Bend the bars of our spiral

Dear diary,

Thank gosh it’s Friday. We made it thru all the other days of the week, and they shall never come again. Forever after, there shall be neither banking days nor work week. It shall only be a string of new time, unending, with the sun rising and falling to mark the rhythm — an X-day weekend, with X equaling lemniscate: the infinity symbol — and all the days shall have new names. Never again Monday. Never again Tuesday. Never again Wednesday, Thursday, even Friday: let today be the last Fri ever. Tomorrow is Femme-day; and the next shall be Wise-day; and then Poem-day; Ur-day; Dada-day. I’m just giving whatever names happen to come to mind. I love femmes, so the first was given to celebrate femmes; I love wisdom and poetry, and the concept of whatever comes before everything else, which is what “ur” meant to me at that moment — primitivism, the earliest and most original je ne sais quoi — so I named that day that. And of course Tristan Tzara’s manifestos made me love dada; so that got its own day. But then I hit a wall: I ran into trouble: my creativity floundered: I drew a blank: nothing else came to mind: I couldn’t think of more stuff that I like. So we decided to reinstall the old system of cyclical naming, and Saturday came back, followed by Sunday and the ever-dreaded Monday.

I wish I could be simple and direct. I wish I could use only simple words, and always sound interesting to people. I wish that people would say about me, “When he speaks, it’s like a force of nature: I feel immediately convinced by whatever he’s saying; and when he leaves off, or walks away, I yearn for him to return and continue his sermon.” Am I really that preachy tho? I need to learn to let things be. I’m always desiring to end war and inaugurate The Century of the Common Soul. But I guess I should just leave war alone. It seems that things only change when you learn to stop caring about them. You could spend your whole life saying “I strive to be a good artist” and your art will always fail: it’ll end up lousy: fourth-rate or worse; BUT on the instant that you say “Forget it — I’m giving up on trying to be good; I’m just gonna keep making art however the heck I wanna do it, and not worry if it’s pretty or ugly, a success or a failure; I’m gonna follow my heart and please myself”; then you end up making passable stuff, & you fetch a price at the Marketplace.

Speaking of stolen masterpieces, I should say a few words about the artwork that accompanies this present entry. In order to do so, however, I must mention a previous entry. Here’s the explanation:

When my entry from July 19 went viral, my fanmail bag spilled over with letters asking about that entry’s obligatory image: “I see that you removed the car pic from a car ad,” fans from all over the world wrote to me, “and you cut out the slogan and brand name, allowing only that stupid phrase in the middle to remain; then, underneath all this, in the voids where the sections had been scissored away, there's apparently some duller photo peeking thru like a backdrop. My question regards this under-image: Will you share it, in some future entry, without the hacked ad atop it?” And now I can answer these fans: I just did.

Now, I hate when I do that — when I forget to explain the obligatory image at the beginning, and I end up doing so in the middle of the post’s body text — cuz it dams the flow of the composition, and it’s hard to continue: you pretty much condemn yourself to conclude. So let me give one quote from a book that I’ve been enjoying, and then I’ll bid you adieu:

The book is by Edmund Wilson, & it’s called To the Finland Station: a study in the writing and acting of history. In the quote below, Wilson is speaking of Anatole France. The passage appears in Part I, Chapter 8: “Decline of the Revolutionary Tradition” — I’ll remove the titles of France’s books that Wilson references, just to make the assertion smoother, for my purpose is only to consider how France’s ideas might illuminate the situation in the U.S., which at present seems to be on the brink of a revolution:

. . . the whole purpose of his later books is to show that revolutions must eventually result in tyrannies at least as oppressive as those they were designed to displace. And when he undertakes to write an outline of history, he has modern industrial civilization blasted off the face of the earth by embittered proletarian anarchists. But no freer and more reasonable order succeeds: the rebels are wiped out with their master, and such men as are left on earth return to their original condition as tillers of the soil. We are back with the cycles of Vico again and might as well not have got rid of God.

I really love that idea (tho it saddens me and frightens me: I love it because it rings true); and even before I read this, I was thinking along these lines, or rather circles, myself. Yet I do not believe that we are inescapably doomed to this fate — I believe in the possibility of humankind to break from its master-slave addiction; I believe that we can get beyond good and evil, via Nietzsche’s “revaluation of all values”. Yet I think the only way we’ll attain this unprecedented outcome is if we understand our bent, our habit, our tendency; so that’s why I wanted to quote the above — if we force ourselves to acknowledge the unattractiveness of its truth, we’ll have a chance to sail beyond it. On the other hand, if we ignore it, THEN we’re destined for rehash.

But what I’m saying is subtly different than that famous maxim “those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it” for what I’m hinting is that the mere knowledge of facts, “historical info”, is not sufficient — it may even be the cause of the arrogance that lures us to rhyme our problems with the problems of the past: for the leaders that have gotten us into this mess where the U.S. so closely resembles the atrocious nations of bygone eras (most recently those from WW2), with its spying and its concentration camps and private prisons of torment and its bloated militarism, is promoted and achieved by the most “educated” among us. Perhaps the grasp of the FACTS dazzle and allow the learned fool to stumble into dangerous reconfigurations of authoritarianism, which look different (when compared to the popularly despised models) only if our fool is focused on the atomic level of details, info, factoids, but they (say, the U.S. and any oppressive realm of your choice) look identical (or at least they “rhyme”) if you zoom out and focus on the CONCEPTS. My point is that what France says above — Wilson’s digest of France, to be exact — is a most important concept that we should keep always at the front of our mind: it’s a crucial poetic narrative; and I see people losing sight of it, or never gaining sight of it to begin with, on account of being preoccupied with names and dates. (I guess I’m saying they miss the forest for the trees; but I hate to admit that my effort here can be summed up so darn cutely.)

On a side note, I just now realized that the above-quoted passage from Wilson on France impacted me so strongly when I read it last evening, that it provoked this morning’s opening paragraph about the days. And my allowing a second coming to Monday proves that, at heart, I’m a pessimist.