bloggers. We said that supplies were limited to just ten copies, though subsequent to posting the announcement I scrounged up another five and we decided to add those as well. Emails began to pour in, just as we’d hoped. We had our first ten bloggers within about six hours, and all fifteen by this morning.
The respondents were diverse in terms of location and the size and focus of their blogs (though most were literary blogs, most of the time), and it wasn’t until I was addressing the cover letters that I noticed something peculiar: 14 of the 15 were female. Why so few men?
Well, for starters, only about a third of our Facebook group members are male (I counted). That makes sense based on my own observations of how people behave on Facebook: women are more social than men, and thus, perhaps, more likely to join groups like ours (even though like most Facebook groups it’s pretty inactive except for the occasional announcements we send out). It’s harder to know the gender of Twitterers, but scanning through our 402 followers, it appears that closer to 50 percent are male.
Other possible contributing factors that occur to me:
It’s this last possibility that disturbs me.
the holes were made in a living person
whose prosthetic left leg was hidden
wounded men who returned to Iraq
women in elaborate headdress
weapons at their side
crush skulls flat as pancakes
a more grisly interpretation
driven into their heads
to help achieve psychological closure
they all walked under their own power
bodies were arranged neatly
five amputees and one blinded soldier
their night terrors stopped after they went
by blunt-force trauma
the amount of developmental growth and closure was phenomenal
two round holes in the soldier’s cranium
as if they were old friends
it was a trade-off
elite burials
where they were maimed
to honor fallen comrades
soldiers have often returned to old battlefields
treated with a compound of mercury
brittle bones of a person long dead would shatter like glass
some victims had been heated, baked not burned
clapped on their backs and welcomed
to exorcise persistent demons
Ur is protected within the perimeter of an air base
places many of them left while unconscious or in agony
the biggest thing in the world is the silence
we’re getting ready to turn off the lights
wear your wounds like badges
not dosed with poison
a war is still in progress
it’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand
the overburden of earth
*
All lines above, including the title, were taken verbatim from the following two news stories:
Feel free to suggest alternate arrangements of lines in the comments.
I'm Dave Bonta, a poet and literary magazine editor from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
Order from the press or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
