"Wars Against Other Freedoms": Chapter Six from The Message of Rainsnow
Donna, Bohemian Beauty of The March of the Eccentrics
Herbert Marcuse and the Liberation of Humanity
"Wars Against Other Freedoms": Chapter Six from The Message of Rainsnow
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at the grave of Jack Kerouac, 1975.
Cultural icons of the movement to reach new levels of freedom.
In my cultural/philosophical study entitled THE MESSAGE OF RAINSNOW, written in
the late 1990s and published in 2002, I began by analyzing many of the perils
threatening our human future, and then proposed a general strategy for taking
them on (centered on the need to create a movement & organization focused on the
transformation of our culture, and the psychological healing/recalibration of
our civilization, as a prerequisite for successfully launching the indispensable
political, economic and social changes we all know must occur if our species is
to survive). Influenced by sources
as diverse as Freud, Jung, Mumford, Marcuse, Heilbroner, Campbell, JFC Fuller,
Daisetz Suzuki, Nietzsche, the great poets and novelists of history, 60s
musicians, Beatniks, anthropology, sociology, sociobiology (oh! oh!), world
history, and Native American traditions, I created an idiosyncratic blueprint
for approaching this objective.
Elements of the work, inspired by my spiritual journeys of the 1990s, made the
larger work very unusual, to say the least, and not readily connectible with
standard, cautious, progressive-liberal circles interested in many of the same
ideas, but without the mystical inspirations and without some of the more
'ancient', 'primal', and even 'sci-fi' tendencies...
In the MESSAGE OF RAINSNOW'S opening chapters, I ran through the perils
of warfare, inflated by our deadly technology; the dangers of environmental
abuse and ecological overload; the cultural and psychological dynamics which
could lead to the erosion of political liberty in our country, and to the
shredding of the American Constitution; and finally reached the point of the
freedoms beyond the walls of the fortress of the law:
the ones which are not yet respected by
custom, business, or legal code; the ones which are violated and starved every
day, under the nose of the police, behind
the backs of armies, and in the shadow of the word 'Liberty', which has
not yet accepted their right to have a home.
One of the main drives of the 1960s counterculture, which influenced me
so greatly, was to put these freedoms on the map, to get them recognized and win
them their due, even as we fought to change more drastic wrongs, such as
misguided wars, global repression and poverty, racism and hunger.
The scales of life which cannot measure
the clamoring of our souls, but only the height of our buildings and the weight
of our bombs, are not yet scales fit for our use.
Chapter 6
Wars Against Other Freedoms
The threat of apocalyptic wars; the threat of environmental collapse; the threat
of massive wounds to our society, which might twist it out of shape, and crush
our freedom forever within the wreckage.
This is what I have talked about till now.
But there are other freedoms, freedoms we must think of saving if our world is
to be saved, freedoms that do not have to do with voting for a president, or
simply knowing that there is no Gestapo to kick down our door at night.
There is the freedom to go beyond mere living, to a life with meaning;
the freedom to feel that we are engaged in something beautiful and truly useful,
not just useful to hands, but useful to hearts…
There is the freedom to feel our spirits soaring and the world opening up
like a jewel to our understanding.
There is the freedom to fall in love, and not have it poisoned by debts.
There is the freedom to revel in the struggle of carrying a dream up a
mountain, instead of dragging a barren stone down into a pit.
There is the freedom to feel respected and welcome, without the cuts of
eyes that have no need of who we truly are.
There is the freedom to be human; to be trusted to live outside the
narrow house of fears where we have driven all life.
It is hard to explain this to many, who are too numb and distracted to notice
their real hunger and loneliness; and yet there are many others who know what I
am talking about. How many happy
faces do I see on the way to work?
How many more do I see, swallowed up from happiness in the night of trains,
whose eyes show the pain of being vivisected, of being stolen from everything
that matters, people with tears not deep below the surface, people with beauty
that will be stepped on, and dreams that sputter, dying inside them, like
candles without air? Stampedes of
promises pound by on the pavement, like the wild horses inside Caligula’s head
that drove him mad, but there is no peace, no light.
We are dying, dying… Paying
for everything between the teeth, we are forced to live with spikes inside of
us. We pull the levers in voting
booths, and call ourselves masters of our land, but in the countries called jobs
we are slaves. One wrong move, and
we are in the desert. After several
years of working for one Lord, such a slip could be fatal, for without his
reference, without his stamp of approval to move on, where will one go, what
will one do? No one will take a man
with missing time, except for the grinning jobs at the bottom that swallow up
the strangers and the nomads, that take the faceless ones and use them for a
day. So to protect ourselves from
that dismal fate, we must bend every day to the power of a king in a land that
says it has no kings.
What of all these freedoms, I say?
These freedoms that are not the crown of life, but its beating heart?
I think that poetry and song describe this landscape better than any scholarly
discourse, because it is a landscape of pain and hope beating its wings against
closed doors; it is a truth that comes out best in the cry of the poet, in naked
feeling, which does not seek to be anything more than the howl of a wounded soul
that cannot be contained.
The brilliant Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, saw it when he came to New York City in 1929, and captured the pain of a powerful but despairing city whose soul has not changed much in all this time [1]
The dawn of New York has
four columns of mud
and a hurricane of black pigeons
which peck at the dirty puddles.
The dawn of New York groans
along immense stairways
searching among the ledges
for flowers of anguish drawn by a human being.
The dawn arrives and nobody receives it in his mouth
because here, morning and hope are not possible.
At times, furious swarms of coins
pierce and devour abandoned children.
The first who come out understand in their bones
that there will be no paradise or loves picked like flowers off of a tree;
they know that they’ll be going into the mud of numbers and laws,
to games without art, to struggles without fruit.
