Andreas Economakis

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THE DAY KURT COBAIN BLEW

HIS BRAINS OUT

by Andreas Economakis

Marisa and I arrived at LAX late in the evening and when we finally got home I hit the sack right away. I was due to work on a Japanese Kirin Lager Beer commercial featuring Harrison Ford early the next morning, out at Zuma Beach in Malibu. I had not realized that the time had changed while we were in Kauai. Daylight savings time. This strange horological tradition does not affect Hawaii, and so the morning of my shoot I woke up an hour late. Nothing like the phone ringing and your boss yelling at you before your morning cup of coffee.

I floored it all the way to Malibu, my red 1975 Toyota pick-up truck a blur on the highway, its SR-20 engine humming like a distressed honeybee. I peeled into the Zuma parking lot and dashed to the Production trailer, formulating a profuse sorry on my lips. All was well. Harrison hadn’t arrived yet. I walked down to the set, an overly built Japanese campfire set by the beach. Two small grey whales came near the shoreline, attracted by the large lights we’d set up. My friend Tim and I waded out into the surf and got close to the beautiful creatures. I remember looking into their eyes and sensing recognition. Then, like two bored tourists, the whales dipped into the water and swam off.

I helped carry cases of beer to the set and chilled them in the coolers. Harrison arrived in his rented Black Mercedes SL500 convertible. His bodyguard followed him in a black SUV. A thin Vietnam Vet with hard looks, the bodyguard eyed us all suspiciously before kind of relaxing.

Within the hour, Harrison started his scenes. “Kirin Laga Beeroo Koodasai,” he kept saying. The Japanese applauded each take. What luck to have Indiana Jones sell your beer. What luck and 3 million dollars.

At lunchtime I took a swim and was called out of the water by a lifeguard who said he’d spotted a shark near me. My nerves just a wee bit frazzled, I walked up to the parking lot, all the while thanking my lucky star that I hadn’t become a McNugget to a California Great White. I found Tim hunched over by the bushes, trying to snare lizards with a homemade horse-hair noose. Tim is a quarter Sioux Indian, which I guess explains this odd obsession. I tried to snare a lizard with the contraption, unsuccessfully. Greeks are not good lizard-catchers. Harrison and his tense bodyguard walked by. Harrison smiled at us. The sun was behind him and we were blinded.

Tim told me that he’d talked to the bodyguard and he told Tim that he didn’t carry a gun. “Don’t need one,” the bodyguard had said. I believed him. Tim returned to snaring lizards. “Dude, did you hear the news?” he asked me. “What?” I responded, watching Harrison enter his motor home. “Kurt Cobain blew his brains out.” Harrison Ford slammed the door shut, the snapping sound making me jump. The bodyguard leaned against the motor home, peering out towards the sea like the Marlboro Man. I looked at Tim. “Got one!” he said and lifted a dangling lizard to my face.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Slavoj Žižek

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***

From the European Graduate School faculty page:

Slavoj Zizek is a senior researcher, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at American universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York, University of Michigan). Ph.D. (Philosophy, Ljubljana; Psychoanalysis, University of Paris). A cultural critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his use of Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture and is admired as a true ‘manic excessive’. Author of The Invisible Reminder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of Fantasies; The Ticklish Subject.

Slavoj Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed ‘cultural studies’ (though he would despise the characterization). He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French ‘liberator’ of Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Zizek’s Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents – and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination – is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years.

Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The production of cultural difference is to Slavoj Zizek the production of the inoperative dream – a dream that recalls perhaps George Orwell’s 1984 or even Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom – the flip side of this is film noir. Slavoj Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the Real. The Real only exists as a fragment, fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates of the hegemonic. The hegemony – the prevailing set of coordinates – always seeks to ‘take over’ the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated Real must be periodically purged.

In his essay ‘Repeating Lenin’ (1997) – ever the trickster, he convened a symposium on Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would be – Slavoj Zizek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively liberate the idea of radical form:

‘One should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” –not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibilty of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with “formalism,” with the idea of a neutral Form. Independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which “colors” the entire field in question.’

