January 10th, 1976 at 3:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
If wealth consists of things like food and clothing and shelter and fire to name a few of the more “wealth-filled” things, just how wealthy is a society like ours where most of the people spend their working lives creating goods and services which can hardly be called essential elements possessing wealth? True it is we have plenty of the wealth-filled things, an overabundance of them, but is it at any rate wise for so many people to be occupied in the work of making unnecessaries—objects which often only make more need for more work?
Are we in danger of, say, topping over because we have lost touch with what is our real base of wealth: food, clothing, shelter, fire, land? If we are so wealthy that we must manufacture a slew of unnecessary products to keep ourselves busy or simply to content ourselves, things of marginal but slight wealth-value, then why don’t we guarantee to everyone free the basic wealth? Since everyone is now over-motivated to work to make and acquire the “finer” things of wealth—the marginal things—there is no reason to supposed that, guaranteed the basics of wealth which practically everyone has anyway, they will lose their over-motivation. But even if they do—what harm?
But there is a point to be made here: most of what we make that we consider to be our wealth, that we identify for instance in our gross national product, is of only marginal value—marginal wealth. Yet it is what especially decoys us into thinking our day to be so many times better off than any pre-industrial time. The biggest difference is our wealth of questionable value, bought at a price to our environment and our pace of life that may be grossly high.
But we pay for it: perhaps because it has become our habit, our new tradition: perhaps we simply don’t know any better, and feel for reasons of our own that it is what we’re supposed to do—it’s progress. Perhaps, and this is the least fun thought, perhaps it is built into the industrial economic system that we must pay for and buy these things—or else risk the toppling over of the entire system, the things of basic wealth-value going down too.
But all in all the industrial civilization still looks best to us—because after all it has guaranteed us the basic things of food and clothing and shelter and warmth, not all of which people (say 500 years ago) could depend on continually (or perhaps in places even sporadically). But what exactly has industrial civilization done? It has enabled us to mass-produce clothing and fire and food to meet the needs of millions—to give the vitals to an over-populated earth. And because of this suddenly the population of the earth shot drastically up. Now industrial civilization meets the needs of billions. For food, clothing, fire and shelter the world is no longer overpopulated. It is even possible that industrial civilization may curb the “population explosion” with contraceptives. But to do all this has resulted in fantastic and sudden changes in the way we live and the things we have enough of to value and the speed of life and the responsibility thrust into our heads, and still, still we live on a greatly overpopulated earth for land.
We’ve had to think up new purposes for living, and new things to do, new ways to spend our time. We’ve had to reconcile ourselves to new work—to occupations and careers many times removed from what man has evolved for. And in all this there must be a sure loss in quality of life—for our environment, physically and mentally, biologically and socially, has become something we are not quite used to, something we can not exactly be at home in, something modernly alien.
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January 5th, 1976 at 8:15 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
In old writings of some old writers there is a real, flowing emotion, such that the words become a thick sky, a thick dark sky about you that you breathe in deep as you read. The emotion engulfs you in your lungs, heaving in and out of you as you stare from word to word. They wrote in a poetry, even when they abandoned rhyme and meter; there was a rhythm of the sway and pull of life, like a close pagan sky. You can see this in parts of the King James Bible, it is there in the Oddessey, and in the medieval writings of men like Aelfric and Chaucer and William of Glouchester. Some of it is even there in turn of the century writers like T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence.
But today it seems to have been lost. We write from our head now, and our prose reads like gaudy abstract clouds being reeled in fashion across a slick blue-tinted glass. Our poets have lost all their poetry, and instead write smug lines of intellectual metaphors, as gaudy as any cloud reeled across any slick blue-tinted glass. We have left the flow of our hearts’ blood out of our writing, just as surely as we have banned it from our living. Any emotions we “feel” are carefully edited and trimmed to mesh with the little, current dalliances of our heads, the little ideas and hypotheses we live on.
In trying to be universal men, and universal women, we have only boxed ourselves into the locality of our small “modern” society. Small, as all words must be, that are isolated, amputated from the cycle of man, the ancient generations of men working their lives in the folds of the close blue sky, centuries of men living from the silent germ and knowledge of their bodies a part of earth and sky. Instead today we are living in the local little world of our minds and our face-mask personalities, in the small little circle of what we call “objectivity.” It’s but a small little circle of enclosure, squeezing us into the tight bone-hard sacks of our skulls. We can feel our table-lamp personalities emanating out of our eyes, mouths and noses in cellophane yellow rays of filmed, edited, produced, and distributed “emotions.” It is the light bulb of our head, as opposed to the flickering, burning, delicate flame of what used to be known as the heart, or breast, or flow of our blood.
