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raybearI just spent an hour on the couch suffering from sleep paralysis. One of my quasi-lucid dreams/hallucinations was that Lowenstein came home and I was trying so hard to yell and make a noise so she would come and kiss me awake but she went in the other room to not disturb me. In another dream, I was visiting the new house of my father, who had divorced my mother and fell in love and moved in with the chair of master's program (a man, incidentally). And I saw them having sex.
I eventually "woke up" for real when the postal carrier rang the doorbell.
So last week I was telling Damon about this essay I wanted him to read so I made him a copy which reminded me to send it to DYA's brother, but turns out he doesn't have a mailing address and I found the article online and now I'm posting it here because I'm in love with it and want to marry it, i.e. I want to save it for easy reference. It's long, so fasten your seat belt it's going to be a long ride.
(With apologies to Bette Davis on that last part.)
from: http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/Quitting%20The%20Paint%20Factory.htm
QUITTING THE PAINT FACTORY
On the virtues of idleness
By Mark Slouka - Harper's Magazine – November 2004 issue
Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe, then.
-Ovid, Remedia Amoris
I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning
in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away
their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the
soul-eaters.
When I was young, my parents read me Aesop's fable of "The Ant and the
Grasshopper," wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the
summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow
formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the
grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn't know what a 401K is,
has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants' door, carrying his
fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: "I was singing, if
you please," the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. "You
were singing?" says the ant. "Well, then, go and sing." And perhaps
because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a
violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my
hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and
bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was
saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain
of my pee.
I was right.
In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to
the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed
that "the chief business of the American people is business," the
dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of
business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the
sellers never stops; the term "workaholic" has been folded up and put
away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or
to make a meal. We're moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in
a well. ["I think that there is far too much work done in the world,"
Bertrand Russell observed in his famous 1932 essay "In Praise of
Idleness," adding that he hoped to "start a campaign to induce good young
men to do nothing." He failed. A year later, National Socialism, with its
cult of work (think of all those bronzed young men in Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will throwing cordwood to each other in the sun), flared in
Germany.]
A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules
the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its
image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the
great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called "unreal estate," the
continent of invisible possessions from time to talent to contentment,
been either infantilized, rendered unclean, or translated into the
grammar of dollars and cents. Thus has the great wilderness of the inner
life been compressed into a median strip by the demands of the "real
world," which of course is anything but. Thus have we succeeded in
transforming even ourselves into bipedal products, paying richly for
seminars that teach us how to market the self so it may be sold to the
highest bidder. Or perhaps "down the river" is the phrase.
Ah, but here's the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity,
requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes
as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of
an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By
allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by
allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about
it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves)
its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of
things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers
grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we
might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each
other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."
Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always
known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a
well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time,
therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience
reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which
raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today
has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to
a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well,
yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it
all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind
steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than
business."
Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a
democratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and
steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current
administration has so amply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind
requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to
develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity,
and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell's leaky metaphor
for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so
generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.
Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to
think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden
associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of
independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily
manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.
But I have to be careful here. Having worked all of my adult life, I
recognize that work of one sort or another is as essential to survival as
protein, and that much of it, in today's highly bureaucratized,
economically diversified societies, will of necessity be neither pleasant
nor challenging nor particularly meaningful. I have compassion for those
making the most of their commute and their cubicle; I just wish they could
be a little less cheerful about it. In short, this isn't about us so much
as it is about the Zeitgeist we live and labor in, which, like a cuckoo
taking over a thrush's nest, has systematically shoved all the other eggs
of our life, one by one, onto the pavement. It's about illuminating the
losses.
We're enthralled. I want to disenchant us a bit; draw a mustache on the
boss.
INFINITE BUSTLE
I'm a student of the narrowing margins. And their victim, to some extent,
though my capacity for sloth, my belief in it, may yet save me, Like some
stubborn heretic in fifth-century Rome, still offering gifts to the
spirit of the fields even as the priests sniff about the tempa for sin, I
daily sacrifice my bit of time. The pagan gods may yet return. Constantine
and Theodosius may die. But the prospects are bad.
In Riverside Park in New York City, where I walk these days, the legions
of "weekend nannies" are growing, setting up a play date for a
ten-year-old requires a feat of near-Olympic coordination, and the few,
vestigial, late-afternoon parents one sees, dragging their wailing progeny
by the hand or frantically kicking a soccer ball in the fading light,
have a gleam in their eyes I find frightening. No outstretched legs
crossed at the ankles, no arms draped over the back of the bench. No
lovers. No be-hatted old men, arguing. Between the slide and the sandbox,
a very fit young man in his early thirties is talking on his cell phone
while a two-year-old with a trail of snot running from his nose tugs on
the seam of his corduroy pants. "There's no way I can pick it up. Because
we're still at the park. Because we just got here, that's why."
It's been one hundred and forty years since Thoreau, who itched a full
century before everyone else began to scratch, complained that the world
was increasingly just "a place of business. What an infinite bustle!" he
groused. "I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive.
It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would be glorious to see
mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work." Little
did he know. Today the roads of commerce, paved and smoothed, reach into
every nook and cranny of the republic; there is no place apart, no place
where we would be shut of the drone of that damnable traffic. Today we,
quite literally, live to work. And it hardly matters what kind of work we
do; the process justifies the ends. Indeed, at times it seems there is
hardly an occupation, however useless or humiliating or downright
despicable, that cannot at least in part be redeemed by our obsessive
dedication to it: "Yes, Ted sold shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no
surname, but he worked so hard!"
Not long ago, at the kind of dinner party I rarely attend, I made the
mistake of admitting that I not only liked to sleep but liked to get at
least eight hours a night whenever possible, and that nine would be better
still. The reaction – a 'complex Pinot Noir of nervous laughter displaced
by expressions of disbelief and condescension – suggested that my
transgression had been, on some level, a political one. I was reminded of
the time I'd confessed to Roger Angell that I did not much care for
baseball.
