Notes from the Wall Street Occupation

Max Hodes, another member of the Sacred Dice Collective, spent days protesting, nights in the cold, endured arrest and went back for more during the ongoing occupation of Wall Street organized this past week.  These are his words about what's going on there.

The General Assembly

The NYT confuses this with an organized group. It is not. It is the name for a gathering of participants who need not be named or declare any affiliation or ever have been here or anywhere else before. It uses a consensus-building model to make discuss and make decisions democratically. Nearly everyone who is at the site seems inexperienced using this model. There are frequent arguments over abuse of process. These conflicts diminish with passing days. New committees and working groups are formed every day to deal with whatever issues have recently arrived. For example, when we arrived there was already a media team. They took it upon themselves to create a 24-hour broadcast on the internet, in addition to shooting and compiling footage with multiple cameras, also on a 24-hour schedule. It was later determined by the GA that there should be a separate Media Outreach committee, dealing with inventing PR tactics and training participants in same. There is a comfort committee, dealing with blankets, cardboard supply, soft things, to increase longevity. There is a medical team. There is a sanitation committee. All volunteers who notice problems and fix them as they see them. Anyone who has an idea is basically free to enact it unless someone in the GA has some principled concern about it. Each participant is given full license to use their time however they see fit. Volunteers are called for where needed, and usually appear in droves. There is a committee of facilitators who might, to the untrained eye, appear to be leaders of the outfit. While facilitating, they do not participate in discussion in the offering of opinions.

As far as larger organizational structures go, this is as good a model as any, but it does have limits which become evident as the group grows.. There simply isn't time for everyone to offer themselves to a discussion and those that feel more inclined to lead than follow seem to end up facilitating. However, that level of participation is still more democratic than a simple yes or no vote. Individuals determine the level of participation they want to see from themselves. Gaps in leadership are filled as soon as someone wants problems solved, because they need to do the solving themselves. The GA seems to create a less inert population because people with the inclination against slow decision making are free to speak up and seem rarely shouted down.

I think that on a large scale, the consensus model could be used in well-trained groups of up to 500. Smaller groups, being more agile, might serve larger communities better by volunteering representatives, training them, and sending them to larger consensus-bodies. In such a way I can even imagine an alternate societal organization to our current one. Over the course of 100 years with sufficient participatory training, unilateral action on the part of a large body of people might be entirely eliminated because the process has the feeling of fusing individual and group identities. Maybe that's wishful thinking. I'm well trained already in the process, and this one was excessively frustrating. When I disagree with the group at large, I don't want to participate at all. And my lack of contribution goes entirely unnoticed. This has it's advantages and disadvantages, but I ultimately like it more because of the choice one is forced to make moment to moment. In the film The Matrix the Architect describes the same choice to Neo: act, or do not act, choose. Without this choice, no process is democratic. Compulsory participation is fascism plain and simple. It's one of the million things we're protesting against.

Why are we protesting

No one knows. Everybody is enraged and everyone has a unique focus. We have not decided on a single demand, and I don't want to. I would like this to turn into a Burning Man-esque event. An ongoing party of the political, artistic and spiritual avant-garde, that becomes an ever-updated cultural institution; a continual protest against the status quo with real political consequences. For that to happen, we will need to find ways of becoming genuinely disruptive. That means we will more than likely be struck down, unless we can somehow strike a perfect balance of necessity and aggravation. If the world demands we stay because we are stirring up right conflict, then we've got a chance at perpetuation. More likely, the cold will get us before too long. The blue-shirt cops seem to like us. The city cut their overtime hours, possibly as a way to get at their pensions, and this is the best chance they've got to log hours before retirement. It's the police lieutenants who are doing the dicking around.

Still we keep getting asked, what we are doing there. And still no one knows. We are occupying because the world is outrageous, we blame greed, and those who feel entitled to their greed. Wall Street is the center of greed. It's that simple. We didn't keep Troy Davis alive. We haven't fed anybody who was hungry, we haven't stopped the monster or done more than create a slightly spectacular nuisance. No one has thrown themselves into the gears of the machine. Maybe what we're protesting is that we can't even see the gears. The machine is a phantom beyond any measure of control except perhaps this one. We are actually trying to alter culture by pushing and shoving it with phantom hands, which turn out to be the only tool available, since the culture is itself composed of phantoms, ideas, fleeting moments, rather than anything concrete and destructible.  There is not, for example, any factory to strike against and shut down.  The machine will continue with or without our participation.   

