Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

"You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper"

What we all have in common is that we are the descendants of tribes. We are all the descendants of a spiritual reality. The faint ancestral memory is always there…
…The behavior here [Western colonialism] reflects what happened to the tribes of Europe. They no longer had the perceptual reality of what it meant to be a human being. They were owned. (John Trudell)

We are not only wired to be large, we’re wired to seek, maintain and extend the tapestry. We long to be embedded in a web of relations, to know where we came from, where we are, and where we will go. And when our parents freeze us out from answers to these questions, and the job likewise, and the mass media ditto, we fall asleep, fulfill the minimal roles required of us, and then slip quietly into eternity.

I swept into almost every job with exhilaration too. I tried to make family, make tribe. I wanted to gather the new crew round and wrap them in the protective bubble of my power and love. I would give love and receive love. I would be seen, finally, and appreciated – valued for my quite obvious and considerable gifts.

It’s interesting to watch my fellow wage-slaves at work when I’m waiting with the other indigents for what masquerades as health care in this country * – their determined and courageous efforts to create something meaningful, some semblance of coherence in the knitting of relationships at this institution we call wage-work.

But despite our efforts, what we make still feels awkward and false – the sad, perfunctory Friday drinks or donuts; the bringing of photos and stories to share; the covering for each other on long breaks – a pale imitation of what we once had…a tribe.

Not that all tribes across all time have been nurturing, healthy and whole – promoting wholeness in its people – far from it; but a work in progress always starts out rough. Tribes, like other structures, stand only as strong as their framing members.

But even at its most ambiguous, the tribe addressed psychic needs that today are no longer even recognized, which doesn’t make them go away – nor will they, nor could they.

When Barack visited Kenya for the first time:

We wandered into the old marketplace…I watched…nimble hands stitch and cut and weave, and listened to the old woman’s voice roll over the sounds of work and barter, and for a moment the world seemed entirely transparent…where you saw how the things that you used had been made…And all of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that Asante and other black Americans claimed to have undergone after their first visit to Africa. For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway…Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal. (Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father, p. 309-11)

Podrunk propaganda notwithstanding, the needs once met by our tribes are not primordial. They remain as relevant and pressing as they ever were.

All people need history, a story, a memory, that gives them past and future, that raises theirs from brief unremarkable, otherwise meaningless lives to indispensable links in the long chain of culture, its living bearers ever so exquisitely able to connect in their tribal consciousness the two ends of time. From memory comes, in a symmetrical arc, foresight. The length of the former governs the reach of the latter. Memory provides us the rich fuel of self-esteem. Foresight, borne of memory, provides us direction and a purpose for living. No worse crime can be committed against any people than to strip from them their memory of themselves. This is far and away the most egregious particular in the long bill against slavery, the long-running culture-destructive crime from which black people have yet to recover anywhere in the world. (Randall Robinson, Quitting America, p. 134)

What Robinson doesn’t mention, in his righteous and legitimate fury, is that European ‘rulers’ committed this culture-stripping crime against their own earth-connected peoples before they turned all the brutality of their woundedness on us.

The scope of the disaster is much larger than his account admits.

Children are particularly devastated by the denial of tribe imposed by the domination of the market, because once they’re here we force them to accept that not only are they not needed (by us, as opposed to ‘the market’), but all too often they’re not wanted either (our states make sure that ‘parenting’ is a stressful and costly proposition.)

Children, more than anything, long to be wanted and needed – and they gravitate to where the apparent ‘Power’ is (they are wired for survival, after all. *) If we offer them nothing to define themselves by except the market, they will try to excel in the market (formal or informal, surface or underground).

Far from finding coherent meaning once they arrive, children are told there’s no meaning to anything – there is only being bought and sold, eating or being eaten – and, even worse, that they are on their own, not only in the search for meaning, but in the struggle for psychic and physical survival.

A living culture (present) is a negotiation with past (ancestors) and future (earth) – it’s a listening for, and a hearing of, the undeveloped (future) say what it needs – not by a group of designated ‘thinkers’ or ‘experts,’ but by all of that culture’s people. It’s the tools people create (language, art, traditions) for apprehending the wisdom (intentions) of our ancestors in discussion with what the future (the earth) needs, acknowledging that the earth is promise – pregnant with our children and our children’s survival.

The process of creating our living cultures is freedom moving in us, Understanding evolving. By definition, then, it’s dynamic…which means it’s the opposite of what we see around us under conditions of non-freedom: a way of living that is ineffably boring, and altogether outside our ability to impact with our judgment or powers of analysis.

Because of a ‘system’ that tells us we’re commodities – resources for ‘capital’ to use, or not, as ‘it’ sees fit – we’ve become passive observers of our own world, ‘outsiders’ on our own planet.

Designated “experts” make the decisions and we make the best of it. So a neighborhood filled with Mexicans must bear the insult of Lou Dobbs’ face blasted into it on the back of a billboard bombshell.