The light is buried by chains, and by sounds
which come from the reckless attack of a science that has no roots.
Sleepless people wander aimlessly about the neighborhoods as though they had
recently emerged from a bloody shipwreck.
According to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, “…we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers
inside.” And yet, what has become
of us? Finding a sunflower ruined
in the polluted shadow of an industrial wasteland, Ginsberg saw it:
“gray…poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut of
smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye”, its “corolla of bleary spikes
pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be toothless mouth of sunny air, sun rays obliterated on its hairy head
like a dried wire spider web, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem,
gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black
twigs, a dead fly in its ear… all that dress of dust… all that civilization
spotting your crazy golden crown…unholy battered old thing,” exclaimed the
hammered poet, “you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!” [2]
Of course, the dirt and pollution in our skies is only the dirt and pollution of
what we have done to our souls, reflected above us; what we see plunging upwards
in sick gray plumes from the open wounds of smokestacks, is but a small hint of
what we have done to ourselves, of the choking cloud inside us.
Can we ever be free of this?
Truly free?
I have already talked a great deal about this kind of freedom in my discussion
on Nazi Germany [3]: the freedom of
the spirit, the freedom of the heart, that no kingdom can replace.
The need is deep, it is like the longing to fly buried in the heart of a
bird, who will never truly be a bird until he leaves the ground.
The denial of these freedoms frustrates the soul, enrages it with its own
death, even if the rage lurks below the vision of the distracted eye, tricked by
jugglers and dancers as the heart it guards is stolen.
Time passes - the wound deepens, and one learns to hate everyone and
everything, all the walls around the desperate longing to live.
The frustration builds like a dammed-up river, waiting to break through,
to throw its own death back at anything else that moves, at all the hands that
did not reach out to it when it was in need, at all the world that just walked
by. In the blind fury to kill
death, all is killed, the last traces of life torn to shreds like love letters
that let you down, that left you waiting alone in a dark room for someone who
never came. Let the emptiness
within be extended into the world by bombs, let everything, inner and outer,
merge into one great wasteland, let nothing be left to feel pain.
I have talked about the danger that arises when these freedoms we do not even
dare to call freedom, are denied.
The people become a weapon, and he who needs a weapon seeks them out, and finds
them. Hitler did so in 1930s
Germany. I saw it and felt it,
though you still do not believe it:
I saw the tears harnessed and turned into the blood of a world.
But even aside from such functional considerations - the need to care for the
soul and recognize its definition of
freedom lest its bondage explode in our faces - we have one last powerful
incentive to reshape our civilization into something fitting for the human
heart. And that is the simple fact
that even should we save the world from floods and earthquakes, from comets and
bombs, from plagues and pollution, from famine and drought, from dictators and
concentration camps, it will all have been in vain if death has infiltrated our
very vision of life, if the lives we save have no meaning, no purpose; if they
are like sweet fruit spilled onto the road and left to rot in the sun:
sweet fruits, fallen off of a speeding truck which will go on driving
forever with nothing in it.
NOTES:
[1] "La Aurora", from POET IN NEW YORK.
[2] From 'Sunflower Sutra', 1956.
[3] Referring to Chapter 25, from
'The Journey of Rainsnow', a mystic exploration of past-life memories or
parables.
For those interested to read more from THE MESSAGE OF RAINSNOW, the work, as a
whole, is available through its publisher, iUniverse, and from Amazon.
Though I may need to come at some of the things I wrote there from
different angles in the future, there is still a lot of worthwhile material in
it; and the basic thrust of what I proposed there remains my priority today:
to make a real-world impact, led by my art, and followed by my life.
- JRS, July/August 2016.
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936 ) by Fabrizio Cassetta.
Other Freedoms: The Poem, by J Rainsnow
In case the previous entry was not convincing enough, try this:
the same idea, as a poem:
I just want to love you, I don't want to work.
I just want to spend all day with you, naked with my guitar, my pen, my paper,
and a table full of fruits. I want
to sing you songs that make your body
vibrate like an instrument, I want you and me to become pure music, I want our minds to fly out of our parents' home and land in the tree of our own eyes.
I want to feel without being afraid I won't be able to put it all back in
before I have to get on the train to nowhere.
I want my face to spill my secrets everywhere I go
and not get beaten up for it,
I don't want a face of stone, I don't want to have to sit on the lid
of laughter that wants to come out at the wrong time.
I don't want to be carved up by the serious faces,
I don't want joy and love and imagination to have a muzzle put on them
before they'll take me out for a walk to the money.
I don't want to be put against the wall in front of a firing squad of clocks
or donate blood to the dynamo that tears up villages,
I don't want to build for the sake of building
or to labor just so they'll know where I am.
I don't want to leave a trail of gold from my dripping soul
between the sacrificial altar of someone else's wealth and your yearning bed,
to come to you with nothing left and go to sleep by your disappointment
engulfed by the sound of breathing that has nothing in its hands.
I don't want to step on the budding flower because I am looking at a gray sky.
I don't want to pass by the gesticulating rose without seeing it because I am
crying,
without smelling it because I have turned myself off to get rid of the pain.
I don't want to miss the moon because I am lying in a battered heap
with my back turned to the window,
curtains pulled to blot out the monster.
I don't want to hate the sun because I don't own the day,
because it means I must leave you
and walk into the jaws of a lost world away from your arms.
I know I must walk, I know I must work, I know I must fight.
But here, there is no river to rest by, no tree to rest under, no chance
to say when, to say where, to say I have done it for now, to say I will do it
again
when it needs to be done. It is
endless,
not tied to the seasons, not following anything ; it never reaches its goal, because its goal is to run forever, away from the heart, away from people who matter more than the engines that won't turn off, than the lights that won't stop shining in deserts,
than the doors to wastelands that have to be kept open,
than the marches no kiss must interrupt, and no poem jar.
