WALTER BENJAMIN

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PROTOCOL IV: WALTER BENJAMIN: 29 September 1928. Saturday. Marseilles.

Translated by Scott J. Thompson

After long hesitation, took hashish at 7 o’clock in the evening. During the day I had been in Aix. I am taking down notes of what possibly follows only to determine whether it will take effect, as my solitariness hardly allows for any other supervision. Next to me a small child is crying, who disturbs me. I think that three quarters of an hour have already elapsed. And yet it has actually been only half an hour. Thus… apart from a very mild absent-mindedness, nothing’s happening. I lay upon the bed, read and smoked. All the while opposite me this glimpse of the ventre of Marseilles. (Now the images begin to take hold of me.) The street that I’d so often seen is like an incision cut by a knife.

Certain pages in Stepppenwolf, which I read early this morning, were a final impetus to take hashish.

I definitely feel the effects now. Essentially negative, in that reading and writing are difficult for me. A good three quarters of an hour has transpired. No, it seems that much just won’t come.

Just now the telegram from [Wilhelm] Speyer would have to come: “Work on novel finally given up” etc. It does one no good if, in spite of everything, disappointing news rains on the parade of the oncoming Rausch. But is it really only this sort? For a moment there was suspense as I thought, now [Marcel] Brion is coming up. I was intensely excited.

(Postscript during dictation: Things happened in the following way:

I lay upon the bed really with the absolute certainty that, in this city of hundreds of thousands, where only one person knew me, I would not be disturbed, when there was a knock at the door. That had never happened to me here at all. Nor did I make any move whatsoever to open it, but inquired about the matter without altering my position in the least. The valet: “Il y a un monsieur, qui voudrait vous parler.” — “Faites le monter.”

[“A gentleman wishes to speak to you.” –“Let him come up.”]. I stood leaning against the bedposts, my heart palpitating. Really, it would have been quite remarkable to see Brion show up now. “Le monsieur”, however, was the dispatch courier.)

The following written the next morning. Under thoroughly magnificent, mild after-effects which give me the lightheartedness not to pay strict attention to the sequence. Of course, Brion didn’t come. I finally left the hotel, for it seemed to me that no effects were apparent or else they were so weak as to overrule the precaution of staying in my room. First station, the café at the corner of Cannebière and Cours Belsunce. Viewed from the harbor, the one on the right and not my usual one. Now what? Only that sure benevolence, the anticipation of seeing people amiably disposed towards one. The feeling of loneliness quickly vanishes. My walking stick becomes especially delightful to me. The handle of a coffeepot suddenly looks very large and remains so. (One becomes so sensitive: afraid of being hurt by a shadow falling across paper. –Disgust disappears. One reads the slate on the pissoir.) I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. So-and-so came up to me. That he doesn’t do so does not matter to me, either. But it’s too loud for me there.

Now the demands which the hashish eater makes on time and space come into play. They are, as is well-known, absolutely regal. Versailles is not too great for one who has eaten hashish nor eternity too long-lasting. And in the background of these immense dimensions of the inner adventure, of absolute duration and the immeasurable spatial realm, a wonderful, blessed humor now lingers all the more agreeably with the contingencies of the spatio-temporal world. I am endlessly aware of this humor when I find out that the kitchen at Basso’s and the entire upstairs have just closed the very moment I’ve sat down to tuck in eternity. All the same, the feeling afterwards that all this indeed remains forever, constant, lit up, well-patronized and full of life. Presently I must note how I happened to find a seat at Basso’s. To me it was a matter of the view of the Old Port which one had from the upper storey. As I was passing by below I spied an unoccupied table on the balcony of the second floor. In the end, however, I only got as far as the first. Most of the tables by windows were occupied. So I walked over to quite a large one which seemed to have just become free. The moment I sat down, though, the disproportion became apparent to me: disgraceful to seat myself this way at such a large table, so I walked on through the whole floor towards the opposite end to take a seat at a smaller table which had just then become visible.

But the meal was later. First, the little bar on the port. I was again on the verge of making a confused retreat, for I heard a concert, what’s more a brass section, coming from that direction. I was just barely able to account for it as nothing more than a honking car horn. On the way to the vieux port [Old Port], already this wonderful lightness and determination in my stride, which turned the stony, irregular pavement of the large public square I crossed into the dirt of a country road which I, brisk wanderer, traveled by night. For I still avoided the Cannebière at this time, not being certain of my regular functions.

In that little port bar the hashish began to allow its truly canonical magic free reign with a primitive acuity which I had hardly experienced before. Namely, it began to make me a physiognomist, at any rate an observer of physiognomies, and I witnessed something quite unique in my experience: I became dead set on the forms in the faces around me, which were partly of a remarkable rawness and ugliness; faces which I generally would have avoided for two reasons: neither would I have wished to draw their attention to myself, nor would I have been able to bear their brutality. It was a seemingly advanced outpost, this port tavern. It was the one furthest in that direction which was still accessible without putting me in danger, and here in my rausch I had assessed it with the same certainty with which a deeply exhausted person understands how to fill a glass to the very brim without spilling a drop, whereas a person with refreshed senses would never be in a position to do so. It was still far enough away from the rue Bouterie, and yet no bourgeois were sitting there. At best there were a pair of petit bourgeois families from the neighborhood sitting next to some of the authentic harbor proletariat. I now grasped all at once how to a painter –has it not happened to Rembrandt and many others? –ugliness is the true reservoir of beauty, better than the receptacles of its treasure; just as the jagged mountain chain could appear with all the interior Gold of the Beautiful sparkling from its folded strata, vistas and ranges. I particularly recall an infinitely bestial and vulgar face of one of the men, from which the “wrinkles of abandon” suddenly struck me. It was men’s faces which appealed to me most. And now, too, I began the long sustained game in which an acquaintance surfaced up in front of me in each new face. Often I knew his name, often again not. The deception vanished as deceptions in dreams vanish, that is, not in shame and with oneself compromised, but rather untroubled and friendly like a being which has performed its obligation. Under these circumstances there could be no talk of loneliness; was I my own companionship? That certainly, though not quite so conspicuously. Nor do I know if that would have particularly pleased me. This, on the contrary, was no doubt more likely: I became my own shrewdest, most sensitive, most shameless pander, and procured for myself with the ambiguous certainty of one who is intimately acquainted with and has studied the desires of his customer. Then it began to take half an eternity until the waiter appeared. Rather, I couldn’t wait for him to appear. I walked into the barroom and left the money on the table. Whether tips are customary in such a tavern, I don’t know. I would have left something in any case, though, otherwise. Under hashish yesterday I was stingier; it wasn’t until I grew fearful that my extravagances would attract attention that I really made myself conspicuous.

The same at Basso’s, with the order. First I ordered a dozen oysters. The man also wanted to know right then what was to be ordered for the following course. I indicated a standard something or other. Then he returned with the news that they were out of that. So I looked over the menu at the other courses under the same section, seemed about to order one when the name of another above it caught my eye, until I had reached the top of the list. It was not out of gluttony, though, but rather a quite pronounced politeness towards the entrés, which I didn’t want to insult by disregarding them. In short, I got stuck on a pâté de Lyon. Lion pâté I thought, laughing facetiously as it sat before me nicely on a plate, and then disdainfully: this delicate rabbit –or chicken meat– whatever it may be. To be sated on a lion would not have seemed at all out of proportion to my lion appetite. Besides, it was secretly all settled that I would go to another restaurant after I’d finished at Basso’s (that was around 10:30) and have dinner a second time.

First, however, [was] the way to Basso’s. I glided along the quayside and read one after another the names of the boats docked there. At the same time I was overcome by an incomprehensible cheerfulness, and I smiled in the face of all the first names of France there in a row. It seemed to me that the love which was promised to these boats along with their names was wonderful, beautiful and touching. Only one called Aero II, which reminded me of aerial warfare, did I pass over unaffably, just as I’d been forced to avert my glance from certain overly deformed faces in the bar which I’d just come from.

