1 

 

The sole meaningful belief is belief in the value of disbelief. 

 

The first step in knowing something is to disbelieve in it.   

 

Disbelief is where knowledge begins, not where it ends. 

 

Knowledge culminates in neither belief nor disbelief. 

 

Knowledge culminates somewhere else.  There isn't yet a word for where. 

 

The sanity of disbelief resides at that point where disbelief discovers the tranquility of its outlandish accuracy. 

 

I disbelieve in your mother's cunt.  And also in her dick.   

 

This is a beginning. 

 

I will get back to this later. 

 

 

2

 

Reality cannot be grasped logically.  The very attempt to see a thing or event in terms of its coherence is usually an imposition of coherence on that thing or event as opposed to being a grasping of a coherence that is already there. 

 

This is why the insane -- i.e., the incoherent --  is frequently more sane than sanity. 

 

Nat Turner maintained, in a language part biblical and part lunatic, that “the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first” and that God had appointed him to “slay my enemies with their own weapons.”  Believing the solar eclipse of February 12, 1831 to be a revelation that the time for a slave uprising had arrived, over the coming months Turner gathered together a 70-person guerrilla force and  within a 24-hour period, beginning on August 23, 1831, killed about 60 white men, women and children, leaving only one family in his path -- a poverty-stricken group of non-slave-owning whites -- unharmed.  (Herbert Aptheker, Essays in the History of the American Negro, International Publishers, New York, 1969, p. 48-52)   Correctly, Turner has gone down in history as a black freedom fighter. The blood on his hands, although regrettable, was no more a criminal indictment of him than the British blood on George Washington’s was an indictment of the general. 

 

Still, Turner’s legacy has its ambiguities, not the least of which is that, while one man may have a religious vision condoning slaves’ political right to rebel, another individual may have a religious vision that supports one race’s mastery over another.  A case in point is early Puritan leader John Saffin whose religious vision led him to believe that “God has ordained different decrees and orders of men, some to be High-Honorable, some to be Low-Despicable... yea, some to be born slaves, and so to remain during their lives, as hath been proved.”. (Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977).  In the psyche’s murky interiors, sometimes emotional extremities lead to truth, sometimes merely to shallow justifications of the violent enslavement of the other. 

 

Unfortunately, distinguishing which variety of emotional extremity leads to what outcome is impossible.  The only certainty is the absence of certainty.  Coherence is something we strive for, not something that preexists. 

 

There is nothing romantic or exotic about this.  The early 20th century Russian poet Maria Tsvetaeva understood this, recognizing that truth was too cumbersome to fit into our neatly packaged way of looking at the world.  She wrote that “the blown-apart links of causality” are the terrain the authentic knowledge-seeker must traverse.  For Tsvetaeva, the beginning of hope required first being “without hope” and surrendering to the disorder that underlies all supposed order.  It was only then, she maintained, that we could “step out from our shores” and discover more comprehensive perspectives and  meanings.   (Maria Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, Penguin Books, New York, 1994, p. 48)

 

There is no way to prettify such an assessment of the road to knowledge.  It is bleak and disturbing. 

 

And true. 

 

 

3

 

What is structure, chaos?  What is sane, insane? 

 

We live on the borderlines. 

 

The naked man at the porno shoot masturbates for the camera.  The moment is recorded so that later we can study it, then be aroused or appalled or amazed by it.  What complicates the image, giving it a kinkier depth than it would otherwise possess, is that in the film the man isn’t jerking off of his own volition but is rather being compelled to by a dominatrix.  From the man’s intimidated manner, he clearly believes that some degree of physical or psychological injury will be inflicted upon him if he doesn’t do what is ordered.  In fact, even when he does what’s ordered (e.g., “suck my stiletto heel,” “drink when I piss on your face”), she torments him, once by squeezing his testicles, another time by whipping his buttocks.  This is sadomasochism’s sweet ontological edge.  We wait with bated breath, seduced by the taboo’s reinvention of the normal and by all the apparently trivial but nonetheless psychologically revealing questions that various members of the audience have.  One of them wonders, “How will the look in this man’s eyes at the moment of his ejaculation affect me?”  Another ponders, “What would it be like to suckle at the dominatrix’s breasts while she berates me for being a baby?”

 

There is so much that we, the audience, don’t know. 

 

Including who or what, exactly, the dominatrix is, beyond the obvious:  she is pure power.  Over another.  The unobvious part of this power over is that such power isn’t merely the brute capacity of a single individual to enslave another individual.  It also entails the memory -- and forbidden pleasures -- of other more collective aspects (e.g., colonization, concentration camps, etc.) of power’s history.  These aspects allow the dominatrix to feel the edgy shuddering of craving’s fulfillment in the act of conquest while the subjugated experiences the self-mutilating joy of being turned on, then orgasming at the very moment of his/her humiliating loss of power. 