What are we, fragile naked things with traces of fire sputtering about us, next
to the mighty God Pot we are flung into, to be melted into the divine force of
forward motion pitted against embraces and lips,
ripping down the sides of mountains to get the rubble to bury hearts?
Sweet, sweet love, I wish more of a man were left for you today.
But slowly, I am fading into my aches, disappearing into what they have made me,
here, in this public square of freedom and liberty, filled with statues of
justice and laws which hold their shield above me,
this freedom without freedom where I blow away like sand,
less of me left each night to crawl
into your bed,
climbing into memories with broken wheels and trying to drive them to yesterday,
trying to make you happy,
giving you trinkets from the edges of who we are, above the dried-out essences,
peering into your sleeping face, at your shut dead-angel eyes and rough cheeks
weathered by the winds of neglect.
Do you remember the Garden of Eden, the way it was before the brilliant
wrong-turn, before the apple of the Steam Engine and the Promise,
before the Iron Miracle hooked into our soul skin, like cat's claws into a mouse
and dragged us from each other and from the singing of the earth
into the new forever of otherworldly pistons, endlessly drumming the rhythm of
our demise?
Awake, my love! One last dawn!
Let us rise for each other one last time, by the light of the true sun
within, and love each other with the fire of knowing we are more than what they
let us be.
Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden.
We desperately miss the possibility of the Paradise our instincts have
longed for since the beginning of time, but which our societies have routinely
squashed in the effort to build a poison penthouse for the few.
Somehow, as our technology empowered us to create new realms of freedom,
we missed the turn and kept on driving down the highway of frustrations,
amplifying our pain and its capacity to punish us
for lingering thoughts of
liberty. Donna, let's go back home!
(See next entry.)
Donna, Bohemian Beauty of The March of the Eccentrics
Donna Baum, Your Hippie Majesty, as expertly depicted by artist Katalina
Gutierrez for the MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS novel.
While on the subject of the counterculture (see previous entries on this blog
page), let's go straight to Donna, the bohemian Muse of my alternative-reality
1980s New York. She was the
embodiment of the artist-rebel's ideal partner, queen of the new, non-material,
love-based world we were trying to make from within the belly of the Giant Cash
Register. Perhaps we could describe
her as a combination of Van Morrison's 'Brown-Eyed Girl' & Sophocles' Antigone:
a guitar-playing, photoshooting, alternative-theatre-acting, nurse-of-the
rejected/ artist Boudicca, distributing no-nukes pamphlets in the rain, healing
tenderly the bruises of nonconformity and raging fiercely on behalf of the
damned. She was, as Freddy Wells
might have said, 'the reason I fight and protest... what I want to come home to
at night, and why I didn't sell out... She is what I long for, and why I hate
the slabs of concrete I lie under, the useless loads I carry, the material gun
pointed at our heads that steals pieces of our life together, robbing the choice
hours of our intersection and leaving us the scraps...'
Inspiration, Guide, Shaper of Bohemia through the warmth she gave to
those who didn't join the lemmings, she was the beacon of the world-changers,
the light of the protest march, the comrade of the oversensitive and the
wounded, the female Walt Whitman/ euphoric champion of the diverse and the
banished, the Leonardo Da Vinci of new social designs: fixer of broken wings and
sorceress of the justice avalanche.
Inspired by the countercultural Atlantis of the 1960s, she sought to raise it
from the bottom of the sea in a more sustainable and effective form for the
1980s, where it was to be characterized by 'Hipness without Drugs' (meaning an
end to the self-obliterating hard-drug culture), and by more long-term and
developed links than the chance-meetings and transitory bondings at rock
concerts or alt-site pilgrimages:
experiences that turned into vapor, and left no lasting mark on the
landscape of sin. In THE MARCH OF
THE ECCENTRICS novel, both Donna and Georgie (the Rasta boyfriend of Donna's
friend Marcia), take up the cause of a new form of sustainable counterculture to
advance the human future: a network
of alternative communities or groupings of people that is to serve as the
foundation for the genesis of a new culture, manifesting all the solidarity of
the pre-industrial 'tribe', and which is to avoid the flaws which sank the
previous version. (Chapter 15,
'Flashbacks of Boho Town', pp. 1169-1174.
On pp. 1239-1241, a music group, the True Believers, adds to the analysis
of what went wrong in the 1960s and what must be done to get the 'revolution
back on track.') In THE MARCH OF
THE ECCENTRICS screenplay (Film 1), not yet at your favorite movie theater,
Donna expresses it in this way:
DONNA
We've
got to fight to save the world,
Freddy! We can do it! Politics
won't do it, voting - 'vote for me,
I'll set you free!', 'I am the mighty
Oz!' Change comes from culture, and
culture comes from us! Once we create
a new culture, the politicians will
have no choice but to follow, we'll
be the rock on which everything
stands. It's in our hands, Freddy!
We're all so much closer than we
think... I've got this idea about
forming a network of urban communities -
inspired by artists, as tight as
families, helping each other out in
every possible way, listening to
each other, really listening, not
just 'Yeah, yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh.'
Abandoning no one, filling in the
void of loneliness from which monsters
come, with love, beating the tyrants
of the world to the lever that can
move the earth. It's all about what
the void gets filled by; who gets
there first, and with what.
Who couldn't love this girl, so human and flawed, yet so passionate in her
desire to save the earth and to encourage those who share her beliefs ('please
help me do it!'), as well as to nurture anyone who has been battered and beat up
by the unchanged world ('I'm so sorry I haven't fixed it yet')?
