We have to immediately dispatch with the notion that we’ll get any dice whatsoever from people who already have jobs in oak-paneled rooms with leather seating.
Cast your mind back to the end-of-term glee that accompanied Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can,” “Time for Change,” “Ain’t We Neat” election. There was such hope, such optimism, but what happened? Nothing. Nothing was ever going to happen, nothing could happen in that context. That’s the whole point. The joy of Obama’s presidency after eight years of Bush amounts to an insipid blowjob at the end of a rotten evening. Very nice for a moment, but who’s going to actually mop up the mess?
We are, obviously. All else has failed; it’s time for a Revolution.
24
Plug Me In
A REVOLUTION IS WHERE A POLITICAL SYSTEM IS OVERTHROWN from outside the formal political structures that already exist.
The 1997 UK election that swept Tony Blair’s New Labour into power, jolly though it may’ve been, wasn’t a Revolution; it was at best a refurbishment. It was comparable to the election of Obama or Clinton: A bloke with a nice smile and an angle is swept into power after a more obviously despicable regime and then behaves more or less exactly like his predecessors. We shouldn’t be disappointed. No version of “bloke with nice smile,” or different-color skin, or accent, or vagina will work. True change has to subvert the system that produces these people.
Joseph Campbell has a lovely analogy to help us understand mortality. He explains that a school janitor in charge of minor repairs, on discovering a lightbulb has broken, doesn’t collapse into a quivering puddle of grief, warbling, “That was my favorite lightbulb, and now it’s gone.” The janitor, if he’s any good, knows that the bulb is just an expression of the electricity that illuminates it and simply unscrews the dead, useless bulb, tosses it away, and pops in a new one.
Here I will use Campbell’s maintenance fable to deliver two points: 1) we human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain but is approaching in its fledgling understanding of the harmony and transcendent principles of the quantum world, and 2) all political figures are the expression of a refined systemic energy and cannot therefore ever convey a significantly different ideology—it’s not their fault; they’re just not plugged into it.
I chatted to a boy from an expensive British private school yesterday. The boy was smart, alert, and funny. The most obvious result of his education, though, was an adamantine, unblinking certainty that things are the way they should be. That there are no alternatives to the current political system. Anything else would be mayhem, violence, and corruption. I suppose that must be one of the key priorities of any elitist educational establishment, to indoctrinate the pupils with a turgid and absolute sense that change is impossible, that privilege is correct because it exists in a realm beyond morality. It seemed like even to countenance an alternative would be a kind of blasphemy. These ideas had been wedged into his head, and no room was left to ponder alternatives.
Whenever I’m surprised by some unrecognizable behavior or trait, I try to think of comparable phenomena within myself. Pedophilia is the most obvious example. Every time another icon of my childhood is slung into jail for diddling his audience, my peers, I am astonished. Whenever we hear a gut-wrenching tale of child abuse, we are sickened by the aberration. Our impulse is revulsion, disgust, to recoil from these monsters and their practices for fear of some indiscernible contamination. Like perversion is radioactive.
Clearly, the ancient urge that motivates my own compulsions that are conveniently socially appropriate, are comparable to the drives of a pedophile, if aimed at a conveniently socially acceptable target: adult women.
When pedophiles talk about their obsession, they always say they have no choice and that the urge is overwhelming. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that can’t identify with that urge or obsession; the distinction is the object.
Sometimes I tell myself not to smoke a fag or eat a chocolate biscuit, but the urge overrides my will. Fortunately, the subject of my desire is not taboo and doesn’t have a negative effect on others—unless you’re comparing passive smoking to child abuse. When I was single and lived a life of nocturnal excesses, I got out of the habit of curbing compulsion; if I wanted to indulge a behavior, I usually could. How pitiful if, for some reason beyond choice and will, the subject of your urges were forbidden.
Judging from the number of people who’ve experienced abuse as children, this desire is incredibly common. What of those that feel forbidden lusts but don’t act upon them? Those who suffer pedophilic urges but suppress them? What do they get, a medal? A parade? Even wanting, imagining, sexual contact with children is disturbing, only marginally less than the act. Really, then, it’s just an unpleasant thing that exists, that doesn’t seem to be hugely curtailed by penalties or current therapeutic solutions. If our objective is to limit the number of children subjected to abuse, we must be open to new ways to treat the perpetrators as well as the victims. Not just out of some wet liberal notion of tolerance but because it will yield better results.
Come with me now on a brief New Age hippie ramble, which may be of no help and, if you’re reviewing this book for the Daily Mail or are a concerned parent picking it up in a teenager’s room, will have you apoplectic. Don’t look under the bed, for God’s sake. The horrors that lurk there will dwarf this eastern liberalism. Although do kids these days even have things under the bed? Isn’t all their porn, booze, and weaponry stored in a digital cloud floating around the house about to burst and drown us in a contraband downpour?
