And a good part of what Hedges wrote, I didn't understand.
And for some reason, my Truthdig emails aren't appearing. I've resubscribed
again, maybe the fourth time, and one or two or four will come, and then they
stop. So I had to search for this Hedges article from last week. It's really
difficult for me to find the material on the Truthdig website. It's hard to
navigate and there are ads that I can't bypass, somehow. And then last night I
wanted to hear what he had on his On Contact. Well, I found it on RT, but the
play button for audio wouldn't work. I couldn't find the video. I then went
searching to find it somewhere else and I did, but it took 40 minutes. By then,
it was way past my bedtime, but I knew I had to listen to it because I wouldn't
be able to find it again. Now again today, I didn't get the Truthdig email so,
at some point, I'll need to find whatever it was that Hedges posted yesterday.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2017 2:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Artist as Prophet
I can only dream of having the talent to have said this:
"The disease of empire, the belief that military power is a virtue, blinds us
to the folly of our own hubris, our proclivity for violence and our decline.
It leads us, Martinez Celaya said, to create miniature, distorted empires of
our own. Donald Trump embodies this yearning for a personal empire as vicious
and exploitative as the American empire. Empires create a culture in which
people dedicate their lives to building monuments to themselves."
Carl Jarvis
On 6/4/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sunday, June 4, 2017
The Artist as Prophet
Published on
Monday, May 29, 2017
by
Truthdig
The Artist as Prophet
by
Chris Hedges
“What Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and most other prophets
have in common is a strong ethical outlook and a heightened
sensitivity to attitudes and morals—the obvious ones as well as those
that lurk beneath the surface,”
the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya said in an essay. (Photo of
Kierkegaard
statue: Arne List/flickr/cc)
The Israeli writer and dissident Uri Avnery asked an Egyptian general
how the Egyptians managed to surprise the Israelis when they launched
the October 1973 war. The general answered: “Instead of reading the
intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.”
The deep malaise, rage and feelings of betrayal that have enveloped
American society are rarely captured and almost never are explained
coherently by the press. To grasp the savage economic and emotional
cost of deindustrialization, the destruction of our democratic
institutions, the dark undercurrent of nihilistic violence that sees
us beset with mass shootings, the attraction of opioids, the rise of
the militarized state and the concentration of national wealth in a
tiny cabal of corrupt bankers and corporations, it is necessary to
turn to a handful of poets, writers and other artists. These artists,
who often exist on the margins of mass culture, are our unheeded
prophets.
“What Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and most other prophets
have in common is a strong ethical outlook and a heightened
sensitivity to attitudes and morals—the obvious ones as well as those
that lurk beneath the surface,”
the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya said in an essay. “They also share
urgency. Prophets are not inclined to wait for the right time. Their
prophetic vision demands action, leaving little room for calculation
and diplomacy. Truth, for the prophets, is not merely a belief but a
moral imperative that compels them to speak and act with little regard
for convenience or gains. But prophets need to do more than speaking
and acting, and it is not enough to be apocalyptic. Something must be
brought forward.”
All despotisms, including our own, make war on culture. They seek to
manipulate or erase historical memory. This assault on memory,
Martinez Celaya said, is “philosophical violence.” It leaves us with a
“sense of being a stranger, displaced, a sense of having no way to
check where one comes from because something has been cut and removed.”
When I recently interviewed Russell Banks, the novelist said, “It’s
remarkable to me, the speed which memory gets lost in America and
perhaps elsewhere. The world has been so decentralized. No one lives
with anyone older than they are, generally. It’s only through memory
that we can compare the present to anything else, to take its
measure.”
“If you can’t take its measure then you can’t judge it,” he said. “You
can’t evaluate it. You can’t take a moral position with regards to
it.”
Randall Jarrell in his essay “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” calls
our consumer culture “periodical.”
“We believe that all that is deserves to perish and to have something
else put in its place,” he wrote. This belief, Jarrell said, is “the
opposite of the world of the arts, where commercial and scientific
progress do not exist; where the bone of Homer and Mozart and
Donatello is there, always, under the mere blush of fashion, where the
past—the remote past, even—is responsible for the way we understand, value,
and act in, the present.”