Is she ingenuous, or merely the typical pioneer standing at the beginning
of the road, where the first step always seems like a long shot?
Her friends weigh in in THE MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS screenplay:
GEORGIE
The whole Bohemian world has a crush
on Donna.
MICK
She's the patron-saint of
nonconformists...
GARY GRONIKA
The Florence Nightingale of tortured
artists... and scientists...
TANNENBAUM
The savior of extraordinary penniless
men!
Sarah, imitating the 'Irish Spring' commercial.
SARAH
I like her, too!
TANNENBAUM
She has x-ray vision that sees through
to the heart. All the walls, the
dreadful walls that obscure the vision
of the rest... her soul is like the
trumpets at Jericho... Crumble walls,
crumble, reveal the beauty of the
man never before seen! To be seen
by Donna is to live again! Tear up
the death certificates!
FOSTER
Wow, I want whatever you're on!
GORDON
Food of the Gods.
JERRY
Sure ain't whiskey.
FOSTER
'Burp' is to 'erupting volcano' as
'cocaine' is to 'whatever the ****
this guy's doing.'
Nothing, not even a new culture that could save the earth, would be capable of
commanding our loyalty and interest were it not imbedded with beautiful people
we wished to know and live beside.
In THE MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS, Donna is the human face of the resurrected
Sixties Dream, just as Graciela is the human face of the Latin American
Revolution. She continues to work
with me today (as do all my fictional creations, or 'the voices in my head'),
filling up the disheartening emptiness of my literary isolation with a sense of
the real life that teems outside my mind, poised to change the world.
Somehow, by means of my characters, I know I have drawn a map of the real
people who exist beyond my desk, who I can connect with on the projects that
propel my fiction. (They may live
well within the glamorous borders of the archetypes I have drawn, but they are
robust in their reality, and I hunger for their company; to stand beside them in
the ranks of history as we overturn the engines of the lie and break the power
of the insidious repetitions.)
Peace & Love to Planet Earth, and to its hurting but still unvanquished
residents!
JRS, August 2016.
Of course - Dr. Herbert Marcuse!
Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979) was one of the big heroes of the 1960s
Counterculture, the movement/ethos/milieu/aura which so influenced my writing of
THE MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS novel.
This German philosopher/political-thinker was most famous for creating an
engaging synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychology which, rather than
emphasizing violence and a predominantly material view of history and change
(seize the factories, take control of the machines!), dealt with the
psychological dynamics of constructing civilization, the mental aspects of
subjugation, and the possibility of the liberation of the human body from unfair
dynamics of labor and the human psyche from
false and energy-stealing concepts imbedded into it by powerful forces of
manipulation.
From Marx, Marcuse derived a basic critique of capitalist society, and a sense
that the economic exploitation of the working class by the owners of capital was
an injustice that ought to end (let the workers reap the fruits of their labor,
not see it siphoned away by wealthy bosses while they remained in poverty or
constant insecurity). He also
strongly connected with Marx's discussions on 'alienation':
the phenomenon whereby workers in an industrial society (characterized by
'division of labor') - now producers of mere components of a whole -
had lost the pride and the solidity of identity which the 'craftsmen' of old had
experienced whenever they completed an entire project, which they could then
truly say was 'their creation' (and an extension of their self).
Having lost that sense of pride and usefulness or artistry, an inner
vacuum was created, and Marcuse believed that the capitalist society had stepped
into that vacuum with consumerism, replacing creation & production as sources of
the sense of self-worth, with consumption and possession of material goods as
new measures of human value.
Production, robbed of its dignity, now became a means (within the system of
wage-labor), of earning the income which would allow one to 'buy' one's value
back from the capitalist class, through the attainment and presentation of
material goods which would represent one's worth to others (reflecting back upon
oneself). The vast business (you
could say 'propaganda machine') of advertising, furthered this process by
pumping out images of the successful life, and embedding specific virtues,
triumph-associations, and sublimated experiences into specific products, to turn
them into 'substitutes' for 'real life' which had been stolen through the vast
loss of energy, the control of one's time by others, and the emasculating
workplace submission entailed by the productive process in the capitalist
society.
Now, turning to Freud, Marcuse went over
the psychological theory that the construction of civilization depends upon
'repression' - the partial repression of one's own desires and
instant-pleasure-gratification in order to create a manageable harmony with
others (whose feet your unbridled desires might otherwise stomp on).
It was also necessary to appropriate and harness a portion of the
biological creative/life force - to take it away from pure pleasure, love, and
self-determined creativity - to channel into the construction of civilization...
to transform (sublimate) into work which would expand the human condition
materially and facilitate the survival of all.
The erotic and personal energy of the individual was sublimated, and
poured into the immense social project of the group.
Marcuse, as an observer and thinker of his own times, stumbling upon life as it
was in wealthy/consumerist post-war America of the 1950s and 1960s,
came to believe that the 'necessary psychological repression' described
by Freud, was now being vastly exceeded by what he called 'surplus repression.'
The great age of the economic and psychological exploitation of Man by
capitalism (1700s - his time), had constructed a tremendously effective
productive base, characterized by spectacular technology and well-developed
industrial and agricultural techniques, which Marcuse judged so capable of
satisfying people's material wants, that it ought to be possible for people to
now partially withdraw their energy from the labor system, and to spend more of
it on themselves in the form of love, play, recreation, and engagement with the
imagination. In other words, the
captivity of the worker within a demanding, grinding economic system (9-5,
day-in, day-out, year after year) should no longer be necessary, and significant
new tracts of personal freedom should be opening up for people to develop and
enjoy. But, said Marcuse, this
wasn't happening. Why not?
