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Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

 

Chapter III: Progress (Part 6)

Survival and Complicity

 

 

Survival and Complicity

 

Powerful people share what they know willingly, because they understand the compact, the call and response, between all Life: “I seed you” – “I feed you;” an endless circle of mutuality, inter-dependency; a continuous cycle of promise fulfilled.


But when a weakened people – orphaned by disaster – who are the living dead, the walking wounded, who seek only to consume, to take, and to give nothing back, when such as these surveys the scene – the dance of inter-dependency – it sees not a circle, but a sword, not fellowship – but force. They are “Trouble,” writ large, who then become the Disaster.


And once disaster occurs, solidarity, and its living form, culture, is no more, or hopelessly compromised – and we have entered the era of “survival and complicity” – human beings are left to their individual devices.


Which is how the podrunks want it.

The primitive level of human existence is that of want. There are imperative needs which have to be satisfied before anything else. Only when man has time and energy left beyond the satisfaction of the primary needs, can culture develop and with it those strivings that attend the phenomena of abundance. Free (or spontaneous) acts are always phenomena of abundance. Freud’s psychology is a psychology of want. He defines pleasure as the satisfaction resulting from the removal of painful tension. Phenomena of abundance, like love or tenderness, actually do not play any role in his system. (Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, p. 292)

We are capable of investigating the world from a stance of unity, without linking that inquiry to a bunch of fanciful notions about ‘Thought realizing Itself,’ and some people being ‘good’ because they help Thought realize itself and other peoples being ‘bad’ because they don’t represent ‘Thought,’ or some such bullshit.

 

Let’s start telling ourselves a different story – if only out of solidarity, out of a need to grow together rather than in opposition.

 

The alternative story can be summed up in three words: “misery loves company.”

 

Some really, really unhappy people with big gaping holes in their souls, “under the pressure of necessity, resorted to violence.”


They set out on an endless mission to try to fill these holes with material stuff.


The sight of happy people drove them mad and they set about trying to destroy their happiness as thoroughly as possible.


From Necessity in the human story the road led to Child Abandonment and Violence, and then onward to Hierarchy and Passive Obedience.

 

Now it’s true that we can’t elevate this story to the level of ‘System,’ and in it there are lots of incompletely answered questions like, “how did they get so unhappy?” But, still, it fits the facts way better than the tale Hegel tells.

 

Fear stalked the globe, stealing wherever it went – food, resources, happiness. And destroying the happiness of others was most satisfying of all: to smash as it had been smashed, wound as it had been wounded – to do to others what had been done to it: it made orphans. It’s a common compulsion, a familiar vacancy – a death-fetish dynamic (Israel comes to mind.)

 

The lost child is the source of our troubles.

 

And, for better or worse, we are all lost children now, here in America.

 

It’s time for us to heal the hurt, complete the circuit – return home.

 

We have nothing now but our imaginations and our biological memory, but that’s enough for the task at hand, which is reunion.

 

In our heads, in the stories we told ourselves, we saw ‘rejection’ writ large. But imagine if we changed the story, walked in and welcomed the alternate universe, the parallel world in which we get to play the hero’s part, the one who prevails, despite. One who’d been lied to cruelly about our parents, our home, our harbors and friends – it wasn’t ‘abandonment’ at all, but a gross contagion that overwhelmed everything in its path, the virus Fear.

 

And in that universe, that world, we forgive, we grant ourselves the love we never got, granting permission, invitation, to return to our sources and renew our relations, and discover them fresh, anew.

 

Most of us concerned about the wastefulness of the capitalist system in terms of its mammoth overproduction and the mountains of garbage and toxic waste it generates are simultaneously, painful though it is for us to think about, obsessed by the ‘waste’ of human beings. The podrunks perpetuate the mythology that “Merit Rises" – that the best float to the top and the rest settle to the bottom like sludge. Like most capitalist mythologies this one is multiply useful for the less than honorable goal of maintaining the status quo. It demoralizes us, first and foremost, and what could be better than that, if you want to rule the demoralized?


A friend of my son is a beautiful, exuberant, chatty, quick-witted black woman who loved to draw as a child but…stopped. The longing to make something with her hands survived, however, and she took a class in making books – lovely, hand-stitched things that she occasionally bestows on friends and relations during the holidays.


Restless, unhappy, unseen, unchallenged, and beginning to experience carpal tunnel syndrome at her present job – doing high-end massage for a pricey establishment – she’s recently started interviewing at another high-end establishment, only in management this time, in consideration of her wrists.

Hello, hello, hello. This is K calling, to say: I am the dopest person alive, almost in the history of the world. I got a phone call today from one of the owners that I did the interview with and he wants me to meet the other owner because, he said, and I quote: “I was really impressed with the answers you gave and the questions you asked.” Why? Because I’m dope! Because I’m awesome!

The exhilaration in her voice, captured on the answering.machine, sickened me – the idea that some stranger’s opinion – worse, some boss’s, with intent only to ‘make-use-of’ – could matter so much to her sense of herself.


K has a sarcastic father who left when she was two but put in enough appearances thereafter to shackle her with a vicious insecurity about her own worth and her relationships with men. She was excited about a management job because she has no health insurance and the warnings from her carpal tunnels are getting louder. A few strokes of attention from the next boss and she was on cloud nine.


The next job has no health insurance either.

 

I swept into almost every job with exhilaration too.
I tried to make family, make tribe.
I wanted to gather the new crew round and wrap them in the protective bubble of my power and love.
I would give love and receive love.
I would be seen, finally, and appreciated – valued for my quite obvious and considerable gifts.

 

For some reason I can’t stop thinking about those teen-age “nymphs” of Melville’s, who swam out to greet the ambassador sailors of “civilization” –

…catching at the bob-stays, and wreathing their slender forms about the ropes, hung suspended in the air. All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity, laughing gaily at one another, and chattering away with infinite glee. Nor were they idle the while, for each one performed the simple offices of the toilette for the other. Their luxuriant locks, wound up and twisted into the smallest possible compass, were freed from the briny element; the whole person carefully dried, and from a little round shell that passed from hand to hand, anointed with a fragrant oil…

– how they dried each other off, coiled and perfumed each other’s hair, anointing each other with oil, how with each of the “simple offices of the toilette” they confirmed for each other: “you are ineffably, exquisitely, delightfully, perfect.”

 

Who among us retains that certainty?

 

Continue to "Progress" - Part 7

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)