Recently...

Oh
Can't anybody see
We've got a war to fight
-Portishead

As ever, there is a lot to say. It is just a matter of how to express it, how to get at the order of things, how to qualify them, how to sift the banal from the real, or, even especially, how to give up the distinction without seeming to have capitulated.

~

Recently I was in the Baltic. I lied about wanting to settle there, of course. Not much to report from that time and place. Nice to see my cousin, of course. While I was there we learned that the child his wife is pregnant with is going to be a girl. With long arms, it seems.

~

Recently I was in Greece. Having come from the bland and blanched north, the savoir vivre of the Mediterranean immediately stood out. A number of other things there also made a strong impression on me.

One evening in Athens my companion and I were walking to get dinner. It was around ten. The evening was warm and quiet and fragrant and elegiac. It was a long weekend, and with many residents having decamped to the islands or the villages, the streets were all but deserted. We may not have taken the main thoroughfares, but on a 20 minute walk through the seedy heart of a 4 million person city, we encountered hardly a soul. Barring my friend's assurances, I would have thought something was amiss. This background of desolation underscored the people populating the telephone booths. We may have encountered no one strolling, no one simply hanging around, but in every single every phone booth we passed--and there were many--there was a person huddled or hunched, speaking or listening, stuttering or summoning the courage to say something. They were speaking quietly, privately, even intimately. I remember thinking that the scene was worth noting, that it was a memory worth forming and then exploring. Every caller we passed added to a gathering sense of vaporous rapture. If there was something weird about it, something uncanny, there was also something touching. I imagined that we were walking through a city in the final stages of abandonment, that these were the last people left, and that they were pausing to say goodbye--to the city itself?--before leaving everything behind. After some time we ended up in a restaurant full of diners, but the scene of the callers tethered to the phone booths, those refugees tarrying for a final second by a cherished friend or memory before lighting out for whatever territories--that scene stayed with me.

The next day we went to a pet shop. We needed to buy formula for an abandoned newborn kitten whose life we were trying to save. The shop was in a very seedy part of Athens, which is a seedy town to begin with. To get there we had to walk some way along a road that led downhill. At the top of the hill was a Pakistani/Arab neighborhood with sidewalks lined and trafficked exclusively by men. They tracked our downward progress with noncommital interest. Betel nut was being chewed, Qawwali played, merchandise bargained over and sold, food prepared and rung up and eaten. By the time we had got to the bottom of the hill where the pet shop stood, we had passed through a gradient along which Pakistanis and Egyptians had given way almost entirely to greasy and muttering drug addicts on the prowl, either coasting or coming down, whose gazes, when they did manage to land on us, were much keener and more appraising than those that had lingered on us at the top of the hill. I surveyed the scene outside and followed my companion into the store. She reached into the basket we had been carrying and presented the kitten to the owner for inspection. He gave it a practiced once-over as the two of them launched into a conversation about his prospects in Greek. I drifted off to have a look at the puppies and the kittens, the ferrets and the hamsters, the fish and the snakes. As I peered into the cages from the inside, junkies were passing by and leering into them through the shop windows, eyes vacant or crazed or both. At one point a pair of them passed to survey a particularly cute and helpless-looking puppy, exchanging views on what they saw. Once we'd bought the formula for our little foundling to nurse on, my friend said the shop owner was a nice guy, and related for me parts of the conversation she'd had with him. When the two junkies had been talking about the puppy (it went something like "Boy he looks dumb!" / "You think you're any smarter, buddy? Think again. You're the dumbest animal I know."), the owner turned to my friend and said "You see what I have to go through every day?" Something about the atmosphere of this pet shop down in the seedy bowels of Athens (a city which, in spite of everything, is still presided over by the [disappointed?] Attic sky that witnessed and spawned all the heroic accomplishments of Antiquity) captured my imagination. I immediately thought it would make a good central setting for a movie or a book or a story. It could be a cheap movie, too. The kitten pulled through, by the way, and is living happily now.

