in the series finale of 'the wire' (no spoilers), the writers put kafka in bubbles' mouth:
“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”
i think that's exactly right, as my friend jess austin michalik used to say.
remember that this blog was borne of the rib of google. remember that i was searching for benedictions and then stole from the body of "related searches" at the bottom of the page. getting to where we are:
last saturday i bumped into kate at a house party in somerville. she just got back from a film shoot in new orleans where she was charged with the care of the pigs on set. pig-actors. the thing is, she said, normally films hire a trainer to bring some pigs to the set in the morning and take them home at night when the shooting is done. for whatever reason, this film just bought some baby pigs, and she has since been their sole guardian, trucking them after the filming to her parents' house in ohio, where they probably await her return from parties in somerville. we talked about a bunch of seemingly unrelated things and then we started talking about google: i was saying that what i'm really into right now is what happens when you go to search something on google and you see the dropdown menu and realize either that people have searched exactly what you are searching, thousands of times before you ever arrived at the point of query, or you realize that people are searching some whole other shit that's beyond the horizons of the horizon of your universe. she said that what's really amazing is if you type into google "i am terrified of":
i am terrified of i am terrified of chinese people i am terrified of bugs i am terrified of black people i am terrified of death i am terrified of flying i am terrified of bees i am terrified of all things i am terrified of needles i am terrified of the dentist
look for yourself. the dropdown list will probably change over time. which is why google is the MOST AMAZING index of our semi-collective terrors in this semi-collective moment.
see also:
i am in love with i am in love with my best friend i am in love with you lyrics i am in love with we are not what we should be i am in love with you i am in love with my teacher i am in love with my grandson i am in love with a married man i am in love with my grandson and we are having a baby i am love with you imogen heap i am in love with a married woman i am in love with you quotes
so google is also an index of our loves! our moment to moment passions! on the subject of "i am in love with you quotes," one of the things i quote all the time is the part in the Zizek documentary, "Zizek!", where Zizek says "Like nobody almost dares to say today 'I love you': it has to be, 'As a poet would have put it, "I love you"' or some kind of a distance... So it's we today who are afraid that if we were to put it directly, 'I love you,' that it would mean too much."
related/unrelated, the business section of the New York Times today had an article about a guy, Darryl Siry, who's starting a website that connects journalists and p.r. firms by allowing journalists/reporters to post questions (i.e. "what is the role of google in indexing our collective phobias?") and p.r. firms, corporations, and academics can respond meaningfully (i.e. "Google in China: A Manager-Friendly Heuristic Model for Resolving Cross-Cultural Ethical Conflicts," Hamilton, J. Brooke, Stephen B. Knouse, Vanessa Hill, Journal of Business Ethics Vol. 86 No. 2). hedging the question of what's ultimately meaningful, this means that p.r. people can push press releases, academics can fact-check and footnote, and the world continues to spin sideways on its axis, mossy with knowledge grown at the crossroads of corporate self-interest and public accountability. late capitalism, you really are genius!
capitalism is capitalism is good capitalism is dead capitalism is boss capitalism is the crisis capitalism is founded on capitalism is wrong capitalism is a sin capitalism is a scam capitalism is unsustainable
most of my friends in Berlin who could be called activists sustain themselves by applying for grants from the E.U., collecting Hartz4 (unemployment money), or working a job (as bartender, masseuse, whatever). most of my friends in the U.S. who could be called activists work for nonprofits and so are paid a salary to fight for justice. the way this plays out is that in Berlin more people are invited to join the struggle for safe queer spaces or noncapitalist exchange or nazi-free streets; in the U.S. the people invited to join the struggle are those paid to organize it and those being organized. there is a broad swath of people who fall outside those lines and so see themselves as superfluous to the struggle ("it's not my job"). not that relying on EU grants is really that different from relying on Ford Foundation grants but-- professionalizing activism still seems contrary to popular struggle & collective liberation, dubious as those goals seem day to day. maybe the corollary of "none of us is free while some of us aren't" is that a struggle waged by some is lesser than a struggle waged by all.
in the end i did get a job at whole foods, in the bakery department. every night we throw all the baguettes, boules, doughnuts, croissants, dinner rolls, sandwich pockets, bagels, and scones in biodegradable trashbags and leave them in Receiving where Salvation Army is supposed to pick them up the next day. Salvation Army rarely comes and even then, i wonder what they do with the breads since the local chapter doesn't have a kitchen. my coworkers often skip Receiving and toss everything in the dumpster along with the other 2 shopping carts full of expired sandwich bread, mini cookies, cake slices, etc. i don't know why the 2 shopping carts of food aren't donated. every night when i open the great metal door to the great metal room that houses our dumpster--locked from the outside and surrounded by a fence-- i have visions of oranges burning in the Grapes of Wrath.
