what it means to write in a capitalist society

Like every other subject in the land of Mammon; you seek succor; you bite the hand that feeds you; or you kill the farmer and take his seat at the table for your episode of “Animal Farm.” Unless you, as I seem to be, are haunted by the ghost of Don Quixote, in which case you reconnoiter the battlefield (planet earth); muster your forces (anyone capable of love); and liberate the ungrateful (the 99% waiting in line at “Club 1%”). However, you’re reading because you have a curiosity about meaning as it pertains to writing in a capitalist society - that’s easy, memorize a few billion lines of advertising until you can spit copy out like it was your own, slap some rugged individualism on it as though you didn’t care a whit what anybody thought; add a splash of testosterone (gender neutral if you’re really gifted) - stir and serve chilled as though you invented the word blasé. Who you serve it to, however, is the key, and whichever “man” you choose must be a deity from the temple of “The 3 Attributes” - one, he must be richer than g_d. two, he must be successful. three, you are unable to defy his will. If you can find a patron possessing these qualities and gain his approval, write as though your soul depends upon it, for it most likely will.

Sounds a little like Faust, don’t it. Who else spurned the offerings of the most high in order to satisfy greatness? That is not a rhetorical question; it is one which has plagued our species back, and prior to King Hammurabi in his role as "protector of the weak and oppressed.” Only in those days kings had more than money - they had heart and soul. Whereas by the time the legend of Faust was gaining a head of steam, royalty had been whinging for many centuries about not having it all . This bait and switch excuse for vacating positions of responsibility for unrealized or unacknowledged appetites has become more than a breach in the dike of the human condition held in place by a highly responsible Dutch boy, for it is coming down to whether the human species can serve each other and survive the coming apocalypse or bow before the all high god of Mammon and perish in the cauldrons of our own arrogance. Writing use to have a place in this discussion, now it is the bean counters who are calling the shots and the writers simply line up behind who is parsing the largest pile of beans. Previously, as was the case of King Hammurabi, one's beliefs were paramount and the medium simply a representation of the purity of one’s convictions - thus the “Code of Hammurabi” was inscribed in Basalt which if you have any knowledge of stone or how it is worked is no mean feat. Today this nobility of purpose is reduced to Bob Dylan’s undeniable observation, “You know, capitalism is above the law. It say, ‘It don't count 'less it sells’”.

Then again Mr. Dylan asked, “What’s money? A man’s a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” Our imaginary patron of “The 3 Attributes” has so far outstripped this modest ambition as to chase at the heels of 'the' real g_d, like some sort of lost canine, yet still manage to hoodwink 7 billion human beings such that if they too affect airs of superiority; claw and scrape their way to the top of the heap (however local that may be); or slit the the throats of all those threading their way from the bottom of whatever heap one's clambered atop surrounded by rising tides; then and only will they consider your petition to step into the ring of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal”. The magic of this success is the illusion of free will be stamped inside the forehead of every manjack popped out of each fetus factory the sanctity-of-life franchise has brilliantly positioned on every street corner of the planet - replete with the delusion of strength-in-numbers nationalism piped into every nursery training future soldiers for the gladiator wars all the rage in our bored-to-tears dying planet. I’m still astonished how the ruling class with so little gumption, bereft of any distinction other than an obscene predilection for amassing everything, could conjure the fiction that they are happy, when they, any one of them, possess no more capacity for feeling of any kind than one might find on an uninhabited asteroid in apsis of its orbit away from our Milky Way? - and yet they rule our planet or enough of it so as to render the planet virtually uninhabitable for those on whose sweat they float. 

