waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Everyone is dreaming in this country. Now it is time to wake up…

The storm is here. From the clash of these two winds the storm will be born, its time has arrived. Now the wind from above rules, but the wind from below is coming…

The prophecy is here. When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country in peace, the world will no longer be the world but something better.
(Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, The Lancandan Jungle, August 1992)

The Two Winds

Alchemy – The World We Are Given Isn’t Real

The Zapatista movement casts a transfigurative light across the progressive spectrum in our present moment, illuminating the question of social transformation, translating problems previously thought intractable.

Its clandestine spokesperson, * Subcomandante Marcos, came to the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Mexico, initially to “organize” them as workers, à la Marx’s injunction: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

…The Mayans just stared at him. They said they weren’t workers but people, and, besides, land wasn’t property but the heart of their communities. Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he knew. (Naomi Klein, No Logo, p. 455)

We are people, not workers. Our bodies continue to know this, which is why our “world” – so “advanced,” so “modern,” – feels so unreal, so much like a dream.

As a teenager I had a job processing checks at night for a bank. There we were, this crew, all backgrounds, ages, skin tones – as varied in appearance as we were homogenized by function – a tribe united by our appendages, chained to our sorting machines – machines ourselves, really – appendages, truly. We offered up our brains, eyes, and hands so that the machine could complete its function and checks find their destinations.

At night I dreamed of numbers.

If “reality” is created in a transformative process of human vision made manifest through human agency, it is those free to plan who ‘make’ reality while the rest of us ‘simply’ implement their visions.

But what of our visions?

Deferred? Dead? Rotting away in the backs of our minds?

If we are always only ever realizing others’ dreams rather than our own, “reality” starts to feel very unreal. It’s tempting, in such circumstances, to retreat into our minds, into our personal dramas, into the Internet. But whatever parts we play in these venues reverberates little upon the built world around us. Our ancestors, and contemporary communal peoples, were, and are, much more intimately involved with creating their environments than we.

Our relative impotence has left us somewhat shell-shocked, unsure what to make of this inflexible “reality” that has nothing to do with us.

And if we have no transformative impact on the built, created world of ‘men’, what are we if not simply minimally animate objects, placed on various shelves, some higher, some lower, but only nominally-alive, waiting for our expiration dates, for our timers to time out?

Tapping away into our computers, or gathering on street corners, pretending by our very lives that we’re composing something, we dangle impotently above the keys, unable to strike even a single note, let alone write a layered, complex piece.

Yet – it could change in an instant because we are nature, no matter what ‘ideas’ get shoveled on top of that reality.

If you’re rushing around in your life right now, stop and consider the dust we will all one day be. Is the ‘knowledge’ you must ‘master’ for your job something you hope your grandchildren will be carrying forward?

The hollowness of our lives is an aberration in earth-terms – an odd abomination.

One of the reasons I went into the trades was a longing for something real in the eight hours I contributed to serve my fellow. * I knew very well that all the minutes of all the useless, boring meetings I’d written up, all the kiss-ass or cover-ass memos, all the carefully crafted or smell-the-bullshit grants I’d worked on or composed, had long since been tossed, shredded and hopefully composted.

But when I go to the movie theater I worked on – my very first job as a first bracket apprentice – and look up at the lighting.fixtures in the entryways to each theater, people and stories swell up in a rush. I start thinking about…Bob who was facing his third brush with death, colon cancer, but could still notice me, dumb as a rock, and give me advice that would save my life. And Tom, who took his time with his work, an embodied reminder that there’s no need to rush. And Robbie who looked at me with such exasperation when I asked him if I was using the right screw to secure a string across some studs, saying, “if I wasn’t here, would you use that screw?” “Yes.” “Then use it. Trust yourself.” Later, he said, “Pamela, you know it has to be done, so just do it. Do whatever you have to do to get the job done.”

Just get the job done. You have no idea how refreshing those words can sound after a lifetime of working in offices.

But then maybe you do.

The world we are given isn’t real.

The earth, that’s real.
The ancestors, they’re real.
And the spirit of the commons in us – our hands touching, our bodies straining to hear, theearth – that’s real.

A big part of our problem working up the will to change things is that we don’t have our own language and we don’t speak podrunk.

We’re called simple and made to feel stupid for not grasping the convolutions of their reasoning which never touch down on anything real – like nightmarish vultures chewing on air, puffing themselves up on lies, and vomiting death. They specialize in creating unnecessary complexity to bludgeon us back into boxes marked “dim,” whenever we dare challenge them. They steal the work – the blood, sweat, tears, and love, of our ancestors and our earth – both cultural and tangible – commodify what they can translate into podrunk, and delete the rest from “History.”

All of which, we’re told, means they’re “smart.”

The insanity erected around us, and the jobs they give us to do, aren’t real. They’re somebody else’s wet dream.

The work of our time is for all of us to begin to distinguish ourselves from “the system,” so we can begin to be people again.

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 2

* … we learn in Naomi Klein’s No Logo. She writes: “…[the Zapatistas’] goal was not to win control over the Mexican state but to seize and build autonomous spaces where ‘democracy, liberty, and justice’ could thrive. For the Zapatistas, these free spaces, created from reclaimed land, communal agriculture, and resistance to privatization are an attempt to create counter-powers to the state, not a bid to overthrow it and replace it with an alternate, centralized regime.”

* Of course we know we give up way more than eight. Every job requires that non-work hours be oriented around those eight – but we’ll use that number for convenience.

Nascence to End Work

waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 1)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work

The Two Winds