Welcome.

“We are not lost. We are here.”*

Now what’s going to happen to us without Barbarians?**

The Dutch doctor Bernard de Mandeville, who set up his practice in England in the early eighteenth century, published in 1714 an essay he called The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, in which he argued that the system of mutual assistance which allows society, like a beehive, to function, feeds on the honeyed passion of consumers who love to acquire what they don’t need. A virtuous society, Mandeville maintained, in which only the basic requirements must be satisfied, would have neither trade nor culture, and therefore collapse for want of employment. The consumer society that came fully into being almost two centuries later, took Mandeville’s sarcastic arguments literally. Flattering the senses, valuing possession over worth or need, it turned the notion of value on its head: value, according to the codes of advertising, became not the worth of an object nor a service measured in its practice, but a perception based on how extensively the service or object was promoted and under what brand name. In the consumer world, Berkeley’s esse est percepi has a different meaning. Perception is at the root of being, but things acquire value not because they need to exist but because they are perceived as being needed. Desire becomes then not the source but the end-product of consumption.

Like Jack London’s Assassination Bureau, Hal [9000 in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey] is a failproof machine, built to reach the wished-for goal “at all costs,” even at the cost of its maker’s life. The mercantile structure that we have built as the driving engine of our society is as perfect as those other imaginary constructs, and as lethal. We have given it the command to reach a goal, to render financial profit at all cost; we have forgotten to inscribe in its memory the caveat: except at the cost of our lives. For the vast economic machinery that governs every aspect of our societies . . . we are the Barbarians. That appears to be the identity awaiting us.

In our search for structures within which we can be with one another, we may have ended up with societies from whose benefits we all seem destined to be excluded. Disregarding the abuse of human rights for the sake of economic partnerships, allowing the devastation of the planet with the excuse of ever-increasing financial benefits, refusing to adopt scientific solutions because of superstitious beliefs: all these things allow partnerships, profits, and beliefs to overide the responsibilites we have toward each other, toward ourselves individually, and toward the world.

[Fashion dictates]; that is to say, that the dictates of commercial dogma are made to impregnate so deeply the fabric of society that no strand remains unaffected, and even though we might consciously refuse to follow the day’s fashion, we will nevertheless become “slaves to the system.”

This last point is all important: the industry must educate us in our stupidity, because we don’t come by stupidity naturally [my emphasis]. On the contrary, we come into the world as intelligent creatures, curious and avid for instruction. It takes immense time and effort, individually and collectively, to dull and eventually stifle our intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, our creative perception, and our use of language.***

Paradoxically, it is the very rich nature of language that allows for it to be co-opted, to be reduced to dogma or, on the contrary, to flourish as literature.

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

Cartoon: Mr. Fish

*Northrop Frye
**Constantin Cavafy
*** What I call, “trained to be comfortable.”

Why are we together?

In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne attempted to understand the reasons that move us to be together, whether we be frighteningly different or attractively similar. In the Municipal Library of Bordeaux is a copy of Montaigne’s Essays annotated in his hand, with corrections for the printer, which Montaigne kept by his bedside to revise it at his leisure. In the first book, in Essay 28, he had written about his relationship with Etienne de la Boetie, a dear friend who had died in 1563 at the age of thirty-three, and whose loss Montaigne had felt so deeply. “In the friendship of which I’m speaking,” Montaigne says, “souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.” According to Montaigne, in this kind of relationship the separation between “I” and “the other” is not denied: each preserves intact his individuality and uniqueness; only that the “seam” that unites them, and which is consequently what divides one human being from the other, “cannot be found” in the eyes of the observer: it remains undetected and therefore unlabelled, free from the possibility of prejudice. This distinct invisibility, this evident but indefinable “separateness” that links two individuals in affectionate concern for one another, is what a fluid, multifaceted may strive for, not only between two but between all of its members. Before jumping to the conclusion that such relationships are impossible on so large a scale, let us ask: in what does it consist, exactly, this as-if seamless relationship? Montaigne confesses that he finds it impossible to give an answer: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed.” This is how the paragraph ends in the text of all editions of the Essays, up to 1588. But then, in 1592, shortly before his death, Montaigne found a sort of an answer and scribbled it on the right hand margin of the printed book. After “it cannot be expressed,” he wrote in his elegant script, “except by replying, because it was him.” That is to say, because of those qualities that identified his friend and yet remained ineffable, because of what lent him existence not because of their perceived difference but because of his intrinsic qualities. And then, a few days or months later, as if the full notion had suddenly been revealed to him, Montaigne added five more words in a hurried hand and in a different ink, so that today we can read the whole sentence as one single thought, luminous in its wisdom: “If you pressed me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by replying, because it was him and because it was me.”