And so we have the universal man, stretching out his eyes and tongue and ears into the modern sterile universe. And filling it. And at the same time being over-blown by it.
For it is a universe created by logos, out of logos, and steadied from within by the dacron thread guidewires of logos. Man become God and logos and circus acrobat. Both filled and emptied by the cellophane yellow ramp of his own eyes, his own noses, his own mouths.
So that our modern writing is but this logos on paper; all of our head, and not a bit from our close ancient sky-life in our lungs, or the rosy, wide sun that feeds the delicate warm flame in our breast. We are bereft of the warm flesh body below our necks. Though we worship it and exercise it, and push it to limits, and carry our pride in it, we are bereft of it, for we have stored and fitted it into the new modern prisons of our new modern heads. We can use our bodies in security, because of the surety and control of our modern prisons. There will be no mild riots or disorderlinesses: for we act from the logos stamped and sealed in our minds, within the tight bone-structure of our skulls, never from the little warm flame in our bodies—much to the detriment and waste of the stark, white, cyclic sun over our heads.
What we are missing is the strange, full emotion and pull of writing like this:
“Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.” And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met or whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt.” D. H. Lawrence
We have never seen the sun, but with our heads, we have never tasted the wind, felt the damp earth, stared at the moon, smelled of the blood of the pine, but with the educated modern personality of our heads; as if they were cut free, independent lives all themselves. Little, cut free people of heads.
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January 3rd, 1976 at 9:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976, Journal)
So Queenie is bearded now—a white or grey beard. We were lying on the floor, home again, and she nudged her head into my clothes, and looked into my face. We were home again, back in out of the cold, and she was breathing from the run in the cold, and I was lying there as she stretched her side across the floor and nestled her head into my clothes, and looked at me. I was studying her face, and she must have seen that, and nuzzled me more, and I patted her head, so soft from the black hair, the short black hair that had kept her head warm above her brain when we had been out in the cold, and I thought about it why it was so short, compared to the hair on her body which was so furry and long.
And so I studied her face, covered like a carpet of her short black hair, and the long matted hair of her ears, and the little black, bare nose, and the thick warm long hair of the neck, I studied it and then I saw—the little white mustache hair above the mouth. Yes a white mustache like a man’s on her black face, beneath the black, bare little nose. And below her mouth, on her chin—more little white hairs, congregated together out of the black forest of hair into the beard of a man. The white mustache and beard of a man.
It had been cold today—a white sort of cold, with crisp white air. The cold had come Saturday for the little white flurries of snowdrops, like miniature white petals of flowers, that covered the sky and breathing air, but disappeared into nothing but the damp shine of the wetness of the ground and buildings and hard road pavements. The cold had come, and stayed behind after the snow had left, and spent the night, and the day, and the night, and again today the day again, and again tonight the night. We had walked in it tonight, Queenie and I, down the lane of houses and across the bridge of concrete, and the interstate noise of cars, and the weird straight white and red lights of it, down the black asphalt road where there were no lights, white, red, or any color, toward the dark shadows of school buildings up on the hill.
Queenie ran from me in and out of the darkness, panting and breathing out the cold, and the cold, away sound of her running against the road. I walked, bundled in my winter growth of coats and pants, and the hardened, worn soles of my leather and rubber feet. I was warm from the cold, and could feel it in its movement across my face and about my hair as I walked. With each step the cold stepped, and each stop the cold stopped. I could feel the cold to my eyes, and my warm little pockets of flesh above and below each eye. Queenie would come, sudden, out of the darkness running, stopping just before me, faking a jump against my thighs, but then veering off to the right into a clear hole to touchdown. You could see the cold about her, in the wind trying to get in past the barrier of her hair—but there was no way in—, in the white air appearing through the night in the place of her breath from running—but again it was outside her and found no way in—, finally in the hard cold clatter of her feet on the shadowy hollow asphalt of a road—the sound and clang of cold—but again though it could gather in invisible waves of air outside the door of the ear, there was no way in.
The long, matted hair of her black ears stopped it and locked the door, and the cold had nothing but to stay out. But my ears were bare, with a little white baldness; there were no long, matted black locks of hair to bar the door with. And so the sound of cold, the clang of its sound on the road, stormed my ears, and got in to me to shiver and contract my brain. The sound of cold got into me. And I became cold, because of a sound.
It is not the best way.
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