My comment was immediately rebutted by testimonials to sleeplessness: two
of the nine guests confessed to being insomniacs; a member of the Academy
of Arts and Letters claimed indignantly that she couldn't remember when
she had ever gotten eight hours of sleep; two other guests declared
themselves grateful for five or six. It mattered little that I'd arranged
my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement
entailed. Eight hours! There was something willful about it. Arrogant,
even. Suitably chastened, I held my tongue, and escaped alone to tell
Thee.
Increasingly, it seems to me, our world is dividing into two kinds of
things: those that aid work, or at least represent a path to it, and those
that don't Things in the first category are good and noble; things in the
second aren't. Thus, for example, education is good (as long as we don't
have to listen to any of that "end in itself" nonsense) because it will
presumably lead to work. Thus playing the piano or swimming the 100-yard
backstroke are good things for a fifteen-year-old to do not because they
might give her some pleasure but because rumor has it that Princeton is
interested in students who can play Chopin or swim quickly on their backs
(and a degree from Princeton, as any fool knows, can be readily converted
to work).
Point the beam anywhere, and there's the God of Work, busily trampling out
the vintage. Blizzards are bemoaned because they keep us from getting to
work. Hobbies are seen as either ridiculous or self-indulgent because they
interfere with work. Longer school days are all the rage (even as our
children grow demonstrably stupider), not because they make educational or
psychological or any other kind of sense but because keeping kids in
school longer makes it easier for us to work. Meanwhile, the time grows
short, the margin narrows; the white spaces on our calendars have been
inked in for months. We're angry about this, upset about that, but who has
the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on,
memos to remember, emails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow.
The alarm rings and we're off, running so hard that by the time we stop
we're too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV,
which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our
exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its little
trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction that not only
is this how our three score and ten must be spent but that the transaction
is both noble and necessary.
KA-CHINK!
Time may be money (though I've always resisted that loathsome platitude,
the alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is transformed into the
base lead of commerce), but one thing seems certain: Money eats time.
Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the view from the deck in St.
Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the price.
Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of
the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way to
bankrupting us. We're impoverishing ourselves, our families, our
communities – and yet we can't stop ourselves. Worse, we don't want to.
Seen from the right vantage point, there's something wonderfully animistic
about it. The god must be fed; he's hungry for our hours, craves our days
and years. And we oblige. Every morning (unlike the good citizens of
Tenochtitlan, who at least had the good sense to sacrifice others on the
slab) we rush up the steps of the ziggurat to lay ourselves down. It's not
a pretty sight.
Then again, we've been well trained. And the training never stops. In a
recent ad in The New York Times Magazine, paid for by an outfit named
Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc., an attractive young woman in a
dark business suit is shown working at her desk. (She may be at home,
though these days the distinction is moot.) On the desk is a cup, a cell
phone, and an adding machine. Above her right shoulder, just over the
blurred sofa and the blurred landscape on the wall, are the words,
"Successful entrepreneurs work continuously." The text below explains:
"The challenge to building wealth is that your finances grow in complexity
as your time demands increase.”
The ad is worth disarticulating, it seems to me, if only because some
version of it is beamed into our cerebral cortex a thousand times a day.
What's interesting about it is not only what it says but what it so
blithely assumes. What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be
successful, we must not only work but work continuously; what it assumes
is that time is inversely proportional to wealth: our time demands will
increase the harder we work and the more successful we become. It's an
organic thing; a law, almost. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, you
gotta work like a dog till you die.
Am I suggesting then that Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc. spend
$60,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine to show us a
young woman at her desk writing poetry? Or playing with her kids? Or
sharing a glass of wine with a friend, attractively thumbing her nose at
the acquisition of wealth? No. For one thing, the folks at Wealth and Tax,
etc. are simply doing what's in their best interest. For another, it would
hardly matter if they did show the woman writing poetry, or laughing with
her children, because these things, by virtue of their placement in the
ad, would immediately take on the color of their host; they would simply
be the rewards of working almost continuously.
What I am suggesting is that just as the marketplace has co-opted
rebellion by subordinating politics to fashion, by making anger chic, so
it has quietly underwritten the idea of leisure, in part by separating it
from idleness. Open almost any magazine in America today and there they
are: The ubiquitous tanned-and-toned twenty-somethings driving the
$70,000 fruits of their labor; the moneyed-looking men and women in their
healthy sixties (to give the young something to aspire to) tossing
Frisbees to Irish setters or tying on flies in midstream or watching
sunsets from their Adirondack chairs.
Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is
not, because it doesn't. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires
is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast,
watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure
– particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology – is as
American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a
bad attitude. It doesn't shave; it's not a member of the team; it doesn't
play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to
say. So it has to be ostracized.
[Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we read,
for example, is one of the world's great domains of imaginative diversity:
a seedbed of individualism.
What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a
personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or
improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say you
like to read? Then don't waste your time; put it to work. Order
Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the
Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on the
cover.]
With idleness safely on the reservation, the notion that leisure is
necessarily a function of money is free to grow into a truism. "Money
isn't the goal. Your goals, that's the goal," reads a recent ad for
Citibank. At first glance, there's something appealingly subversive about
it. Apply a little skepticism though, and the implicit message floats to
the surface: And how else are you going to reach those goals than by
investing wisely with us? Which suggests that, um, money is the goal,
after all.
THE CHURCH OF WORK
There's something un-American about singing the virtues of idleness. It is
a form of blasphemy, a secular sin. More precisely, it is a kind of
latter-day antinomianism, as much a threat to the orthodoxy of our day as
Anne Hutchinson's desire 350 years ago to circumvent the Puritan ministers
and dial God direct. Hutchinson, we recall, got into trouble because she
accused the Puritan elders of backsliding from the rigors of their
theology and giving in to a Covenant of Works, whereby the individual
could earn his all-expenses-paid trip to the pearly gates through the
labor of his hands rather than solely through the grace of God. Think of
it as a kind of frequent-flier plan for the soul.
