As soon as a perspective on the material structure makes too much sense, I abandon my comfort in it. Things are making too much sense. I’m excited/terrified for the next ideological intervention to come my way.
You have to do a lot of “giving up” to realize yourself as a total person. The way I figure it, “totalness” (since I don’t know what Hegel means by “totality”), if not inherent, exists as possibility divided by those symbols deemed appropriate by the external. It doesn’t mean you’re ever gonna get there, because the idea of what constitutes the “total” is consistently flawed (allowing for growth), but the virtue in attempt, even in a minor way, stretches the self to something more along the lines of that elusive, problematic concept: truth.
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing ad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves “hippies.” When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 197 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends.”
“
| — | Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” |
Down with history
Down with sense
Nothing makes much difference
I’ll surrender to this tragic mess
Spinning ball of randomness
Where Logos is the finest blasphemy
Men’s lives pass like strips of film
Recorded gesture, acts of will
I’d like to think that down through time
They’d compose a logical line
But chances are that’s just a pile of shit
And I can’t help but bow my head and cry
It took so long to finally realize
That all our hopes are based on such gross lies
Classroom lessons World War Two
Atrocities against the Jews
Never again our solemn vow
That’s why we all share Cambodia
Isn’t it great how far we’ve come since then?
And I can’t help but bow my head and cry
It took so long to finally realize
That all our hopes are based on such gross lies
Dialectic’s shit
Evolution’s crap
Time and time again the masquerade is
Shown for what it really is:
Progress, progress it’s a pleasant myth
Progress, progress it’s a pleasant myth
Progress, progress
Pleasant myth
That makes my life worthwhile
“
| — | Mission of Burma, “Progress” |
The Jews once portrayed God as an enormous hand reaching down from the firmament. That hand, I feel, reaches down to press our bodies into the ground, to pulverize us, make us seethe our breath, blood, come, water, not so much to exercise sovereignty but to totalize us, to, at once, make us base and holy things.
You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is a ll right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, al the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.
“
| — | Joan Didion, On Morality |
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
“
| — | from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