 

As Michael Foucault has shown in his work, such master-servant relationships echo the penal system’s evolution in the modern world into a “machinery of power” whose aim isn’t rehabilitation but the production of “docile bodies.”  (Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Vintage Books, New York, 1995, p. 138)  Nothing better illustrates puritanism’s role as pornography’s soul than this manufacturing of submissive bodies.  Having shown throughout history that it is incapable of crushing the body’s hungers, puritanism still triumphs in the end by turning those hungers against themselves.  It does this by transforming the satisfaction of the hungers not into a consummation set in motion by the self, but into the subjugated’s compliance with the subjugator’s demands.  Masturbation, the ultimate act of self-pleasuring, is robbed of its origins in the self when the torturer turns it into something the tortured must do.  Like a Hutu husband compelled to slay his Tutsi wife during the Rwandan genocide, the masturbator whose masturbating hand is controlled not by himself but by his enemy is a ruined being for whom touching what is loved (i.e., the wife, the cock) becomes the ugliest form of destruction and degradation. 

 

Such facts seem more chaotic than meaningful.  They oppress rather than enlighten.  It is difficult to feel secure in a world in which such things (e.g., the masturbator’s masturbating hand is controlled not by himself but by his enemy) rise up to prove that our smiles are more idiotic than sane.  We want the world to make sense -- no, we want it to make a certain kind of sense, one that lets us feel comfortable, secure.  The absence of such order panics us.  This is why one philosopher once wrote, “Insecurity generates the quest for certainty.” (John Dewey. The Quest for Certainty, New York: Capricorn Books, 1960, p. 254)

 

And so we hunt for, and find, certainty.  Everywhere.  Even when it doesn’t exist. 

 

From such belief (in certainty) arises the perfect citizen, who has given up, not his life, but his mind for the country. 

 

Example: 

 

In response to the photos of prisoner mistreatment at the hands of US soldiers in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld initially chose not merely to comment on the details of what was depicted in the pictures but also to define (a) what was going on in the photos and (b) what exactly the planet’s populations were upset about.  “I’m not a lawyer,” Rumsfeld explained to the world at a press conference, “but my impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture.”  (Quoted in David Folkenflik, "Dodging Using Words Like ‘Torture’ in The Baltimore Sun, May 26, 2004.)

 

To whom, we should wonder, did Rumsfeld refer when he suggested that those who charged  U.S. guards with inappropriate behavior at Abu Ghraib stressed that the guards were guilty of abuse, not torture?  Whoever these people were, Rumsfeld refused to identify them, thereby creating a situation in which those who developed the this-is-abuse-not-torture thesis were not available for questioning, much as Iraq’s “definitely existing” weapons of mass destruction were not, and still are not, available for analysis.  All this is part of an epistemological game of guess-under-which-shell-the-pea-is-located when there are no shells and no pea either, but only a hypnotist who knows how to embed a picture of shells and peas in your mind.  Facts no longer need to be verified in order to exist, they merely need to be asserted.  CNN and the White House share the same motto: “To say it is to make it.”  This is the “world of information” that we inhabit, a world in which facts are acts of will rather than realities independent of the will. 

 

Rumsfeld’s emphasis on the technical nature of distinguishing between gradations of meaning (“what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture”) is also interesting.  His approach shifts the emphasis from the facts themselves (i.e., evidence of serious mistreatment) to a  suggestion that the real issue is not the facts but the challenge of finding the proper way to classify those facts.  By adopting this stance, Rumsfeld reduces a question of moral/legal substance (e.g., the Geneva Convention mandate against “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”) to a pseudo-scientific concern with categorization and developing lines of demarcation between the various classes of violations that we create.  In the abstract this might make sense, but as a policy discussion tactic intended to postpone rather than facilitate drawing a conclusion it represents thought at the service of bad faith rather than thought at the service of clarity.  In the process,  debate as a method of deferring action is elevated above what one is debating about.  This serves the purpose of providing the powerful (Rumsfeld and those he represents) with a way of entangling others in endless discussions about power while they (the powerful) do not discuss power but rather are power. 

 

 

4

 

The line between one thing and another, between bad and good, between high and low, what do we know about it?  Is it black and definitive?  Or vague, a gray area? 

 

And what about the line between logic and illogic, the graspable and ungraspable?  Is there such a line?  And if so, should we care?

