Clippings: 1

I am feeling too receptive to new ideas to write anything of my own these days.   Here are some things I have liked.

First, something upsetting, but juicy.

This domination increases as the system is charged with neutralising the symbolic retaliation by buying it back through wages.  If, through labour, the exploited attempts to give his life to the exploiter, the latter wards off this restitution by means of wages.  Here again we must take a symbolic radiograph.  Contrary to all appearances and experience (capital buys its labour power from the worker and exorts surplus labour), capital gives labour to the worker (and the worker himself gives capital to the capitalist).  In German this is Arbeitgeber: the entrepreneur is a ‘provider of labour’; and Arbeitnehmer: it is the capitalist who gives, who has the initiative of the gift, which secures him, as in every social order, a pre-eminence and a power far beyond the economic.  The refusal of labour, in its radical form, is the refusal of this symbolic domination and the humiliation of being bestowed upon.  The gift and the taking of labour function directly as the code of the dominant social relation, as the code of discrimination.  Wages are the mark of this poisonous gift, the sign which epitomises the whole code.  They sanction this unilateral gift of labour, or rather wages symbolically buy back the domination exercised by capital through the gift of labour.  At the same time, they furnish capital with the possibility of confining the operation to a contractual dimension, thus stabilising confrontation on economic ground.  Furthermore, wages turn the wage-earner into a ‘consumer of goods’, reiterating his status as a ‘consumer of labour’ and reinforcing his symbolic deficit.  To refuse labor, to dispute wages is thus to put the process of the gift, expiation and economic compensation back into question, and therefore to expose the fundamental symbolic process.

Hot damn.  That was Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage Publications, 1993. p.41.

And something not-so-upsetting.  Still juicy:

Because the Body is Made of Water

A thimble full of moonlight

Drains onto the forest floor–

Milk through a colander.

.

The branches ignore those splashes.

The oaks ehre, like hairy hands

Shuffle against each other.

.

They fight for who gets to keep

And brew the fluids of the night.

I do not believe he who hails,

.

Love is having her all to yourself

Or her who swears, I know him

Completely. The water body

.

Eats the image, beams back

From a funhouse mirror

A blurred pillar of light.

.

We forget to check

The magician’s left sleeve.

I would like to know

.

Why we never catch all of anything,

Why we worship reflections.

Occasionally, a new image enters my stock of archetypes.  Water is one I’ve had for a while, but which I had forgotten in the last year and a half.  The vibrancy, vitality, reproduction, expiation.  One of my friends scribbled some notes when he was high on weed a couple days ago, and it was about water.  He showed me the paper yesterday, and, although it was a page’s worth of incoherent ramblings, I was moved.  I can identify nothing else that so fully encapsulates that fear/anticipation binary.  Eviscerated sharks.  Propulsions.

Dreams of America 2

They told us to dream big, so we did.  We caught

a broth of moonlight

in Tupperware, sealed it in

with a sly burp and our red thumbs

rocking forward.

Afterwards the yellow stains—

cream of corn, apple-

sauce and spicy trout were absolved

and I made light.

That’s sacrilege;

it’s only G-d,

dashes with the uptick itch of

counting your years in grabs at

and-a-halves; handfuls of digits.

But we dreamed of something bigger, owning a wardrobe

of red/white striped shirts, a wallet, and flight from cubicle mittens.

Dashing up the stairs I thought I’d save

Free Willy, beat

the bearded man who sneered,

and paint a mural:  Adam and Eve on floor two,

the Sabbath on three,

Commandments on floor one, the ground

for a cosmo of Davids.

The bobbed woman bobbed and whispered,

You know, I think she painted God;

so I know better.

Matisse and the cabinet

This is the sort of thing I might normally write in my private journal, but I’m increasingly needing to keep to myself, and at this point I believe my best chance at resuscitating a social life, should I want one in the future, is to make use of this in-between pocket of communication.  I am overwhelmed by the tasks at hand.  So many books I should be reading, so much poetry and prose I should be writing.  The challenge I have set before me is sometimes too much, not because I doubt my ability to make something of myself, but because I question the merit of my priorities.

