Gerhard Richter, Rosen, 1994
Fireflies, wild phlox, blackberries, buttercups, purple birds in purple grasses—new delights arise daily in the late spring countryside of Central New York. Voluminous shrubs of Field Rose explode in bloom. For the first time in my life, the ambient scent isn’t garbage, urine, or exhaust, but roses.
On June 3rd, eBay, PayPal, and Stripe payouts penetrated the gridiron of my bank account, and I paid rent in glorious triumph. Such is the victory of my middle years—to scrape together funds to pay the property owner for one more month of sleeping, cooking, showering, and shitting in private.
What made us think life would ever be without contradiction?
The school semester ended and my coworkers and I were tasked with arriving at dawn to scrape burnt remnants from smokers and fryers, scrub grease and mildew from walls, etc. It wasn’t stressful, merely boring, yet a day came when I woke rigid as a corpse and couldn’t go. The dread was too pronounced, some internal shriek or alarm drowning out the pleading, plodding voice of practicality. Maybe angels were protecting me from a deliming accident. I promised I’d use the stolen time to apply for hundreds of jobs: jobs in gardens, forests, in museums and galleries, libraries, parks, nurseries, churches, in sanctuaries of nature and culture absent the roar of industrial machinery. I paced the home in which I’m no longer illegally squatting. I paced the roads and trails surrounding. What is wrong with me? There’s no heat wave here. There are no explosive remnants of war.
“We see many people with very complex injuries such as fractures, peripheral nerve injuries, amputations of one or several limbs, spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and burns.”
Everything is terrible somewhere else, but it always has been—we just weren’t paying attention. Hundreds of millions of us discover our agency doesn’t extend very far outside of consumer choices, even collectively.
In one of her latest videos, Patti Smith reads an excerpt from Just Kids, in which she questioned her art practice during the Vietnam War:
“What was the point of creating art? For whom? Are we animating God?”1
Clowns, freaks, aesthetes, and dandies are always justifying their actions and motivations to the laity. But in times of acute social upheaval, we question ourselves. Do we have the right to pursue a livelihood in the arts? Is there any utility in doing so?
Yes, artists animate God. Spirit animates us so that we can animate Spirit. Creative work is essential and necessary for a good life, for robust, self-reflective culture, for communion with divinity.
But as one hoary, bespectacled philosophy don said, capering around the classroom in a worn out loafer: “it’s necessary, but not sufficient!”
How sorry I feel for my beloved—one day treated to erotic delights, the next to “Ethics, Risk, Apocalypse.” Substack itself recommended this query into revolutionary sabotage, the fact of which invokes nothing if not Psychopolitics:
“Smart power cosies up to the psyche rather than disciplining through coercion or prohibitions. It does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences—to tell all about our lives. Friendly power proves more powerful, as it were, than purely repressive power...free choice is eliminated to make way for a free selection from among the items on offer.”
Haha! The items on offer are a dunce cap and broken phone. For those of us who deftly sidestepped the chasm of cynicism, now the quicksand of paradox! Welcome!
Even so, I, too, highly recommend Peter Gelderloos’s essay. He outlines a kind of risk/ reward assessment of destroying the property and tools of dominant power structures—as opposed to symbolic protest (or nothing at all.) “What does it mean to stay safe in a world that is ending?” he asks. Having automated much of our world, systems run independently, run to entropy, run amok. Regardless of anyone’s intention, there’s a demonic momentum with demonic consequences that requires physical clogs be thrown into physical looms—by physical bodies.
I’m not sure the demographic of Peter’s readership, but I feel unusually confident making the gross and unresearched generalization that most of us aren’t willing to risk even a slim statistical possibility of a brief prison sentence. It’s terror of cops, prison, and the capricious justice system; a lifetime of turning a blind eye to the extraction and violence that powers our economy and lifestyles; and also a diffuse guilt/ magnanimity towards fellow workers—the people like us who’ll be tasked with repairing and cleaning up the mess of sabotage. It’s like most jobs these days: theft, time theft, and rebellion only harm one’s colleagues; the bosses and institutions are in another building, on another coast, untouchable.
Two weeks ago, video essayist Jenny Nicholson uploaded a review of the now defunct Star Wars Hotel. I have no interest in Disney, Star Wars, theme parks, or immersive experiences designed by corporations, yet I watched all four hours along with 7.4 million other people. “The very first time a luxury cruise ship has ever been symbolic of the hubris of man,” she quips at the end. Why would something built only for profit be designed, executed, and marketed so poorly it failed within 18 months? We peasants love to settle in with a bag of popcorn and watch the grandiose failures of the rich, but this is unsettlingly flawed, more like the passion project of an eccentric tech magnate then a hotel built by a megacorporation surviving and thriving for 101 years.
The last two ‘real’ days of work were commencement weekend. The dining hall was decorated with bear mascots, streamers, towers of fruit, huge bouquets of red and white carnations. The chefs made steaks and quiches and shrimp fettuccine. There was a table piled high with cream puffs, lemon bars, cupcakes—and the crown jewel, a cake the size of a truck bed. No one came! It was a stage set with no actors, only stagehands, many of whom had arrived before 5:00AM to set up. I wish Jenny Nicholson would review the shadow-masters of Cornell Dining, but I guess that’s up to me. “I’d give them zero stars if I could.”
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Solidarity Postscript
I’ve received many thoughtful letters since I turned off comments. They don’t seem to have been written for public dissemination, but I want to share the authors’ projects—in solidarity, and also as experiments in right livelihood from which we can all benefit.
Allegra makes beautiful handmade clothes.
Suzanne is a holistic health coach starting a trauma-informed health support group.
Mariah is a mom, poet, and tarot reader.
Anna, my best friend from elementary school, is a chef with a newsletter of delicious recipes. She’s opening a café in Nashville this fall.
And her brother is a farmer and filmmaker; here’s the documentary platform he’s building. I’m obsessed with the movie he’s currently developing, How to Heal the Planet. Here’s the trailer!
˚ · . ig: mjbuffett
˚ · . my favorite books: bookshop
˚ · . digital letters to the editor: thelaboringheart@gmail.com
˚ · . analog letters: 459 Boiceville Rd., Brooktondale, NY 14817
It’s interesting that in Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis uses Patti Smith as an example of the ‘new individualism’ of members of the artistic avant-garde in the seventies. I wonder what she thinks of that characterization. Were artists prior to the seventies less individualistic? Hard to know since the historical record itself is largely hero worship.