by Jay Fox
“Then there are those who play the blame game. Some blame the devil, which, to me, implies that the devil is more powerful than God. Whatever. Then there are those who say that the problem is the church. And then there are those who say it's the System, or the Man, or the Patriarchy. There are those who say it's the Plutes. It's the Gays, or the Poor, or the Feminists, or the Blacks, or the Latinos. It's the Democrats. It's the Republicans.” He pauses. “The truth, though, is simple: it's humans.
“Most humans cannot be satisfied with their lot in life. Isn't that what the story of Eden is all about? Because we are conscious of possibility, we are capable of imagining a better world than the one in which we reside. The fruit is just the final straw, the symbolic divorce between man's acceptance of nature and man's wish to control nature, which, through a long string of consequents, ends with man's desire to remove God and Fate from the mix. Those who truly have faith try to deny this faculty, this faculty that led to the Fall. So, too, do they try to deny the mind the ability to foster spite over the way the world is versus the way they want it to be. They put their life in God's hands, so the speak. But, as I have said, most of us can't do this. We want someone to hate. We actively fucking seek it. And when a true demagogue comes along, he knows that the easiest way to recruit people is by tapping into this vast pool of hatred and focusing it on one group of people or one individual person. Isn't that what Hitler did? He came across a population ready to hate, provided an easy scapegoat in the Jews, manufactured a form of nationalism based upon a bastardized version of Hegelian and Nietzschean philosophies, and then proceeded to establish an economic system that utilized the Keynesian principal of deficit spending in order to both increase the quality of life for Aryans, who consequently acquiesced to the new regime, and to bulk up an army that had been eviscerated by the Treaty of Versailles. And, if you ask me, Fascism, as an economic system, is defined more by the marriage of executive power—Hitler, Franco, Mussolini—with powerful international corporations—particularly the arms industry and the American banking industry. This is why the term Islamo-fascist doesn't make any fucking sense: Virtually no Islamic country has a serious industrial sector in their economy, let alone the capacity to manufacture munitions for a large standing army—they import most of their weapons either from us or from the Russians.
I have no idea where he's going with this.
“We're always looking for something or someone to blame, for someone to hate. That's maybe the only place where black people have it easy. We can always blame white people. We can always blame history. Are we wrong? No. History has dealt us a fucked up hand. And that history follows us. Every fucking day. But you can't understand that. You can only understand that you can't understand. I can empathize, though. I have no idea what it's like to be a woman. And I know sometimes I forget this. So I can see how white people can forget their privileges from time to time because I sometimes forget my privileges as a man. I can empathize. I know that I cannot have a feminist perspective; I can only be a man seeing the world through a feminist lens. In order to fully understand what it is to be a woman, I would have to be a woman. And I'm not. Even if I hooked my brain up to the brain of a woman, I would still only be able to interpret her perception via my own. The only way to get around this would be to eliminate myself, but this just leads to a paradox: If I can only understand another by dissolving myself, then I cannot be said to experience anything.”
He pauses. He almost smiles. “I'm guessing you thought I'd hate white people, huh?”
“Well, I had no idea you were black until I came here.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Kind of.”
“Why?”
[Imbroglio: See Above]
“People typically mention it.”
“But they don't mention skin color when a person's white. It's the default, the normal, right?”
I stutter.
“Look, man, I don't think you're racist,” he laughs glacially. “But you have to understand, your basic orientation to the world is. You just don't realize it. I do. I can't help but not.” He pauses. “This is something that all black people have to live with. It's infuriating when I see that you don't realize it, but I can't completely blame you. Like I said: I'm sometimes oblivious to the privileges of being a man.”
He reaches over to the table to grab Scooter's cigarettes. “You want one?” he asks.
“Will he mind?”
“Are you kidding me? He brought them out here for me.” He pulls two out and tosses one my way. A lighter soon follows. “Do you mind if I change the music? I'm not really feeling this right now.”
I toss the lighter back his way. “No.”
An early Medeski, Martin and Wood album begins to play.
“I love these guys.”
“You know them?”
“Yeah. Chris Wood is kind of a hero of mine. He knows how to keep a steady head in the middle of chaos.” I reflect for a moment. “That's probably one of the only pieces of fatherly wisdom I ever received in my life. When my grandmother died, my dad came up to me and said, 'Son, you know you're a man when you can keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs'.”
He nods. “Sounds about right.”
“So what's the story with him?” I ask after a few moments. “I don't see the two of you being friends—or cousins for that matter.”
“He's here on vacation. From Detroit.”
“And he's your cousin?”
“My mom was real close with his parents. They never knew my father. He—my dad—was born in the City, and he moved to Detroit in the sixties to pursue a music career. He was a singer, and he was under the impression that Motown was just handing out contracts to anyone who could carry a tune.” Caesura. “I shouldn't say that. He wasn't naïve or conceited; he just thought he had a better chance of making it out there than he did back here. Who knows? He may have been right.