He is interested in discerning the Lacanian Real amid the propaganda of systems. In appropriating ‘Lenin’ he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia, ‘the [pure] management of things’. That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Slavoj Zizek is extracting the signifier ‘Lenin’ from the historical continuum, which includes that failure – or the onslaught of Stalinism. The version of Lenin that Slavoj Zizek often chooses to re-enscribe into radical political discourse is ostensibly (by his own admission) the Lenin of the October Revolution, or the Lenin that had the epiphany that in order to have a revolution ‘you have to have a revolution’.

In his critique of contemporary capitalism Slavoj Zizek finds not simply the conditions that Karl Marx anathematized but those same conditions reified and made nearly intangible:

‘A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints […] Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values acquires autonomy, is transformed into the specter of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment.’

In the era of globalization, then, the main question is: ‘Does today’s virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way – his “net value” is zero, he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the future?’

‘In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence –it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are – as if by Grace – for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontian wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.’

Slavoj Zizek’s agenda is to foster and engender a withering critique of the structural chains that enslave late-modern man. His nostalgia is for very large gestures: the meta-Real, the Universal, and the Formal. ‘This resistance is the answer to the question “Why Lenin?”: it is the signifier “Lenin” which formalizes this content found elsewhere, transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation.’

Slavoj Zizek was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis, Universite Paris-VIII in 1982–83 and 1985–86, at the Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Art, SUNY Buffalo, 1991–92, at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1992, at the Tulane University, New Orleans, 1993, at the Cardozo Law School, New York, 1994, at the Columbia University, New York, 1995, at the Princeton University (1996), at the New School for Social Research, New York, 1997, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998, and at the Georgetown University, Washington, 1999. He is a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School. In the last 20 years Slavoj Zizek has participated in over 350 international philosophical, psychoanalytical and cultural-criticism symposiums in USA, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherland, Island, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Brasil, Mexico, Israel, Romania, Hungary and Japan. He is the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RABINDRANATH TAGOR

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UNTITLED

by Rabindranath Tagore


The foolish run.
The clever wait.
And the wise go into the garden.


Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian Bengali polymath. He was a popular poet, novelist, musician, and playwright who reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”, and as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Tagore was perhaps the most widely regarded Indian literary figure of all time. He was a mesmerizing representative of the Indian culture whose influence and popularity internationally perhaps could only be compared to that of Gandhi, whom Tagore named ‘Mahatma’ out of his deep admiration for him. (Annotated biography of Rabindranath Tagor courtesy of Wikipedia.org.)

Editor’s Note: This piece was by suggestion of my mother, a poet and gardener who, often, knows best.


Want to read more by and about Rabindranath Tagor?
NobelPrize.org
SchoolOfWisdom.com
INDOlink.com

ANNA BALTZER

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Paintball Gun?

THE AFTERMATH OF THE FLOTILLA

By Anna Baltzer

Last night marked one week since Israel’s attack in international waters on the Mavi Marmara Turkish humanitarian ship bound for Gaza, killing nine. One by one, the hundreds of witnesses aboard the vessels have been returning home to tell their stories after being stripped of any and all footage. By confiscating all non-military evidence of the incident, Israel has been able to successfully dominate the narrative, at least in the US where news of the attack had begun to dwindle by the time witnesses were released. One wonders, if Israel is conveying the whole story of what happened that night, why eliminate every single other piece of documentation? What does Israel have to hide?

According to hundreds of eyewitnesses, the Navy shot at the boat and threw tear gas and sound bombs before boarding the ship, and then hit the ground shooting. The videos released by Israel show those aboard the ship attacking soldiers with sticks. Israel claims that the deaths were an accident, that the soldiers were startled by the sticks and thus forced to shoot people to defend themselves.

Now let’s put things into perspective. In 2005, the Israeli Army removed 8,000 ideological settlers from Gaza, many of them kicking and screaming with sticks and rocks in hand. The Army managed not to kill or even shoot a single one of them. Do sticks from Turks hurt more, or is it not about the sticks at all?