Upstairs at Basso’s the tricks commenced for the first time when I looked down. The square in front of the port was, to put it best, like a palette on which I mixed the local colors at random, probing this way and that, irresponsibly if you will, but like a great painter who views his palette as an instrument. I was extremely reluctant to partake of the wine. It was a half bottle of Cassis, a dry wine. A piece of ice swam in the glass. It was, however, exquisitely compatible with my drug. I had chosen my table because of the open window through which I could glance down at the dark square. And when I did so from time to time it had the tendency to alter itself with each person who set foot on it, as if it formed a figure [in relation] to the person which, mind you, had nothing to do with how he saw it, but rather was closer to the view of the great portraitists of the 17th Century who cast persons of title in relief by positioning them in front of porticos and windows.

Here I must make this general remark: the solitariness of such a rausch has its shadow side. To speak of the physical aspect alone, there was a moment in the port tavern when a severe pressure in my diaphragm sought release in humming. Furthermore, there’s no doubt that many a beautiful and illuminating thing remains dormant. But on the other hand, the solitariness acts in turn as a filter; what one writes down the next day is more than an enumeration of sequential events. In the night the rausch stands out with prismatic edges against everyday experience. It forms a kind of figure and is more memorable than usual. I should say, it contracts and in so doing fashions the form of a flower.

To get closer to the riddle of bliss in rausch one must reconsider Ariadne’s thread. What delight [there is] in the mere act of unwinding a skein. And this delight is quite profoundly related to the delight of rausch, as it is to the delight in creative work. We go forward: but in doing so not only do we discover the bends of the cavern in which we venture forth, but rather we savor this happiness of discovery by virtue of that other rhythmical bliss which comes from unraveling a skein. Such a certainty from the intricately wound skein that we unravel – is that not the happiness of at least every prose form of productivity? And under hashish we are prose beings savoring at the peak of our powers. De la poésie lyrique –pas pour un sou.

At a [public] square off the Cannebière where the rue Paradis runs into promenades, an all-engrossing sensation of happiness came over me which is harder to get a grasp of than everything prior to this point. Fortunately, in my newspaper I find the sentence: ” By the spoonful one must draw sameness [das Gleiche ] out of reality “. Numerous weeks prior to this I’d read a sentence by Johannes V. Jensen which seemed to say something similar: “Richard was a young man who had a sense for everything in the world of the same kind.” This sentence had quite pleased me. It now enabled me to confront the political-rational sense that it had for me with yesterday’s experience of a individual-magical one. Whereas Jensen’s sentence meant for me that things are, as we certainly know, so thoroughly mechanized [and] rationalized that whatever today is particular lies hidden in the nuances only, the insight yesterday was completely different, namely, I saw nuances alone; and they were the same. I became inwardly engrossed in the pavement in front of me. By means of a kind of salve – magic salve- that I glossed it over with, so to speak, this very same pavement could have been Parisian pavement. One often talks about stones for bread. Here these stones were the bread of my imagination, which thereupon had suddenly become voracious to taste that same something of all locales and countries. During this phase as I sat in the dark, the chair against the wall of a house, there were fairly isolated moments of [an] obsessive character [Suchtcharakter]. I was immensely proud to think of sitting in Marseilles here on the street in a hashish rausch ; certainly who else shared my rausch here, on this evening, how few. As though I were not capable of sensing the danger of approaching misfortune and loneliness, the hashish was ever to remain. In this thoroughly intermittent stage a nearby nightclub’s music, which was following me, played an extraordinary rôle. [It] was peculiar how my ear made a point of not recognizing “Valencia” as “Valencia”. [Gustav] Glück [16] drove past me in a taxi. It was a fleeting moment. It had been strange, just as, earlier, [Erich] Unger [17] had suddenly emerged out of the shadows of the boat on the quay from the form of a harbor dead beat and pimp. And when I discovered some such literary figure again at a nearby table at Basso’s, I said to myself that I had finally found out what literature was good for. But there were not only familiar figures. Here in the stage of the deepest reverie, two figures – philistines, vagrants, who knows – passed by me as “Dante and Petrarch”. “All men are brothers.” Thus began a train of thought which I can no longer follow. But its final segment was certainly much less banal than its first, and led perhaps into animal imagery. But that was at a stage other than the one at the port, from which I find the short note: “Acquaintances only and beauties only ” –namely, the passers-by.

“Barnabus” stood on an electric tram which briefly came to a stop in front of the square where I was sitting. To me, though, the sad and desolate story of Barnabus seemed no bad destination for a tram outward bound for the city limits of Marseilles. Around the door of a dance-hall a very beautiful scene was taking place. Every now and then a Chinese man in blue silk pants and luminous rose-colored jacket emerged. That was the doorman. Girls made themselves conspicuous in the doorway. I was in a very contented mood. It amused me to see a young man with a girl in a white dress coming out and to jump to the conclusion: “She gave him the slip in there in her chemise and he’s claiming her back to him again. That’s it.” The thought of sitting here in a center of every revelry flattered me, and by “here” I was not referring to the city but to the little, by no means eventful spot where I was sitting. But the manner in which the events occurred was such that the outward appearance touched me with a magic wand and I became engulfed in a dream about it. At such times people and things behave like those stage props and mannequins made out of elder pulp in the glazed tin-foil crate, which become galvanized by rubbing the glass and with each movement involuntarily enter into the most bizarre relationships.

The music, which meanwhile continued to blare and subside, I called the straw scourge of jazz. I’ve forgotten the reasons with which I permitted myself to tap my foot to the beat. That goes against my upbringing, and it did not happen without inner conflict. There were times when the intensity of the acoustic impressions crowded out all the others.

Most of all, it was the din of voices, and not the streets, which drowned out everything in the little port bar. The strangest thing about this noise of voices was that it sounded entirely like dialect. The people of Marseilles suddenly did not speak a good enough French to me, you might say. They had stopped short at the dialect stage. That phenomenon of alienation, which may be implied, and which Kraus has formulated with the fine adage “The closer one looks at a word, the further away it looks back” appears to refer to things here, too. At any rate I find among my entries the astonished note: “How things resist one’s glances.”

The effects wore off when I crossed the Cannebière and finally turned the corner to have just a little ice cream in a small Café des Cours Belsunce. It was not far from that other, first café of this evening where the lover’s bliss which the contemplation of some fringe ruffling in the wind imparted suddenly convinced me that the hashish had begun to take effect. And when I recall this state, I’d like to think that hashish, in relation to nature, possesses the force and power of persuasion to allow us to recapture the great squandering of one’s own existence, which we savor when we’re in love. For when we are in love for the first time and our existence slips like gold coins through nature’s fingers, which cannot hold on to them and must lavishly spend them in order to obtain the new being, the new-born, then, without hoping or expecting a thing, she flings us with both hands full toward existence.

–Translated by Scott J. Thompson

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Trans. note: Gustav Glück was a director of the foreign department of the Reichskreditgesellschaft [Reich loan association] in the years before Hitler. Concerning his friendship to Benjamin, see Gershom Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, NY: Schocken, 1981, pp. 179-180, 231.

[17] Trans. note: Erich Unger (1887-1952) had been part of the Neopathetisches Kabarett and the circles surrounding the modern German kabbalist Oskar Goldberg. See Scholem, op. cit., pp. 96-97, 108.