Talk about your blind obedience, but then again here I sit laboring under the same delusion of success and hoped-for-freedom; save the fact my patron is a female god impoverished by her male oppressors and too timid to express her undying love for my gentle heart and stalwart ways - ah the sweet 'dame irony' of human existence, or as I prefer to think of it, the rich humor of m’Lady G_d. As to obedience, she has only to point to a mountain and say climb and I commence, or point to the sky and say jump - I ask only “how high.” It is she - this goddess of love, who has forced me to denounce the fiction of literacy through this hackneyed myopic whinge about all the good work that has been crafted by earnest hearts seeking understanding in a world wanting no more than to be told "thangs" will be alright - a world willing to listen to any siren song representing a surcease of the illimitable grief that is part of breathing - a world that will claw one to death for speaking the truth unless it can be made to laugh at the same time. How is it possible to compete with the well-heeled big shots willing to pay copious amounts of money for any sequel that echoes or even whiffs of the bliss of success and harmony; of any prosperity regardless of the hollow sound released from the caverns of disbelief and betrayal fed daily by the inexorable reality of death and gratuitous suffering wrought by a handful of ciphers disguised as humans. Our dumb luck, as it happens, is the mortal coil from which we shuffle, for it contains the only law we must obey - even suffering is a fiction for which we have no one to blame but ourselves - there I’ve gone and said it, sharing why I will likely never succeed as a writer - can’t keep my mouth shut or my keyboard hushed.

However, this essay is about what it means to write in a capitalist society. I don’t know, may never know - not sure I want to know, but for the sake of amusement, let’s assume some of what I’ve written means something; I live on a capitalist planet, and I write. Some of our world’s most popular entertainment evolves around virtual voyages through galaxies in a starship “Enterprise,” or one of its many avatars, not to confuse enterprise with capitalism however useful that sleight-of-hand may be to the ciphers amongst us. This same planet and its Freedom Fighters have also recently managed to dethrone the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” or at least underwrite their transition to market economies - talk about your fictions. Herein lies the rub, the real fiction is that there is any sort of market economy - we are a Thralldom, or what used to be called a Kingdom before Napoleon began fucking around with semantics. If we were a truly capitalist society there would be market forces very much in play - there are none. We buy what we are told, like it. We may grouse, even saber-rattle because we see it done on the flickering screen, or what was once a flickering screen - now just a +5v/-5v twitch affixed at the end of our wrists fed from the mothership's servers in our rigidly controlled, vertically distributed network (though not actually a single network, the distinction is too fine to parse in this essay). The writers for the tractor beam of this highly effective Death Star are today’s much sought after, and well compensated high priests and priestesses of “content.” My concern and reason for this essay is born of an insatiable appetite for meaning of which there may be none - that the coalescing of resources and decay surrounding our existence is exactly what is found in nature with no other meaning than what one might find in the protoplasm of a flattened ant at the bottom of a rockslide which had come unhinged by another ant clambering up to the pinnacle of the topmost stone in an effort to satisfy an inexorable, insatiable, and ceaseless existential hunger, I just don’t know .  .  . 

jts 1/4/2018

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

le mauvais fils en France - the sonnet

I now sit in the "Place de la République";
my lodging's gone, family's gone, future's gone.
From where you sit, you might think "fucking bleak,"
without hearing clacking skateboards moving on.

How great's the fall from grace, or're we mid-air?
Newton says increase is the same throughout,
but it's said "flying's easy - landing takes care.
We're gonna find out - i care not your doubt.

Physics and its meta trumps misery;
which makes my puny concerns laughable.
My regret's not writing this from a tree,
but real joy's walking while still capable.

This "Place" was made to displace the villains; 
Help François Villon come this way again?

my night at the "theatre"

Mark Twain said “write what you know,” so I share. For anyone having read my previous essay will know I’ve wandered off to France in search of my lost heart and what better place to search than the stage, for as Master Shakespeare himself has told us “ All the world’s a stage, / And all men and women merely players.” Fortune has favored my script with lodging in the home of a young actress in the city of Paris. My first week in France was spent in astonished confusion by my good fortune at having fallen in with such interesting folk, for she and her beau also happen to be, as I understand the French expression “très sympathique” - never mind my boorish frontier manners or my borderline grasp of reality for having believed any young woman would have pity or interest and respond to my earnest efforts to find a live-in model/companion/business partner ( http://josephtstevens.blogspot.fr/2012/05/model-companion-business-partner.html ) willing to parley my life’s work into cash as a financial buffer from the inevitable ravages of decrepitude, and/or for us a great deal of fun and profit in a world quickly going to hell-in-a-handbasket . . 