“An artist’s work and life presuppose continuing standards, values
stretched out over centuries of millennia, a future that is the
continuation and modification of the past, not its contradiction or
irrelevant replacement,”
he went on.
“The past’s relation to the artist or man of culture is almost the
opposite of its relation to the rest of our society,” Jarrell wrote.
“To him the present is no more than the last ring on the trunk,
understandable and valuable only in terms of all the earlier rings.
The rest of our society sees only that great last ring, the enveloping
surface of the trunk; what’s underneath is a disregarded, almost hypothetical
foundation.”
In his novel “Cloudsplitter,” Banks tells the story of John Brown
through the eyes of Owen, a son who survived the assault on Harpers
Ferry and the aborted slave uprising.
“White Americans always say that John Brown was well intended but insane,”
he said in the interview. “Black Americans don’t think that at all.
They think he was heroic. From Malcolm X to Baldwin to whomever you want to
ask.
W.E.B. Du Bois’ biography of Brown was the first biography of Brown
that was sympathetic in any way. It’s very interesting there’s a
racial divide on this man that is so extreme, yet no one disagrees
about the facts. The facts have been known since 1859. No one has
uncovered any new facts. But diametrically two views of history.”
“It began in the 15th century with this power grab that required
genocidal relations to people who were not white Europeans,” he said.
“It continues all the way to our present. You think of Shakespeare.
The Moor becomes Caliban. The rise of the slave trade coincides
exactly with that 10-year period [in which ‘Othello’ and ‘The Tempest’ were
written].”
The artist makes the invisible visible. He or she shatters the clichés
and narratives used to mask reality.
“Whenever they talk about unemployment figures or the state of the
economy, you read the comments [about the article],” the poet Linh
Dinh said when I interviewed him earlier this year. “The comments are
people howling and cursing the article. Most people know these
articles are nonsense. If you’re not fighting for your livelihood you
tend to believe these articles.”
“What’s most disturbing is the hatred for these people, [the working
class],” he told me. “The left always pretends to talk about the
masses, the working class, but it really hates the working class. It
doesn’t pay any attention to the working class. It mocks their
values.”
Banks, in his novels beginning with “Continental Drift” in 1985, has,
like Martinez Celaya and Linh Dinh, relentlessly chronicled the
economic and psychological effects of deindustrialization on the
working class and the deadening effects of technocratic society.
“If you lift the rock of bourgeois respectability, you see underneath
these kinds of realities,” Banks said. “It isn’t just particular to
small towns in upstate New York or New Hampshire or south Florida.
It’s true across the entire spectrum of humanity. Those just happen to
be the worlds I know best personally and longest. So my attention
tends to focus there. But I know I’m really writing about humanity at
large. Jesus said ‘the poor will always be with us.’ I think he was
really saying there are more of them than there are of us. I think I’m
writing about the majority of human beings on this planet, more than
the majority. My attention goes out to those people. They are
everywhere. Whenever someone says you’re writing about the minorities
and outcasts, that’s not true. There are more people of color than
there are people without color on this planet.”
Martinez Celaya said, “We need artists more than ever to be the
conscience of the moment, to reflect back to us in the mirror what
this society and this moment is, so we can see it. We cannot see it
because of the creations, fabrications, and reality TV. It makes it so
difficult for us to see what we’re going through. I keep wishing
Dostoevsky could be born again so he can actually write a book of this
moment.”
The physical decay of towns and cities silences important parts of our
past.
It allows corporations to create a false history and a false culture
that homogenizes our lives into a deadening sameness.
“Stories make a place,” Linh Dihn wrote. “Without stories, there is no
place, but without place, there can still be stories. If your stories
are not organically grown, but imposed on you by those who hate
everything about you, then you’re virtually dead.”