~

Recently I read a book on the Arab conquests in the first century of Islam by Hugh Kennedy. He quotes the writing of one Tu Huan, a Chinese man held captive for nine years in the court of the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad, following a battle won by a Muslim army against a Chinese one in central Asia (the only recorded conflict between these opponents). Tu writes: "The entire land has been transformed; the people follow the tenets of Islam like a river in its channel." I found this to be a stirring metaphor, and an incisive one, to the extent that it reveals the unity of man's need to tame watercourses with his desire to conquer fellow men and to reshape the channels their lives run through. 1300 years have done nothing to diminish its relevance. In the modern age, the two projects are intimately and flagrantly linked: From the World Bank's many and monstrous hydroelectric projects to the Three Gorges Dam, power over water and power over people are never far apart.

~

Recently I read a devastatingly powerful book that attempts an integrative critique of the world-historical processes of modernity and the modernist art conceived in response to those upheavals. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, by Marshall Berman, is a herculean effort to capture modern experience and modernist art whose scope sweeps across 200 years. "To be modern," he begins, "is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world--and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, or religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air.'" I recommend this book with all my heart and mind. For me, the act of reading it not only recapitulated the modern maelstrom of my own experience, but allowed me to establish a deep, newly illuminated spiritual connection with the most notable artistic responses to the threats and possibilities of modernity: Goethe's Faust, Baudelaire's simultaneous exaltation and vituperation of the modern types he saw haunting the streets of Paris, the phantasmagoric Petersburg literary tradition from Gogol to Dostoevsky to Biely.

Below I have compiled a series of quotes from the book itself, or which were in turn cited in the book:

From Rousseau's The New Eloise:
"I'm beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to."

Marx: The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a 20,000 pound force, but do you feel it?

Marx: There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force.

Nietzsche: We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable.

Berman, on the abandonment of the positive side of the dialectic by Foucault:
'Foucault reserves his most savage contempt for people who think it is possible for modern mankind to be free. Do we think we feel a spontaneous rush of sexual desire? We are merely being moved by "the modern technologies of power that take life as their object," driven by the "deployment of sexuality by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, their energies, sensations and pleasures. Do we act politically, overthrow tyrannies, make revolutions, create constitutions to establish and protect human rights? Mere "juridical regression" from the feudal ages, because constitutions and bills of rights are merely "the forms that [make] an essentially normalizing power acceptable. Do we use our minds to unmask oppression--as Foucault appears to be trying to do? Forget it, because all forms of inquiry into the human conditions "merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another," and hence only add to the triumphant "discourse of power." Any criticism rings hollow, because the critic himself or herself is "in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism.'

Mephistopheles:
I am the spirit that negates all!
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly...

Berman, on the promise of modern adventure: Body and soul are to be exploited for a maximum return--not, however, in money, but in experience, intesity, felt life, action, creativity...Universally modern, too, are the Faustian pressures to use every part of ourselves, and of everybody else, to push ourselves and others as far as we can go.

Berman, on Faust, in his incarnation as a developer, in which he has Philemon and Baucis, the old couple who will not give up their land for development in exchange for a cash settlement, murdered: "It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works."

Berman, p. 95: 'Our lives are controlled by a ruling class with vested interests not merely in change but in crisis and chaos. "Uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation," instead of subverting this society, actually serve the strengthen it. Catastophes are transformed into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal; disintegration works as a mobilizing and hence an integrating force. The only specter that really haunts the modern ruling class, and that really endangers the world it has created in its image, is the one that traditional elites (and, for that matter, traditional masses) have always yearned for: prolonged solid stability. In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well.' Consider that this was written in 1981.

Baudelaire: I leave aside the question of whether, by continually refining humanity in proportion to the new enjoyments it offers, indefinite progress might not be its most cruel and ingenious torture; whether proceeding as it does by a negation of itself, it would not turn out to be a perpetually renewed form of suicide, and whether, shut up in the fiery circle of divine logic, it would not be like the scorpion that stings itself with its own tail--progress, that eternal desideratum that is its own eternal despair!

Berman on Benjamin's Parisian writings: "His heart and sensibility draw him irresistably toward the city's bright lights, beautiful women, fashion, luxury, its play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes, meanwhile his Marxist conscience wrenches his insistently awat from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering world is decadent, hollow, vicious, spiritually empty, oppressive to the proletariat, condemned by history."

