Pamela's Blog 13

Published on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The Fuck-It Factor”

by Pamela Satterwhite

Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work off and get rid of before he can do better – and indeed, the more lasting a man's ultimate good work is, the more sure he is to pass through a time, and perhaps a very long one, in which there seems very little hope for him at all. We must all sow our spiritual wild oats. The fault I feel personally disposed to find with my godson is not that he had wild oats to sow, but that they were such an exceedingly tame and uninteresting crop. The sense of humour and tendency to think for himself, of which till a few months previously he had been showing fair promise, were nipped as though by a late frost, while his earlier habit of taking on trust everything that was told him by those in authority, and following everything out to the bitter end, no matter how preposterous, returned with redoubled strength. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free-thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do. Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition which really suits them. This they say must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. It is the making us consider the points of difference between our present and our past greater than the points of resemblance, so that we can no longer call the former of these two in any proper sense a continuation of the second, but find it less trouble to think of it as something that we choose to call new. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy – very unhappy – it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness....True [they] will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to [this system]. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

...like most of those who in the end come to think for themselves, he was a slow grower. By far the greater part, moreover, of his education had been an attempt, not so much to keep him in blinkers as to gouge his eyes out altogether. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

Etienne came to a sudden decision. Perhaps he imagined he could see Catherine's eyes up there, at the entrance to the village; more likely it was the wind of rebellion sweeping from Le Voreux. He wasn't sure, but he wanted to go back into the mine to suffer and to fight. He thought wrathfully about those "somebodies" Bonnemort had spoken of, and about this unknown, glutted, and crouching god to whom ten thousand starving people fed their flesh. (Emile Zola, Germinal)

With one mechanical wave of his hand Dr. Mengele would direct my parents into the left-hand column, and my sister would also join that column, for even if she were ordered into the right-hand column, she would surely beg, on bended knee, for permission to go with our mother. So they would let her go, and she, with tears in her eyes, would shower them with thanks. (Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz)

It was only those who took the first and most obvious step in their power who ever did great things in the end... (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

Ernest resolved at once, as he had fallen so far, to fall still lower – promptly, gracefully and with the idea of rising again, rather than cling to the skirts of a respectability which would permit him to exist on sufferance only, and make him pay an utterly extortionate price for an article which he could do better without.

He arrived at this result more quickly than he might otherwise have done through remembering something he had once heard his aunt say about "kissing the soil." This had impressed him and stuck by him perhaps by reason of its brevity; when later on he came to know the story of Hercules and Antaeus, he found it one of the very few ancient fables which had a hold over him – his chiefest debt to classical literature. His aunt had wanted him to learn carpentering, as a means of kissing the soil should his Hercules ever throw him. It was too late for this now – or he thought it was – but the mode of carrying out his Aunt's idea was a detail; there were a hundred ways of kissing the soil besides becoming a carpenter. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)

Sooner or later you may have to consider the “fuck-it factor.”

I see its possibility in the eyes of edgy youth doing shit work – a soft, incipient “don’t-push-me-I’m-close-to-the-edge” grit that says they resent the role “servant” that – only for the moment (they think) – they’re stuck in. They know how smart they are, how ill-fitting the sham Edgar-suit.

Now the way it usually goes is this: resentful refusal gets funneled into a determination to escape, to “achieve” employment worthy of its gifts.

This is a fanciful fateful decision that decades later breeds regret.

Edgy youth – of which they are all – flee the shitty jobs, seek answers with the ancestors, arrive at great truths, feel very frisky and full of themselves, reenter the work world in jobs that suck on their brains – which they take as a complement until they figure out it is not…try the next more challenging thing…and then the next…until the horrifying reality dawns that all the carefully cultivated and honed talent, smarts and heart they offer to the world matters not at all to a system that chews them up and spits them out like a brown wad of smelly tobacco.

Then comes fleeing into private realms that offer the allure of the illusion of control…and then children…and then a little herb, a little wine, trying to reconnect with an earlier time.

And then onward courageously to death, having bestowed one’s unmet dreams, like a debt owed, to the next generation, who repeat the pattern…dot dot dot.

[See: OTheRLog 39, Wednesday, 09.30.09 and "You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper" ]

An alternative, that I call the “fuck-it factor,” is to enter a place of…what Marcuse called “refusal,” where you recall your earlier insights, those first truths that came dripping with you fresh from the river of continuity – continuum – out of time, across the artificial barriers…and you decide to trust those insights that the phony world of ‘Power’ would blow right out of the water.

Confronting the real – you know, some unavoidable, raw truth – can trigger the fuck-it factor, the alternative to the tried and untrue and tried again…

It’s the alternative to chasing the ‘gold ring,’ the ‘carrot,’ the ‘praise,’ the ‘approval.’ It’s what comes after playing by the rules, getting sick on the fickle food…

It’s what comes after riding the bus round and round without end, never finding the dreams, or the truths you began with – arriving either at more of the same or the moment you say…

“Is this all there is?”

At which point, after that, the very next transfer, takes you to…the “fuck-it factor.”

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Pamela's Blog 13

Published on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The Fuck-It Factor”