As Dr. Norman Finkelstein pointed out, Israeli officials met for an entire week prior to the flotilla to plan precisely what they intended to do. The Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren himself stated that the Mavi Marmara was simply “too large to stop with nonviolent means.” It’s hard to believe that this was an accident.

While the world focuses on the flotilla and Gaza, Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian rights in the rest of Palestine continue to tighten. On Friday, soldiers surrounded the Old City in Jerusalem to prevent Muslim men from praying at Al-Aqsa mosque. Only those younger than 15 or older than 40 were allowed through. Hundreds of men gathered outside the metal bars installed by the Army around the city gates. Frustrated, many men sat down to wait to pray on the sidewalk, but soldiers on horseback pushed through the crowd, forcing the men to scatter.

It’s important to note that many Palestinians wait for years to receive a permit to visit Jerusalem for just one day. Sometimes the permits are valid only for a few hours. I saw a woman in Beit Sahour whom I’d met in Syracuse last Fall. She said it’s easier for her to travel to New York than to go 10 miles away to Jerusalem. She said often permits are sent to the wrong village and families fall over themselves to get the permit to the right person in time, often failing. At the gates, some men argued with the soldiers, close to tears, not knowing if they would ever get another chance to realize a life-long dream of praying at their country’s holiest site.

Eventually, hundreds of men began to gather next to the wall of the Old City and across the street. If they could not enter, they would pray as close as they could. As the call to prayer rang out (at least sound can overcome walls), a noticeable calm came over the space as they bowed down in unison. The soldiers stood over the group, some filming with cameras. In the middle of the group were an olive tree and a young child who stood by himself, watching.

When the prayers ended, those who hadn’t brought prayer mats wiped the dirt off their foreheads and gathered with others across the street where an imam had started to speak. Lara, a Palestinian delegate in our group translated bits and pieces of what he said.

The sermon was about the importance of compassion and justice in Islam. There they were, being denied their religious freedom, and they were talking about compassion. The imam asked that their prayers be accepted even though they could not be in the house of God. At one point, he raised his finger and called out the following: “Someday, we will live in a place where it doesn’t matter what color your skin is, or where you’re from.” With every sentence the group resounded in a collective “Amen.”

After the prayers, hundreds of women and older men poured out, one of whom told me he’d seen a man beaten by the Army for calling out against Israel’s attacks on the flotilla. This is likely precisely what the Army wanted to avoid by keeping Muslims from congregating at the mosque, and they had been largely successful, at least so they thought.

Just as I was turning to return to the hotel, I heard a chorus of women’s voices coming from inside the city walls. Soon a large group of women emerged carrying a Turkish flag and singing out familiar calls for justice and praising those who gave their lives to free Gaza. The soldiers thought that keeping the men out would be enough, but they had underestimated the women.

Israel has also underestimated the international civilian community, which continues to speak out. Day and night, we watch protests around the world unfold one after another, seemingly stronger and larger by the day: Japan, Paris, India, Oslo, Australia, and beyond. This is being called “Israel’s Kent State.”

Far more significant than protests is the fact that worldwide disapproval has been transforming into concrete rejection of normalization with Israel, including major victories for the Palestinian movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with international law.

This past week, the student body at Evergreen College voted to divest from “Israel’s illegal occupation.” Before she was run over by Israeli soldiers in a US-made Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza, Rachel Corrie had attended Evergreen. Along with divesting, students have voted for a “Caterpillar free” campus. You can support the students by clicking here.

A week before the flotilla, Italy’s largest supermarkets COOP and Nordiconad announced a boycott of the Israeli produce company, Carmel Agrexco. Four days later, Deutsche Bank (Germany’s largest bank, worth more than $1 trillion) announced divestment from Elbit Systems, an Israeli firm that supplies technology for Israel’s military, settlements, and Wall (as well as the Wall between the US and Mexico). Deutsche Bank was one of the company’s largest share-holders.