PHOTOGRAPHY & OTHER MODES OF CRYING AT YOUR OWN FUNERAL

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482px-Lewis_Payne

1865 photograph of Lewis Powell who stabbed US Secretary of State William Seward repeatedly in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Powell was executed along with three other Lincoln assassination conspirators.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND OTHER MODES OF CRYING AT YOUR OWN FUNERAL

by Mishana Hosseinioun

There appears to be a force almost magnetic and primordial in kind which draws us to photographs of men awaiting their execution. We look into these images alike fortune-tellers gazing into a crystal ball, only to gain futile reaffirmation, time and time again, of the one and only certain fate we will ever know—our impending death. For, as Roland Barthes would concur, in the image of these damned individuals we find a tangible and familiar, mirror-reflection of our proper finitude[i]—the kind of recognition that can only come from having looked death in the eye before, presumably, if not from having lived death in the a-temporal expanse of our fears and darkest moments.

Nevertheless, such images—though morbidly prophetic and evocative of their subjects’ imminent demise—seem to manage to simultaneously escape the flow of time, in the ultimate act of redemption against mortality. In many ways, the click of the camera responsible for capturing (or liberating) these images, amounts to that which in Benjaminian terms would be considered the revolutionary application of emergency breaks[ii] against the passage of historical time, allowing us to stop and chat with life on its untimely journey toward death, as it were, or “to climb into its skin and walk around in it,”[iii] in the famed words of Atticus Finch; in so doing, we might just be better able to come to grips with its fleeting reality and universal beauty, and perhaps even acknowledge it as the singular fragile skin that truly binds together all of humanity.

In that spirit, let us look closely at the subsequent trio of snapshots to dissect the common skin of light or shadows, shall we say, shared by each, and also with all others that have ever been photographed[iv]: the first, a photograph of former death row inmate Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, the second, that of A Thief Being Buried Alive taken by Antoin Sevruguin, and finally, the image of ourselves—our self-image. Along the way, let us pause to weep for these men, as we would, essentially, at our own wake, for soon we will learn that these three images are possibly one and the same.

Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, 12th of December (give or take a day) 2005:

On and around the eve of Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams’ execution in San Quentin, California, one cannot help but feel the tug of the looming punctum[v]—the assurance of the former Crips gang co-founder’s lethal injection behind prison walls—pinned in stark contrast against the studium[vi]—the sea of protestors ‘braking’ and barking in solidarity at the penitentiary gates. In the flurry of hours either before or after the execution (here, time loses its foothold, really), this vigil seems to prematurely mourn the death row inmate’s passing as much as it posthumously wills him to live. The result is a striking tableau vivant[vii] of history brought to a standstill[viii].

“Tookie lives on. Tookie lives on!”

Aided by their elaborate cardboard appendages, some protestors are decidedly showier and more manifest this year than they probably were at their last anti-death penalty stand-in, determined, in their view, to shake things up differently this time around. Others keep to themselves in silent, close-eyed meditation—a pose that likely sustains them as much through their daily yoga practice as it does now, and that, coincidentally, has been statistically shown to reduce violence when practiced en masse[ix]. Helicopters intermittently circle the premises not unlike vultures sniffing out soon-to-be cadavers, the blaring sound of their gyrating mono-wings ventriloquising the gesticulating jaws below. Stray TV news reporters attempt to fit in but must certainly find it difficult, encased as they are in their blinding cadres of light, and trying hard not to look like they might have been conveniently teleported onto the site by their satellite bureaus; even then, their stiff, flaxen coifs are enough to give them away, sprayed across an otherwise somber backdrop as though splotches of yellow paint from a Richterian landscape.

When witnessed in concerto, are these different proto-images not one dynamically still meta-image, swaying from side to side, taking us backward and forward and no where at all, at the same time—a frame dipping in and out of the filmic continuum of executions, peace rallies, and sound-bites of yesteryear and the morrow? Seen in their all-at-once-ness, these different components can practically be read like volumes off the ever-shifting shelves of a Warburg library,[x] their meaning, a function of the transient constellation which they together comprise—their fate, a matter ‘written in the stars,’ metaphorically speaking.

What is bound to come of this slowly tapering pictorial constellation of protesters deserting their posts, leaving behind the occasional limp banner and prayer candles at the end of their wicks, is the impulse to reconstitute the aforementioned complex set of interrelated events as a crystallized monad or a mental snapshot for posterity to subsequently redress[xi]. In the case of Tookie’s execution, the latter attempt is facilitated by the availability of the following conclusive data: 12:35 am PST.  Such is the officially proclaimed hour of Brother Stan’s death—a once irrelevant set of digits, suddenly affixed with historical import and seared into the mind’s eye as a monogram[xii] image of a clock’s arms cocked to signal that precise hour and minute—an extension of some sort, of Tookie’s cocked neck, cocked life, and above all, of a memory image that allows us to straddle forevermore the line between his life and death, never being faced with the minute before or after, yet all the while, bravely staring at death, dead-on, for what seems like an eternity. After all, the toxic juice that contracts Tookie’s muscles for good is also that which is quite likely “strong enough to contract the whole of historical time”[xiii] in the same shot, and arrest along with it, the hands of time.

Antoin Sevruguin, A Thief Being Buried Alive (ca.1890-1900)[xiv]:

In one way or another, Antoin Sevruguin’s photograph of A Thief Being Buried Alive produced in Iran ca. 1890-1900 is also arguably a photograph of Stanley Williams, particularly the one taken of Williams from within the confines of his prison quarters and popularly reproduced in the papers—yet another universally reoccurring stock image of ‘the doomed man,’ unleashed anew onto its conveyor belt of becoming (or unbecoming, is it not?). Once viewed side by side, the two bald and bearded men even begin to look alike, both staring glassy-eyed, as though beyond a perceptible visual field, into the blind field[xv] of the hereafter—the grayness[xvi] of their communal predicament acting as the only factor robust enough to neutralize the one’s blackness and the other’s whiteness.

These images which are unmistakably caught in a dialectical embrace with one another, and which by their mere juxtaposition, have the potential to (a)mend the (w)hole of their mutual history, could provide ideal testimony to Godard’s contention that the past is not gone, it has not even passed yet; for, plainly and simply, upon facing one another, the two photographs seem to echo the same narrative of a seemingly open ended and recurring past—that of man’s recurring ‘passing,’ if you will. Similarly, it is as Christian Metz puts it, a past presence[xvii], which refers to the unique ability of photography to concomitantly reside in the dual temporality of the past and the present while conferring upon the objects it represents, both an unmistakable imagistic presence as well as a marker of having well been a thing of the past. Photographs of individuals, pre-execution, conceivably contain the utmost degree of past presence given the heightened drama and near collision of their respective punctum and studium, that is to say their equidistance from both life and death.

This particular Sevruguin photograph is precisely as its title suggests—a contradiction in terms. If the paradoxical notion of being buried alive does not entirely evade us, at least it has the capacity to arrest us, stop us in our tracks, until we can vainly try to wrap our minds around it. As spectators bearing witness to the photo of a nameless, typecast individual—a Thief—up to his neck in what looks to be his own grave, we are stepping onto a sort of photographic quicksand in our own right, no longer traveling horizontally along a chronological axis, but descending downward, into the depths of an aesthetic underworld, so to speak; such a picture which carries within it the dual potentiality of death and life, just as the individual terms, buried and alive imply, respectively, also predictably holds a promise of magic and mystification for the viewer, hence its genius.

There is more to Antoin Sevruguin’s talent, however, than meets the eye. Sevruguin, who photographed Iran between 1870 and 1930, was perhaps best know for his photo-portraits of Royalty and romanticized depictions of courtly life at that time—the genre of photography that would become his passport to fame and that would keep his doting patrons contented. Nonetheless, he would quietly pursue his own, independent, historical materialist agenda on the side, or on all sides, to be exact. In other words, beyond merely catering to the ‘Orientalist’ fantasy of the commercial market,[xviii] he fulfilled his promise to himself of capturing Iran from all of its angles[xix], even if it meant exposing a scene of barbarism for every instance of victory[xx]; his portrayal of A Thief Being Buried Alive, is just one case in point.