 

The French writer Antonin Artaud wrote, “There are too many signs that everything that used to sustain our lives no longer does so, that we are all mad, desperate, and sick.”

 

But what happens if in a mad time we don’t go mad and instead go about our lives as usual? 

 

Answer: the usual and the condoned become the death of the spirit, while the unusual and the uncondoned become the only hope, the only life. 

 

From the eastern mountains of a southern country that has nothing to do with the Middle East, a message arrived on our shores at the beginning of the new millennium.  It said: 

 

“We rose up not seeking power, not in response to a foreign mandate.  We rose up to say, ‘We are here.’”  (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos “From Vietnam to Chiapas, Twenty Years Before” in Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, edited by Juana Ponce de Leon, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2001, p. 169)

 

We must listen to such voices, question them, challenge tem, wrestle with them, learn from them. 

 

You might think you’re fly but you’re fucked if you can’t do this.   

 

 

5

 

“To see” means “to perceive with the eyes, to look at.” 

 

“Too see” also has other meanings, however, ones that relate to the act of knowing -- e.g., “to perceive things mentally, to discern, to understand” and “to ascertain, learn, find out.” 

 

To understand these various definitions of to see in all their fullness, we must take them to an extreme place. 

 

Extreme as in “outermost” or “far beyond the norm” or “of the greatest severity.”

 

And so: 

 

When a person dies as the result of a combination of suffocation and dehydration, both optical and mental seeing are affected.  Example:  place a person in an enclosed metal drum that has no air holes, then force her/him to remain there for days and the person will not only die, but, prior to death, enter into a state of altered consciousness characterized by delirium and hallucinations. Under such conditions, logic brutally reinvents itself as the mind wrenches free of its conditioning in a desperate effort to discover survival options where there apparently are none. 

 

If this happens not to one person confined to a metal drum but to a large group of people crammed, for instance, into a freight car or the back of a truck, the individuals will eventually descend into unreason.  As police investigators and medical examiners have shown by studying actual incidents, such group insanity includes licking the sweat off each other’s bodies in a panic, biting and clawing each other, hallucinating, babbling hysterically, cannibalism. 

 

Far from being repulsive, such a group breakdown is admirable in that it displays the extent of humanity’s capacity for realism even under the most adverse conditions.  The victims’  collective psychic collapse allows them to confront without blinders the magnitude of their hopelessness and the relativity of all ethics.  No common sense or ordinary logic or method of scientific classification can evoke the depth of this hopelessness with the same eloquence as can insanity.  In such a situation, then,  the loss of reason, with its accompanying physical violence, reveals itself to be not a loss but rather a gain as reason triumphantly reorganizes itself so that it can comprehend and confront that which is beyond all its previous experience.  This gain, this achievement of a new lucidity, is the only valid way to comprehend the nature, the fact, the isness of a forced group death via suffocation and dehydration.  In such a situation. all illusion of order evaporates.  Disorder reigns, having established itself as conditioning’s assassin.

 

The above description is not hypothetical.  It describes the last hours of hundreds of illegally murdered Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners who now lie buried in the mass graves of  Dasht-e Leili, a northern Afghanistan wasteland.  The prisoners, captured in Konduz in late November 2001, were packed into truck cargo containers (approximately 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet in size), then held there until they were transported to another site approximately 24 hours away.  Some survived the journey but hundreds of others, felled by dehydration and slow asphyxiation, were DOA, although not before succumbing to the group symptoms (e.g., panic, biting, delirium, etc) mentioned above.  Reporting how military guards prepared to unload his cargo of two hundred people, one driver told an interviewer, “They opened the doors and the dead bodies spilled out like fish.”  Not one of the driver’s prisoners arrived alive.

 

Whatever panicked, hallucinatory visions the almost-dead had before dying were more accurate as accounts of world reality as seen from inside a questionable war than any CNN or New York Times analysis of what that war was like. 

 

In the words of a 13th century poet born in Afghanistan, “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty / and frightened.”  (Rumi, The Essential Rumi, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco, 1995, p. 36.)

 

Bleakness swells like a tick on a dog’s skin.  As a species we have created wastelands in our own image, landscapes that are simultaneously real and symbolic where, as the Syrian writer Adunis put it, “There is nothing for the wind except naked branches, nothing for the traveler except a blocked road.”  (Adunis, “A Grave for New York” in Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, p. 148.) 

 

Does the road end or begin in Dasht-e Leili?  Are we ourselves the road? 