The next day, it was announced that Sweden’s largest national pension funds were also divesting from Elbit. (Norway did the same more than one year ago.) Going a step further, the Swedish Port Workers Union announced last Wednesday that it would temporarily stop handling Israeli cargo in response to the attacks on the flotilla.

On the same day, Britain’s largest union, Unite, passed a unanimous motion “to vigorously promote a policy of divestment from Israeli companies” and to boycott Israeli goods and services as in “the boycott of South African goods during the era of apartheid.”

Then yesterday, the Pixies canceled of their upcoming concert in Israel in response to Israel’s attack on the flotilla. Musical artists Klaxons and Gorillaz canceled as well. This on the heels of cancellations by Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, Snoop Dog, Sting, and Elvis Costello.

These are but a few of the BDS victories that have happened just in the last month. The movement that officially began in 2005 crossed its first threshold in 2009 (having gained in four years the same momentum it took the BDS movement against South Africa 20 years to achieve), but 2010 has brought it to a new level.

Last month marked 62 years since 80% of the families in Gaza were displaced during Israel’s creation, the Palestinian Nakba. And this week marks 43 years since Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The Occupation has been in place 70% of Israel’s life-span so far. It is not temporary. And it is but one part of the problem. Along with Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians within Israel’s de-facto borders and outside historic Palestine, the Occupation will not be stopped voluntarily by Israel. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” I spoke with a member of Boycott from Within (Israelis supporting the Palestinian BDS Call) paraphrased a common phrase during the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa: We will bring them to their senses, or we will bring them to their knees. For Israel, as was the case for the South African Apartheid government, the former has simply never worked.

This was orginally published at Anna’s Eyewitness Reports from Palestine on Monday, June 7, 2010.

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who has been documenting human rights abuses and supporting nonviolent direct action in the West Bank with the Int’l Women’s Peace Service. Witness In Palestine is the title of her book detailing her experiences

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

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Flickr photograph by super-structure.

THE DAY I WENT CRAZY

by Andreas Economakis

I’ve always been a little superstitious.  Okay, I don’t wig out if a black cat crosses my path (maybe because I once read that the Portuguese consider the black cat a sign of good luck), but I do make a point of putting on my left sock first every morning.  I don’t know why I do this, it’s just that I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember.  Call it a part of my routine, call it some kind of DNA signature, this left sock thing has never done me wrong.  I’m alive and kicking to prove it.

I guess you could say I believe in signs.  So you can imagine what was running through my head when my girlfriend Justina mentioned that our 8-year relationship was in trouble on the exact same day that our cat Buddy was run over in the driveway by our idiot neighbor Quentin.  Yup, the meaning of this wasn’t lost on me.  After all, Buddy had been our very first kitten and he was probably the sweetest of our cats.  People need symbols and Buddy became a symbol of our relationship, a symbol of our budding love.  At least for me.  And as anyone who’s ever believed in something will tell you, when a symbol dies, well then the thing that it represents dies as well.

Justina moved out shortly after Buddy’s death, the very day after I celebrated my thirtieth birthday.  It was nice of her not dumping me on my birthday, all in all.  Okay, it sucked that I had to spend the day all alone (Justina had once again feigned a heavy work load at school, leaving me a cupcake and a pink Hallmark card by the key dish), and it also sucked that my free birthday eggs at Denny’s were watery, cold and tasteless, but at least I was still in a relationship.  Or so I believed.  When my girlfriend showed up with a moving van the next day, I worried that this cataclysmic event would influence all of my thirties.  I shivered in dread.

How would the relationship ads read? “30 year old male, shy, not too bald, with nice smile, totally dependent and mono-focused on his ex-girlfriend, is now totally and utterly alone and looking for companionship.  A pretty decent cook, likes animals and enjoys romantic Sunday afternoon hikes up Runyan Canyon.”  “Ugh, just shoot me here and now and get it over with,” I thought to myself.  Ads aside, a bigger dilemma was now at hand: what does one do with oneself when not in a relationship?

