Just a quote from John and a quote from Noam

Dear diary,

I’m still sad about John Ashbery being dead, so I won’t write much here today; but I think it’s important that I at least try to click a few keys and mumble some words, if only for the sake of going through the motion of composition, the way that it’s important for a soldier who’s imprisoned by the enemy to continue his daily hygiene routine—shaving, paring the nails, applying the war paint—so as to lure back normalcy’s head from its ostrich hole; in the name of “fake it till you make it.”

I’m not sobbing into my latte at the coffee shop; I’m more simply stunned and quietly sulking. But it’s not that I didn’t expect this; the guy was 90, after all. And only Saint Saul’s Christ and a few other demigods have managed to play possum convincingly enough to . . . (I wanna say something about tugging the tail off the lizard of life but I don’t know how to make it fit with this sentence; plus I feel that there are already too many animals in this entry). I wish I could claim that Ashbery’s death leveled me more than my earthly father’s, who died this year, because that would make me seem more zealot-like in my literary madness, since surrealist poets concern me more than mine own biological tribesmen . . .

There went great multitudes with him; and Jesus turned, and said unto them: If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. [Luke 14:25-26]

But the truth is that I cried a lot when my dad was put into the nursing home, yet I only dropped two tears for Ashbery yesterday. But even this show of emotion is more for my too, too selfish self. Like, Milton cares little for Lycidas, Milton cares mostly for Milton; so weep no more, woeful shepherds. Hearing that Ashbery will not be publishing any more volumes of poetry just reminds me that someday I too will be unable to update this weblog.

I hate this weblog tho, so who cares. Plus there are many volumes of poetry from Ashbery that have yet to be released, I’m sure, which they will find squirrelled away in his writer’s desk; and also his private journals will be published, etc.; so for us living fools it’ll be like Ashbery is transitorily more alive than he was when alive. Here’s an excerpt from Flow Chart.

That’s from section V, by the way. It’s apropos because it’s exactly how I feel now that Ashbery is a phantom, and it’s also exactly how he feels, hovering nearby and reading my composition. From what I understand, Ashbery wrote Flow Chart after his mother died: he composed bits of the book-length poem daily, like keeping a diary; and I think it took him a year (pardon my shoddy non-scholarship; I’m only offering up what I remember from reading interviews: if any of this is inaccurate, thank the imagination, which has the power to manipulate all truth). So he wrote a long poem on the occasion of his mother’s death; and I’m writing this diary entry on the occasion of his death; and I chose to quote the part whence I stole the title of my own book, to prove that I care. For when you care, you ransack.

*

I don’t have any more time or any more words, but I want to add something to this post which has nothing to do with anything except the fact that I like it. It’s part of a video of Noam Chomsky talking casually to a group of people at a media outlet. The full event is almost four hours long, but it’s worth watching every last second, right to the end. (I found this brief speech around 3:25:00.) If the quote looks too lengthy, perhaps just read the small, 2nd paragraph.

Take, say, corporations – where’d they come from? They’re pretty recent inventions. I mean, any classical liberal would scream his head off at the idea of a corporation. Corporations were created early in this century, in their present form, to attack market principles. That was their purpose. . . . Classical liberal doctrine is that rights inhere in human beings; like, an individual has rights; not super-individual organic entities: they don’t have any rights, OK? But this attacked that. In fact, the roots are rather like bolshevism and fascism: organic entities, which are over and above individuals, have rights – it’s a major attack on the whole classical liberal tradition. And in fact conservative legal theorists were very much opposed to the judicial decisions – there were never any laws – the judicial decisions that granted corporations personal powers, like the right to free speech, say. In the 19th century, corporations didn’t have the right to free speech. Free speech means advertising, OK? The idea that corporations have a right to advertise would’ve been denounced by any classical liberal. I mean, they’re not people; they don’t have any rights; you know? Maybe the members of them have rights; it’s kind of like a partnership, so the individuals have rights, but not the corporation. Or the right to, say, buy some other property: Where’d that come from? Or protection from search and seizure – like, you can’t go in and get their records – I mean, that’s an individual right; it’s not a corporate right. Well, you know, corporations early in this century were granted huge rights: not by legislation, by courts mainly, lawyers and intellectuals, including progressive intellectuals. . . . But that’s recent, thin, you know; no reason why it should exist—there’s good basis for just dismantling the whole apparatus and putting them under democratic control. That’s institutional change; and that gets rid of the whole system. It’s, again, very conservative; that’s going back to principles that were just standard in the 19th century.

In fact, if you look further, right through the late 19th century in the United States, mainstream thought was opposed to wage labor. I mean, like, Abraham Lincoln; I’m not talking just about the labor movement, but Abraham Lincoln was opposed to wage labor. The Republican Party was the party of free labor, after the Civil War, still. Free labor means not wage labor, OK? Wage labor was considered an abomination; the idea that you should rent yourself to somebody and be paid – that was considered like slavery. The north fought the Civil War under the banner of free labor, meaning: no slaves, no wage labor. These are not exotic ideas; they can quickly become mainstream again. It’s a matter of things that people can do. I mean, these ideas are not from outer space. They happen to be right in the core of American history. Actually, the New York Times in 1970 denounced wage labor as “like chattel slavery.” That’s the New York Times—not a radical rag; it’s not Z Magazine.