Because, he said, the capitalist system, abetted by the culture which it
had created through its organization of life (centered around the need to
survive through wage-labor) and especially by its endless cannonades of
advertising and aspiration-indoctrination, was dedicated to creating wealth for
those on top, not distributing surplus wealth in such a way as to release
workers from their bonds. On the
contrary, the system was committed to keeping workers locked into place, by
means of a hierarchically manipulated scarcity (no longer genuine environmental
scarcity), produced by diverting surplus wealth (the potential basis for
economic liberation) away from the workers and back into the hands of the
dominant class, so that worker insecurity, economic stress and tension could all
be maintained as goads to keep them from 'wandering off.'
Abundance was being deflected from the masses and its liberating
potential therefore thwarted. At
the same time, the power of manipulating psychologically-energized commodities
against the people (imbedding pieces of the workers' stolen lives within things
that could be bought, thus binding them to the system) was in full swing.
Essentially, a society of individuals with a dulled sense of freedom
(infiltrated into their psyches by those who wish to control them), conditioned
to judge the meaning of life in terms of commodities (whether bought objects or
experiences), to experience joy and success in the shadow of products they have
to work for others for, and to assign self-value according to how well they
conform with a manipulated image that can only be constructed through servitude,
is enslaved from within. Thus, said
Marcuse, true liberation could only come via a change in consciousness.
(A classic old-school revolution of such people, nearly impossible to
imagine in the first place, would, if it succeeded, only reproduce the
internalized repressive structure which now ruled them from the inside.)
For Marcuse, fantasies, art, and utopian visions - products of the imagination -
remained as sanctuaries of the embattled life force, which was otherwise
kidnapped by labor and jailed within commodities.
Here, in these unconquered realms, within the hearts and minds of the
freest members of society not yet captured by the dominant mindset, often
because they were on the fringes of the system, not successfully-imbedded in it,
or else rejected by it (subaltern ethnic groups, outcasts or culture rebels),
the movement towards liberation might
begin. And it would not simply be a
matter of proselytization via pamphlets or soapboxes.
Art, for example, might project new aesthetic ideals and goals for
society, as the visions of free minds, turned loose on the streets of the
brainwashed and the damned, might strike chords of recognition and create new
poles of hope, breaking the materialist trance of the deceived and opening up
the gates to vast & fruitful worlds that had been hidden by the imposed
perception, and left off of all official maps.
The object of this movement, in the end, would be nothing less than the
transformation of the human being, centered on the recovery of the human heart,
mind and soul from the mental bondage inflicted upon us by the dominant system,
and on the extraction of the false values generated by that system which
obstruct our full expression and realization of life. Once awakened, the light
bulb in the prison cell would be seen to be no match for the sun.
With liberated minds, the people would go on to transform the economic
system in order to insure a fairer distribution of its wealth, and facilitate
the dismantlement of 'engineered scarcity', thus enabling the abundance at hand
to serve the purpose of a general redirection of human energy towards the
sensual, the artistic, the pleasurable, and the life-enhancing, rather than the
excessive sacrifice, self-denial and existential waste characterizing our own
times.
Marcuse's philosophy was very popular with the 'Youth Movement' of the 1960s,
which gravitated towards its seeming emphasis on consciousness over violence,
and related to its goal of escaping from oppressive imposed patterns of life
that maimed happiness, unless one bought into the zombie-life of consumerism,
and accepted the aim of becoming a ghost adorned with jewels.
This was a generation not only frightened by war and the presumed
dangers of the military-industrial complex, and, likewise, ashamed of programs
of domination emanating from our country (in the 3rd World), it was also a
generation desperate to find the meaning of life, and to fuse with life in its
most passionate, adventurous and spiritual expressions - not to be swallowed up
by corporations, factories, suburbia and shopping malls, or, on the contrary,
slums. It had an instinct for the
beauty of life, and didn't want to sink into the quicksand, to become 'like
everyone else': the ruined and the
wrecked and the lost. For this
generation, the ideas of Marcuse were like manna...
At the same time as they were reveled in by some, Marcuse's ideas
received their fair share of criticism, not only from the usual angles (Daddy's
mad), but also from many somewhat compatible thinkers who, nonetheless, did not
feel he had identified a truly viable source of revolutionary change, or agency,
capable of engaging his interesting ideals - so appealing to some - in an
effective discourse with the mainstream. There
were also critics wondering how the scheme to redirect (and at the same time
maintain/enhance) the abundance of Western societies was to work in a global
system consisting of both wealthy and impoverished nations, strained by
exponential population growth, and divided by serious cultural differences...
Perhaps it is best to think of Marcuse's work as a spectacular
suggestion, with many vital details still to be worked out.
In THE MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS novel (as in THE MESSAGE OF RAINSNOW), the spirit
of Marcuse's fascinating critique and exhortation find a place, as yet another
inspiration and building-block of my own commitment to promoting a
transformation of our culture capable of liberating the full beauty and
potential of our lives. We must
fight not only to become masters of the circumference of the circle in which we
live, but to fill that circle with genuine meaning and with authentic humanness.
(For more on Marcuse [by Marcuse], see:
EROS AND CIVILIZATION.
ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN. And ESSAY ON
LIBERATION.)
POSTSCRIPT ONE:
As stated above, many critics find fault with Marcuse for not creating a truly
clear or detailed blueprint for the revolution/liberation his fascinating
theories point to. In my book, THE
MESSAGE OF RAINSNOW (
https://www.amazon.com/Message-Rainsnow-Spiritual-Cultural-Beginning/dp/0595213391 ), I do attempt to provide concrete suggestions for the construction of a
transformative apparatus by means of which this kind of consciousness might take
fuller hold in the world.