The analogy to today is instructive. Like the New England clergy, the
Religion of Business – literalized, painfully, in books like Jesus, C.E.O.
– holds a monopoly on interpretation; it sets the terms, dictates value.
[In this new lexicon, for example, "work" is defined as the means to
wealth; "success," as a synonym for it.]
Although today's version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a host
of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to corner the
market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of our hands will
save us. And we believe. We believe across all the boundaries of class
and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we believe in numbers that
dwarf those of the more conventionally faithful. We repeat the daily
catechism, we sing in the choir. And we tithe, and keep on tithing, until
we are spent.
It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls
me. There's such a lovely perversity to it; it's so wonderfully
counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn
them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly
knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight
fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy
afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply
being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your
children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you
must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both
natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.
The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do not
go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of
subordinating all that matters to all that doesn't. Eventually, of course,
sitting in their cubicle lined with New Yorker cartoons, selling whatever
it is they've been asked to sell, most come to see the advantage of
enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for their illusions.
It's a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The generations before us
clear the path; Augustine stands to the left, Freud to the right. We are
born into death, and die into life, they murmur; civilization will have
its discontents. The sign in front of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual
Work confirms it. And we believe.
- - - - - -
All of which leaves only the task of explaining away those few miscreants
who out of some inner weakness or perversity either refuse to convert or
who go along and then, in their thirty-sixth year in the choir, say,
abruptly abandon the faith. Those in the first category are relatively
easy to contend with; they are simply losers. Those in the second are a
bit more difficult; their apostasy requires something more ….. dramatic.
They are considered mad.
In one of my favorite anecdotes from American literary history (which my
children know by heart, and which in turn bodes poorly for their futures
as captains of industry), the writer Sherwood Anderson found himself, at
the age of thirty-six, the chief owner and general manager of a paint
factory in Elyria, Ohio. Having made something of a reputation for himself
as a copywriter in a Chicago advertising agency, he'd moved up a rung. He
was on his way, as they say, a businessman in the making, perhaps even a
tycoon in embryo. There was only one problem: he couldn't seem to shake
the notion that the work he was doing (writing circulars extolling the
virtues of his line of paints) was patently absurd, undignified; that it
amounted to a kind of prison sentence. Lacking the rationalizing gene,
incapable of numbing himself sufficiently to make the days and the years
pass without pain, he suffered and flailed. Eventually he snapped.
It was a scene he would revisit time and again in his memoirs and
fiction. On November 27, 1912, in the middle of dictating a letter to his
secretary ("The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their
kind made in the..."), he simply stopped. According to the story, the two
supposedly stared at each other for a long time, after which Anderson
said: "I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet," and walked
out. Outside the building he turned east toward Cleveland and kept going.
Four days later he was recognized and taken to a hospital suffering from
exhaustion.
Anderson claimed afterward that he had encouraged the impression that he
might be cracking up in order to facilitate his exit, to make it
comprehensible. "The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a
little insane they would forgive me if I lit out," he wrote, and though
we will never know for sure if he suffered a nervous breakdown that day
or only pretended to one (his biographers have concluded that he did), the
point of the anecdote is elsewhere: Real or imagined, nothing short of
madness would do for an excuse.
Anderson himself, of course, was smart enough to recognize the absurdity
in all this, and to use it for his own ends; over the years that
followed, he worked his escape from the paint factory into a kind of
parable of liberation, an exemplar for the young men of his age. It became
the cornerstone of his critique of the emerging business culture: To stay
was to suffocate, slowly; to escape was to take a stab at "aliveness."
What America needed, Anderson argued, was a new class of individuals who
"at any physical cost to themselves and others" would "agree to quit
working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world."
"To refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world." It sounds quite
mad. What would we do if we followed that advice? And who would we be? No,
better to pull down the blinds, finish that sentence. We're all in the
paint factory now.
CLEARING BRUSH
At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we're attached to, this
mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude
can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and
mark its progress, like Lon Chaney's Invisible Man, by its effects: by the
things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it
leaves behind. What we're leaving behind today, at record pace, is
whatever belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time:
in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the
importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of play. In the
thing in itself – unmediated, leading nowhere. In the present moment.
Admittedly, the present – in its ontological, rather than consumerist,
sense – has never been too popular on this side of the Atlantic; we've
always been a finger-drumming, restless bunch, suspicious of jawboning,
less likely to sit at the table than to grab a quick one at the bar.
Whitman might have exhorted us to loaf and invite our souls, but that was
not an invitation we cared to extend, not unless the soul played poker,
ha, ha. No sir, a Frenchman might invite his soul. One expected such
things. But an American? An American would be out the swinging doors and
halfway to tomorrow before his silver dollar had stopped ringing on the
counter.
I was put in mind of all this last June while sitting on a bench in
London's Hampstead Heath. My bench, like many others, was almost entirely
hidden; well off the path, delightfully overgrown, it sat at the top of a
long-grassed meadow. It had a view. There was whimsy in its placement, and
joy. It was thoroughly impractical. It had clearly been placed there to
encourage one thing – solitary contemplation.
And sitting there, listening to the summer drone of the bees, I suddenly
imagined George W. Bush on my bench. I can't tell you why this happened,
or what in particular brought the image to my mind. Possibly it was the
sheer incongruity of it that appealed to me, the turtle-on-a-lamppost
illogic of it; earlier that summer, intrigued by images of Kafka's face
on posters advertising the Prague Marathon, I'd entertained myself with
pictures of Franz looking fit for the big race. In any case, my vision of
Dubya sitting on a bench, reading a book on his lap – smiling or nodding
in agreement, wetting a finger to turn a page – was so discordant, so
absurd, that I realized I'd accidentally stumbled upon one of those visual
oxymorons that, by its very dissonance, illuminates something essential.