My arrest on Monday morning was the first that I know of.  It was carried out, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and The Colbert Report, under an obscure law from 1848 against the wearing of masks at public gatherings.  The arrest, like many at protests, was possibly illegal, but of course legality is not the point of these arrests while disruption and intimidation absolutely are. It snowballed in many more, each more brutal than the last. This got people down there. That and the free pizza. Now the slog war begins. Get bodies in there every day and every night, marching, singing, laughing, being. Not too loud or they'll shut us down, but loud enough and long enough and we'll be undeniable, and then we can become unstoppable. Unless we issue a demand, which I'm pretty sure would get ignored. This is perhaps the point which is missed by the GA: why issue a single demand? Why not continue at this noise making, this occupation, with no singular demand and thus no end in sight?  Why not confound the whole model of protest with an absurd action?

So we press on, activating ourselves ever more despite all the forces that tell us to stop.. That's what we're protesting. The middle of the road with it's long yellow line. That's what we're protesting. A million little hurts and ten-thousand big ones. That's what we're protesting. That we're not allowed to protest aloud. That's what we're protesting.  That public space, the space where thousands of tiny, healthy, necessary, revolutions can take place, has been stolen from us and remade as controlled space, sanitized space.  That’s what we’re protesting.  That the police, and by extension the state, do not protect us, the majority of the people, but the tiny greedy minority which conducts its business on Wall Street.  That’s what we’re protesting.

From Deep in the Noise

      It’s time to leave all the old ideologies behind, which means it is time to stop having ideologies.  Perhaps it is time to stop having ideas at all, since there are so many swarming around that it impossible to classify them, a swarm of ideas like millions of butterflies each with a different wing pattern and shape, and a few of us running around in a panic trying to identify each.  Someone will ask, “Are you on the left or the right?” and we will answer, “I don’t know what that means”.  They will ask, “Are you communists or something?”, and we will answer, “No, I don’t believe in systems.”  They will ask, “Are you anarchists, then?” and we’ll have to answer, “Stop playing in labels, they only exist to make you feel better.”

     There is no one on the left and no one on the right.  There was never anyone on either side, just a lot of noise being thrown about aimlessly, sometimes bullets and sometimes other brutality, sometimes torture and sometimes exile, but really it was just a lot of noise that didn’t accomplish very much.  All the same old machines kept on turning, oblivious to all of the noise.  They didn’t miss a beat, or they watched the game from the sidelines, drinking beer and eating hotdogs, not from the executive suites windowed off from the crowd, but right down in the midst of it all, innocuous as anyone.

     Communism and capitalism, socialism and anarchism, these are ideas, fragments of static in the noise.  They are representations, which is the same as saying they are fictions.  They are absurd reductions with the pretension of explanation.  Someone says, “Capitalism is failing”, but what does that really mean?  There is more joblessness, more poverty, more wealth in the hands of the very rich and less in the hands of the very poor, less production?  To begin with, if capitalism is representative of anything, it would seem in that case to be doing very well for itself.  Our mistake is thinking it would ever do well for us.    

     That, of course, is the problem.  The idea, as always, ends up serving the idea, and everything else fades in importance.  We, as always, end up servants of the idea, working fervently to maintain the idea despite all good moral judgement and despite visions of horror.  The idea, as always, wants to maintain itself.  All systems, as always, want to maintain themselves.  

      When it has been “communism” the mode of maintaining itself has often been similar to all others: oppression, imprisonment, totalitarianism, reactionary modes to a world largely arrayed against it, natural, as it were, responses of a system born and living constantly under threat.   