POSTSCRIPT TWO:
Besides being an influence blended into the aura of my counterculturally infused
novel, THE MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS, Dr. Herbert Marcuse is mentioned several
times throughout the book (although, to be honest, almost everyone and
everything is mentioned somewhere or sometime in my vast opus).
On one occasion (Chapter 15, 'Flashbacks of Boho Town', pp. 1242-1244,
PDF version), protagonists of the New York bohemian scene, including Donna,
Freddy, and Gary are watching a concert at the 14th St. Palladium, taking place
in the context of a gigantic cultural rift between Left and Right, and in the
shadow of the possibility of the total collapse of American democracy.
In this environment, proponents of democracy and social liberalism have
gathered to take inspiration from their favorite musicians, while, unbeknownst
to them, dangerous thugs hover outside in the adjoining streets, waiting to
clash with them when they come out.
At one point during the concert, a band known as the True Believers comes out to
perform, pumping out a particularly heady but interesting tune which refers to
Marcuse. Here is the (edited) scene
relating to our philosopher of the moment:
The Palladium, one of New York City's most treasured (yet nonetheless
demolished) concert venues of the 1970s and 1980s.
####The
True Believers followed this number with another song about the deeper cultural
context we live in: "We row factory
oars at ramming speed to our own sorrow; stuff our faces with the white bread of
things that leave us hungry and wreck tomorrow; cover our arms with jewels that
weigh a ton; and sink into the ocean of never living, and things left undone..."
And there was the refrain:
"Social, Political, and Economic excuses... why the hell didn't we listen to Dr.
Marcuse?" And a weird bit oozed out
of the song structure here that seemed like sap coming out of a maple tree with
an East Indian flavor, and we heard the singers half singing and half chanting
to the accompaniment of the sitar and the tabla:
"The abundance has been stolen!
The freedom the machines put in reach, the sex and play, the art and love
and dance of post-Dickens days, the morning after coal and sweat, the open door
of time unburdened, the weight off the back; we've been gypped , and chained to
the oars of the slave ship, tied to the rack! They stole the manna to keep us
running to nowhere! They hijacked
the liberation to give us new loads to bear!
-- No more washing clothes in the river all day long, so why aren't we
singing a song?
Ten times faster spinning jenny, now one man can do the work of
ten, so where'd the time go, why is now like then?
They put a lid over history (not to grow), and under the Christmas tree
put a lump of coal! Coal for you and coal for me, pointing us towards a useless
goal! ...Us making love and us
singing songs in the garden will never come to pass... because they found a way
to make the crime of history last... the crime of our lives not belonging to
us... because freedom is not a
thing to trust... the crime of being able to reach the sun... yet bound to the
satanic mills till Kingdom come..."
And then they went back to:
"Social, Political, and Economic excuses... why the hell didn't we listen to Dr.
Marcuse?"
"Is Dr.
Marcuse a relative of Dr. Frankenstein?" demanded Gary.
"He's a
partly groovy psychologist," Donna replied, as the song headed towards its end,
sort of flopping around with dwindling increments of energy every time it did.
(Somehow, it seemed like a dying fish, but not in a bad way, if that makes any
sense...) "He is sort of Marxist and Freudian," Donna continued; "but the good
thing is he believes we should use our expanding technological capability for
producing more in less time in order to create more freedom for ourselves
- liberated spaces out from
under the thumb of necessity in which we will be free to play, love, create art,
enjoy life... Unfortunately, the
fetish nature of consumer goods and the whole impetus of the socioeconomic
system has kept us locked into a situation in which we still work far too much
and play far too little. The
possibility for liberation provided by technology's ability to accelerate and
expand our ability to meet our basic material needs, is being squandered by the
inertia and agenda of our society.
Like, dig, the guy was onto something..."
"So the
True Believers expect us to know all this?" demanded Gary, extremely irritated
yet amusing at the same time.
"Christ, they should hand out a syllabus six months before their concert, and
the Tone Deafs, too; nothing like a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who spend all
day with either guitars or joints in their hands trying to come off like
geniuses just because they skim a couple books by Hesse or Gibran, is that the
one that all the mellow brunettes who will go to bed with almost anybody like? -
almost anybody," he muttered with disappointment in his voice, "and now
there's Dr. Marcuse, and who else do I have to know to appreciate this concert,
what about the guy who floats in the water tank and tries to talk with
dolphins?" ##### (There's something
to be said for the lyrics, 'Wild thing, you make my heart sing...')
POSTSCRIPT THREE:
Similar
themes, dealing with the conflict between our love life/private life/creative
life/true happiness and the oftentimes grinding/degrading work regimen we are
subjected to, which erases so much of what we want to do and give to others, are
reflected in many popular songs.
(You could call this musical back-up for Dr. Marcuse.)
In 'I
Say A Little Prayer' (Bacharach/David), Aretha Franklin sings:
"I run for the bus, dear; while riding I think of us dear.
I say a little prayer for you.
At work I just take time, and all through my coffee break time, I say a
little prayer for you..." Work
isn't the Joy of Life, our raison d'etre, it is the impediment, the torment we
must endure to return to what we love...
https://youtu.be/KtBbyglq37E
A
similar feeling is conveyed by the first verse of Victor Jara's 'Cuando voy al
trabajo' (When I go to work): "On
my way to work I think of you, through the streets of the city I think of you.