What the picture of George W. Bush flushed into the open for me was the
classically American and increasingly Republican cult of movement, of
busy-ness; of doing, not thinking. One could imagine Kennedy reading on
that bench in Hampstead Heath. Or Carter, maybe. Or even Clinton (though
given the bucolic setting, one could also imagine him in other, more
Dionysian scenarios). But Bush? Bush would be clearing brush. He'd be
stomping it into submission with his pointy boots. He'd be making the
world a better place.
Now, something about all that brush clearing had always bothered me. It
wasn't the work itself, though I'd never fully understood where all that
brush was being cleared from, or why, or how it was possible that there
was any brush still left between Dallas and Austin. No, it was the
frenetic, anti-thinking element of it I disliked. This wasn't simply
outdoor work, which I had done my share of and knew well. This was brush
clearing as a statement, a gesture of impatience. It captured the man, his
disdain for the inner life, for the virtues of slowness and contemplation.
This was movement as an answer to all those equivocating intellectuals and
Gallic pontificators who would rather talk than do, think than act. Who
could always be counted on to complicate what was simple with long-winded
discussions of complexity and consequences. Who were weak.
And then I had it, the thing I'd been trying to place, the thing that had
always made me bristle – instinctively – whenever I saw our fidgety,
unelected President in action. I recalled reading about an Italian art
movement called Futurism, which had flourished in the first decades of the
twentieth century. Its practitioners had advocated a cult of
restlessness, of speed, of dynamism; had rejected the past in all its
forms; had glorified business and war and patriotism. They had also, at
least in theory, supported the growth of fascism.
The link seemed tenuous at best, even facile. Was I seriously linking
Bush – his shallowness, his bustle, his obvious suspicion of nuance – to
the spirit of fascism? As much as I loathed the man, it made me uneasy.
I'd always argued with people who applied the word carelessly. Having been
called a fascist myself for suggesting that an ill-tempered rottweiler be
put on a leash, I had no wish to align myself with those who had
downgraded the word to a kind of generalized epithet, roughly synonymous
with "ass-hole," to be applied to whoever disagreed with them. I had too
much respect for the real thing. And yet there was no getting around it;
what I'd been picking up like a bad smell whenever I observed the Bush
team in action was the faint but unmistakable whiff of fascism; a
democratically diluted fascism, true, and masked by the perfume of
down-home cookin', but fascism nonetheless.
Still, it was not until I'd returned to the States and had forced myself
to wade through the reams of Futurist manifestos – a form that obviously
spoke to their hearts – that the details of the connection began to come
clear. The linkage had nothing to do with the Futurists' art, which was
notable only for its sustained mediocrity, nor with their writing, which
at times achieved an almost sublime level of badness. It had to do,
rather, with their ant-like energy, their busy-ness, their utter disdain
of all the manifestations of the inner life, and with the way these traits
seemed so organically linked in their thinking to aggression and war. "We
intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia," wrote Filippo
Marinetti, perhaps the Futurists' most breathless spokesman. "We will
glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the museums,
libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited
by work."
"Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers," "a
feverish insomnia," "great crowds excited by work" ... I knew that song.
And yet still, almost perversely, I resisted the recognition. It was too
easy, somehow. Wasn't much of the Futurist rant ("Take up your pickaxes,
your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly")
simply a gesture of adolescent rebellion, a FUCK YOU scrawled on Dad's
garage door? I had just about decided to scrap the whole thing when I came
across Marinetti's later and more extended version of the Futurist creed.
And this time the connection was impossible to deny.
In the piece, published in June of 1913 (roughly six months after
Anderson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that
Futurism was about the "acceleration of life to today's swift pace." It
was about the "dread of the old and the known... of quiet living." The new
age, he wrote, would require the "negation of distances and nostalgic
solitudes." It would "ridicule . . . the 'holy green silence' and the
ineffable landscape." It would be, instead, an age enamored of "the
passion, art, and idealism of Business."
This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the
crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The worship
of speed and business would require a new patriotism, "a heroic
idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a
people"; it would require "a modification in the idea of war," in order to
make it "the necessary and bloody test of a people's force."
As if this weren't enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently
clear, there was this: The new man, Marinetti wrote – and this deserves my
italics – would communicate by "brutally destroying the syntax of his
speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right
adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and
nuances of language." All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a
"dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love
of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. 'Quick, give me the whole thing
in two words!'"
Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and be
given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the
resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the English language
to his well-documented impatience with detail and analysis to his
chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack jokes about
Aileen Wuornos’s execution as well as mug for the cameras minutes before
announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was Marinetti's "New
Man": impatient, almost pathologically unreflective, unburdened by the
past. A man untroubled by the imagination, or by an awareness of human
frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one doubted he could ever
articulate it) to "today's swift pace"; to the necessity of forging a new
patriotism; to the idea of war as "the necessary and bloody test of a
people's force"; to the all-conquering beauty of Business.
Mark Slouka is the author, most recently, of the novel God's Fool. He
teaches in Columbia University's School of the Arts. His last essay for Harper's
Magazine, "Arrow and Wound," appeared in the May 2003 issue.
I love the part about being at a dinner party and saying he gets eight hours of sleep -- I've had similar conversations. "It mattered little that I'd arranged my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement entailed."
The funny thing about this essay, even re-reading it? It inspires me to work. Not in the furtive thinkless way he describes, but in a careful, slow, patient, enjoyable way that's often lacking in my drawer of mindsets.
I eventually "woke up" for real when the postal carrier rang the doorbell.
So last week I was telling Damon about this essay I wanted him to read so I made him a copy which reminded me to send it to DYA's brother, but turns out he doesn't have a mailing address and I found the article online and now I'm posting it here because I'm in love with it and want to marry it, i.e. I want to save it for easy reference. It's long, so fasten your seat belt it's going to be a long ride.
(With apologies to Bette Davis on that last part.)
from: http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/Quitting%20The%20Paint%20Factory.htm
QUITTING THE PAINT FACTORY
On the virtues of idleness
By Mark Slouka - Harper's Magazine – November 2004 issue
Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe, then.