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

I want the above read at my funeral.

The Two Merrys

Me & Joseph

Ready or not.

It’s Christmas. And, once again, I’m making all the wrong choices.

That is, doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t do again last year.

That is, do Christmas.

“I won’t go to that trouble again.”

No. Never.

The “trouble”, exactly?

This year, I simply can’t afford it. It really is a matter of living expenses or Christmas. Rent or not.

And, you can’t not have Christmas.

You’re either generous or a Scrooge. A believer or a heathen. Love me or don’t. Success or failure (i.e., flush or broke).

Not that I actually ascribe to any of the above, and I’m a giver. It delights me to bestow. And there’s very little joy in not being able to gift as I would like.

Would it feel any differently if I could afford it?

Duh.

“What’s wrong with you? We’re all in the same boat this year. Don’t worry about it. We understand. We’ll get through it.”

Sure we will.

All I remember as a child about Christmas, is you either got what you wanted, or not. And it was never the expected (necessary) clothes item from Grandma Kirby (bought by Mom), it was what you really wanted, from Santa, which Mom already told you you weren’t getting.

If you did, it was a “good Christmas” this year. If not, it was somehow still a “good Christmas”, I guess. Because we had one.

Okay, that’s a bit one-sided. There’s other things I enjoyed, still, about Christmas.

The lights. The caroles. The crowded church. Snow. The biggest orange I’ve ever seen in my stocking. Christmas cookies (we frosted, with sprinkles). Christmas eve, my mother’s side, with her eight siblings, always a full house of merriment with ham surrounded by a feast. Hugs and kisses.

The anticipation. Some years more cursed than joyful.

There will be ham tonight. (Thanks, Shelley).

And loved ones.

And Johnny Mathis.

Merry.

Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.*

The love of liberty is the love of others;
the love of power is the love of ourselves.**

Language is our common denominator.

Literature is the opposite of dogma. A literary text lies constantly open to other readings, to other interpretations, perhaps because literature, unlike dogma, allows for both freedom of thought and for freedom of expression, and is, like those essential genes that granted us the power of imagination, self-reproductive. I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use. Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no very last one. Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier. “Freedom of expression,” declared the Egyptian theologian Gamal Al-Banna, commenting on recent manifestations of Islamic extremism, “is an integral part of the freedom of thought. I believe that all opinions must be accepted. Otherwise, there is no freedom. Freedom can find its own limits, but to impose them from outside is contrary to its nature and risks destroying it.”

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

Artist: Martin Creed Words Fail Me @ MOCAD ’til January 20, 2008 Photo: NYTimes

*Freedom, baby. Freedom.

**William Hazlitt, Political Essays, 1819

“The free man never thinks of escape.”*

“Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation. ”

MOSHE FELDENKRAIS

I’m still a liberationist. There are damn few of us left.

*JEANETTE WINTERSON, Weight

Holiday bliss.

Just a reminder of the exquisitely rendered gifts of love, joy, and beauty you will find in Kensington Market by the boys of the season, Joey & Leo of Orbital Arts (275 Augusta Avenue). Boxes, bowls, buddhas, dishes, and furnishings, (many $15 – $40), transformed into delectable pieces that delight and inspire.

I’ll be playing music and spreading cheer at the store this Sunday (the 16th), and the following weekend, including the magical merriment known as Festival of Lights, my favourite local event of the year, celebrating the Winter Solstice, Friday, December 21 at dusk.

Come shop and play!

It started as a crush . . .

now, it’s love.

The Two Toms

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787*

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for believe, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.

THOMAS PAINE, The Age of Reason

*Jefferson believed that Jesus was “the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country,” and [the apostle] Paul was the “first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” The words of Jesus he called “diamonds,” and the words of his disciples he called “dung.”

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, Blasphemy: How the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence

Photo: from the K. Ryan Jones documentary, Fall From Grace.