When I look at the faces through steamy windows, not knowing who they are, where
they're going, I think of you, companion of my life and the future, of the
bitter hours and the happiness of being alive, working at the beginning of a
story without knowing the end.' (Translated by Joan Jara)
https://youtu.be/VQTZftPXJng
Eric
Burdon and the Animals worked it harder in 'We Gotta Get Out of this Place'
(Mann/Weil), as Burdon dwelled on the battering the callous working life had put
on his father: "Watch my daddy in
bed, a-dying, watch his hair been turning gray, he's been working and slaving
his life away..." Then, after a
passage that musically conveys that battering, Burdon, speaking to the girl he
loves, sings: "We gotta get out of
this place if it's the last thing we ever do; we gotta get out of this place...
there's a better life for me and you."
https://youtu.be/LUpBSvN1a50
Come to
think of it, that's pretty much mirrored by Bruce Springsteen's 1975 classic,
'Born to Run', where he sings:
"Baby this town, it rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, it's a
suicide rap, We gotta get out while we're young, Cause tramps like us, baby, we
were born to run!"
Speaking
of Bruce Springsteen, nothing does this theme any better than 'The River', whose
somber, poignant tone of a life pulled away from its dreams and slowly beaten
into numbness, briefly erupts with memories of the fire that first brought the
two lovers together, before the heartless grinding life of work and struggle
crushed the preciousness of their hope and passion, and left a wall between
them. "But I remember us riding in
my brother's car, her body tan and wet at the reservoir.
At night on them banks I'd lie awake and pull her close just to feel each
breath she'd take. Those memories
come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse...
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse... that
sends me down to the river, though I know the river is dry..."
https://youtu.be/nAB4vOkL6cE
*****
And...
that's it! My little bit on
Marcuse, and his still relevant warning that the Freedom we are taught to
believe we enjoy here, is actually rife with unfreedoms... with powerful,
life-altering expanses of coercion and territories of self-negation and
soul-neglect where we spend years of our existence:
whitewashed zones of servitude and degradation which slowly erode the
brilliant possibilities of our lives, compress our breadth and reel in our
natural genius, channeling us towards minor roles in a mediocre vision that lets
all of us down, even as we are trained to accept it, embrace it and defend it...
Through
fiction (THE MARCH OF THE ECCENTRICS novel), and philosophical/cultural analyses
and exhortations (THE MESSAGE OF RAINSNOW), I take on this issue, along with the
starker demons of extreme poverty, war, and ecological suicide; for true
liberation can only take place on multiple levels.
A
special thanks to Dr. Marcuse for being one of my culture-mentors.
I remember the romantic days, years ago, when I carried around versions
of Carlos Fuentes' 'Where the Air is Clear' and Marcuse's 'Essay on Liberation',
while dating my first girlfriend and dreaming it would be easier to change the
world than it is! Still fighting
on, in spite of the damage... and calling on all kindred souls to help!
- JRS,
August 2016.
Following are two articles originally intended for Facebook, which I decided to
place here, instead, due to some FB posting problems in August, 2016 (especially
of longer material). The first
describes one of my favorite Dylan songs, and is well-suited for this page!
The second links Moses and the Exodus to
the 1960s counterculture... not too wild an analogy to make, when all is said
and done!
MR. TAMBOURINE MAN: A version of Bob Dylan's classic song, which was also like a
snapshot of the soul of the 1960s counterculture.
Dylan was, of course, one of the great icons of the
culturally-transformative Sixties music scene, which propelled thousands on a
journey of change which began with support for social justice and peace issues
(civil rights, antiwar, antinuclear, etc.), often generated by the 'folk music
scene', and which led eventually to
searches aiming for a complete metamorphosis of the individual mind and the
nature of civilization, often carried on the shoulders of the rock scene
(Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Youngbloods, Bob-Dylan-gone-electric, etc., etc.)
In this classic song, the discontent of a generation was embedded, and
the longing for something magical and different to lead the discounted heart out
of what seemed to be a vast trap, a mighty dead-end with no way out - a
grinding, crushing, boring, spiritless place of routines, lies the size of
mountains, and endless expanses of Captivity that one began to sense was not
going to be easy to extricate oneself from.
So many times, the beautiful dreams that made life worthwhile were beaten
up by this cold reality until they crawled back into the refuge of the
imagination and accepted the name of 'fantasy', while the defeated took a number
and walked through the gate of surrendering their soul, taking a dose of the
numbness called 'maturity', and assuming their expected place beside the machine
of self-obliteration. "Another
angel shot out of the sky." And
yet, the rebels of the times didn't give in easily, they fought on against the
prejudice they had brought upon themselves by not being like their parents, by
rejecting privilege (if they had it in the first place), by throwing away
opportunities that didn't resonate with their hearts or with their conscience.
Battered socially and economically by an uncompromising society, they
were not yet ready to quit as they put on this record, which told their story.
Tired and wearing out fast, with the price of their nonconformity already
weighing heavily upon them, they sat in the silence between being free and being
recaptured, and listened to this song, night after night...
"Though I know that evening's empire has vanished from my hand, left me
blindly here to stand but still not sleeping... My weariness amazes me, I'm
branded on my feet, I have no one to meet, and the ancient empty street's too
dead for dreaming." And then, the
cry for help: "Hey, Mr. Tambourine
Man, play a song for me. I'm not
sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song
for me. In the jingle-jangle
morning I'll come following you."
Whether it is the magic of mind-altering, dream-nurturing, or simply
pain-suppressing drugs (unfortunately, often part of the burn-out formula), or
whether it is the magic of music, itself, with its ability to transport us to
new locations and to resurrect our broken spirits when they have been trampled
on, a kind of invocation is being made:
an invocation to a healing, understanding force that can save our soul
from the impending ingestion we seem to be on the brink of succumbing to; a
miraculous rescuing force which can snatch the glowing vision of our heart's
purest moments from the clutches of defeat.
