I confess to only a few missed takes in my life, and only when
in a moment of solitude, perhaps a rainy day such as this one, I must confront
my raw Self without any middle person. Clever thinkers such as Foucault and
Watts would argue that this Self that I bewail is an illusion: that the day I
am truly free from sin there shall be no “past” to lament. Yet I find a kind of
purity and comfort in having the humility to admit my wrongs. I know that I was
lured into them with per chance an even deeper innocence, and for that I do not
apologise: That experience can warrant my views, and only Dogmatism can turn a
blind eye to them.
I wasted eight months of my life working at a fabric store.
Cynics insist that I have not truly suffered, that I ought instead have wasted
it to its entirety. They treat lives like cigarettes, and they condemn me as
less of a man for not burning mine to its butt, as though I were afraid that it
would singe my moustache.
They are like people who will beat their children, using the
fact that other children get molested as their excuse and justification.
That time could have been spent saving the life of Jennifer
Kelly. Jennifer I met admittedly after I had quit my job. She had a glowing innocent
smile that seemed burdened by her insufferable cares in the way that the baby
fat leant humanity to her cheeks. Her lips were red and she wore a head dress
that looked like that of a Muslim woman in Iran. Her eyes were vacant and
welcoming, and looking into her through them was like finding that God had left
open a window that usually separates this world from THAT one.
Jennifer committed suicide. I tried to talk her out of it, but
she was too fast for me. As I was just stumbling again to pick up philosophy
she had all ready read all my Camus and my Sartre. The last time that we spoke
I did not even try to fore stall an other attempt on her part. Camus’ Absurdism
had all ready taken root in my heart, and she would not be moved, even by the fact
that Camus his self had disavowed self-destruction. We spoke by phone and it
was as though for once I saw snow in San Diego. It was falling in my bedroom.
Jennifer’s suicide ensured that never again would I work at a
fabric store. Never again would I go back on the promise that I had made to my
enraged family that I would never work for a living.
Never again would I be a faceless middle man betwixt a
corporation who specialized in the production of objects valued for their
uselessness and a gang of consumers who held onto dear life by these trinkets.
Never again would I facilitate, by my dispensable role, the wasting
away of human lives. Never would I look into the eyes of a woman in what were
supposed to have been her Golden Years, terrified that I might accidentally cut
to pieces one of a stack of plastic trading cards that she had handed to me,
proclaiming “What are you doing??” shortly and with shock the moment that my
scissors all most cut to pieces one that “still had money on it”. Never again
would I see before me a parade of human beings reduced to cattle by the system,
and rather than finding solace in their life long learnings and their families
and friends and joys and mysteries and hopes for what might follow they found a
safe guard against total psychosis in the acquisition of use less items.
And never again would I answer to Jean, my boss. I remember the
moment that I attained financial independence. It was just as illusory as any
man’s pretense towards material independence, a remnant of Shamanic life still
rooted in the collective Unconscious mind. It was only within minutes of this
false epiphany that, having corrected Jean, I had to look upon this dwarfish
person and hear her say the words that I could never have expected or
permitted: Dmitry, I am your boss. Dmitry, you have to do as I say. Dmitry, I
am your mistress. Dmitry, your twenty one years of reading and suffering and
education mean nothing here. YOU are a means to an end. And what ever your
QUALMS with how we run things here, I have all ready been involved in this
machine long enough that what ever humanity might in some other dimension
prevent me from saying this, it is absent in this hell.
One cannot study philosophy if one cannot live it. One cannot
divide one’s work from one’s play as an adult. One’s work becomes arbitrary and
one’s play turns to debauchery. How did I allow my self for eight months to be
transformed into one of those face less conformists who never had a moment’s
time to talk of social change, for they went from THEIR job with all its
falseness to THEIR luxuries, either at home or at some club or party, without a
plan in either case for how it would inform their virtues?
Yet supposing that one did NOT commit one’s self to an
impersonal system? Supposing that one DID follow one’s solitary bliss? All work
would be towards the greatest good, and none would be over looked. One would
not subordinate one’s intelligence towards drudgery nor with draw into the
shame full inconsistency of childhood. One would not watch with agony one’s
creative psyche turn to a series of repetitions, as Life Opportunities floated
by on a conveyor belt. What kinship does ROUTINE have towards a Divine Plan,
with all of the nuances of a Dream Narrative? One would not be a complacent
discontent, without a plan for delivering all other discontents, including the
less advantaged and more deeply afflicted, towards a Better Way.
And one’s Enjoyments would not be born of desperation. They
would not be the debauchery that even in my working days I had tried to
dissuade my closest friends from, the same people that I no longer call friends
for that same debauchery had turnt to disloyalty. A night out would be an opportunity
to MEET some one. Some one like Jennifer. Some one whom I could save. Or some
one who might save me.