     When it has been “capitalism” we have been spared, some of us even prospering, so long as capitalism does well for itself.  Now it comes under some sort of threat, now the cracks begin (but again, since as Marx pointed out, everything occurs twice: first as tragedy and then as farce, with the Great Depression and subsequent second world war as the tragedy, and the postwar period as a drawn out farce growing more absurd, more hilarious, more decadent and depraved, by the moment), now we feel it coming down on us.  

     We’ve all seen “The Matrix” at this point.  Systems want to replicate themselves and maintain themselves.  This is why Nietzsche, in the “Twilight of the Idols”, called it philosophizing with a hammer; the systems must be broken for anything new to be made. Almost every time, it seems, we merely attempt to replace one system with another system, which is more beloved of us because it is our own, or we lay claim to it, and at which point we are all hapless Trotskys watching in abject sorrow as the idea runs away and turns into a carnival of horror.

      There isn’t the left and there isn’t the right.  We aren’t interested in being another part of the noise, another feature in the desolate sideshow.  Someone will want to say that is apolitical, and maybe they are right, since this seems somehow beyond, underneath, or at a different wavelength all together from what is called politics, which is, above all, a game that maintains a consistent level of noise.  

      This is the resistance.  That’s it.  This is the arranging of oneself against systems because those systems have arranged themselves against us.  It has nothing to do at the beginning with capitalism  or communism, with left or right, though it has quite a bit to do with love and quite a bit to do with resilience, quite a bit to do with serving ourselves rather than replacements for dead gods.  
     Make something new that doesn't depend on subservience to anything.  Cooperate.  Construct.  Learn from rhizomatic forms.  Reject hierarchy.  Sing, dance and act loudly.  Don't think about what it is supposed to look like.  Throw out the masterplan.  Listen.  Begin.

Poetic Manifesto

Note #1:

Poetry is a sustaining activity.

Note #2:

Poetry is a need of those who have little, thus it is given no place in a society of excess.

Note #3:

That society of excess, which some said would lead to greater learning, more refined consciousness, or really just everyone listening to Mozart and reading Hegel, has managed to take over and destroy almost everything capable of being subsumed...including, or especially, as the first casualty, most art.

Note #4:

Because poetry is not easily palatable it has been left to die.  Because it cannot be made into a mass commodity, despite efforts of the literary establishment, university writing programs, and above all the poets of that establishment, it remains something viable, something capable of sustaining memory, history, shreds of reality, humanity, resilience, rebellion and love.

Note #5:

Profit and corporation has poisoned everything but it has not yet poisoned poetry.  This is missed by those who write about poetry, always from the establishment of poetry.  That establishment, which claims its own absurd self-importance, is completely ignored by those in power, by corporations, by those who distribute art.  The only rebellious poetry allowed is approved rebellious poetry.  That establishment, and every poet who is a part of it, is worthless and worthy of ridicule no matter how good the poetry is.  I’m thinking right now of Billy Collins.  I’m thinking less of Seamus Heaney.  I’m thinking not at all of Bolano, Bukowski, or Rimbaud, no matter how precious they become now, dead and unable to defend themselves.

Note #6:

Poetry, like love, does not have a direct answer to systems.  It is sustaining resilience.  It preserves what would be killed off: like impossibility, like the unreal, like love other than seen in the movies, like kindness, like courage of a kind not exploited for wars.  It corrodes those systems, like water, slowly and consistently, like winter freezing and unfreezing the pavement into numerous deadly potholes.  It refuses to go away.  It gnaws at systems.  It is always opposed.  That is the work of poetry.  To simultaneously preserve and oppose.  That is why poetry has no ideology, no “politics”, even while it must always be profoundly political.

Note #7:

That is the work of poetry, to simultaneously preserve and oppose.

Note #8:

I think you all know this, but you have become very lazy and very comfortable.  

Note #9:

The only way anything is written is to refrain from thinking at all about who will read it.  Cave paintings, errant footprints, William Blake.