The Self-Image and Crying at Your Own Funeral:

Dubbed a mummy-complex by André Bazin, the need to preserve history meticulously, such as by attempting to document it from every vantage point à la Sevruguin, can be understood more generally as the common preoccupation of mortals with the conservation of life, and by extension, the desire to hold sway over our destiny; “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it […] for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption […],”[xxi] Bazin specifies. This assertion suggests that the chief faculty of photography, unlike other media, is one of salvaging an actual piece of life from the G-force of the ephemeral three-dimensional world. In this way, he claims that the image effectively takes on the life of the object being photographed, albeit in a mummified form—a life released from the downward spiral of time, yet snatched by the shutter all the same. The question thus remains as to whether an object photographically mummified is at all free if it leaves the shackles of time and space only to be embalmed, in turn, by the camera. What new device, one might ask, will then rescue it from its pictorial sarcophagus?

It becomes evident in light of Bazin’s unforeseen double bind, that the task of faithfully documenting history, or capturing life in all its minutiae, remains an ambitious and fundamentally impossible undertaking for any photographer. Even so, the very challenge of the endeavor is also what gives distinctive value to those photographs capable of taking us to the ledge of death and back in one piece, namely images of individuals who look to be on the brink of death themselves yet are still, in that safeguarded moment, positively intact and shielded from transience, whether they be ‘Tookie’ or Sevruguin’s Thief. For in the faces of such men we inevitably see our own countenance, and in their freeze-framed confrontation with death we find an opportunity to gather our own composure vis-à-vis our forthcoming demise.

We may, however, actively choose not to perceive ourselves in the image of Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams and the Thief. We may even refuse to look at such bleak images in the first place. It is specifically this kind of passionate disavowal that signals, all the more, our inability to remain indifferent or unaffected by the latter, and which attests to these photographs’ definite, universal gravitational pull; after all, once pricked by their punctum, we cannot turn a blind eye to their gloomy prophecy, not to mention to the irreversibility thereof; for we too are bound by the same fate, only we have the choice to stop and contend with its reality if not to fully grieve over it well in advance so much so that we may even greet it as we would an old friend when it finally comes knocking at our door.

Accordingly, at ‘Tookie’s’ vigil just as at the interment of the Thief, it can be said that we really grieve for ourselves. It is as though observing such scenes concurrently allow us to mourn our own preordained passing, bit by bit, and to virtually preside over and weep at our own funeral. What is more, it is probable that we even make the legacy of the one executed, part and parcel of our own, all of which serves to further immortalize us when our own time is up. As Freud has famously written in his treatise on “Mourning and Melancholia” and Christian Metz reiterates, “the work of mourning is at the same time an attempt […] to survive.”[xxii] In this context, mourning is not only an act of grieving, but also debatably the wish to live to witness our own death and ornate funeral. The result is somewhere between trying to achieve a death-defying sense of mastery and plotting to crash the would-be ‘surprise party’ planned for us by death.

Further, it might be added that the practice of mourning ourselves is the first step toward genuinely mourning others—a golden chance to dwell in the now-time [jetztzeit][xxiii] of our precious, common humanity and to commemorate our short-lived existence together on this whirling planet. Ironically enough, the tears we shed for the dead double as a wake-up call to remind us of how alive and sentient we indeed still are, and that we are destined as much to live as to perish.

–Mishana Hosseinioun is a Drafter with the 2048 Project: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together at the UC Berkeley Law School and a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford, England.

More writings by Mishana Hosseinioun:

Sex Pistols & the Polis: The Weapon of the Feminine in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC)

Black on White: Reading Fanon Against Mapplethorpe

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Phallocentric Economics, Triangular Trade & Other Shady Business


[i] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) p. 97.

[ii] Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin LcLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 402.

[iii] See Lee Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird.

[iv] Barthes (1981) pp. 80-2.

[v] Ibid. pp. 25-7.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid., p. 32.

[viii] Benjamin (1999), p. 395.

[ix] William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, What the Bleep do we Know!? (DVD, 2004).

[x]Aby Warburg, “The Art History Scene” in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), pp. 229-236.

[xi] Benjamin (1999), p. 396.

[xii] Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” in The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard, 1995), p. 51.

[xiii] Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin LcLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 479.

[xiv] Figure 9. Antonin Sevruguiun, A Thief being Buried Alive, ca. 1890-1900. Albumen print. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Antonin Sevruguin Photographs.

[xv] Barthes (1981), p. 57.

[xvi] Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings, l962-l993, trans. David Britt (Cambridge: MIT, l995), p. 37.

[xvii] Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish” in The Critical Image (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), p. 159.

[xviii] Corien J.M. Vuurman, Theo H. Martens, “Early Photography in Iran and the Career of Antoin Sevruguin” in Sevruguin and the Persian Image (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999), p. 18.

[xix] Ibid. p. 26

[xx] Benjamin (1999), p. 392.

[xxi] André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), Vol. 1, p. 14.

[xxii] Metz (1990), p. 159.

[xxiii] Benjamin (1999), p. 395.

WALTER BENJAMIN

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angelus novus1920

Paul Klee’s 1920 watercolor, Angelus Novus (once owned by Walter Benjamin and now part of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem collection).

PROTOCOL I: HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FIRST HASHISH IMPRESSION

[by Walter Benjamin:] Written 18 December [1927]. 3:30 a.m.

Translated by Scott J. Thompson

1. Apparitions hover (vignette-like) over my right shoulder. Chill in this shoulder. In this context: “I have the feeling that there are 4 in the room apart from myself.” (Avoidance of the necessity to include myself.)

2. Elucidation of the Potemkin anecdote[1] by the explanation, be it suggestion: to present to a person the mask of their own face (i.e., of the bearer’s own face).

3. Odd remarks about aetheric mask [Äthermaske], which would (obviously) have mouth, nose, etc.

4. The co-ordinates through the apartment: cellar-floor/ horizontal line. Spacious horizontal expanse of the apartment. Music is coming from a suite of rooms. But perhaps the corridor [is] terrifying, too.

5. Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful “character” unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.

6. The comical is not only drawn out of faces but also out of situations. One searches out occasions for laughter. Perhaps it is for that reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as “arranged”, as “test”: so that one can laugh about it.

7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: for a while at one point, no sooner had I made an assertion than I’d have used the very word in answer to a question merely by the perception ( so to speak) of the length of time in the duration of sound in either of the words. I sense that as poetic evidence.

8. Connection; distinction. Feeling of little wings growing in one’s smile. Smiling and flapping as related. One has among other things the feeling of being distinguished because one fancies oneself in such a way that one really doesn’t become too deeply involved in anything: however deeply one delves, one always moves on a threshold. Type of toe dance of reason.

9. It is often striking how long the sentences one speaks are. This, too, connected with horizontal expansion and (to be sure) with laughter. The arcade phenomenon is also the long horizontal extension, perhaps combined with the line vanishing into the distant, fleeting, infinitesimal perspective. In such minuteness there would seem to be something linking the representation of the arcade with the laughter. (Compare Trauerspiel book: miniaturizing power of reflection). [2]

10. In a moment of being lost in thought something quite ephemeral arises, like a kind of inclination to stylize [a few words here illegible] one’s body by oneself.

11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of transport. Considerable sensitivity towards open doors, loud talk, music.

12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The entrance gates to a world of grotesques seem to open up. I simply prefer not to enter.

13. Heating-oven becomes cat. Mention of the word ‘ginger’ in setting up the writing table and suddenly there is a fruitstand there, which I immediately recognize as the writing table. I recalled the 1001 Nights.

14. Thought follows thought reluctantly and ponderously.

15. The position which one occupies in the room is not held as firmly as usual. Thus it can suddenly happen –to me it transpired quite fleetingly –that the entire room appears to be full of people.

16. The people with whom one is involved (particularly Joël and Fränkel) are very inclined to become somewhat transformed: I wouldn’t say that they become alien nor do they remain familiar, but rather resemble something like foreigners.