 

Although U.S. troops were not directly responsible for the suffocation deaths, Newsweek reported that U.S. culpability was still an issue since at the time of the murders “American forces were working intimately” with those “who committed what could well qualify as war crimes.” This U.S. presence consisted of Special Forces and CIA operatives who tutored/guided Northern Alliance units in selection of tactics and use of psychological warfare.  Newsweek also noted that a further indication of the U.S.’s problematic relationship to the deaths was “that Pentagon spokesmen have obfuscated when faced with questions” about the mass suffocations and that “Defense Department spokespersons have made statements that are false” concerning the deaths.

 

“Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s . . .”

 

Beethoven said about the beginning of his Symphony No. 5 that “Destiny pounds at your door like this.”

 

But in our era what music do we have that shows us destiny’s physique? 

 

no seein’ with that mind 

 

 

6. 

 

Disbelief is a method.  A specific posture in relation to the world.  It is not a rejection of the world.  I don’t disbelieve in the existence of things.  Or of events.  I merely disbelieve in the illusion that they exist. 

 

Here is what “the illusion that they exist” means.  

 

The illusion of a thing’s existence always takes a particular form.  That form is this: someone or some group portrays a thing in a particular way, then says, “This is how this thing exists; if it doesn’t exist in this way, it isn’t real and doesn’t exist at all.” 

 

As mathematician, physicist and astronomer, Galileo was a genius.  Yet he “knew” beyond a doubt that comets were not real but were optical illusions.  He “knew” this because, according to the prevalent view of his time, astronomical bodies, being part of an immutable and perfectly organized heavenly zone, always moved in perfectly formed, self-contained circles and never in elliptical or any other “imperfect” (i.e., non-circular) orbits or trajectories.  This illusion that the heavens and all within them were mathematically organized in specific, unchanging ways that did not allow for so-called imperfection prevented Galileo from “seeing” the comets for what they were -- i.e., real heavenly bodies.

 

Galileo’s response to comets was an example of compound illusion.  His incorrect belief that comets were illusions was itself based on an illusion about the heavens.  That illusion was this:  that all heavenly bodies moved circularly and therefore any body which did not move circularly could not be a heavenly body.  Clearly, this was am instance of belief or presumption dictating what one thought one saw.  As a result of this dictation, the fictive heavens (fictive in the sense of being described as only containing bodies that moved circularly) relegated real comets to the status of unreality (unreal in the sense that the dominant -- but wrong-  view of how heavenly bodies behaved left no room for their existence). 

 

In this way a fictive view of the heavens triumphed over real comets in much the same way that in late winter 2003 a fictive view of the “definite” existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq triumphed over the reality of their nonexistence there.    Consequently, the possibility of war turned into the illusion of the inevitability of war.  In the end, this illusion produced not an illusory, but a real, war.  The real had been spawned by the unreal. 

 

From Galileo to Bush, compound illusion has produced labyrinthine traps waiting to snare consciousness. 

 

Initially, compound illusion springs from a single illusion.  As already stated, such single illusions always take the form of someone or some group portraying a thing in a particular way, then implying or saying “This is how this thing exists; if it doesn’t exist in this way, it isn’t real and doesn’t exist at all.” 

 

Heavenly bodies only move circularly. 

 

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq definitely possesses weapons of mass destruction. 

 

The Jew is “a true bloodsucker who attaches himself to the body of an unhappy people” and, because of this, the greatest failure that can befall such a people is for them not to “recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace.”  Or so said Hitler in Mein Kampf.  (Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1943, p. 310, 327.)

 

Illusion -- i.e., the insistence that a thing must be seen in this way and this way only -- has a life of its own.  Fortunately, the thing and the illusion of the thing are distinct.  On the one hand there is the illusion, on the other there is the thing that the illusion is about.  If one destroys the illusion of a thing’s existence, the illusion dies but the thing still exists.

 

But so what?  Searching for the thing is so exhausting that even if one finally glimpses it, one is sufficiently bedraggled that the glimpse seems anticlimactic.  The thing’s existence, or our search for that existence, no longer matters. 

 

“Does anything matter?” a voice in the brain asks.   

 

There is no definitive answer to this question about mattering.  One individual slips into  depression and eventually commits suicide because she or he can’t tolerate a world stripped of illusion.  Another individual thrives in such a world.  Neither person is right, neither wrong.  One is dead, the other alive, that’s all.  Different people respond differently to things and events.

 

For an observer to “know” what these different people should and shouldn’t do in a particular situation is a delusion of grandeur.  However, knowing what these different individuals’ options are isn’t a delusion. 

 

It’s an acknowledgment of the pluralism of the real.   

 

 

7.