My father left me twenty dollars on my account this weekend. It
was for food in case I grew hungry whilst looking after Pumpkin in the rest of
my family’s absence. Supposing that he asked me if I’d spent it. I would say “No”.
Supposing that he then told me that it was to be my lunch allowance for this
week. I would rage against him. Ought I not to be rewarded for my frugality?
Supposing that he gave me five dollars a day as planned. I would have forty
dollars by the end of the week. Were I to spend the five dollars I earned each
day (earned not by [active] conformism but by passive resistance, as the earth
earns the fruits that fall upon it simply by Being There for the tree) I would have
twenty dollars left to go dancing on Friday. I might have forty dollars left to
buy a book. But neither narrative could work should he decide not to oblige. I
would rather eat than dance if I could not afford to do both, having only the
twenty dollars necessary to gain entry to the club and [thus] losing entry by
the act of buying an apple, and I would never have enough money to buy a novel
and then to come back begging again. But the grand irony is that this same indignation
with my father would be feigned by my capitalist enemies. In truth there would
be some thing Totalitarian and Stalinist in my father’s behaviour. It would be
an affront to my freedom. The twenty dollars would only be mine so long as I
spent them within a given time; if I refused to, trying to save them, my
frugality would be rewarded by the dropping of my standard allowance. The most
generous way of putting it: My father takes back my twenty, and then as a
reward for having been frugal he would distribute the weekly allowance in one
installment rather than four, allotting me the opportunity to waste it all in
one day if need be or to waste away eating greasier and more expensive food for
at either rate I shall never afford either to dance nor to read.
What Father has attained in this hypothetical narrative is the
capacity to be Stalin in a capitalist country. Conservatives of capitalism
remember such instances of oppression from their youth. So they seek the holy
Grail of “financial independence”, forgetting as I demonstrated that so long as
they answer to a boss they are not free, and so long as they cannot talk back
to authority they are infants not adults. They commit their selves to a system
and nurse their guilty consciences by pretending towards a greater maturity
than their loafing peers. The irony is that many of their loafing peers have
all ready tried capitalism and watched it fail, and the wisest, myself
excluded, learnt from others’ missed takes and NOT their own.
So it is that the conservatives associate with all Marxism the
spectre of Communism, but only insofar as Communism is extrapolated to be akin
to an earlier rung of hell under Capitalism. They ascribe to the Post-Conventionality
Morality of the sophisticated drop-out the laziness of the Pre-Conventional “bum”,
but they never bother even to probe the minds of the bums to see which of them
are actually NOT Untouchables but rather Gurus and Saints. They miss take all
deviants for children that have not yet attained Financial Independence. Yet to
them I say: Do you make money? Yes. Then you are NOT financially independent,
and no one is. And insofar as YOUR occupation obligates OTHERS to participate
in the playing of money, this is YOUR fault. The definition of a child, it has
been said, is one who still thinks that there is such a thing as an Adult. I
for one am not going to waste ten years of my life deluding my self and
corroding my intellect in anticipation of my Saviour. I want freedom NOW, and
so should you. And it is not freedom to deny that you want freedom. You THINK
that you are adults. But you are merely delusional adolescents who bought into
the system before you had developed a Conscience that spoke louder than its
orders. MY indignation with oppression is not directed at Communism, so do not
use the semblance of Communism against me, for any semblance you can produce is
an ACTUAL symptom of Capitalism. Per chance YOU have found comfort in escaping
the lower rungs of hell by sitting atop people still stuck in them. But never
again shall I look in the tormented eyes of a customer whose only solace in
life is to buy a scrap of fabric, knowing that I am benefitting at that person’s
expense. Only Satan his self, or worse a politician, would insist that he is
giving that person what she needs. It is like a drug pusher pretending towards
dignity in supplying the heroin that he got his victims addicted to in the
first place. And since this act of making-addicted and supplying are done in
one swift wave of a hand, the ruse is transparent to all who are not dazzled by
sleight of hand.
You are not adults. You are adolescents still. You will only be
an adult the day you commit your self to the annihilation of currency. Until
then you are just children, either the family bully or the family scape-goat. My
indignation has NO kinship to yours. Yours is directed at Stalinism, as though
you could vilify all those who have not found shelter in YOUR coping mechanism
by analogy to dead dictators. The irony is unbearable. You have no right to use
my father’s oppressive tendencies or any other that YOU have endured to support
the system under which both villains thrive: The only system you or I have ever
known directly. Whatever kinship these tendencies seem to have to Stalinism or
any other Totalitarian alternative is only possible because of the corrosion in
THIS system ITS SELF. And you must surely be suicidal if you believe that any
alternative to THIS system can ONLY be an amplification of this one’s ills. You
have at that point TRULY surrendered your humanity to the machine, for you have
surrendered not only your Hope but your Ingenuity. Just as I had for eight
months when I worked at a Fabric Store.
Dm.A.A.
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