17. It seemed to me: pronounced aversion to discuss matters of practical life, future, dates, politics. The intellectual sphere is as spellbinding as is the sexual at times to persons possessed, who are absorbed in it.

18. Afterwards with Hessel in the cafe. Departure from the spirit-world. Wave farewell.

19. The mistrust towards food. A special and very accentuated instance of the feeling which a great many things occasion: “Surely you don’t really mean to look that way!”

20. When he spoke of ‘ginger’, H[essel]’s writing table was transformed for a second into a fruitstand.

21. I associate the laughter with the extraordinary fluctuations of opinion. More precisely stated, it is, among other things, connected with the considerable sense of detachment. Furthermore, this insecurity which possibly increases to the point of affectation is to a certain extent an outward projection of the inner feeling of ticklishness.

22. It is striking that the inhibiting factors which lie in superstition, etc.,and which are not easy to designate, are freely expressed rather impulsively without strong resistance.

23. In an elegy of Schiller’s it is called “The Butterfly’s Doubting Wings” [“Des Schmetterlings zweifelnder Flügel”].[3] This in the connection of being exhilarated with the feeling of doubt.

24. One traverses the same paths of thought as before. Only they seem strewn with roses.

–Translated by Scott J. Thompson

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Potemkin anecdote from Alexander Pushkin’s Anecdotes was used twice by Benjamin: at the beginning of the essay “Franz Kafka” (Schriften II, p. 196f.) [Trans.: see “Franz Kafka” in Illuminations, by H. Zohn, Schocken Press, NY, 1969, pp. 111-112] and in the story “Die Unterschrift” [“The Signature”] in Prager Tagblatt 5. Aug. 1934 and Frankfurter Zeitung 5. Sept. 1934. It can also be found under the title “Potemkins Unterschrift” [“Potemkin’s Signature”] in Ernst Bloch’s Spuren.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, hrsg. von Rolf Tiedemann, 1969, S. 78 [See Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. by J. Osborne, London: New Left Books, 1977, p. 83 ].

[3] Compare “Der Spaziergang” [“The Stroll”]: “Mit zweifelndem Flügel/ Wiegt der Schmetterling sich über dem rötlichen Klee.” [“With doubting wing/ The butterfly sways above the red clover”].

HER BOTTOM LINE?

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lady esq 3

ASK LADY ESQ.

Relationship advice from a divorce attorney.

Dear Lady Esq.,

I need your sage advice. Here is my story. My girlfriend, whom I’ve been dating for the past year, has made clear to me her desire to have children and raise a family. She is 37 years old and like many women her age she feels that her time is limited in this regard.

When we first met each other she was in a previous relationship of three years that she ended so that we could start dating. This boyfriend was ready to get married and raise a family with her. Although she felt he was not the right person, she seriously considered going down the family path with him. After we met, however, she realized he was the wrong person for her and ended it.

From the beginning I have communicated to her that I was not ready to get married and have children. She accepted that and never really made it an issue. Until now.

We have a wonderful loving relationship. Our only issue has been the family one. She would be a wonderful mother and she deserves to have her desire to have children fulfilled. Unfortunately I cannot provide that for her and her desire for children is only getting stronger.

I have come to the conclusion that I have to end the relationship. Recently I broached the subject of ending things, and as expected, it went awfully. She absolutely does not want to end our relationship. I am in a real quandary on how to end this relationship without devastating her.

Lady Esq, what should I do?

– Dilemmaed in San Francisco


Dear Dilemmaed,

It seems to me the trouble here is one of bottom lines. Clearly you are willing to end this relationship over your desire to not get married and have children. The fact that you’re willing to pull the plug on this relationship over this issue makes not wanting to get married and have children your bottom line.

You are assuming her bottom line is wanting to get married and have kids. Yet when you broached the subject of ending the relationship over this issue she did not want to do so. If getting married and having kids were her bottom line, your girlfriend would be willing to walk away from this relationship when she knew that her bottom line will not be met with you.

You seem to be a caring person and you seem attentive to your girlfriend’s desires. Clearly you know she wants marriage and kids, and you want her to have that. But, at the end of the day, ensuring that her desires are met is her job, not yours.

Find out whether your girlfriend’s desire for marriage and kids is her bottom line, or if it is merely a strong desire. The way to do this is by telling her your bottom line. Let her know clearly and unequivocally that you do not want to get married and have kids. And let her know that this is your bottom line. Period. That no matter how much you love her and want to be with her, this issue is non-negotiable for you.

This leaves the forum open for her to be honest with you (and herself) about what her bottom line is. If her bottom line is wanting marriage and children, then the relationship must end. But the mere fact that she wants marriage and children does not in and of itself a bottom line make. Her bottom line may be that she wants to be with you. As important as getting married and having kids might be, she might prefer to stay with you without these things rather than lose you in order to pursue them.

Until you are open and frank with her about exactly where you stand and encourage her to do the same you’ll never know what her bottom line is. And if you are happy with her and want to be with her then it is unfair to both of you to end this relationship over an assumption that marriage and kids is not only a desire for her, but her bottom line.

Now, I’ll be honest with you. I sensed in your message that you want to end this relationship regardless. Maybe I am wrong. (As much as I like to think I am all-knowing, I cannot, in fact, read minds.) But something in the wording of your question made me think that you wanted advice on how to end this relationship regardless of your girlfriend’s bottom line.

If I am right, and you want out of this relationship one way or the other, then you just have to bite the bullet. Tell her you want to end things and that’s that. Breakups are never clean or easy. In fact, they can be quite messy. But being clear and unequivocal and unrelenting is the only answer. Once you end it and sever the ties that bind you then you both need time to accept it and move on, so no contact for at least a few months is a good idea, particularly if she’s not accepting of the idea.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Are you breaking up with her because you think she deserves marriage and children, or are you breaking up with her because you really want out of this relationship?

If you are breaking up with her because you really want out of this relationship then you need to own up to what you really want and end it because it’s what you want, not pin it on your girlfriend’s differing desires.

If you are breaking up with her because you think she deserves marriage and children, then that is a decision she needs to be allowed to make for herself. She must be honest with herself and with you about what is and is not her bottom line. Her bottom line should dictate this decision under the circumstances. Your unselfish desire for her to have everything she wants in life should not.

As is most often the case in relationships, open, honest communication is the answer. And if you feel the two of you can’t do it alone then perhaps you should enlist the professional assistance of a couple’s therapist. Go for a few appointments to work through this one issue and to have someone to help both of you determine whether to continue or end this relationship. I can recommend a great one in your area if you’re interested.

Thank you for sharing. I hope this helps.

– Lady Esq.

askLadyEsq.com

CINDY SHEEHAN’S SOAPBOX

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StopBAf

WARNOGRAPHY

by Cindy Sheehan

“We’ll know it when we see it.”
Richard Holbrooke, Special US Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan on defining victory in Af-Pak

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . .”
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defining pornography in 1964

Well, there you go…Richard Holbrooke has defined the US’s demented mission in Af-Pak as an indefinite proposition and when I say “define” I am joking, because what kind of definition is “we’ll know it when we see it?”

Oh yeah, I know what kind of definition that is; it’s a Bush era definition, which is totally appropriate because it seems like in so many ways that we are still in the Bush/Cheney era…or error.

In a related article, Bush/Obama Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, spells success in Af-Pak even more ephemerally than Holbrooke when he said: “Mysteries were those where there were too many variables to predict. And I think that how long U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan is in that area.” I know I had to read that last sentence a few times before it even began to make sense to me.

Does this inspire confidence in anyone that A) high ranking officials in the Obama Administration are either profoundly stupid, or deliberately obfuscating on the length of the “mission;” and that B) as in Iraq, the US is never leaving that beleaguered region unless our ass get deservedly handed to us like the USSR’s was.