-Ovid, Remedia Amoris
I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning
in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away
their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the
soul-eaters.
When I was young, my parents read me Aesop's fable of "The Ant and the
Grasshopper," wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the
summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow
formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the
grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn't know what a 401K is,
has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants' door, carrying his
fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: "I was singing, if
you please," the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. "You
were singing?" says the ant. "Well, then, go and sing." And perhaps
because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a
violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my
hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and
bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was
saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain
of my pee.
I was right.
In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to
the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed
that "the chief business of the American people is business," the
dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of
business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the
sellers never stops; the term "workaholic" has been folded up and put
away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or
to make a meal. We're moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in
a well. ["I think that there is far too much work done in the world,"
Bertrand Russell observed in his famous 1932 essay "In Praise of
Idleness," adding that he hoped to "start a campaign to induce good young
men to do nothing." He failed. A year later, National Socialism, with its
cult of work (think of all those bronzed young men in Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will throwing cordwood to each other in the sun), flared in
Germany.]
A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules
the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its
image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the
great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called "unreal estate," the
continent of invisible possessions from time to talent to contentment,
been either infantilized, rendered unclean, or translated into the
grammar of dollars and cents. Thus has the great wilderness of the inner
life been compressed into a median strip by the demands of the "real
world," which of course is anything but. Thus have we succeeded in
transforming even ourselves into bipedal products, paying richly for
seminars that teach us how to market the self so it may be sold to the
highest bidder. Or perhaps "down the river" is the phrase.
Ah, but here's the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity,
requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes
as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of
an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By
allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by
allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about
it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves)
its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of
things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers
grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we
might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each
other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."
Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always
known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a
well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time,
therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience
reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which
raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today
has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to
a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well,
yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it
all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind
steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than
business."
Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a
democratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and
steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current
administration has so amply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind
requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to
develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity,
and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell's leaky metaphor
for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so
generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.
Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to
think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden
associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of
independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily
manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.
But I have to be careful here. Having worked all of my adult life, I
recognize that work of one sort or another is as essential to survival as
protein, and that much of it, in today's highly bureaucratized,
economically diversified societies, will of necessity be neither pleasant
nor challenging nor particularly meaningful. I have compassion for those
making the most of their commute and their cubicle; I just wish they could
be a little less cheerful about it. In short, this isn't about us so much
as it is about the Zeitgeist we live and labor in, which, like a cuckoo
taking over a thrush's nest, has systematically shoved all the other eggs
of our life, one by one, onto the pavement. It's about illuminating the
losses.
We're enthralled. I want to disenchant us a bit; draw a mustache on the
boss.
INFINITE BUSTLE
I'm a student of the narrowing margins. And their victim, to some extent,
though my capacity for sloth, my belief in it, may yet save me, Like some
stubborn heretic in fifth-century Rome, still offering gifts to the
spirit of the fields even as the priests sniff about the tempa for sin, I
daily sacrifice my bit of time. The pagan gods may yet return. Constantine
and Theodosius may die. But the prospects are bad.
In Riverside Park in New York City, where I walk these days, the legions
of "weekend nannies" are growing, setting up a play date for a
ten-year-old requires a feat of near-Olympic coordination, and the few,
vestigial, late-afternoon parents one sees, dragging their wailing progeny
by the hand or frantically kicking a soccer ball in the fading light,
have a gleam in their eyes I find frightening. No outstretched legs
crossed at the ankles, no arms draped over the back of the bench. No
lovers. No be-hatted old men, arguing. Between the slide and the sandbox,
a very fit young man in his early thirties is talking on his cell phone
while a two-year-old with a trail of snot running from his nose tugs on
the seam of his corduroy pants. "There's no way I can pick it up. Because
we're still at the park. Because we just got here, that's why."
It's been one hundred and forty years since Thoreau, who itched a full
century before everyone else began to scratch, complained that the world
was increasingly just "a place of business. What an infinite bustle!" he
groused. "I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive.
It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would be glorious to see
mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work." Little
did he know. Today the roads of commerce, paved and smoothed, reach into
every nook and cranny of the republic; there is no place apart, no place
where we would be shut of the drone of that damnable traffic. Today we,
quite literally, live to work. And it hardly matters what kind of work we
do; the process justifies the ends. Indeed, at times it seems there is
hardly an occupation, however useless or humiliating or downright
despicable, that cannot at least in part be redeemed by our obsessive
dedication to it: "Yes, Ted sold shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no
surname, but he worked so hard!"
Not long ago, at the kind of dinner party I rarely attend, I made the
mistake of admitting that I not only liked to sleep but liked to get at
least eight hours a night whenever possible, and that nine would be better
still. The reaction – a 'complex Pinot Noir of nervous laughter displaced
by expressions of disbelief and condescension – suggested that my
transgression had been, on some level, a political one. I was reminded of
the time I'd confessed to Roger Angell that I did not much care for
baseball.
My comment was immediately rebutted by testimonials to sleeplessness: two
of the nine guests confessed to being insomniacs; a member of the Academy
of Arts and Letters claimed indignantly that she couldn't remember when
she had ever gotten eight hours of sleep; two other guests declared
themselves grateful for five or six. It mattered little that I'd arranged
my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement
entailed. Eight hours! There was something willful about it. Arrogant,
even. Suitably chastened, I held my tongue, and escaped alone to tell
Thee.
Increasingly, it seems to me, our world is dividing into two kinds of
things: those that aid work, or at least represent a path to it, and those
that don't Things in the first category are good and noble; things in the
second aren't. Thus, for example, education is good (as long as we don't
have to listen to any of that "end in itself" nonsense) because it will
presumably lead to work. Thus playing the piano or swimming the 100-yard
backstroke are good things for a fifteen-year-old to do not because they
might give her some pleasure but because rumor has it that Princeton is
interested in students who can play Chopin or swim quickly on their backs
(and a degree from Princeton, as any fool knows, can be readily converted
to work).