I am sitting in my leather chair in the corner of my room, beneath the Van Gogh, my Cafe Terrace at Night.  I bought it last September, thinking as I pried it loose, this will be my window into the world.  Coffee shops were made for the ambivalent, people like me who are torn violently in two opposite directions– to be?  or to see?  Diners at midnight are one of the indulgences I will always honor.  The panoramic windows, the stained porcelain, the bad teeth, and above all, La Plume! La Plume!  The painting appeals less to me now than it did then.  It has become the wax seal I’ve stamped onto my room. Now, I sit it my corner and make eyes at the potpourri above my bed, an odd collage of pop art, fashion spreads, and fauvism.  I have two favorites, one for day, one for night.  In day, when I nest in my chair, I stare at one of Matisse’s self portraits.  He crosses his legs awkwardly.  A hand on the hip, a hand on the head:  a crouching teapot.  Beneath it I have taped a black and white study of the same portrait.  I like seeing his portraits evolve; he makes more eye contact each time.  It is the awkwardness I love, the slippery juxtaposition of cool against care.  The nonchalance of his cap and his rickety wooden chair.  The intense passion of canvas.  How could these both find home in the same man? the same portrait?  Matisse! Matisse!  My ode to Man Matisse!

At night, my choice is altogether different.  It is a cabinet, replete with a bottle of ketchup, a jar of mustard, an orange, a radio, and a clock.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cabinet just above my elbow as I sleep?  This, too, is a pocket.  Cabinets are intensely optimistic.  When you install a cabinet in your kitchen, what you’re actually doing is making a promise:  Cabinet, cabinet my love. I will fill you and I will do my best to keep you full.  I will caress your handles lovingly, and you mine.  When you get old, I will repair you.  When you grow dirty, I will sponge you.  I will buy nice smelling things for you.  You will never belong to anyone as you belong to me.  Cabinet, we will grow together.

But at the same time, cabinets mean death.  When you install a cabinet in your home, you are shouting to the world:  I will stay here with my cabinet!  We will not move!  No we will not move!  Once you pay mind to your cabinet, you are hoisting up all the cabinet’s baggage.  The cabinet has very heavy baggage.  The cabinet keeps a shopping list.  The cabinet keeps receipts.  The cabinet is duty-bound, more so than the strongest soldier.  You can survive the loss of your country, but never will you survive the loss of your cabinet.  You will first wither away into nothing.  And it gets worse!  To maintain your cabinet is also a guarantee of withering into nothing.  That is the inevitable.  So there is no escape from cabinet death.

In this way, cabinets are the future.  The promise of life, the promise of death.  I think often of the cabinet above my bed.

Dreams of America 1

What wheat shafts meet

the grain against granule,

the thrushy palm-fist,

the laconic cocaine in Middle America; the

last

open reservation,

and that bare brush.  I’ve slept in my pick-

up truck dreams.

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Migration Story

I was born into the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  I say “into”, not “in” because to live on the Upper West Side is to belong to a thoroughly homogenous community, an ordered institution dominated by Columbia University and its products.  In this world, neighbors hang their degrees just on the other side of their mezuzahs.  Growing up, I denied the homogeneity of my neighborhood.  Like the other liberal white children I knew, I was inculcated with values of diversity, and it is difficult as an eight year old to recognize that your ideology doesn’t cohere with your reality.  And later, when I was old enough to understand the contradiction, it was difficult to even wonder if I should assign guilt – whether to myself, my parents, or the system – for the contradictions I inhabited.

.

I think my gradually increasing sense of guilt, undeserved or otherwise, is partially responsible for my move to Harlem.  Harlem, for anyone who’s unfamiliar with New York geography, is directly adjacent to the Upper West Side, but culturally, it’s worlds apart.  In high school I read for the debate team about how we assign moral values to latitudes, condemning the Southern hemisphere and congratulating the Northern one.  Geography in Manhattan works similarly, for if you walk East past the Columbia quad, you will come to a large terrace which overlooks the same cityscape eulogized by Hughes and Angelou.  With the hilly barrier of Morningside Park, black is separated from white, poor from rich.  The Upper West Side literally looms over Harlem.  You have to walk three avenues uphill on 110^th street to make your way to the top.

.

I didn’t know any of this before I moved, because I, like everyone else I knew, had been forbidden from walking through the park or going into Harlem by myself.  And forget going there after sunset.  Even now, many of my close friends have never seen my apartment because, in the words of their parents, they’re just worried about safety.  (Theft or death by black hands.)  Back when I was fifteen, this was ground for rebellion.  Now it just strikes me as a little absurd.

.

So I moved to Harlem when I was fifteen.  I contacted my father, with whom I hadn’t really spoken in several years, and after three months of crashing at friends’ apartments and the occasional night in grand central, I convinced my father to let me move in with him and his girlfriend, into his one bedroom apartment in Harlem.  Of course, this wasn’t solely out of some noble political protest, which is the way I’ve construed it so far.  There was also a good deal of adolescent defiance for defiance’s sake.  But white guilt played its role, too.