 

One of the illusions we must overcome is ourselves. 

 

Wherever we turn, we find another force that shapes us. Each “I” is both a tub of genetic code and the perpetually changing result of endless environmental, cultural, economic psychological and other molders.  The I in I am isn’t a pre-existing entity that persists in tact through multiple life stages, occupations and so on. The I instead is the evolution of a perspective.  It is a being’s self-creation and the mechanics of that creation.   

 

In her book Imperial Designs and Indian Realities, which documents the steps taken by the British to plan and improve Bombay from 1845-1875, Mariam Dossal touches upon a number of issues pertaining to group and individual identity.  One of these issues for the British  at the time was the challenge of making sure the city’s physical organization reinforced the colonists’ view of themselves as “above” the lowly locals.  This was accomplished through a variety of tactics.  One of these was the separation of Indians and British into distinct parts of the city, with the Indians crammed into densely populated chawls or tenements and the British inhabiting superior dwellings.  Another was the colonists’ implementation of an architectural vision which stressed the importance of constructing large stone buildings whose appearance symbolized the colonists’ strength, durability and towering nature in comparison with the enfeebled status of the supposedly lesser locals. 

 

The use of such tactics wasn’t simply a method of imposing outside rule on the indigenous population, it was also a method of instructing that population in how to view themselves -- i.e., as a lesser people.  This psychological dimension of the colonial project was an unrelenting aspect of the British presence and as such was a constant force in daily life.  The chawls’ filth, the presence of the tanning industry’s dangerous dyeing pits in the midst of the Indian (not British) living sections, the employment of Indian soldiers as the occupying army’s bottom strata were all physical realities that played a crucial role in shaping a new Indian identity.  That identity was as an “less than.”  In this way “I am an Indian” became synonymous with “I am powerless when faced with my ruler’s power.”

 

As Dossal pointed out in her book, not only architecture and urban planning but also the most subtle aspects of language use were at the service of reinforcing the creation of this new identity. 

 

 

In this way the Indian I became an illusion in the sense cited above.  The I wasn’t a product of its own self-examination but was rather the product of an outside force’s insistence that it must be seen in this way and this way only and if it wasn’t seen in this way, then it possessed no value -- and no existence, for that matter -- whatsoever. 

 

Such an I can’t find itself until it first obliterates itself.  Sometimes such obliteration leads to liberation, sometimes to nervous breakdown and/or psychosis. 

 

 

8.

 

For too long many people in the world believed that capitalism’s goal was to reproduce itself on a global scale.  These people  believed that colonialism and imperialism were the vehicles through which capitalism tried to bring about this state of affairs.  They believed that although capitalism’s initial interest in conquering other countries was in gaining access to their natural resources and workforces, capitalism’s ultimate interest was in using the colonial period to foster a local capitalism that would eventually, after independence was achieved, play the role of a Little Brother Capitalism to the west’s Big Brother Capitalism. 

 

This is not the correct way to look at capitalism. 

 

Capitalism is not an economic Don Juan seeding poor nations’ wombs with baby capitalisms that it hopes will one day grow up and take over its empire. 

 

On the contrary, capitalism loathes progeny.  Even more insane than the biblical Herod, who declared that the firstborn of every Jewish family should be slain, capitalism decrees that its own children should be slain.  An so, in an orgy of transcendent self-satisfaction, capitalism spawns an image of itself in every womb that it can rape, then slaughters any fetus unfortunate enough to survive long enough to evolve into a human and be born.   

 

This slaughter isn’t abstract.  It is made of flesh and blood.  Or at least of their decay.  We can see it. 

 

Look at the violence that much of the underdeveloped world inflicts upon itself as its populations, which make up a majority of the world’s inhabitants, go mad in their desperate attempts to survive on a small portion of the world’s natural resources, three-quarters of which are controlled by the richest one-quarter of the world’s population (including the United States) while the poorest three-quarters of the planet’s inhabitant must scrape by on only 25% of the planet’s bounty. (Dimensions of Need, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy, 1995.) 

 

No biblical Isaiah is needed to cry out, “Behold!”

 

In Rwanda, where ancient tribal rivalries were exacerbated by a postcolonial legacy of scarcity, the 800,000 Tutsi corpses slain by Hutus speak for themselves. 

 

In Ethiopia, the starving are a choir of beggars wandering in the shadows of ancient Coptic manuscripts written by naive authors who believed that the world actually made sense from at least a theological perspective. 

 

In Central America the hundreds of thousands of disappeared and dead victimized by  North America’s client governments even now haunt us as their children sneak across our borders in order to gain at least a glimpse of the so-called good life that their parents were killed to protect.