What is a “mystery” to me is where the anti-war movement is.

There has been no significant removal of troops from Iraq and there has been a very significant increase of troops to Af-Pak, with the unfortunate commensurate increase in casualties on all sides, yet there is very little movement in the “movement.”

McCain would be doing the exact same thing that Obama is doing in Iraq-Af-Pak: the EXACT same thing. There is no difference between what Obama is doing and what McCain would be doing, except Obama has a (D) behind his name.

The profound difference to us here in the grassroots would be that if McCain were president, faux-gressives would still be up in arms about the wars and, even though our protests wouldn’t change McCain’s mind, at least we could retain our moral high-ground, that has been sold out to the Democrats for absolutely nothing in return.

War always has been and always will be the most obscene slasher-porn ever invented by deeply sick minds and perpetuated in the 21st century by even sicker minds that kill indiscriminately for power and profit.

I know evil when I see it.

War is evil and the US Empire that is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” (MLK, Jr.) is the greatest evil no matter who is at the helm of the ship of state.


— Cindy Sheehan

This piece first appeared on Cindy Sheehan website: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox on 8/14/09.


WITNESS IN PALESTINE

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hebron

Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank.

FROM JERICHO TO HEBRON

by Anna Baltzer

I took a short day trip to Jericho several days ago; it was love at first sight. My friend and I were welcomed to the city with free bananas by friendly merchants who sold us fresh fruit from orchards within walking distance. Jericho is more like a big farm than a city. I had never been to a desert with so much green (it turns out Jews aren’t the only ones who can make a desert bloom). The air smelled like citrus and flowers; and in the late afternoon, a family sitting in their garden invited my friend and me for tea. We accepted after the requisite three refusals, and soon tea turned into supper, which turned into an invitation to stay the night that we couldn’t refuse.

The evening air was warm, and from the garden I watched the local children riding their small bicycles home from school and the well-dressed adults riding their bigger bicycles home from work, past the palm trees and setting sun. Behind the orchards we could see the mountains, dusty and still, peaceful.

The next morning I took a walk to the ruins of Hisham’s Palace, one of the city’s biggest attractions. The archeological site is beautiful, and the mosaics are extraordinary. I received a personal tour from a 1948 refugee working there, who said “the pleasure of my company” would be his payment.

I wondered why Jericho felt like such a different world from the rest of the West Bank, so relaxed, spontaneous, and open. Then it hit me: I hadn’t seen a jeep or heard a sound bomb my entire time there. There were no Humvees zooming past in the middle of the night, no soldiers demanding who I was and where I was going. Jericho is—almost—Palestine without the Occupation. And it is beautiful. It’s a vibrant reminder of what Palestine could—and hopefully someday will—be. Who says all Palestinians would rally against Israel if left alone? Nobody I met talked much about Israel while I was there. They were too busy living their daily lives, like most people in the world.

It takes just 2 hours to get from Heaven to Hell. At least, that’s how long it took for me to go the next morning from the paradise of Jericho to the nightmare of Hebron. Until recently, Hebron was the only city in the West Bank besides East Jerusalem suffering from settlements within its city limits. Usually settlers establish themselves on hills surrounding villages or cities, but many of the settlers in Hebron have moved into the second floors of Palestinian homes in the Old City, always by force and sometimes with the help of the army.

Hebron’s were the first settlers in the West Bank after Israel occupied the area in 1967, when the Old City’s Palestinian population was around 7,500. Twenty-five years later, that population had shrunk by 80% to 1,500, a mass exodus provoked by Israeli settler and state violence and dispossession. The wealth left with the refugees; only the poorest residents remain, those with nowhere else to go. Today the old market, which used to be bustling and vibrant, is run-down and abandoned. Unemployment hovers around 80%. The local economy is in shambles, as are the hopes of many Hebron residents.

I took a tour of the city led by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a faith-based organization that witnesses and intervenes nonviolently to prevent violence in Hebron and other hotspots around the world. We walked through the market area, where the few remaining Palestinian merchants have hung netting above their shops to catch trash that the settlers throw down from their apartments onto the Palestinians’ streets and rooftops. Said one merchant, “I’m not here to make money anymore. I just sit here because there’s nothing else for me to do. I’m waiting to die.” Even if his old customers had the money to spend, the merchant couldn’t get to his shop because it’s in the Old City, which is now cut off from the rest of the holy city of Hebron by a checkpoint. The people of Hebron can no longer go freely to their city center, nor to their main place of worship. I wonder how Israel would react if Palestinians started moving into the Jewish section of old Jerusalem by force, and then cut everyone off from it but themselves.

It doesn’t make sense. In a city of more than 120,000 Palestinians, there are about 600 settlers calling the shots, and about 2,000 soldiers and police stationed to protect them. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a local settler from New York affiliated with the Kach Israeli extremist political party, opened fire on a mosque full of praying Palestinians. He waited until they were bent over with their heads to the floor in worship before shooting 29 men to death, injuring about 100 more.

According to the imam who was present during the shooting, when the soldiers heard the shots they assumed they were from “Arab terrorists” and began to target Palestinian residents in retaliation, including one in the process of evacuating the body of a friend who had just been slaughtered. Riots following the massacre left 9 Israelis and 26 more Palestinians dead. Since the massacre, Hebron settlers have built a monument in Goldstein’s honor and make pilgrimages to his tomb.

The 1994 massacre was not the first Hebron has seen. In 1929, some 30 Jews were brutally murdered by Palestinians who resented their growing presence in Hebron. A native from Hebron named Hisham sometimes gives tours of the city, sharing little-known details about the time of the 1929 massacre, which he himself witnessed as a young boy. According to Hisham, before the massacre there was a large population of Jews in Hebron who considered themselves Arabs. They were well-integrated and respected in the community. As the Zionist movement gained ground, some people began to resent the huge influx of Jews flooding to Hebron with hopes of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state. Hisham said the vast majority of Jews killed in the massacre were recent immigrants from Europe, because most of the native Hebron Jews were saved by their Muslim neighbors who hid them in their homes.

Hisham’s family members, for example, were “shabbes goys” (non-Jews whom Jews hire to perform work that is forbidden for observant Jews on the Sabbath, such as switching lights on and off and cooking) for a Jewish family next door, whom they took in during the massacre. Hisham added that the majority of perpetrators of the massacre were not from Hebron.

It’s disappointing that these stories of Jewish and Palestinian solidarity are not more well-known. People remember the non-Jews who risked their lives to help Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust, but those who sheltered Jewish Hebron residents in 1929 are mostly forgotten. Similarly, the Arab media doesn’t go out of its way to talk about Israeli activists who risk attack and arrest every day for standing in solidarity with Palestinians against the Occupation. It seems the media on both sides have an interest in perpetuating fear and racism rather than taking advantage of the solidarity that has always existed here, albeit limited.

Although the native Palestinians in Hebron can be blamed for neither Goldstein’s massacre nor the one of 1929, they continue to pay the price for both. The earlier massacre is still used to justify excessive security measures at the expense of Palestinian freedom of movement and self-determination in Hebron. Ironically, Goldstein’s crimes are used to justify the same security measures. After he opened fire in the mosque, Palestinians in Hebron were put under curfew for a month (presumably to prevent retaliation), while the settlers were allowed to roam freely shortly afterwards. The Palestinians, who had been the target of the massacre, were shut in their homes for 30 days, unable to go to work or school, let alone visit one another and pay their respects to the dead.

Another result of the Goldstein massacre was that the site of the massacres—the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Hebron’s main mosque, the Ibrahimi Mosque, sits—was split into two, with one side for Muslims and one side for Jews. Both the curfew and the division were allegedly to prevent further confrontation, but in reality they served to further curtail the rights of the very population that had been attacked. The Israeli army and government call Goldstein’s gang terrorists, but in practice they are the group’s most crucial suppliers of security and impunity.