.

Now I am one of many the many white people who reside in Harlem.  When I went home for my first summer break as a college student, I was immediately struck by how many other white people had flooded the sidewalks, the cafes, the supermarkets.  Our neighborhood has more Starbucks, more wine shops, more highrises with broad windows now.  Now I say, sardonically, that I haven’t moved at all.  If you want to know about migration, I don’t have a whole lot to contribute.  Just a three year attempt to relocate.  Culturally, I’ve changed a great deal.  But is it a migration?  I’m not sure the change was enduring enough to be called that.  It is, however, safe to say that the Upper West Side has migrated.  It has stretched its arms, and who is to say whether Harlem – the Harlem I knew before college – is welcoming of the embrace, or if it will simply recoil, and shrink into nothing.

Uruguay

Uruguay

is like Uranus, full of vowels;

consonants repelling,

like North & North, two reds,

wet by the slick of

third grade hands.

Sight

I was reading an editorial on Avatar in the New York Times today.  Offhandedly, its author, Adam Cohen, wrote:

All of this draws on a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide — that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see. This is one reason the Nazis pushed Jews into ghettos, and one reason that the worst Soviet abuses occurred in far-off gulags.

to which I responded– “What?”  From my psychoanalytic film theory background I’m used to thinking of looking (“the gaze”) as the means by which we dominate and demonstrate our dominance.  Biopower, the Panopticon, etc. etc. etc.  But Cohen is right; we do segregate in genocidal circumstances.  I think, however, that it might be too much of a leap that segregation is a means of turning a blind eye.  If I were to think of contemporary, American instances of segregation I would think of trailer parks.  Which are dirty.  Segregation is a form, in my eye (and with much credit owed to Mary Douglas), of hygiene.  And indeed, we do speak of voyeurism — a transgression of optical boundaries — as dirty.

I am not well acquainted with the history of genocide, or at least no more than my Jewish heritage affords me.  I don’t know, outside conversational arguments like mine and like Cohen’s, how sight relates to genocide; whether Hitler or Pol Pot liked to watch.  Regardless of my doubt, I do think Cohen raises an interesting point:  to what degree does segregation challenge the spectacular?

It always ends

One of the faculty at University of Chicago (my alma mater) wrote this poem:

Aria

The ending is sad if you think of it.

Portable castle, luna,

.

two singers pretending to kiss

for the mob.  Ovation.  The end

.

of applause, the sound of a fire

failing to catch in the dark.

.

Somebody took down the bay

and left us to pick up the boats

.

in the pit.  Rigging everywhere.

What stagecraft, what dripping

.

cathedrals.  I sit on my rock

with a fistful of raisins

.

and listen.  Sometimes an extra

dismantles a cloud.  Sometimes

.

a whale remembers the spotlight

.

–Srikanth Reddy

This poem has haunted me since I read in for the first time two weeks ago.  Since then I’ve been trying to duplicate the emotional state Reddy’s poetry lends, but it’s more difficult than I imagined.  I am struck by the oddity and potency of my new obsession with endings.  Perhaps “obsession” isn’t quite the right word.  It’s more like a lingering fancy, of which I am only just becoming aware.  On a walk, today, I couldn’t stop mentally reciting the words to “Pioneers O Pioneers”, which is about endings in its peculiarly American way, and then, this evening, I teared up at a picture of a tattoo that read, courtesy of Neil Gaiman, “It always ends.  That’s what gives it value.”

I am posting this as a blog entry, I suppose, in order to verbalize my confusion at the origins of this “lingering fancy”.  Contrary to my affinity for Woody Allen movies, I’ve never feared death.  I didn’t even cry at the end of Anna Karennina, which makes me a soulless bastard, I know.

This is probably just an adolescent cliche, a product of the dawning realization that maturity looms closer daily, and of the fear that has been inculcated in us, in the children of the boomer generation; that when we grow up, we will have lost more than we will or could ever gain from the meager trappings of agency and erudition.

Just for fun

Check out Communications from Elsewhere.  Every time you click the link it generates a new, meaningless essay on postmodernism.

(That is to say, each internet protocol click, when mapped on the international, online, globalized disciplinary grid, transports the self to a series of ontologically jocular narratives regarding the Other, whose deonotological etiology hinges on the absurdity of non-neo-platonic philological ideals, suspended in schizophrenic time and space in an ongoing, quasi-apocalyptic and pornographic dialectic.)