excerpt:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the river and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must dill in the certificates—died of malnutrition---because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
end excerpt.
i think about printing 50 copies of this and sticking it in all the bosses' mailboxes, jerry maguire style. instead what i usually do is bag a loaf of quinoa-flax bread for my lover, a loaf of pain rustique for my grandfather, a loaf of old-world sprouted grain bread for myself, cranberry pecan rolls for one cousin and almond croissants for the other. this is considered stealing at whole foods--even though the goods can no longer be sold--and so i have to carry the stuff out in a paper bag acting like i bought it during my break. i think about what i would say if they fired me for stealing trash. i think about burning oranges. once i get home i lay out the goods on the kitchen table with post-its on top of each one so that my mother, who is still out of a job, can deliver the stuff to my two cousins and my grandfather. yesterday my grandfather emailed me:
from
LEEROMAN@aol.com
to
alissa.romanow@gmail.com
date
Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:33 PM
subject
(no subject)
Lissie, darling, you've pulled a J.C. on me and provided me with enuf loaves to feed the multitude! Thanks much. I do in fact have a sufficiency for awhile- will let you know when I run out. love, grandpa
from
alissa.romanow@gmail.com
to
LEEROMAN@aol.com
date
Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:32 PM
subject
Re: (no subject)
hi grandpa, does that mean i pulled a Jesus Christ on you? glad to hear you're stocked up well in case of apocalypse. i hope you are well and send you love. lissy
from
LEEROMAN@aol.com
to
alissa.romanow@gmail.com
date
Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:16 AM
subject
Re: (no subject)
Sure, you know the fishes and the loaves at the sea of Galilee that fed the multitude.
end email conversation. too bad i am not feeding the multitude. and neither is whole foods. i was reminded of a colleague who was recently fired for stealing hours. she has 3 kids and a husby out of work. someone evidently thought Whole Foods Market would miss that money more than she. when do people stop thinking about people and start thinking only of rules? do they feel a whole country of their brains stop glowing? have they seen the movie Brazil?
if i were curating my day (w blog as gallery) i would put all of this in the dada trash heap with my A.Word.A.Day newsletter, whose theme this week is "words derived after mythical places." monday was utopia (noun: 1. An ideal place or state. 2. An impractical scheme for social or political reform) and tuesday is cockaigne (noun: An imaginary land of luxury and idleness. From Middle French pais de cocaigne (land of plenty), from Middle Low German kokenje, diminutive of koke (cake). Cockaigne was a fabled place of ease and luxury, a land overflowing with milk and honey where food fell into your mouth by itself. It was an imaginary place a medieval peasant could aspire to, a place away from the harsh reality of life). and i would throw mccain's latest t.v. ad in the show too, just for good measure.
how could i have gone so long without touching the paper trail of taha muhammad ali? how could i have survived until now and does this mean i will cross still other paper trails that will make me wonder how i could have survived in this very moment without them?
MEETING AT AN AIRPORT
You asked me once, on our way back from the midmorning trip to the spring: "What do you hate, and who do you love?"
And I answered, from behind the eyelashes of my surprise, my blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: "I hate departure... I love the spring and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning." And you laughed... and the almond tree blossomed and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.
...A question now four decades old: I salute that question’s answer; and an answer, as old as your departure; I salute that answer’s question...
...And today, it’s preposterous, here we are at a friendly airport by the slimmest of chances, and we meet. Ah, Lord! we meet. And here you are asking—again, it’s absolutely preposterous— I recognized you but you didn’t recognize me. "Is it you?!" But you wouldn’t believe it. And suddenly you burst out and asked: "If you’re really you, What do you hate and who do you love?!"
And I answered— my blood fleeing the hall, rushing in me like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: "I hate departure, and I love the spring, and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning."
And you wept, and flowers bowed their heads, and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.
POST-OPERATIVE COMPLICATIONS FOLLOWING THE EXTRACTION OF MEMORY
In an ancient, gypsy dictionary of dreams are explanations of my name and numerous interpretations of all I’ll write.
What horror comes across me when I come across myself in such a dictionary! But there I am: a camel fleeing the slaughterhouses, galloping toward the East, pursued by processions of knives and assessors, women wielding mortar and pestle for chop meat!
I do not consider myself a pessimist, and I certainly don’t suffer from the shock of ancient, gypsy nightmares, and yet, in the middle of the day, whenever I turn on the radio, or turn it off, I breathe in a kind of historical, theological leprosy.
Feeling the bonds of language coming apart in my throat and loins, I cease attending to my sacred obligations: barking, and the gnashing of teeth.
I confess! I’ve been neglecting my post-operative physiotherapy following the extraction of memory. I’ve even forgotten the simplest way of collapsing in exhaustion on the tile floor.