Point the beam anywhere, and there's the God of Work, busily trampling out
the vintage. Blizzards are bemoaned because they keep us from getting to
work. Hobbies are seen as either ridiculous or self-indulgent because they
interfere with work. Longer school days are all the rage (even as our
children grow demonstrably stupider), not because they make educational or
psychological or any other kind of sense but because keeping kids in
school longer makes it easier for us to work. Meanwhile, the time grows
short, the margin narrows; the white spaces on our calendars have been
inked in for months. We're angry about this, upset about that, but who has
the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on,
memos to remember, emails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow.
The alarm rings and we're off, running so hard that by the time we stop
we're too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV,
which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our
exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its little
trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction that not only
is this how our three score and ten must be spent but that the transaction
is both noble and necessary.
KA-CHINK!
Time may be money (though I've always resisted that loathsome platitude,
the alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is transformed into the
base lead of commerce), but one thing seems certain: Money eats time.
Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the view from the deck in St.
Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the price.
Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of
the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way to
bankrupting us. We're impoverishing ourselves, our families, our
communities – and yet we can't stop ourselves. Worse, we don't want to.
Seen from the right vantage point, there's something wonderfully animistic
about it. The god must be fed; he's hungry for our hours, craves our days
and years. And we oblige. Every morning (unlike the good citizens of
Tenochtitlan, who at least had the good sense to sacrifice others on the
slab) we rush up the steps of the ziggurat to lay ourselves down. It's not
a pretty sight.
Then again, we've been well trained. And the training never stops. In a
recent ad in The New York Times Magazine, paid for by an outfit named
Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc., an attractive young woman in a
dark business suit is shown working at her desk. (She may be at home,
though these days the distinction is moot.) On the desk is a cup, a cell
phone, and an adding machine. Above her right shoulder, just over the
blurred sofa and the blurred landscape on the wall, are the words,
"Successful entrepreneurs work continuously." The text below explains:
"The challenge to building wealth is that your finances grow in complexity
as your time demands increase.”
The ad is worth disarticulating, it seems to me, if only because some
version of it is beamed into our cerebral cortex a thousand times a day.
What's interesting about it is not only what it says but what it so
blithely assumes. What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be
successful, we must not only work but work continuously; what it assumes
is that time is inversely proportional to wealth: our time demands will
increase the harder we work and the more successful we become. It's an
organic thing; a law, almost. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, you
gotta work like a dog till you die.
Am I suggesting then that Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc. spend
$60,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine to show us a
young woman at her desk writing poetry? Or playing with her kids? Or
sharing a glass of wine with a friend, attractively thumbing her nose at
the acquisition of wealth? No. For one thing, the folks at Wealth and Tax,
etc. are simply doing what's in their best interest. For another, it would
hardly matter if they did show the woman writing poetry, or laughing with
her children, because these things, by virtue of their placement in the
ad, would immediately take on the color of their host; they would simply
be the rewards of working almost continuously.
What I am suggesting is that just as the marketplace has co-opted
rebellion by subordinating politics to fashion, by making anger chic, so
it has quietly underwritten the idea of leisure, in part by separating it
from idleness. Open almost any magazine in America today and there they
are: The ubiquitous tanned-and-toned twenty-somethings driving the
$70,000 fruits of their labor; the moneyed-looking men and women in their
healthy sixties (to give the young something to aspire to) tossing
Frisbees to Irish setters or tying on flies in midstream or watching
sunsets from their Adirondack chairs.
Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is
not, because it doesn't. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires
is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast,
watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure
– particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology – is as
American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a
bad attitude. It doesn't shave; it's not a member of the team; it doesn't
play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to
say. So it has to be ostracized.
[Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we read,
for example, is one of the world's great domains of imaginative diversity:
a seedbed of individualism.
What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a
personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or
improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say you
like to read? Then don't waste your time; put it to work. Order
Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the
Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on the
cover.]
With idleness safely on the reservation, the notion that leisure is
necessarily a function of money is free to grow into a truism. "Money
isn't the goal. Your goals, that's the goal," reads a recent ad for
Citibank. At first glance, there's something appealingly subversive about
it. Apply a little skepticism though, and the implicit message floats to
the surface: And how else are you going to reach those goals than by
investing wisely with us? Which suggests that, um, money is the goal,
after all.
THE CHURCH OF WORK
There's something un-American about singing the virtues of idleness. It is
a form of blasphemy, a secular sin. More precisely, it is a kind of
latter-day antinomianism, as much a threat to the orthodoxy of our day as
Anne Hutchinson's desire 350 years ago to circumvent the Puritan ministers
and dial God direct. Hutchinson, we recall, got into trouble because she
accused the Puritan elders of backsliding from the rigors of their
theology and giving in to a Covenant of Works, whereby the individual
could earn his all-expenses-paid trip to the pearly gates through the
labor of his hands rather than solely through the grace of God. Think of
it as a kind of frequent-flier plan for the soul.
The analogy to today is instructive. Like the New England clergy, the
Religion of Business – literalized, painfully, in books like Jesus, C.E.O.
– holds a monopoly on interpretation; it sets the terms, dictates value.
[In this new lexicon, for example, "work" is defined as the means to
wealth; "success," as a synonym for it.]
Although today's version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a host
of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to corner the
market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of our hands will
save us. And we believe. We believe across all the boundaries of class
and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we believe in numbers that
dwarf those of the more conventionally faithful. We repeat the daily
catechism, we sing in the choir. And we tithe, and keep on tithing, until
we are spent.
It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls
me. There's such a lovely perversity to it; it's so wonderfully
counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn
them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly
knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight
fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy
afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply
being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your
children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you
must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both
natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.