 

Capitalism slaughtering its children is the definitive holocaust of our era. 

 

Capitalism doesn’t want to duplicate itself around the world.  It is Jesse James.  It wants all the other gunslingers dead. 

 

The purity of capitalism’s monomaniacal desire to dominate the planet is located in the perfect chaos that it spawns. 

 

The absence of order is the central characteristic of the New World Order.  The chaos of post-Soviet Russia is preferable not just to communism but to any type of structure or ism (including a rival capitalism) that would threaten US global interests. 

 

There is a frightening violence here.  And much to wade through in order, finally, to see. 

 

Look at Abu Ghraib again.  The contentious back and forth between liberals and conservatives concerning what the photos at the scandal’s center ultimately signified created a news environment characterized by saturation coverage but no final answers.  This allowed government and media spokespersons to be amply disgusted by what they saw while simultaneously casting into ambiguity the question of what the scenes photographed in the prison actually meant.  The only point of shared clarity was that something indeed had happened in Abu Ghraib and that this something was not very good.  Beyond this one shared point of clarity, the quest for accuracy was crippled by what was perceived as an inevitable reliance on conjecture.  Take one of the most famous photographs as an example, the one in which a female U.S. soldier pulls a leash that is attached to an Iraqi man on the floor.  The details of the image, the bare facts, are all we know for certain.  Beyond that, it is alleged, we have no way of ascertaining with scientific precision that the soldier’s actions were intended to be degrading in the Geneva Convention sense of that term.  After all, a hypnotist may have convinced her that the leashed man was actually a dog named Spot.  Or, as has been suggested by many commentators, she possibly was manipulated by her lover, another MP.  Or maybe she was (is) just plain sadomasochistic. 

 

Any of these possibilities or others may be, or may not be, true.  There’s no way we can know absolutely.  We only know this:  that during a fraction of a second, that brief instant when the digital camera’s shutter opened, two people were recorded in a pose that possesses a number of potential meanings, none of which is verifiable in any ultimate sense. 

 

Or so the argument goes. 

 

We can, however, in spite of this argument, hazard some intelligent guesses about the meaning and implications of what was photographed at the prison :  (1) according to international law, the soldier should not have been leading a prisoner on a dog leash and (2) based on history, we can surmise that she or some other low-ranking military person or persons, as opposed to higher-up officers, will pay most of the price for the Abu Ghraib fiasco. 

 

Putting aside the notion, then, of trying to grasp the photo’s significance in an “ultimate” sense, we find that it is knowable in a significant way, at least at an allegedly lower level.  

 

Nonetheless, in terms of the media’s and government’s presentation of the photo to us, what we were faced with in the picture wasn’t “a meaning” or a “thing,” but rather part of a spectacle.  The object we were requested to study (i.e., the photo, what it records) quickly became inseparable from its function within newstainment:  to exist as a contested site where a battle occurred between various informations that claimed to have the only true understanding of the image either as a meaning or a thing.  In this way a national debate occurred, a debate whose powerlessness to effect events existed in direct proportion to how noisy and headlines-generating it briefly was.  

 

The fact that subsequent to the initial news coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the government denounced what happened at the prison, then convicted some of the (low-ranking) soldiers who were involved, doesn’t alter the fact that the scandal’s coverage did more to promote talking-heads-dominated newstainment that it did to launch a serious national discussion of the U.S.’s history of insisting that it not be held accountable to international law.  Instead of such a discussion, we got democracy in its rawest, most useless form:   a chaos of shouted opinions that overwhelms all hope of meaningful thought. 

 

Welcome to virtual reality where things and events drown in an electronic ocean of multitudinous images and analyses of things and events.  Real and unreal merge as everything is possible but nothing, ultimately, provable.  Thought, although it still exists, is increasingly crowded out by a lot of thinking about thinking that is premised on the notion that the world’s hereness is less interesting than the challenge of what we can mentally conjure out of that hereness.  

 

So, the dissident activist dies while the opinion-producers thrive. 

 

There is no escape. 

 

Unless we “lose it.”  Unless, while smashing furniture and breaking windows, we shout, in a maniacal outburst that triumphs over all good taste and that will result in our being placed on every government “under suspicion” list that exists, “Fuck this!  I will bring down the whole house of cards if that’s what’s required to see even one small thing clearly!  I disbelieve in everything about the power structure except its existence!  I hate it and hate those who run it!  They and their creation must be destroyed!”

 

Only in such a violent anarchy of disbelief is there hope. 