–Anna Baltzer

This piece was originally published on Anna Baltzer’s website: AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com on 3/12/05.

Further Reading:

The Olive Harvest by Anna Baltzer, 8/7/09



COMMENTARY

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mercurydime_xlungex

Photo of what is commonly called a Mercury dime, but which actually depicts Liberty wearing a Phrygian cap with wings, symbolizing both liberty and freedom of thought. It was designed by Adolph Weinman.

TOWARDS A DEMOCRATIC, COOPERATIVE, AND CARING ECONOMY

by Mira Luna

There has been a lot of talk lately about how we should reform our economy. In order to figure out where we want our economy to go, we need to evaluate where we currently are. The economy we operate within in the US is, by many measures, not taking care of our most basic needs. The US spends more on healthcare than any other country, but is now ranked 50th in longevity and 47 million people in the US are without health insurance. 3.5 million people, 39% of them children, currently experience homelessness every year and 30% of Americans are on the edge of poverty. 36.2 million people live in households considered to be food insecure, including 12.4 million children. Even by the most conservative standards, the US ranks 23rd in world happiness despite its enormous wealth, making up one quarter of the world’s GDP. We work longer hours for less pay doing unsatisfying work and have little time to connect with each other, as the social fabric of our communities slowly disintegrates. Why is wealth being pulled away from the things that we need and the things that make us truly happy?

Where money flows is partly determined by where it comes from. US dollars are issued solely by the Federal Reserve (a private financial institution) as debt (usually from loan agreements, including to the US government), which means it must be paid back with interest. The money to pay for this growing debt comes out of one person or institution’s pocket and interests accumulates in another’s pocket, creating inequalities and pooling wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The Federal Reserve attempts to set the value of the dollar by controlling the supply of it as a scarce resource. So even though there is enough food or housing for everyone, there will not be enough money in the hands of those that need it to pay rent or buy food, especially in times of economic recession. Markets also create artificial scarcity for the sake of increasing value, making only somewhat scarce resources and very abundant resources seem very scarce.

Scarcity created by the centralized monetary system and the market encourage unnecessary competition and greed out of fear that there isn’t enough resources out there for everyone. In the US, the top 10% of the population now possesses 80% of all financial assets while the bottom 90% holds only 20%, a significant threat to democracy, as concentration of wealth also leads to concentration of unchecked power. A continually growing economy is not sustainable, a boom-bust economy is not secure, and an unjust economy will lead inevitably to other social problems.

With the current economic crisis, we have an opportunity to create tools and structures that facilitate a shift away from wealth accumulation and competition for scarce resources to a more democratic, cooperative, and caring economy. How do we start to make this transition? We must start to decentralize our economy and develop aspects of it that have disappeared after decades of free market and capitalist fundamentalism.

If you can imagine, we operate within three economic circles. In the innermost circle, immediate family and friends give freely amongst each other (though less than they used to) – this network of trust is primarily a gift economy, usually with no expectation of direct reciprocity.  Our local communities used to provide the middle circle of economy, meeting most of our basic needs that our families and friends couldn’t. This middle circle was made up of local government and also people and business we knew well, trusted and exchanged with regularly, usually reciprocally through barter or exchange of money. Evaluations of who needs what the most, who we trust, and who deserves the most would influence our trading. Today most of this middle circle is gone. Now the outer circle, consisting exclusively of anonymous monetary exchanges in the global economy, determined primarily by the highest market value or profit, has consumed most of the two inner circles. We have very little control over this outer circle of trade and it has done great damage as it is run by businesses and people who have little vested interest in or responsibility towards the communities that they affect.

In order to create a better economy, we need to redevelop the inner and middle circles and reduce the dominance of the outer circle. There are many grassroots projects already underway to develop the inner and middle circles – worker cooperative development organizations, cohousing and cooperative housing projects, community credit unions, land trusts, urban community gardens, bicycle kitchens, free clinics, sustainable local investment programs, ridesharing, recycling stores, and community currencies are just a few examples. Though we can’t completely jump ship right away from the current economic system, we can slowly build alternatives as a transition to the new economy. Community currencies, though not a panacea, can be an especially potent fulcrum point in making this shift.

Regional or municipal community currencies that are well constructed can help redirect wealth away from corporations and towards local businesses, local governments, and not for profit groups. They can also provide stability in a roller-coaster market economy so that people don’t lose their jobs and public services don’t need to be cut. Local currencies re-pattern behavior by encouraging local exchanges, relationships and local self- and small business employment, increasing local community self-sufficiency and sustainability. Spending locally results in three times the income effects, three times the wealth effects, three times the jobs, and three times the tax income, before it leaves the community. Community currencies combined with import replacement could drastically increase local wealth and stability. Ithaca Hours and Berkshares paper currencies are two good examples of paper currencies successfully being used in the United States, as well as the Worgl in Austria and the Chiemgauer in Germany. Over 300 alternative scrips issued in North America during the Great Depression.

For other needs and wants, we should create soft currencies within the middle circle that transition us towards the gift economy and indirect reciprocity.  We should design these currencies so as to maximize feelings of abundance and trust in communities. Soft currencies include mutual credit systems like time banking and LETS (Local Employment/Exchange Trading Systems). Time banks are based on hour-for-hour exchange that reduces the emphasis on keeping score, creates abundance because we all have some time and skills to offer, and reduces inequalities through a single standard metric, the hour, rather than the market value of that hour. Because there is no interest in this system, there is no incentive to accumulate credits and no problem with being in debt.  Wealth then circulates more fluidly throughout the community, which means people are taking care of each other. Time banks and other mutual credit systems now number in the hundreds in the US and in the thousands across the world. The most successful mutual credit system is the Swiss WIR bank, a business to business trading and accounting system, which has captured a significant portion of the economy and buffered it from depressions.

In order to create a more loving economy, we should also create as many opportunities for gift giving as possible. Gifting builds a collective consciousness that we are all in this together and we trust each other to take care of each other.  There are many examples of successful gift economies. The entire country of Mali functions primarily on a gift economy. Other examples of gift economy are practiced in Black Rock City by participants of Burningman and in the Pacific Northwest by indigenous peoples during potlatch ceremonies.  Spreading around the world contagiously are small events which epitomize the gift economy, called Really Really Free Markets, in contradistinction to the capitalist free market, which actually gives nothing away for free and tries to commodify everything. In a Really Really Free Market, skills are shared, services are offered, music is often is provided, and goods are given away, but no money, barter, or advertising is allowed.  Everyone receives reward merely by seeing others benefit from their gifts and they may take whatever they need, whenever they need it, building trust that all will be provided for.

As we grow these inner and middle circles, we will see a shift toward a more democratic, cooperative, caring , and dare I say, loving economy. Our currencies, businesses, banks, and investment mechanisms should all be based on our highest values and the kinds of relationships we want rather than these tools and structures determining our relationships and our values. It is time to move forward consciously, deliberately and and fearlessly to create the new economy.

–Mira Luna is a San Francisco based activist who is working on developing an alternative economy in the Bay Area. She helps coordinate Bay Area Community Exchange, a local timebank, JASecon, and the Really Really Free Market. Her blog is Trust is the Only Currency.

I WANT TO BE BETTER

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Ajanta caves in Northern India

Reclining Buddha carved in the Ajanta Caves in Northern India, dating to the 2nd century B.C.

I WANT TO BE BETTER

by Eve Toliman

I once read about a young man who joined an ashram (I think his name was Chris and I think the ashram was in San Francisco).  At a certain point he slowed way down.  He smiled sweetly and spoke less and less.  His peers were awed by his spiritual progress.  They tried to emulate what they believed was his serenity.  Over a period of about a year, he became slower and stiller until he didn’t speak at all.  He just smiled.  A shiny, round, apple-cheeked young Buddha.  Enlightenment.  Turns out he had a massive brain tumor.  His fellow aspirants had mistaken dullness for serenity.  (I think pharmaceutical companies capitalize on a similar confusion.)  I fear I am Chris (minus the sweetness) — something vital in me is being eclipsed by something vacuous.