The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do not
go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of
subordinating all that matters to all that doesn't. Eventually, of course,
sitting in their cubicle lined with New Yorker cartoons, selling whatever
it is they've been asked to sell, most come to see the advantage of
enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for their illusions.
It's a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The generations before us
clear the path; Augustine stands to the left, Freud to the right. We are
born into death, and die into life, they murmur; civilization will have
its discontents. The sign in front of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual
Work confirms it. And we believe.
- - - - - -
All of which leaves only the task of explaining away those few miscreants
who out of some inner weakness or perversity either refuse to convert or
who go along and then, in their thirty-sixth year in the choir, say,
abruptly abandon the faith. Those in the first category are relatively
easy to contend with; they are simply losers. Those in the second are a
bit more difficult; their apostasy requires something more ….. dramatic.
They are considered mad.
In one of my favorite anecdotes from American literary history (which my
children know by heart, and which in turn bodes poorly for their futures
as captains of industry), the writer Sherwood Anderson found himself, at
the age of thirty-six, the chief owner and general manager of a paint
factory in Elyria, Ohio. Having made something of a reputation for himself
as a copywriter in a Chicago advertising agency, he'd moved up a rung. He
was on his way, as they say, a businessman in the making, perhaps even a
tycoon in embryo. There was only one problem: he couldn't seem to shake
the notion that the work he was doing (writing circulars extolling the
virtues of his line of paints) was patently absurd, undignified; that it
amounted to a kind of prison sentence. Lacking the rationalizing gene,
incapable of numbing himself sufficiently to make the days and the years
pass without pain, he suffered and flailed. Eventually he snapped.
It was a scene he would revisit time and again in his memoirs and
fiction. On November 27, 1912, in the middle of dictating a letter to his
secretary ("The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their
kind made in the..."), he simply stopped. According to the story, the two
supposedly stared at each other for a long time, after which Anderson
said: "I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet," and walked
out. Outside the building he turned east toward Cleveland and kept going.
Four days later he was recognized and taken to a hospital suffering from
exhaustion.
Anderson claimed afterward that he had encouraged the impression that he
might be cracking up in order to facilitate his exit, to make it
comprehensible. "The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a
little insane they would forgive me if I lit out," he wrote, and though
we will never know for sure if he suffered a nervous breakdown that day
or only pretended to one (his biographers have concluded that he did), the
point of the anecdote is elsewhere: Real or imagined, nothing short of
madness would do for an excuse.
Anderson himself, of course, was smart enough to recognize the absurdity
in all this, and to use it for his own ends; over the years that
followed, he worked his escape from the paint factory into a kind of
parable of liberation, an exemplar for the young men of his age. It became
the cornerstone of his critique of the emerging business culture: To stay
was to suffocate, slowly; to escape was to take a stab at "aliveness."
What America needed, Anderson argued, was a new class of individuals who
"at any physical cost to themselves and others" would "agree to quit
working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world."
"To refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world." It sounds quite
mad. What would we do if we followed that advice? And who would we be? No,
better to pull down the blinds, finish that sentence. We're all in the
paint factory now.
CLEARING BRUSH
At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we're attached to, this
mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude
can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and
mark its progress, like Lon Chaney's Invisible Man, by its effects: by the
things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it
leaves behind. What we're leaving behind today, at record pace, is
whatever belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time:
in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the
importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of play. In the
thing in itself – unmediated, leading nowhere. In the present moment.
Admittedly, the present – in its ontological, rather than consumerist,
sense – has never been too popular on this side of the Atlantic; we've
always been a finger-drumming, restless bunch, suspicious of jawboning,
less likely to sit at the table than to grab a quick one at the bar.
Whitman might have exhorted us to loaf and invite our souls, but that was
not an invitation we cared to extend, not unless the soul played poker,
ha, ha. No sir, a Frenchman might invite his soul. One expected such
things. But an American? An American would be out the swinging doors and
halfway to tomorrow before his silver dollar had stopped ringing on the
counter.
I was put in mind of all this last June while sitting on a bench in
London's Hampstead Heath. My bench, like many others, was almost entirely
hidden; well off the path, delightfully overgrown, it sat at the top of a
long-grassed meadow. It had a view. There was whimsy in its placement, and
joy. It was thoroughly impractical. It had clearly been placed there to
encourage one thing – solitary contemplation.
And sitting there, listening to the summer drone of the bees, I suddenly
imagined George W. Bush on my bench. I can't tell you why this happened,
or what in particular brought the image to my mind. Possibly it was the
sheer incongruity of it that appealed to me, the turtle-on-a-lamppost
illogic of it; earlier that summer, intrigued by images of Kafka's face
on posters advertising the Prague Marathon, I'd entertained myself with
pictures of Franz looking fit for the big race. In any case, my vision of
Dubya sitting on a bench, reading a book on his lap – smiling or nodding
in agreement, wetting a finger to turn a page – was so discordant, so
absurd, that I realized I'd accidentally stumbled upon one of those visual
oxymorons that, by its very dissonance, illuminates something essential.
What the picture of George W. Bush flushed into the open for me was the
classically American and increasingly Republican cult of movement, of
busy-ness; of doing, not thinking. One could imagine Kennedy reading on
that bench in Hampstead Heath. Or Carter, maybe. Or even Clinton (though
given the bucolic setting, one could also imagine him in other, more
Dionysian scenarios). But Bush? Bush would be clearing brush. He'd be
stomping it into submission with his pointy boots. He'd be making the
world a better place.
Now, something about all that brush clearing had always bothered me. It
wasn't the work itself, though I'd never fully understood where all that
brush was being cleared from, or why, or how it was possible that there
was any brush still left between Dallas and Austin. No, it was the
frenetic, anti-thinking element of it I disliked. This wasn't simply
outdoor work, which I had done my share of and knew well. This was brush
clearing as a statement, a gesture of impatience. It captured the man, his
disdain for the inner life, for the virtues of slowness and contemplation.