Back to my jumped-up, hemp-dusted theory: If we consider humanity to be not a disparate and separate conglomerate of individuals but the temporary physical manifestation and expression of a subtler electromagnetic, microcosmic realm (thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven), like in Campbell’s lightbulb allegory, then all resultant phenomena emanated from a single source, so we are all jointly responsible. If we are all one human family—and there’s not a theory out there from any denomination that opposes a single human source—then we cannot reach solutions based on “separateness” or “otherness”; it’s mechanically incorrect.
As the TM Foundation’s Washington experiment demonstrated, the transcendent consciousness of a group of meditators had a positive impact on the city’s crime statistics. There is no real gap between my consciousness and your consciousness. The separation is a retrospective, sense-based application.
We’ve all seen the heartening and peculiarly uplifting news story of a recently bereaved parent who somehow instantly forgives the killer of their child. Someone who has somehow overcome the initial rage, hatred, and urge for vengeance that accompanies such tragedy. Seemingly, though, beyond that pain is a kind of sanguinity in forgiveness. How do they do that? From where is that strength sourced?
Resentment is painful to carry, justified resentment no less so. All resentment has to be relinquished to find peace. As it says in the St. Francis prayer: “It is by forgiving that we are forgiven.” If we want to be free from pain, we have to forgive everyone we believe to have wronged us, to find love beyond the pain, as these heroic parents do. In this forgiveness is the acknowledgment of our unity. That we are one human family. One consciousness. One body. Increasingly I learn that spiritual principles only have value in adversity, when applied in opposition to a powerful contrary tendency.
It is precisely when I want to kill or fuck I have to look within and see if there’s another way. For years I lived by subduing my sensitivity. Eckhart Tolle says, “Addiction begins with pain and ends with pain,” meaning that pain is behind compulsive behavior. Eleven years clean, I still feel the urge to medicate pain. Whenever events don’t go my way, my first instinct is to annul the feeling, to look for an external resource to solve the problem. The second part of Eckhart’s edict kicks in here—addiction “ends with pain.” Medication of any kind offers only a temporary solution; it always leads back to
pain and becomes therefore predictably cyclical.
These myths—Sisyphus, Prometheus, and the sun-god Ra—all recount this cycle of perpetual struggle.
Sisyphus was a Greek king who irritated the gods, mostly through hubris; he was up himself and constantly trying to pull a fast one. His primary offense, as far as I can see, was an attempt to cheat death itself when he was taken to the Greek underworld and chained by Hades, the bloke who looked after it. Actually, Hades was a god, not some subterranean lavvy attendant; “bloke” might be reductive. Interesting that in Greek myth both hell and its chief administrator, which for us would be the devil, are seen from a much less pejorative perspective.
In Hellenistic myths, “the underworld,” where the dead are sent, is a complicit part of the human experience, not a fiery penitentiary, and Hades is a more neutral character, not a cackling horned beast, jabbing you with a trident. I prefer pagan ideologies like Hellenism; they’re more obviously symbolic and inclusive of human frailty. Monotheism is a bit too judgmental and reductive. It even sounds dumb: “Monotheism”—it’s only got one idea, what a durr-brain.
King Sisyphus, who has spent his whole life tricking people, engaging in scurrilous wars, having it off with his enemies’ kids, and generally being a real dick, really takes the biscuit when sent to the absolute terminus of the underworld. When enchained by Hades, he dupes the deity into releasing him by using the oldest trick in the book, the ol’ “Mate, show us how them chains work” number. Hades, who in my mind should be sacked on the spot by the god of gods, Zeus, for this fascinating incompetence, falls for it and in no time at all is chained up himself like Elmer Fudd or something.
Having made a mockery of Hades and the underworld, which amounts to “laughing in the face of death,” Sisyphus comes back to the land of the living and starts kicking off again like a royal hooligan—so like Prince Harry, I suppose, or Uday Hussein.
All the while that Hades is chained up, clenching his fist, and cursing that “damn rabbit,” no humans can die, so the earth is becoming overpopulated, the sick are suffering, and we are learning that death is a necessary part of the life cycle.
Zeus, not before time, decides to step in. To demonstrate the necessity and even favorability of death, Sisyphus is given the task of rolling a boulder from the bottom of a hill to the top; then Zeus, in a trick of his own, which might simply be called “gravity,” returns the boulder to the bottom, where Sisyphus must resume his fruitless and unending labor.
Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish brainbox, reckoned it was a good metaphor for addiction to materialism and sex: “It is comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it is comic that Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the number simply indicates that they have no value. Therefore, one should stay within one’s means in the use of the word ‘love.’ ”
This analysis is resonant: this book, to a point, is about my own disillusionment with the material offerings of fame and fortune, which include money and sexual opportunity. My mate Matt once said he heard me, from his place on the couch, skylarking and jesting with some female companions in my room and assumed I was adrift in hedonistic glory.
He then reported that I left the room, deadpan and hollow-eyed, somberly walked past him, fetched some lubricant—either mental or anatomical—from the kitchen, and glumly trotted back to the bacchanalia. When the door closed, he said, the trumpeting of decadent splendor continued as before. Whilst I don’t recall that particular incident, I do recollect that what began as the pursuit of pleasure or at least an escape from pain became a joyless trudge through flesh, at the summit of each coital march no certainty other than that the process must begin again.