 

We must out-disorder the disorderers.  We must achieve a level of creative disbelief of such profound dimensions that the chaos of disbelieving in the structures that supposedly give life meaning becomes the type of simplicity -- i.e., the pureness of a pure no, the cleanliness of the absolute rejection of the status quo -- that begins the toppling of the worst tyrannies.   

9.  

 

A note on religion.  

 

My disbelief in religion does not preclude my belief in the spiritual.  The universe is characterized by a transcendent mathematics that we don’t fully grasp yet.  Our species possesses a potential we haven’t yet tapped.  I stoop down and study the white horse nettle and am amazed. 

 

Yes, the spiritual exists.  But that is not what I am writing about here. 

 

When I say “a note on religion,” this is what I am talking about:  

 

Traditional theology has turned a corner.  It can never go back.  

 

Believing or not believing in God is no longer relevant.  

 

The only relevant issue is,:  If there is a God, what is he (or it or she or he-she)?

 

Answer:  God is a condom.  Why?  If a rapist wants to protect himself from sexually transmitted diseases but still wants to have “fun,” he places a condom on his cock before raping his victim. If a noncriminal wants to protect himself from the accusation that he is criminal, he places God on his cock.  This allows the cock, patriarch-like, to do whatever it wants, and to violate the dignity of anybody it wants to violate, without catching the “disease” of being labeled criminal.  

 

Unlike the condoms sold in pharmacies, God is not merely 98% or 99% effective.  He is 100% effective.  According to the government, no one wearing God on his cock ever gets ill.  

 

We should all convert to Roman Catholicism.  This is because the pope doesn’t want us to wear condoms when we fuck.  We should oblige him.  God must be the first condom chucked.  

 

If we want to use God in our private, consensual relations with others, that is fine.  But God must not be let out of the bedroom since, whenever he has gotten free in the past, he has gone bionic and started more trouble than he’s worth.  

 

Witness the mass extermination and impoverishment of our continent’s indigenous inhabitants.  

 

Witness, also, the mass extermination of the nation’s collective mind, its capacity to see the world clearly.  We just can’t figure out why so many Muslims around the globe distrust us.  While CNN’s hired pundits debate the nuances of U.S. policy in the Middle East, no detail of that policy goes unscrutinized  The only thing missing is an understanding of what the scrutinized actually means.  Analysis is everywhere but critical thinking is nowhere to be seen.  Consequently, nothing happens inside us, no growth in wisdom occurs.  

 

We have forgotten what is required to get “to the bottom of things,” to see.  Self-discipline, unless attached to an acceptable commodity like the latest diet fad or a high-tech treadmill or a corporate teamwork seminar, is extinct.  Self-discipline is no longer a life-long methodology for sharpening focus but is instead a one-month or six-month experiment in having your chocolate and eating it too (e.g., drinking Slimfast)  or in taking a white suburban night school class in the “Exotic World of Voodoo” without having to go through the inconvenience of simultaneously studying, in a disciplined way, the history of white racial stereotyping that produced the very concept of an “exotic voodoo” to begin with.  This is self-discipline for the post-thinking age:  learn self-control while taking 50 mgs of Ativan twice daily to make sure that your self-discipline doesn’t get in the way of staying relaxed and not worrying about difficult or distasteful issues.  

 

Now cut to Emily Dickinson, weirdo of the pre-Ativan era.  

 

Emily Dickinson was a skinny 19th century spinster with a variety of peculiar habits who composed poems while keeping house for daddy.  In spite of her eccentric exterior, she understood that true focus produced a new clarity that alters, often in shocking, unnerving ways, how one experiences, and acts in, the world.  She didn’t run from this possibility, she ran toward it.  

 

In a beautifully stated and incisive poem about despair, Dickinson wrote:  

As in many of Dickinson’s poems, in this poem the lack of a transparent syntactical logic renders her meaning more fragmented than it might be otherwise.  This is shown in how her untraditional use (she does this throughout her work) of so many dashes inevitably edges the reader toward greater than usual uncertainty about how to read what is written.  For instance, the dash after “Afternoons” in this first stanza stops (for what reason?) the sentence’s forward motion, whereas the dash after “Tunes” in the same stanza functions as a period and does so in a place where a period might well be placed; on the other hand, the dash following “Death” at the poem’s conclusion could serve as a period although it works just as well (maybe better) as an indication of a not-quite-graspable meaning beyond the poem’s last word.  