This was movement as an answer to all those equivocating intellectuals and
Gallic pontificators who would rather talk than do, think than act. Who
could always be counted on to complicate what was simple with long-winded
discussions of complexity and consequences. Who were weak.
And then I had it, the thing I'd been trying to place, the thing that had
always made me bristle – instinctively – whenever I saw our fidgety,
unelected President in action. I recalled reading about an Italian art
movement called Futurism, which had flourished in the first decades of the
twentieth century. Its practitioners had advocated a cult of
restlessness, of speed, of dynamism; had rejected the past in all its
forms; had glorified business and war and patriotism. They had also, at
least in theory, supported the growth of fascism.
The link seemed tenuous at best, even facile. Was I seriously linking
Bush – his shallowness, his bustle, his obvious suspicion of nuance – to
the spirit of fascism? As much as I loathed the man, it made me uneasy.
I'd always argued with people who applied the word carelessly. Having been
called a fascist myself for suggesting that an ill-tempered rottweiler be
put on a leash, I had no wish to align myself with those who had
downgraded the word to a kind of generalized epithet, roughly synonymous
with "ass-hole," to be applied to whoever disagreed with them. I had too
much respect for the real thing. And yet there was no getting around it;
what I'd been picking up like a bad smell whenever I observed the Bush
team in action was the faint but unmistakable whiff of fascism; a
democratically diluted fascism, true, and masked by the perfume of
down-home cookin', but fascism nonetheless.
Still, it was not until I'd returned to the States and had forced myself
to wade through the reams of Futurist manifestos – a form that obviously
spoke to their hearts – that the details of the connection began to come
clear. The linkage had nothing to do with the Futurists' art, which was
notable only for its sustained mediocrity, nor with their writing, which
at times achieved an almost sublime level of badness. It had to do,
rather, with their ant-like energy, their busy-ness, their utter disdain
of all the manifestations of the inner life, and with the way these traits
seemed so organically linked in their thinking to aggression and war. "We
intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia," wrote Filippo
Marinetti, perhaps the Futurists' most breathless spokesman. "We will
glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the museums,
libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited
by work."
"Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers," "a
feverish insomnia," "great crowds excited by work" ... I knew that song.
And yet still, almost perversely, I resisted the recognition. It was too
easy, somehow. Wasn't much of the Futurist rant ("Take up your pickaxes,
your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly")
simply a gesture of adolescent rebellion, a FUCK YOU scrawled on Dad's
garage door? I had just about decided to scrap the whole thing when I came
across Marinetti's later and more extended version of the Futurist creed.
And this time the connection was impossible to deny.
In the piece, published in June of 1913 (roughly six months after
Anderson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that
Futurism was about the "acceleration of life to today's swift pace." It
was about the "dread of the old and the known... of quiet living." The new
age, he wrote, would require the "negation of distances and nostalgic
solitudes." It would "ridicule . . . the 'holy green silence' and the
ineffable landscape." It would be, instead, an age enamored of "the
passion, art, and idealism of Business."
This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the
crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The worship
of speed and business would require a new patriotism, "a heroic
idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a
people"; it would require "a modification in the idea of war," in order to
make it "the necessary and bloody test of a people's force."
As if this weren't enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently
clear, there was this: The new man, Marinetti wrote – and this deserves my
italics – would communicate by "brutally destroying the syntax of his
speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right
adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and
nuances of language." All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a
"dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love
of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. 'Quick, give me the whole thing
in two words!'"
Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and be
given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the
resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the English language
to his well-documented impatience with detail and analysis to his
chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack jokes about
Aileen Wuornos’s execution as well as mug for the cameras minutes before
announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was Marinetti's "New
Man": impatient, almost pathologically unreflective, unburdened by the
past. A man untroubled by the imagination, or by an awareness of human
frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one doubted he could ever
articulate it) to "today's swift pace"; to the necessity of forging a new
patriotism; to the idea of war as "the necessary and bloody test of a
people's force"; to the all-conquering beauty of Business.
Mark Slouka is the author, most recently, of the novel God's Fool. He
teaches in Columbia University's School of the Arts. His last essay for Harper's
Magazine, "Arrow and Wound," appeared in the May 2003 issue.
I love the part about being at a dinner party and saying he gets eight hours of sleep -- I've had similar conversations. "It mattered little that I'd arranged my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement entailed."
The funny thing about this essay, even re-reading it? It inspires me to work. Not in the furtive thinkless way he describes, but in a careful, slow, patient, enjoyable way that's often lacking in my drawer of mindsets.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-08 03:38 pm (UTC)The whole thing points me towards a big WHY, though - why have we developed this? whatever human beneficiaries there are, people who "profit" from all of this work, are just getting more of the same "leisure" and so on...and if it's some thing that we've just gotten ourselves into, somehow, some new obsession that will last a few centuries until it burns itself out or we destroy the world or whatever, well, then what? Does knowing about it just help the individual to check out and live a more idle life, personally? Or is this essay kind of an Anne Hutchinson move itself, not just in the way he describes, but as the start of a general erosion of the foundations of the religion?
And why does everything I read like this always make me think of The Matrix even though the sequels were terrible?
Anyway, we should catch up soon and I can tell you all about my holiday sexploits.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-09 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-09 04:41 am (UTC)So, just when we need to use our brainpower the most, we have our seatbacks in the upright and off position. That's why such "emotional" topics are at the fore right now. It's no coincidence that freedom of speech, a woman's right to choose and even the basic right to protest have been on the docket now. Why are we even in need to DISCUSS such topics in the USA in the 21st Century? It makes no sense...
But if you call it a "conspiracy theory" or something like that, whatever credibility you might have by bringing up the topic just evaporates. And a grass roots project to "get people to think" seems far fetched at best.
Heh. Well, The Matrix did have the seed of an idea there, before they made that wacky turn and lost it. There is a good question. Just how much of your life are you in control of on a day to day basis? What percentage of your life really belongs to YOU?
It's as good a place as any to begin.