“Everywhere I go, every town I visit, you don’t see any industries,”
he said in the interview. “You don’t see any factories. You don’t see
anything. We don’t make anything. We are really the poorest country on
earth, but people refuse to see that. We are only surviving. We are
only looking good because of our military might, because we are an
empire. But this force cannot go on forever. It should be so obvious
that we’re only chugging along, bullying people into lending us money
and sending us stuff that we don’t deserve, that we haven’t earned.
How can we survive? Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been
reduced to living like savages in this self-proclaimed greatest
country on earth.”
The disease of empire, the belief that military power is a virtue,
blinds us to the folly of our own hubris, our proclivity for violence
and our decline.
It leads us, Martinez Celaya said, to create miniature, distorted
empires of our own. Donald Trump embodies this yearning for a personal
empire as vicious and exploitative as the American empire. Empires
create a culture in which people dedicate their lives to building
monuments to themselves.
“I’m interested in this fabrication of empires,” Martinez Celaya said.
“The implication that we’re always looking at a place that is better
than where we are. We’re always insisting on a future that in some
ways invalidates our present. Empires are dangerous for many reasons.
Empires are dangerous because they ignore the conditions of the
present. They are a denial of self. They are a denial of the real
conditions of the present. And empires are illusory fabrications,
manipulative to one’s self as well as to others.
They are projections of human vanity. That’s what they are. The vanity
of imagining ourselves better tomorrow than we are today.”
Soren Kierkegaard understood that the fundamental problem of modernity
was that people had been deformed by mass culture into non-people. It
was the artist-as-prophet who was tasked with exposing the lies
embodied in the mindless chants fed to the crowd, he said. Tyrannies
always seek to destroy us as distinct, autonomous human beings.
Christ “did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass
movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to
the single individual,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Therefore everyone who
will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a
crowd is not art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a
little knowledge of human passions.
But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.”
In his novel “The Lost Memory of Skin,” Banks looks at how the
alienation and isolation of modernity have been exacerbated by the digital
age.
“If you digitalize your erotic life you have a lost memory of skin,”
Banks told me. “That’s really central to this story and to the
experience of this boy. He’s a 22-year-old boy. That may also be part
of it too. Evolution into adult life is made much more difficult
through the digitalization of our erotic lives and every other aspect
of our lives—our economic lives, our political lives. It is key to
that novel. He lives through his screen. Yet it’s not in any sense a
book that focuses on that fact of life. It’s his environment. That’s
all. I wanted to show what it was like to be immersed in that as an
environment. Where you had no point of comparison. Where you had no
genuine outside experience that you could compare and see what was
going on. I have a 9-year-old grandson. He has no memory of life
without it being located on the screen. It’s frightening because it
alters one’s brain and whole perceptual apparatus of the world.”
“We have now in place a system that makes a person like Trump not only
possible but also probably inevitable as president,” he said. “You can
tell by surrounding himself with billionaires and generals, it’s
really an oligarchy that’s come into existence. The seeds were there
long before Ronald Reagan. Once you no longer have to hide it—because
you’re so entrenched in power—then it’s OK to put someone like that up
front. Until now, we’ve felt with lesser and lesser degree that we’ve had to
hide it.
Now
we’re in trouble. We’re in deep trouble.”
The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, at the height of Stalin’s terror, was
in a visitor line at the prison in Leningrad. A woman came close to
her and
whispered: “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova answered: “Yes, I can.”
“And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once
been her face,” the poet wrote.
Between 1935 and 1961 Akhmatova worked clandestinely on her elegy
“Requiem.”
The 10 numbered poems, which would not be fully published until 1987,
chronicled the despair, grief, loss and terror suffered under Stalin’s
tyranny. She became one of the most eloquent and powerful voices of
the oppressed. Her art was wielded against the brutality of power in
defense of the sanctity of life. She wrote:
Then I learned how faces fall apart
How fear looks out from under the eyelids,
How deep are the hieroglyphics
Cut by Suffering on people’s cheeks.
The artist, if true to his or her vocation, recovers the past and
explains the present. The artist is the true chronicler of who we were
and where we came from. Culture, in times of distress, is not a luxury but a
life raft.
© 2017 TruthDig