I have a friend who won a silver medal for basketball at the World Games.  Like many athletes, her body pioneering new limits, her performance a testament to human spirit and will, she was debilitated by injuries.  Two surgeries later, never having achieved the peak of her athletic capability, she could no longer walk without pain.  She can’t even bear to watch the game anymore.  The love of her life is whole and well, blithely wooing others.

When I was 26 my mother was diagnosed with a terminal cancer.  Ironically (or not) she had worked at Sloan-Kettering as an aide to an oncologist studying the same cancer that took her life at 55.  We were a spirited and unbalanced group to begin with.  During this last year of her life, when all hope died and the shadow of a guillotine draped everything we did, we were launched to new extremes. We drank harder, laughed harder, and pushed harder against the huge inevitability that was pushing toward us. I was doing computer projects — tedious, relentless attention to detail.  As an antidote to the colossal left brain activity that occupied too much of my other time, I started drawing — a lot.  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I took two three hour drawing classes back-to-back.  I sketched still lifes in the morning with a brilliant, laser-like, high-speed printmaker whose work hung in the Guggenheim.  As he passed by, people muttered about the effects of long-term exposure to printing chemicals.  Hushed and inconclusive, it nonetheless impressed me with a desire to avoid printmaking.  In the afternoon, I drew nude models with a sardonic landscape painter whose chosen genre had fallen out of popular consideration.  He pursued his craft knowing it would never amount to anything more than it was, his own private communion with creativity.

One morning, I was drawing in Robert-the-twisted-printmaker’s class.  He was talking non-stop, as usual, but for some reason on that particular morning he kept looming over my shoulder when I least expected it.  I was trying to get into that right brain groove, just be my hands as Andrew Wyeth put it, when BAM, in my ear, rapid fire conceptual jargon.  I would stop and wait for the clatter to move on.  I finally gave up and just listened.  Intermingled brilliance and nonsense.  Impossible to ignore.  Fascinating and grating, my left brain sifting, panning for gold.  When I showed up for figure drawing, chalks in hand, model prepared, quick sketches done, I was paralyzed.  I just stared, hoping, waiting for that right brain relief.  Walt-the-pragmatist-painter finally asked, “Why aren’t you drawing?”

“I was listening to Robert all morning.”

“Oh, I understand.”

Here I sit, waiting for relief, stunned by the non-stop, clattering demands of a life — meals, laundry, dishes, money, phone snafu again, still haven’t replaced that spare tire, my daughter’s tooth needs to be pulled, I need a crown, (where are my son’s adult teeth?), finish the web copy, my passport’s expired, new doctor for the kids, back-to-school night, we are out of bread, invoice that client, oh god, I forgot to call the insurance agent — hoping, waiting for that right brain relief, spaciousness in which to feel and dream and do nothing at all.  I feel dullness creeping over me.  I watch my love blithely wooing others.

When my mother died, I stopped drawing all together. Ten years and two kids later, when divorce seemed inevitable, I started writing.  It felt as if my soul had been startled into some kind of action and was now fighting for her life.  It is ten years later again.  My soul seems to be in some kind of tug-of-war with modern life.  I am the rope.  We are the rope.   I hear the same things from friends.  These are people who love their work, love their families, but feel eroded by the demands of managing their worldly lives.  Perhaps it’s time of life.  For those of us who didn’t give up, time is taunting us, drawing us out.  If our souls are to have expression, it is now or never.

Perhaps the tug-of-war is created by my misperception.  It is not the inevitable effect of an evil world against a pure soul, of endless tasks eclipsing meaning  — it is the result of a false split.  It is not worldly here and spiritual there, mundane here and creative there, rather it is love throughout.  Driving to the mechanic, watching the teens in the crosswalk, waiting at the post office, calling the dentist,…  The mundane simply raw material for creativity.  Spaciousness throughout.  No destination, just this.  When I stop resisting the tug and just fall, a curious reversal occurs.  That place of tension becomes the opening.

My boyfriend and I have been having the same fight for over a year.  Every month or so, we approach the heated topic gingerly and within minutes it blows up again and we retreat.  Yesterday morning, for the first time, we moved safely over the mined border into an entirely new landscape.  Just like that, peace.  In the evening, he turned to me and said, “I want to be better — better to you, better for you — than I know how to be.”  I felt it enter my chest and move around.  I realized, I want to be better, too — much better than I know how to be.  Suddenly the tug-of-war is recast: It is not what’s keeping me from the fullness of my human life — it is my human life.

–Eve Toliman

Further Reading:

I Dreamt of My Father Last Night by Eve Toliman, 8/4/09

Prodding Baudelaire by Eve Toliman, 7/28/09

Beneath the Damage and Apology by Eve Toliman, 7/24/09


A HALF MAST REBEL

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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A HALF MAST REBEL

by Gabriela Barragan

When I discovered what the religiously-tinted definition of a prude was, back in the 6th grade, I decided I didn’t want to be one.

In my 11-year-old mind, already indoctrinated by a steady stream of Catholic-infused political beliefs and dogma, prudes didn’t sneak Guns N’ Roses tapes, heavy metal magazines, or try smoking an abandoned pack of cigarettes.

But I wasn’t about to turn full-fledged rebel.  In concert with the floweret of rebellion beginning to bloom there was a flash of the most boring of all adages, ready for harnessing at any moment (especially by dieters), and one my Mom stated constantly:  “Everything in moderation”.

So, while I was determined not be a pre-makeover Charlotte Vale from Now Voyager (young spinster goes from nunnery dress to sophisticate on celluloid in black and white) I also wasn’t going to manifest the exhibitionistic Catholic school girl stereotype, with a skirt hiked up to there – the maximal anti-prude.

But the rebel floweret inched a bit taller.  I may not have attempted to set my uniform skirt on fire, but I watched.  And I was disappointed, like everyone else, that the material kind of melted and curled, and that the resulting acrid stench made me and my adolescent comrades run away and stuff our mouths with contraband Hubba Bubba to stave off the caustic tang that permeated our polyester, our Peter Pan collars, and even it seemed, our skin.

More than 20 years later, I’m not as fascinated by cloying bubble gum flavors, burning my uniform in effigy, or espousing the Catholic doctrines I was taught by teachers with (mostly) good intentions.  In those 20 years I’ve met many people of diverse backgrounds.  Through more than a few I observed that faith (not religion, but faith) is not just housed among the very good, the very dogmatic, and those who shun all forms of venial sin.

A notable example:  The best yoga teacher I ever had, a former heroin addict, could drink a bottle of wine and get blazed the night before class and still teach with the kind of patience and in-the-moment presence only gifted instructors possess.  She was a good time gal, and a dedicated and very spiritual yogi – not an either/or.  It gradually became clear that I didn’t have to run from the religious prude archetype proffered by teachers back in my uniform days.  I just had to merely give it my regards and say, “No, thank you”.

I may have veered off the path my parents put me on back in Kindergarten, while they have become even more devout, but I now understand the importance of respecting their beliefs even though they are not okay with mine (maybe slightly alarmed is more like it).  We’ve even managed to have some conversations about our differences without skyrocketing blood pressures on either side (of the aisle).

So, instead of continuing to run, or drowning out the dogma with GN’R, I’ll listen.  I won’t necessarily accept or adopt, but I’ll listen.  My yoga instructor once said:  “flexible in the body, flexible in the mind”.  My sprint now is away from narrowness and rigidity, and toward a more catholic view – but allow me emphasize that lower-case “c”.

–Gabriela Barragan

Further Reading:

My Musical Corkage Fee by Gabriela Barragan, 7/21/09