Dostoevsky's Underground Man: "I was terribly afraid of being seen, of being met, of being recognized. I already had the underground in my soul."

The radical Khazov, in a pamphlet written in 1877, just before before his exile to Siberia: "Russia is led along the road to political freedom not by the liberals but by dreamers who organize ridiculous and childish demonstrations; by men who dare to break the law, who are beaten, sentenced, and reviled."

Dostoevsky, in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, addressing the great works of engineering he has seen over in Europe:
"Man loves to create and build roads, that is beyond dispute. But...may it not be that...he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? How do you know, perhaps he only likes that edifice from a distance and not at close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, and does not want to live in it."

Berman: "...the nihilism of modern revolutionaries is a pale shadow of the nihilism of the forces of order."

~

Recently I immersed myself full tilt in the television series Prison Break. By "full tilt" I mean that by the time I had finished the 22 episodes of the first season, I had worked up such an appetite for the second that I worked through the next 22 in 24 hours flat. Like the show 24--and like scenes constructed by Dostoevsky, or for that matter like the spectacle of current events broadcasting live from the centers of power--Prison Break's rhythm is defined by endless crises, by staggering crescendos of quasi-climax after quasi-climax, by folds within intrigues within Matruyoshka subplots that make the viewer simultaneously beg for resolution and wish that the titillation would never end. To be fair, I would rather watch Prison Break than CNN, no matter the crisis they happen to be selling. The experience of watching the show is a little bit like taking a drug, or playing a video game. It is a wild ride, but in the end the viewer (I at least) feels hollowed out, betrayed--as if the product hadn't quite lived up to its promise. This emotional crash must result from two circumstances. The first is the formal circumstance of the medium in which the story is told. Television needs to keep its users coming back for more, and over the years they've learned to do a damn good job of it. Prison Break is an entertainment product--and if we are disappointed by it, in some sense we have only ourselves to blame: Like a drug, or like any commodity, it seems to be invested with a certain fetishistic aura that it can never live up to, and which we ourselves are complicit in maintaining.

The second fact that breeds my sense of betrayal has to do with the content of the show (which cannot be fully separated from the form of its narration, in the sense that the need to attract advertisers and a mass audience imposes certain restrictions on content, i.e. in some sense the betrayal is the result of conflict between artistic vision and commercial reality). It is the show's content I have been thinking about most. At the risk of coming off a bit dramatically, I would say that the show manages to 'imprison' viewers in an atmosphere of despair and nihilism, while promising them an ultimate redemption from that despair in an imagined final episode where, by transcending both themselves and the small cabal of corrupt officials that rules the country, Scofield and Burrows "make everything right." Until that time, viewers are left to muddle along and make do with whatever hope and meaning they can find in the savage dialectic of violence and vengeance that the show will continue to serve up until the imagined day of redemption. The show imprisons its viewers not only by vividly bringing the grim realities of doing hard time home to the screen during the run-up to the brothers' escape, but then, after the escape, by painting an equally convincing picture of the outside world as a vast 'panoptic' prison from which escape is just as impossible, and which is just as inimical to life as life in a tangible cage--and in which, most importantly, the viewer can easily situate himself. So far, so good: We all know that we are as powerless as gnats against the state's vast resources, against its monopoly on awesome violence, and we can all easily imagine being on the wrong end of the barrel.

The problem is that the show never makes the qualitative leap that true resolution (of the problem of atomized man versus nebulous omnipresent state) would require. In short, there is never anything close to a cathartic moment of solidarity that would transcend parochial ties. Even though the brothers' plight and the dizzying cycles of state violence that trail in the wake of their escape eminently call for mass action against the state, Prison Break inhabits a post-Thatcherite world, and that alternative is not on offer. There is no society: There is only Michael Scofield and Lincoln Burrows (and the other inmates and their families). Thus their only hope, once out, is either to disappear completely, or to get the state to wipe the slate clean by blackmailing the WASP mafia at its head.