Suddenly the accidental bachelor, I hit the streets looking for answers.  All I saw were happy couples and groups of friends, everyone smiling and jocular and together.  The only solitary people I came across were either crazy or passed out from drugs or alcohol or poverty.  That’s when it occurred to me.  Insanity is the quickest way out of a broken heart.  Everyone feels pity for a young man who loses his marbles, even if those marbles were all there but a week before.  And what’s even better is that when one does actually go crazy, nothing is expected of him.  It’s like total freedom.  How cool is that?  I decided to go insane without further ado.  I rushed home all excited, eager to set my new plan in motion.

First off, I would have to get rid of my cats, for a crazy man cannot follow a routine of feeding pets and cleaning up after them.  I loved them dearly and so deliberated a long time before leaving them and the remaining supply of cat food on my girlfriend’s doorstep (I was still having a hard time annunciating the prefix “ex”).  Justina may not love me anymore, but she must surely have a soft spot in her heart for the cats.  Right?  I mean, they’d been with us for so many years and they slept with us every night, albeit on my side of the bed (Justina always insisted that they preferred my side, though I knew she swished and swooshed her feet under the covers to chase them away).  I decided to not leave a note as that would give her an opportunity to return the cats with a reply.

The next step was to clear out of the apartment.  I meticulously gathered all the shreds of my life and bagged them in Smart & Final jumbo garbage bags (“curiously spot on this company name,” I thought as I stuffed my outdated cd collection and utilitarian Ikea cd racks in one of the bags).  I hauled the bags a few blocks away, tossing them in a restaurant dumpster.  Almost like an omen, Fabio, the faux-Italian longhaired model/actor smiled and waved at me as I walked in front of his shiny peach-colored sports car just off of Melrose.  “I’m friends with Fabio?” I wondered as he drove away.  I was now more than ever convinced that my plan must be working, that surely I must be going insane.

I drank my last celebratory beer on the dusty floor of my apartment, staring at the clumps of cat hair that floated about the now empty living room.  As a token to my new found life, I bit down on the can until my mouth started to bleed.  I smeared the sticky blood all over my face, screamed at the top of my lungs and rushed out of the apartment all bleary-eyed but determined, leaving the door wide open.  That was the last time I ever went through that door.  My new life snatched me up and propelled me forward.

I found a safe place to sleep next to a burnt out building on Spaulding.  I dreamt that my girlfriend was trying to wake me up by tickling my eyelashes with her hair.  I kept brushing her hair away, trying to prolong the dream of her tickling my eyelashes.  I woke up shivering after swatting my nose.  A huge cockroach fell off my face and scurried under my jacket.  I jumped up and started ripping my clothes off, trying to find the roach.  I couldn’t find it and so I decided to shuffle off, cursing and trying to rearrange my torn clothes.  I quickly realized that I was barefoot.  Someone had stolen my shoes and my socks while I slept.   The significance of my new predicament didn’t escape me.  Without a left sock to put on first, what did fate have in store for me?

I walked on, vowing to take a straight line down Spaulding, vowing to go straight until I could go straight no longer.  I could not for the life of me fathom making a right or a left.  That would be calamitous.  Two nervous women walked by, stepping on the grass next to the sidewalk so as not to come too close to me (oh, you think I didn’t notice, but I did…).  I decided to mimic them and stepped on the grass as well.  Shit, I inadvertently made a right!   I cringed and quickly shielded my head, expecting a lightning bolt to scream out of the sky and strike me between the eyes.  That’s when I stubbed my toe on a sawed-off tree trunk.  I fell without grace, clutching my injured toe and tipping backwards.  I smacked my head on the edge of the sidewalk, snapping my neck in the process.  I died a couple of minutes later, amused by all the confused voices and sirens competing for space in my increasingly tranquil brain.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OCTAVIO PAZ

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BETWEEN GOING AND STAYING

by Octavio Paz


Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.


Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat. Under the encouragement of Pablo Neruda, Paz began his poetic career in his teens by founding an avant-garde literary magazine, Barandal, and publishing his first book of poems, Luna Silvestre (1933). In 1962, Paz became Mexico’s ambassador to India and resigned six years later in protest when government forces massacred student demonstrators in Mexico City. Paz was awarded the Cervantes Award in 1981, the Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

Editor’s Note: This post is both in line with my love for great Spanish poets and with an ongoing discussion here on As It Ought To Be of the role of artists in politics. In a time of great turmoil – the new racist police state law in Arizona, the BP oil catastrophe, and Israel’s attack on those trying to aid occupied Palestine, to name a few – we as artists have a responsibility to use our voices for the greater good. May Octavio Paz serve as an inspiration to do so.


Want to read more by and about Octavio Paz?
Poets.org
NobelPrize.org
Britannica Online

FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: Kenneth Fearing

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X Minus X

by Kenneth Fearing


Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life, the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the boulevard, is bare;
And after that paradise, the dance-hall, is closed; after that theater, the clinic, is dark,

Still there will be your desire, and hers, and his hopes and theirs,
Your laughter, their laughter,
Your curse and his curse, her reward and their reward, their dismay and his dismay and her dismay and yours—

Even when your enemy, the collector, is dead; even when your counsellor, the salesman, is sleeping; even when your sweetheart, the movie queen, has spoken; even when your friend, the magnate, is gone.


Kenneth Fearing(1902-1961) was an American poet, novelist, speechwriter, editor, and journalist. One literary critic named him “the chief poet of the American Depression.” He helped found the Partisan Review and took an active interest in leftist politics while also churning out pulp fiction that sometimes bordered on the pornographic under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. His poetry uses contemporary vernacular to probe the grotesque in the urban landscape.

GEORGE ORWELL

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SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)

by George Orwell

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror–forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial–has been in progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes–the Communists.

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the origins of the civil war.

Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge, parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the ‘liberal’ bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The ‘liberal’ bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase ‘la carrière ouverte aux talents’. For clearly he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops’ vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly enemies, are fighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia, was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’ militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, ‘People’s Army’), modelled as far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State, with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.

This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this impossible. In the face of France’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup–plied by Russia has been greatly exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get money for their weapons, but to extort terms as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms were: ‘Crush the revolution or you get no more arms.’ The reason usually given for the Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also, that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of counter-revolution.

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution, because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think that this has no relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small and comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if England enters into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to increase–visibly is increasing–as more and more of the capitalist class realize that latter-day Communism is playing their game.

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending–not in so many words, but by implication–that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois ‘democracy, meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois ‘democracy’ are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word–in Spain at this moment you can be thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a Trotskyist–is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing more of it later. The word ‘Trotskyist’ (or ‘Trotsky-Fascist’) is generally used to mean a disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split the left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact that it means three separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wished for world revolution; or a member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped one into the other at will. Meaning No. I may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and meaning No. 2 almost invariably carries with it meaning No. 3. Thus: ‘XY has been heard to speak favourably of world revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist.’ In Spain, to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary Socialism (i.e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until a few years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler.

The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless one happened to know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy probably WOULD disguise himself as a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At the beginning of the war the POUM, an opposition Communist party roughly corresponding to the English ILP., was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into jail.

Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as ‘working loyally’ beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the Government; then it appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in the process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists. Caballero, the left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and ‘enemy of the people’. And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco’s fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different.

Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended to produce greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the Government from August to October 1936, the Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in organizing the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They made a militarized conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary. It is significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting had practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and it is unlikely that the Government will ever have a large preponderance of arms unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to make off with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a deadlock seems the likeliest thing.

And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to lose, that is certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with Franco in flight and the Germans and Italians driven into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that would leave the war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by either side, or by both.

All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in Spain, or even in France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there are very few people who have even heard of the enormous struggle that is going on behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the great war ‘against Fascism’ (cf. 1914, ‘against militarism’) which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

–George Orwell