How Sisyphus and his myth of pointless endeavor chimes with me now is as a tale of recognition of the cyclical nature of all things, even and perhaps especially enlightenment. This commitment must be renewed daily; it is never permanently arrived at.
The poet Rumi has a line: “Tomorrow you will awake frightened and alone.” When I heard that recited, I thought, “Fuck. I will an’ all; I always do.” Each morning, a new commitment is required to hand over my will, to relinquish my own ideas as to how my life should be, knowing that method always leads to trouble.
Bill Hicks said, “The world is like a ride in an amusement park. It has thrills and spills and it is very brightly colored, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have remembered and they come back to us. They say, ‘Hey … don’t be afraid, this is just a ride,’ and we … kill those people!” Rumi, Kierkegaard, and perhaps Bill himself have left clues and codes for us to help us to disentangle from the pain material, sensorial fixation. All prophecies stripped of acculturation and geographic ornamentation seem only to be saying, “Journey within; look behind your feelings, beyond your pain; fashion your world from what you find there.”
What we inhabit now is a world built upon the feelings and fears that the prophets are telling us to overcome.
Sometimes when I’m alone and West Ham have been particularly shit, I shamefully fantasize about supporting, maybe, Arsenal. I can’t do it for long, though, because it feels wrong, disloyal, perverse, indecent, like incest or something incalculably taboo. Like prepubescent fingers in a matriarch’s knicker drawer while the babysitter watches Bullseye downstairs.
Reality responds to consciousness. Reality may only be consciousness, for all we know—for all we can ever know—so we must be free to imagine new worlds. Of course, we will be attacked. “Oh, yeah,” they’ll say, “what will it look like? How will it work?” The current system, of course, was given time and space to evolve and was not subjected to scrutiny from some haughty panel in an aloof gallery, because they were the people who devised it.
There have of course been loads of successful Revolutions in history, where people have come together and overthrown a system that no longer represents them. The problem, you will have noticed, is that they are usually replaced by another system that doesn’t represent them. Like in Egypt in 2011.
What this implies is that any worthwhile Revolution has to have an inbuilt protection against any demagogic exploitation and that the will of the people needs to be perpetual and perennial, constant and continual—not some blind orgasmic flash that yields to postcoital lethargy.
As Bob Dylan wisely said, “Don’t follow leaders.” Leaders will let you down, the role itself corrupt. He did go on to say in his very next line, “Watch your parking meters,” which many might think undermines the line that preceded it. I disagree. We could regard it in a few ways: One is that Bob, by saying something nuts and trivial, is demonstrating that we oughtn’t start looking to him as a leader or kind of folk prophet. “I like this Dylan guy; he’s able to spell out a rhyming ideology in an appealing nasal twang. Tell me more. Watch yer parking meters? No, the man’s a twit.”
Or he could be saying that it is these mundane, municipal inconveniences, like parking meters, that truly outrage a modern, urbanized population.
Are you not more incensed by ATM charges than by oil spills and deforestation? When it comes to the crunch, aren’t you more wound up by Apple mendaciously changing their chargers every fucking time they bring out a new device than by apartheid? I mean, how much money do they want?
Do they have to wring us out like a vagrant vampire with a tampon in his fangs? When will it be enough? Aren’t you deep down more pissed off about unnecessary and financially motivated parking fines than about child sweatshop labor? I am. I know I’m meant to care about children in Palestine, and if you sit me down and explain it to me I get annoyed, I might even squeeze out a furious tear, but when I can’t use my phone abroad because of some intricate admin around roaming, I’m ready to pick up a gun.
What’s terrifying is that our petty frustrations and these awful global transgressions are intimately connected by the same dominant profiteering system.
These miserable inconveniences someh
ow prevail.
That’s why the Daily Mail and Fox News are so effective, because they reach right through our liberal bullshit and into our dark, animalistic, selfish, well-nourished core. And as Solzhenitsyn and the Native American wolf allegory demonstrate, we all have that capacity for darkness within us. The devil has all the best tunes, and Fox News has access to the most responsive buttons.
This is why spirituality is not some florid garnish, some incense fragrance, wafted across our senses but part of the double-helix DNA of Revolution.
There is a need for Revolution on every level—as individuals, as societies, as a planet, as a consciousness. Unless we address the need for absolute change, unless we agree on a shared story of how we want the world to be, we’ll inertly drift back to the materialistic, individualistic magnetism behind our current systems.
25
Give My Regards To The Basket
MY CONCEPTION OF REVOLUTION, PROBABLY LIKE MOST PEOPLE’S, comes from old-fashioned ones where the state is overthrown by a vibrant, sexy, chanting horde and then reassembled, like the eighteenth-century French Revolution.
This was pretty hard core as Revolutions go, because an all-powerful leader, Louis XVI—I’m pretty sure that means “sixteenth”—got his head cut off. Once you’ve called fifteen kings “Louis” and it’s still the only name you can think of, it’s quite clear you’re an institution that’s bereft of ideas and a bit of noggin-chopping is required.
Revolution Page 23