 

Such punctuation makes for a jagged read, but in spite of this jaggedness the poem begins with and sustains an eloquent, albeit stark, lyricism (the slanted light image, the heavenly hurt idea, “the Distance / On the look of Death” at the end, etc.).   It is the image of light of course that drives the poem and shapes the speaker’s emotional state.  In taking on the qualities of the season (winter) in the narrator’s mind, the light seduces the speaker with its cold bleakness into a state of strange awareness.  Strange because the bleakness or “hurt” that the speaker feels is described as heavenly, which suggests that the narrator’s feeling of oppression is, ironically, somehow sublime and related in a positive way to redemption and the Kingdom of God.  But when we look back at the previous image and see how the light is described as being oppressive “like the Heft / of Cathedral Tunes,” we realize that religion and all its trappings are themselves associated in the poem with the very despair from which religion theoretically delivers us.  

 

All of these things (syntactical complexity, image density and so on) added together, however, do not produce the poem’s meaning.   Rather, they make up the context out of which the meaning -- or, better, one of the poem’s meanings -- arises.  This meaning doesn’t take the form of a directive or a statement of fact, but rather exists in the poem’s tone, in the almost scientific way the speaker, sinking into despair, nonetheless refuses to look away from or in any other way rationalize/romanticize the gloom that has engulfed her.  Instead, the narrator, in a state of reverse transcendence fueled by a sense of emptiness, experiences a reorganization -- within her, in the place “Where the Meanings are” -- of her relationship to the world.  This “internal difference” allows her to see -- lucidly, with an almost barbaric simplicity -- an isness that, not softened by opportunistic moralizing or made palatable through the imposition of an “ordering” logic, seems to lie, stripped of all illusion, at the bottom of things.  

 

Whether or not this is, in a universal sense, a definitive vision of the world is not the point.  That it is an accurate vision of despair, however, is beyond question.  Even more importantly, this is not a despair that stops at despondence but instead is one that, transformed by despondency, becomes the vehicle of a ruthless philosophical realism that liberates the self to meditate on, and find meaning in, what is rather than what isn’t (e.g., simplistic salvations, unexamined perceptions, etc.).    

 

On the basis of this one poem alone, it is clear that Dickinson was more mentally liberated than many of the (supposedly) finest minds of her day.  Yet she didn’t write just one poem, she wrote 1,175 of them.  Of all those poems, however, only seven were published in her lifetime; consequently, no one had the faintest idea of the quality and quantity of her output.  The few who knew she wrote didn’t know the scope of her efforts and at any rate found it impossible to see beyond her quirkiness to the full range of her talent and insightfulness.  She was even mocked by some of those she trusted most.  One friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, once referred to her, while discussing her at a dinner party, as “the half-cracked poetess” from Amherst.  

 

At some point as a young woman, Dickinson started dressing all in white and continued this habit until she died.  At age 25 she visited Boston; this was the last time she strayed beyond her hometown.  After age 29, she restricted her movements even more:  she never again left her family property.  She died seventeen years later in 1886 at the age of 56.  

 

Cloistered woman, spinster, enigma, subject of mockery, whatever.  Be on the look-out.  Brilliance is always arising from people we ignore and ridicule.   

 

In conclusion, I want to return for a minute to the title.  To the mother there.  We must remember:  her genitalia is tangential, not definitive.    

 

Mothering isn’t something only humans with cunts do.  Some humans with dicks mother too.  So do some humans who had dicks but then had them surgically removed.  And what about the humans with cunts who want dicks and so strap on plastic ones to make sure other people view them (i.e., these dickless humans who want dicks) as humans with members, not holes.  

 

Genitalia-based discussions of mothering and mothers are a waste of time.  

 

Non-genitalia-based discussions about mothering and mothers aren’t, however, a waste of time.  

 

I believe in mothers but disbelieve in assumptions about mothers.  

 

Disbelief is the beginning of knowledge.  Not its end. 

 

Kill the war makers.  Kill their mothers.  Kill what's been taught. 

 

Remember: when Mary, his mother, begged to see him, Jesus proclaimed, “I have no mother.” 

 

Seek freedom.  Be prepared.  Always. 

 

Bugs Bunny got a banger's bozack.  While shootin' his Uzi, he hoots, "That's all, folks!"  He's the prototype for come correct, total boo-yaa.

 

To see the obvious, see the unseen. 

 

The mother who mothered us is more there than any definition of mother that reduces mothering in size by amputating a few  pounds of flesh in an effort to make it conform to some wounded kingpin's hysteria. 

 

Shred the kingpin's dictionary.  We must write our own.    

11. 

 

Knowledge is a burden.  It’s easier to let others die than to accept the responsibility of disbelieving in the given.

 

Disbelieve in the given.  

 

Disbelieve.