Being old has benefits other than the inexorable decay made so apparent by own nation’s imperial posturing; for example, at my age vanity is so much a part of my existence that it at times feels like a skin which may or may not be torn from my skeleton depending on the jagged edges of whatever environment I’m in or whatever foolishness I may be engaged in. The old French adage “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes” is particularly applicable with this essay, for while I’d like to think with age I’ve acquired some dignity unavailable to the gangly arrogance of youth; no such luck. My gracious hostess invited me to the opening of her play, the efforts of which I could only appreciate by the enormous time and dedication that had occupied her waking hours in my short week in her home. I felt giddy with the prospect of becoming a witness to the culture de Paris, however tangential or imperceptive that awareness may have been. I began to doubt my salvation while sitting in the lounge waiting the call, and it was Shepard Farely’s tired ripoff of Lichenstein’s groundbreaking exposure of modern comic book culture decorating the lounge area - a hand grenade turned into an aerosol nozzle - très original.

But we are here to laugh at my peccadillo here, not the limits of ruling class capitulation to urban scrawl, besides I had a responsibility to my hostess to fully appreciate her work and to honor her kindness and that of her beau for opening their home to me - a barbarian from the western fringes of culture, California. Never mind that my language capacity rendered me deaf and dumb to an art form derived from the epic foundations of modern literature - Greek Drama with its ancient muses transformed by our keen modern sensibilities into a clarion call to humanity in post-history Paris. I was determined to render my meager perceptions fashioned slowly by decades of assiduous application in service of beauty, nor would I allow for any distraction from the artistes by being recognized as a pretentious infiltrator. No, I would use my keen undercover skills to blend in perfectly as just another pre-apocalyptic human seeking solace in tradition. I don’t think I could have been any cooler were I sitting on park bench in Omaha Nebraska on Valentine’s Day - good thing too for the play required all of my attention and focus just to imagine my hostess in her role as 16 year-old disaffected ingenue in a dystopic family when for the entire 1st half of the play, all dialogue was between two men of vastly different backgrounds in a set resembling a disturbed “Waiting for Godot” arguing over monetary issues full with what appeared to be constant double entendre which I conjectured solely from a tittering audience at middling bawdy mimicry.

However determined I may be to affect the sophisticate, I am not genetically capable of laughing at humor incomprehensible to me, so when the play passed the halfway mark and my hostess, nor any players suggesting anything resembling family dynamic appeared I began to suspect my location in the universe was suspect, so I surreptitiously began to inspect my playbill and documents searching for clues that might explain any absence of family in a play named “Une Famile Aimante.” Funny how close giddiness and humiliation can reside in the gut, for my play bill did not read the same as my ticket, yet my gut felt about the same, except now more of a sinking feeling than exaltation. What next - 20 Euros is a lot of money to spend to stand on ceremony, and my mute participation added nothing to the intense performance the two men were working so hard to present. Yet to walk out of a performance any performance - be it the miming poverty of a street beggar, or the proud exclamations of an infant mastering the use of tongue is as hard and heartless as accumulating the world’s booty from the film of human sweat and broken bodies only to retreat into the opulence reserved for the profiteers posing as leaders on our self-extinguishing planet once called paradise.

I am not without heart, but it is so scarred that the choice of silently affecting the dynamic of a performance of those I know not by walking out, or supporting the effort of one in which my late entrance may have had a useful effect by walking in, was not a difficult choice to make. And again my arrogant assumptions proved my undoing, for the same young dame who affably took my ticket for the first performance was now in the role of magistrate and executioner - what else could she do, a philistine unable to appreciate the complete work of a renowned playwright; exiting midway; and then to urgently seek access to another venue underway - vraiment! “Death to the Infidel” may have been read in her eyes if there was a language capable of interpreting the indecipherable - though I felt the daggers clearly enough. The real irony would be the amount of self-knowledge available in such a circumstance if one is able to quiet the shame and panic enough to hear the kind admonition of my actress friend’s beau when hearing my version of hell later that night; “ah,” he said “something happens to everyone,” and while this did not fully assuage my shame or humiliation - a process each individual in isolation with his or her particular puzzle must solve it did help me to fully appreciate the title for the play which my own barely acknowledged limitations allowed me to only partially appreciate “L’Homme de Paille - The Straw Man”