Note #10:

Everyone is not about to start reading poetry.  I don’t imagine the Greeks sitting around reading Homer.  Of course not, they didn’t read.  I can imagine them listening to Homer, maybe once in their lives, another traveling man with the misfortune to be blind, telling tales to get safe passage to the next island.  I can imagine them sitting around at night, retelling variations on those stories.  Even that is being too optimistic.  Mostly I imagine the Greeks getting drunk when life was too heavy and working hard to survive the rest of the time.  I imagine them as distracted as we are with their spare time.  Or impossibly bored, which amounts to the same thing.  Society is not about to better itself.  Everyone isn’t about to read Homer when they have a Playstation.  No one read the Irish monks who kept the ideas of those Greeks alive through the dark times until all the monks were long dead and only their illuminated manuscripts survived.  

Note #11:

Poetry, calcified and self-satisfied like all other culture in this society, is as unprepared as everything else for the situation to change utterly. 

Note #12:

Poetry, because it is a basic urge, not merely an art, can survive the change of everything.  The only thing that ceases poetry is constant distraction, since poetry is born out of memory, longing and boredom.  That distraction is what cannot, no matter what they say, last.

Twin Peaks and Blake's "The Sick Rose"

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy. 

 Everything worth investigating starts as a minor mystery, in this case the question was why the people that publish collections named "Erotic Poetry" would include this poem.  What about it is erotic?  Nothing, the first many times I read it, sounds erotic.  Definitely not if erotic means, the way we almost always use the word today, sexy, or sexual, or enticing, or anything else between pornography and erotic love.  Was this obviously erotic in Blake's time?  Does it matter?  Not any more that it matters that to get at it I needed Lynch's Twin Peaks and Lindsey Cristofani.

 What the hell does a 20th century television drama, even a surrealist soap opera by David Lynch, have to do with an 18th century poem by a poet mostly remembered for his prophetic body and soul melding The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?  Everything, if this poem is about rape.  Everything, if it's about hidden, repressed male desire in society, in the bedroom, in the family home.  The "invisible worm" is nothing else, once you see it that way.  "That flies in the night, / In the howling storm", that seems straightforward enough, that such an act would come out of darkness, out of chaos, out of what is uncontrollable and buried, denied, unseen even by the perpetrator.  Leland Palmer, the father in Twin Peaks, is given to us as possessed by a sort of demon named Bob, under whose control he repeatedly, over years, rapes his daughter Laura.  He doesn't know what he has done until he is near death.  Forget the demon part, focus on that he doesn't know.  He is a slave to what flies in the night.

 "Dark secret love" is poisonous love, not joyful, open, honest love.  It's the kind of love that watches the object of desire from the corner of eyes, hoping no one else notices the glance.  It wants to possess without being possessed, to have without having to be had and without questions being asked.

 What can be done once the rose is sick? Once "thy bed / Of crimson joy" is violated?  Maybe nothing.  Blake doesn't give us any hope, except that, like all the poems in Songs of Experience, there is a song of Innocence to counter it, somehow.  But this is innocence lost, and in human terms that isn't something that can be regained.  In Twin Peaks the stain of dark, secret love, is Laura Palmer's death at her father's hand, but that is only the beginning, since the real stain is her loss of innocence, of which we are all, like the characters in the show, complicit.  Of course she tries to regain it.  Of course she fails.  She is so tormented by the recurrence of the act, by how it begins to possess her, to turn her further to darkness and away from love, away from innocence, that she decides to die.  Thus the last line of Blake, "Does thy life destroy".  The act, the desire itself, the darkness and void that wraps around all of it, is life destroying, always and there isn't an antidote.

 Lindsey noticed this all years ago while we read Blake in the back of a car on the way to a restaurant near LAX.  Alright, not all, I don't know if Twin Peaks was part of our vocabulary yet, but it hardly matters since I have a feeling she understood the darkness of it already, without that point of reference.  I could easily leave that part of the story out.  Do you need to know, reading this? Yes.  You need to know that saying what seems like a crazy idea (no one else, out of several intelligent readers of literature in that car, thought this poem was about sex) is important.  You need to know it might be distilling somewhere, in some mind you don't even think about, and years later might manifest as something new and perhaps important.

 That's how all these sort of things get done.  That's how an 18th century poem says more about a 20th century television show in eight lines than most cultural commentators have said in many, many more.