For a taste of the nihilistic dimension of the violence that the show serves up as we wait in vain for a redemption that is forever deferred, look no further than the character of Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell. A Faulknerian mutant, Bagwell is the eloquent and murderous offspring of an incestuous tryst who, while obsessed with the elimination of his own bloodline, seeks to redeem his own nightmarish childhood by abducting a family and getting them to act out a pastoral set piece for his benefit. Along the way and after the failure of his project, he savagely murders a number of men and women for our viewing pleasure. There is something immorally intoxicating about the portrayal of Bagwell's violence: The long shots of him licking his lips before striking, the semi-learned and wholly deranged speeches he gives to his victims before murdering them--at heart a cat and mouse game in which the viewer is clearly cast as the cat, firmly rooted in the august American tradition of pornographic violence.

Not only does the show make the viewer identify with the experience of prison and the feeling of entrapment at large. It also builds an ideological prison the viewer, and then "throws away the key." The show's masterful dramatization and depiction of the dark side of power is a hermetic world. There is no way out, no iota of light beyond the nostrums of brotherly love and a vague faith in an ultimate justice that will be served up once the existing system is somehow "purged" (the parallel with the Stalinist/Maoist purges is a stretch, but the idea is the same: If we recapture the pure kernel of our society, all will be well. Until then, savage violence is the name of the game). The show (partially correctly) depicts modern America as a police state ruled by a shadowy corporate mafia where to oppose the state is to be faced with savage violence, yet it fails to hold out any hope for redemption beyond running away or getting lucky and somehow nailing the big boss at the top. The characters all tacitly to believe in the fairytale of an American paradise lost, and that all will be well with the country if truth is spoken to the right person, and the structure of injustice implodes like a house of cards. If Scofield and Burrows can unmask the truth, democracy will be restored, and the government will be run in service of the people, just like it says in the constitution.

The prison system, however grimly it is portrayed, is never problematized in itself. Nor are the vast resources of violence at the state's disposal. Nor is the immediate willingness of every random civilian in the show to capitulate to the state's orgiastic displays of violence. We are to believe, as the characters must, that if truth is spoken, and if the WASP mafia is brought down, then the vast resources of repression and apprehension and correction will be deployed to serve the people.

The character of Michael Scofield is very interesting. His struggles of conscience and his need to clean up the mess he makes in springing his brother have an eschatological dimension. Not only is he his brother's savior: He has been put onto the TV screen to redeem America for its sins, a wunderkind able to bear the world's entire weight. Scofield is obsessed not only with the escape itself, but with the 'immaculate' dimension of the escape--he wants people to understand the justice of what he has done, and is obsessed with removing any incidental traces of blood on his hands, even at the expense of the very success of the escape. Witness his crusade to put Bagwell back behind bars. The show's religious references and motifs are interesting when refracted through the prism of the show's Thatcherite/libertarian ideology. The foil of God allows the societal factors complicit in criminality to be sluiced off at a stroke, and firmly situates the problem of crime within the culpable self. Not that the show's writers necessarily do this consciously: I imagine the religious motifs to be an apt reflection of the role that religion plays within the walls of real prisons and in the hearts of those real men and women who add a theological dimension to the violence they have already wreaked and been made to suffer.

Of course, I'd be fooling myself and you if I didn't admit that these idle reflections on Prison Break were partly inspired by a sense of moral guilt at having spent so much time transfixed by the DVDs over the past few days. I'm trying to rehabilitate the banality of my experience, if you like. And maybe the show does have some value beyond pure diversion from and postponement of my "real life," if considered deeply. It is also true that I have only watched through season two. In a few days I will head down to a DVD burning warren I know downtown to buy season three. Who knows? Maybe there will be a redemptive catharsis waiting at the end of the tunnel. I won't hold my breath. Until then, I will contunue to think that the world of Prison Break was conjured from the crumbling bones of Michel Foucault.

Also, since my imagination is so inflamed by the prison and the possibilities and technicalities of escape from it, I think I may set my next piece of writing in one. Maybe it could be an epistolary work with my prisoner carrying on a correspondence with the outside world. Maybe, the better to reflect myself, he could leave the letters unsent.

~

Recently I acted on my wish to come back to America for a little while. I will be coming to New York on June 12.