fake - an essay ·:·

I began this essay in November 2014, then read 5 paragraphs of bullshit at Christmas which became February 2015; March 2015; April 2015 . . . I could barely read what was written - all fake. I was alone within a community I had chosen at the end of a long journey after my father’s death. I did not belong and would never be able to fake it. Three years ago, at the onset of this major life transition and full with a grief I could barely face, an existing breech between ma and myself was torn asunder which no amount of hard physical labor could expunge; with no other channel available, I began to write letters. During this very cold past winter my greatest warmth came from working on the portrait of a “perfect stranger” with whom I had once shared a four hour flight; this woman had thoroughly captivated my imagination and my heart, but outside of drawing her I was unable to express myself. I had begun drawing her repeatedly during this upheaval having obtained her kind permission obliquely through fb. Her features seemed to guide me through the labyrinth of grief. Where I have struggled to be gentle with ma - to reassure her that her hardscrabble logic had found traction in my fighting-to-stay-open heart and mind - the photos of this stranger from which I worked simply drew love from me, so I reached out to this perfect stranger asking her to witness my words to ma as an oversight, again obliquely, hoping my affection for a stranger might attenuate language which I’ve come to understand can be rapier-like, hardly kind. I included 2 other muses, women I have known from well-to-barely, but mostly addressed this perfect stranger in the portrait and ma. The portraits improved, but as you might imagine, it got weird. While this convoluted grieving process infused the portraits with feeling that I may not have accessed otherwise, and my overlong restricted heart warmed for ma through this act of intentional writing, I am now faced with a complex of rich though incomplete feelings: gratitude to ma for my existence; gratitude to my muses for their generosity of spirit and special gratitude to this woman in the portrait for allowing me to love her vicariously with abandon while having no idea what she feels - however confused that may seem. 

Confusion factors into some of the reasons why the concept of fake holds so much fascination and is such a challenge for me to depict. Why, for example would I tear my chest open and share something real with you - another form of stranger? Is it an effort to create belonging which is absent from my life, or is it a real effort to find the heart of existence? As you may imagine possessing such an amorphous perimeter of self and other, my previous 3 marriages have been evolving works in progress - more work than progress. Yet as with any skill, relationships tend to improve the more you persevere, and while poor choices can as easily serve to focus one’s areas of weakness, they may also lead to labyrinths in which to hide from growth. With enough poor choices they either become lessons from which to learn hard personal truths, or millstones dragging you to the bottom. Had I stopped at wife number one, I’m not sure whether I could have developed the intestinal fortitude adequate to expose my tenuous grasp of reality with whomever might be reading this essay just now. However, any anxiety I might feel about your reading this essay is nothing compared to the threat I experience from a handful of people capable of applying remarkably precise filters to a media stream which has become nothing more than a worldwide database as easily manipulated as the bank tracks your financial transactions. Either of which is dwarfed by the stomach-turning anxiety that comes from facing one’s deepest fear which is for me loving and being loved - big surprise.

You may be saying to yourself, “with three failed marriages, what the fuck does this guy expect?” A fair question - I expect love. Nor am I suggesting there is anyone on the planet responsible for my lack of it. My life lessons have convinced me that nearly all human activities not specifically in service of love are efforts to assuage an emptiness from the lack of love so well described when Peggy Lee sang, “is that all there is?” Does this mean your favorite sports star is a surrogate for a brother afraid of his own hate, or any fascination for celebrity could be attributed to an older sister who made you walk behind her to school? Fake is when something is trotted out as real, by someone who knows full well and good that what is being proffered is not real, or worse partially real which is almost as bad maybe worse. The best example of this may be the cynical efforts by community leaders to inspire the young poor that somehow excelling at a playground sport might provide a path out of the hell which the uber-rich have created to neuter their opponents - the 99.999% rest of us. The difference between this and the gladiator spectacles of old is so minute that the entertainment industry is entirely comfortable dressing up today’s star as hero of the downtrodden in one sort of uprising film or another; always, however stopping just short of a careful examination of the root causes for our alienation from each other.