We have to find our way out of the painful world they have made for us,
go inside of ourselves to find the door, and then go through it... to a vision
of freedom, beauty, and belonging, as majestic as a mighty seashore.
"Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy
ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to
the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow... yes to dance
beneath the diamond sky with one
hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all
memory and fate, driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until
tomorrow..." It's such a hard task,
how could we ever do it? 'Don't
know... Listen to this song, just
listen, put the needle on the track again [days of vinyl], keep listening over
and over again till it's filled with scratches and crackling, give yourself a
little more time, another day (can we pay the rent?) something will come to
us... it's got to... keep listening.'
A gigantic war is wrapped up in the texture of this song: a war that many
lost, a war that many are still fighting; a war whose catastrophes made fields
bloom with seeds that didn't make it all the way to paradise; a war which, even
when it was lost, for a time made dark places a little lighter, and cold places
a little warmer... a war against
being misused and swallowed up that will never end as long as the yearning of
the human heart for love, joy, and truth remains...
This version contains one noticeable glitch by Dylan, but it's live
music, so, who cares?! It
also gives us a glimpse of one of the most powerful archetypes of musical
culture - the lone music warrior, armed with harmonica, guitar, conscience &
voice (any sincere voice will do), standing in front of the world, demanding to
be heard - the super-individual (example of the power each one of us has to
affect others), taking on the ills of the earth without an army - a one man
world-changing weapon! "Open the
world-eye, throw the transformation match into the tinder of readiness."
It's a superhero concept (Guthrie-Dylan) which launched thousands of
alt-culture singers into the world, many to crash and disintegrate at high
altitudes, many others to persist and energize our knowledge of right and wrong,
and our commitment to freedom, with their persistent presence on our street
corners, in our clubs, at our social and political gatherings... In this way
were born the troubadours of our times, flag-carriers of the new day we need
music to convince us is in reach...
MOSES
AND THE COUNTERCULTURE. Not a good
analogy, in some ways, as Moses was a tough, domineering, controlling figure
with leadership based upon religious authority; while the 1960s counterculture
was free, wild, often without a center, suspicious of coherence that was not
based on the inspiration of the moment, and allergic to organization (though at
other times it was vulnerable to charismatic charlatans and pied pipers).
Yet, in other ways, there was common ground with the Moses story, as
large swaths of the 1960s rebels adopted an almost magical way of thinking about
change. ("Individual change
produces world change... just be different, and let others be different, deny
your heart and soul to the oppressive/materialist society and its social
machinery, and the heartbreak regime will collapse and follow your inner world
to a new place." In some ways, a
vague social theory was behind all this:
and in the grip of soul-nurturing drugs propagating warm illusions and
giving glimpses of beautiful pathways; in the arms of supportive music, which
built shining palaces of sound and thought for the restless and the
dissatisfied, tired of the hovels of conformity; and in the company of fellow
gypsies and bohemian soul mates, who encouraged each other with nights of
passion & solidarity in the flesh, the whole project seemed not only plausible,
but inevitable. Charles Reich,
author of THE GREENING OF AMERICA, said as much...
The Moses of our inner, freedom-seeking selves, would part the Red Sea of
the world as it was with the power of our music, and the sincerity of our hope,
leading to some kind of divine liberation.)
But harsh economic realities, social barriers and judgments, and
large-scale cultural efforts to keep people on the mainstream path & powering
the mainstream vision took their toll over time.
(People on the edges of society paid a very real price in the form of
opportunity denied, marginality or outright poverty, discrimination as 'culture
traitors', and relationship stress... always hard to make love work when the
bombs of poverty are falling, especially when there seems to be another
option... surrender.) Whereas many of
the issues which engaged the counterculture generated organizational
capabilities (for example, the antiwar movement, environmentalism, women's
rights, etc.) - capabilities which helped to give the movements formed around
those issues direction and to sustain their activities -
the counterculture, itself, as a movement to awaken individual
consciousness and transform the very nature of society in its deepest core,
never developed that kind of organization or sustainable coherence.
Some rituals and gatherings were maintained, and some rather nebulous
networks dedicated to promoting aspects of the dream, but the kind of unity,
will, and awareness needed to resist the vast re-ingestion process which gained
force in the 1970s and 1980s, was never truly developed, with the result that
thousands of loosely connected, sometimes bonding and then separating, foci of
individual revolt were forced to face, in fragile isolation, the full impact of
a mighty social rebel-recovery mechanism.
For a moment, the Red Sea had parted.
(Haight Ashbury/Summer of Love, Greenwich Village dreams, temporary
peace-and-love tribes, tight friends with momentary superpowers, dropout
idealist kings, American palenques on the edge, the eruption of Woodstock.)
But the magic failed to organize and to develop concrete and sustainable
forms of mutual support and viable long-term alternatives against recapture; the
parted-sea walls fell back in upon the freedom-seekers, drowning their rebellion
(as a major transformational phenomenon) while the Pharaoh's troops watched
safely from the shore. Although
some especially powerful and fortunate figures managed to retain their
countercultural lifestyle and independence in the midst of the rolling-back
times ('look out, here comes Disco!'), many others experienced an emotionally
brutal 'defeat' which hurts to this day...
My own heart, today, tells me that the Red Sea of blind materialism,
unsympathetic conformity and institutionalized misuse of human life which
defines and threatens our world, today, CAN be parted... but work must follow
inspiration; a commitment to struggle must fill the lungs of the dream; and
structure must complement spontaneity. Between Bob Dylan's 'Mr. Tambourine Man'
and John Lennon's 'God' ('the dream is over'), there is the terrain of rolling
up our sleeves, turning up our brains to the next setting, and recommitting
ourselves to fight for something that is too beautiful and too necessary to
write off as a failure.