Places and spaces that serve as critical sites for gathering and building community are ripped out of our neighborhoods by more designated “experts” without our knowing such was even being discussed.

Our children (and we) are slotted in and out of ‘jobs’ with no thought given as to whether they serve our children’s growth, or benefit the earth in any way whatsoever.

I remember working as a fifteen-year-old for a movie theater that was showing a musical version of Goodbye Mr. Chips starring Peter O’Toole and Petula Clark. My best friend and I turned that job into a merry romp that featured us chasing each other around the empty balcony and mezzanine with our flashlights flashing, and then harmonizing, before the gaudy witness of an old cinema house gilded mirror, all the film’s big musical numbers as we checked the bathrooms every night for dawdling customers before closing up.

Without warning the chaste Mr. Chips surrendered the screen to The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, followed by Camille 2000, followed by I Am Curious, Yellow. Suddenly two teen-age girls were forced to cope with masturbating patrons and a grossly leering janitor. We had no tribal elders to issue an opinion, let alone a decision. We were on our own.

The very form our lives take under the dictated terms of this system – the constant slotting in and out, the restriction of concern to the narrow cell of ‘family,’ the compartmentalization of our lives, the stripping away of decision-making power over our environments – precludes the creation of culture, the making of tribe.

We find instead that our need to develop culture – that which had been the river of our survival – is used against us.

When the power to create living, healthy cultures is denied, when we’re divided up and slotted by ‘the market’ into jobs, unpaid work, or ‘crime,’ as the case may be, our natural tribal inclinations are easily manipulated and distorted into nationalistic or racist abominations of tribal consciousness.

What had been our greatest strength is used to keep us down and divided.

And with the job, the “Mr. Smith virus,” ever reminding us of our dependent status – through bosses, hierarchy, authoritarianism, disciplining, the note in the personnel file wearing the phony face of scientific authority (so-called “management theory”) – and with our communities impervious to our influence, it’s no wonder, feeling trapped as we do, that we all too often abandon our longing for solidarity – our longing for allegiances interwoven through the whole of our life – and start to snipe.

Unhappiness can be a very fertile force for more of the same.

Unless there’s an on-going conversation between earth, wind and fire – unless we (the present) are involved in this negotiation with the past and with the future…what are we?

In an interview on Democracy Now!, * Bernice Johnson Reagon said, “Culture names who you are.”

The problem is that the market (and its agent, the state) wants to name us, which explains why they want us stripped of tribe and culture – and explains why, when the market no longer has any use for us, podrunks want to strip the earth…of us.

If we don’t get to name ourselves, if we allow “the market” to name us, what are we?

There are parents in England who have allowed their seven to eleven-year-olds to become commercials that sell products to other children.

“It’s quite shocking,” said Ed Mayo, co-author of “Consumer Kids” and chief executive of the British government-backed Consumer Focus campaign group.
He is describing the story of Sarah, a bright and busy little girl, who at age seven has been recruited by the specialist youth marketing firm Dubit through an online children’s chat room to work as a sales agent for the Barbie Girls MP3 player…Her down payment, unsurprisingly, is a Barbie Girls MP3 player – and the more she talks about it to her friends, and the more photos she posts across the Internet showing herself and her mates playing with it, the more bonus points she gets. (Epoch Times, February 5, 2009)

It is our children who most grievously suffer this disaster.

It is our children who most need a coherent explanation of who we are and why we are here.

It is our children who most need the tapestry.

The idea of capturing the history of a community in cloth, caught in the web of our invention – in oral tradition, in song, dance, story and myth – in all our artistic creations, resonates particularly with children because they’ve come freshly from that river, its droplets still cling to their ankles, their feet long for the feel of it between their toes. And when all of us lie on that beach and soak up the sun, we soak up memory too; we remember how it was, before masters made our life a misery, a mockery of real life.

We know that we’re part of a larger whole, and that we are a larger whole. We can feel it. But we’re systematically taught not to credit, but rather to distrust, what we feel. A tremendous amount of deflective force is required to keep us from coalescing on our own terms.

The only way to renounce our subject status and claim our right to name ourselves, is to start rebuilding our living cultures – which means rebuilding tribe. But this requires acknowledging our full power, our wholeness.

Although we are tribal, we are also wholes, we are One – across all time, space and culture. And it is only by claiming our wholeness, our art, that we can find the courage to claim each other.

Coalescing without wholeness is but following the herd.

Artists know this truth.

And we are all artists.

Continue to "Culture" - Part 3

* Of course it’s actually an illness industry.

* On March 28, 2008, I listened to an interview on my local Pacifica radio station with a former Israeli defense force soldier who had formed an organization called “Breaking the Silence.” He said that once, when he was a soldier, he stopped a father and his children at a checkpoint. The father was visibly afraid. The children noted this and looked at the soldier with awe because he could make their father feel afraid. They admired, and wanted, ‘Power’ – but only because they’d been taught to.

* December 30, 2008

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter IV: Culture (Part 2)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work