The fundamentals of salvation are reserved for the wizards of religion who are in no great hurry to vacate their positions of authority with all the financial perks and adulation which come from rescuing humanity from itself. The only real danger for the zealots of our age will be if there is any validity to claims of afterlife and the consequences of bad living. What is heaven, what is hell? Damn good questions except that the only meaningful conversation is whether we are making either condition real for ourselves and those around us at this instant - anything else is posturing. To live a conviction other than how to tangibly improve the lives of those around you or those with whom who share the planet can only result in greater doubt, more fear and stronger hatred for anyone not sharing your conviction - possibly including any actual savior, who I believe, as many do, resides within our own troubled hearts. Where the zealots and I part company is whether higher consciousness is mine or theirs. Today too many assume roles in the salvation of others, perhaps due to the emptiness each feels within their own skin - why else would I take the time to share these feeble reasons for doing good. Truth be told, it beats hell out of acting on fear or occasional fits of pique which are nearly always directly attributable to fear.

Although sometimes fear can be our friend. Take for example, my terror of love (please take it) - sometimes the absence of love is so great I could reach out and take its hand, usually when I am in the midst of nature and her kind beauty, or amongst those kindred spirits who are also drawn to the mysterious warmth of love and collect in pools like dew drops on a leaf. I prefer love to all the other phantoms in our midst, for it cannot be faked; nor is there a power on the planet capable of bending love to its will; I admire anything or anyone capable of such independence in these days when our own mother earth has been pimped by the lackeys and running dogs of those handful of humans whose only recognizable feature is fake - wealth; the .01% richest human beings who occupy the throne of our collective future by default rather than merit or any value for the greater good. I do not fear those faux princes, death, thugs or any of the endless spectres parading across the flickering brain prison of the “information super highway,” I fear my own willingness to believe lies made real by my own hungers. So am I fake, yes. Did I overcome my fear to cross the threshold and speak to my Madam Muse, yes. Has my soul been redeemed . . ? I don’t know; ¿do you?

jts 1/4/2015

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

memorial without memory - the sonnet

My Father is gone never to return,

yet he’s going down the road right now with us.

Often he shared from a page where he’d learned

how to have fun without making a fuss

These words right now are new to each of you

which is as close as i can get to Pop,

for that’s how it was with us - always new.

For him, the past was just another stop.

If i had to take a guess, he’d be honored now

to have a hand in such depth of feeling.

He worked for love, and it mattered not how,

going so far as to beg for it kneeling. 

His brave heart asked each to make their choices,

or each find a muse to give us voices.

jts 21 September 2011 stoneartist.com 

my Father's memory - the sonnet

As my father lay dying, I was asleep

until my brother woke me at his house.

I exclaimed to the phone, Pop made no peep;

gone I know, Pop thought of me not a louse. 

Some months from that date I will participate

in festivities to honor his death.

We made our “good-byes before it was too late.

What i learned from Pop weren’t in his last breath.

What i learned from Pop will be how i die,

for he so much loved life’s sweet mystery.

No one knows when and where our souls to fly . . 

that could be his cackle in yonder tree .  .

it won’t matter when or where once we’ve gone;

what counts is what we’ve stacked our love upon.

jts 20 September 2011 
http://stoneartist.com 

fake - the sonnet

i am writing an essay about fake,

this ersatz sonnet was as far as i'd got;

actually i had found another take;

what is not fake? this sonnet? bloody snot?

the death of a parent is very real; 

mowing weeds on a hot day is just that.

selling poison as useful is just spiel -

more sellout violence kept under the hat.

fair weather love, the bluster of hate . . .

the list just goes on and on - life will end,

with it hate, yet love goes on - g_d’s grand fate . .

or .. her final joke - balance does not bend.

what’s good will never be found encoded . .. ...

but by good done with dust of bones long dead. 

jts 22 march 2015 stoneartist.com