“Now, my granddad wasn't happy with my father's decision. He wanted his son to go to college to become a doctor or a scientist. And it's not like my dad didn't have the brains to excel in either field; he was a brilliant guy. It's just that he believed himself to be an entertainer and an artist. But there's one thing that my father was not, and that was stubborn. So, to appease my granddad, he enrolled at Wayne State as a part-time student. And he did well there. He also did fairly well gigging with his group, the Detroit Diamonds. It's not like he made much—I mean he still had to wash dishes in order to pay his rent.
“Things were going well for him for a few years. He was making a name for himself in the music scene, he was doing well in school, and he was even getting a few articles published in the school paper. And then the riots happened.”
“This is what? Sixty-eight?”
“Sixty-seven. It was really bad, man. And it changed my dad. I mean, he was sympathetic to the cause, you know, the movement—Civil Rights and Black Power. He went to the rallies, and he marched; he read a lot of the literature, too, but he wasn't ready to seriously commit himself to anything beyond his own pursuits. He was an artist first, an activist second. But the riots changed him. The riots changed a lot of shit. The racism within the ranks of the police was a lot more pronounced back then. In the most basic sense, there was the simple fact that the police were white and the majority of the people on the street were not. It affects you even when you see pictures of the things that happened. But he was there. And that's one of the primary reasons that he got involved.
“I don't know much after that. He and my granddad stopped talking because he thought my granddad was a Tom; my granddad thought it was best to just kind of let my dad be, let him be an angry young man. My aunt kept in touch with him, but she didn't really know much because she was only twelve at the time. She and my dad wrote letters back and forth, but he never went into details. In fact, all she ever really knew for certain was where he was living. A part of me feels as though he became a Panther. That would explain why he ended up moving out to L
.A. and, later, to Oakland.”
“Why don't you know? I mean, what happened to him?”
“Well, a few months after I was born, he was shot. He ran a stoplight, got pulled over, and apparently reached for his wallet too quickly, if you know what I mean. The cop got a slap on the wrist—you know, 'Don't you go shooting any more niggers, Dan, otherwise we may have to give you another week's suspension. This time without pay.' My father, meanwhile, died of complications in the ER.”
“Jesus. I'm sorry.”
He gives no response. “Anyway, long story short, my mother and I moved back to Detroit—she was from there. Do you know the area at all?”
“Just the suburbs.”
He shrugs. “Well, we ended up in Ann Arbor, in Scooter's house. It's not like it was a hippie commune or anything like that. My mom just rented out the top floor of their home. We lived there until I was four.”
“Then what?”
“My mother wasn't a saint. I'll be the first to acknowledge that.” He's quiet for a long time. “She was dating this fucking guy. I still don't know how serious it was. Scooter's parents didn't pry into her life, and my grandparents didn't hear anything about him. I guess they had been seeing each other for a couple of months—you know, long enough for her to know that she'd gotten pregnant and that this guy was definitely the father. But she didn't want a child. So she did what she thought was right. Only, she didn't tell him.” He takes a long, lachrymose drag from his cigarette. “But he found out.”
He winces and lets out a sound that one could mistake for a chortle, though it clearly wasn't something so frivolous. In fact, there is no way to refer to the gravity it represented. “He didn't mean to kill her. That's what he's told me. In letters. But he did.” Faxo looks down to his cigarette. “He never could explain what came over him.”
“I'm so sorry.” There are no words that can ameliorate such a wealth of pain; sometimes one can only provide a presence. “Really,” I add without thinking. It feels contrived no matter how much I don't want it to be.
“Well,” he says as he looks up, “I ended up living with Scooter and his parents for a little while before moving in with my granddad. And I've always kept up with him and his folks. He comes out here every once in a while. I go to Detroit every once in a while. Well…not Detroit. Ann Arbor or Royal Oak, which is the suburb to which Scooter moved a few years ago.”
There's silence for a while. I try to think about what my parents were doing during the sixties and the seventies. My dad was born in 1951. My mother was born a year later. They don't talk about the past much. When they do, they concentrate on their early childhoods or on the fact that they hated the seventies—probably because they were both stuck in med-school and residency during much of the decade, even if my father is the only doctor in the family. I can't imagine them going to rallies or even being politically conscious. My mother saw the Dead in 1973 while she was attending the College of William and Mary. She enjoyed a few of the songs, but was rather turned off by the scene surrounding the band. My dad only listens to jazz records. He wasn't what Mailer would have called a White Negro, nor is he much of a musician. He really wanted to be, but he just never had the time to cultivate much of a talent. I guess that explains why I had a bass in my hands at the age of seven.
My parents are not Episcopalian, but they do exhibit the characteristics that one typically associates with the sect. They don't talk about the three things that most New Yorkers dwell upon: politics, religion, and sex. They are quiet, polite, socially conservative (with the exception of the issues of abortion and euthanasia), and active in the clubs and civic communities that comprise any suburban town: the PTA (maybe they've finally included an 'S' in there by now), the church, the book clubs that read best-sellers that are “cultural” in the sense that the setting of the book is different than suburbia or some nineteenth century British estate. They wear clothing that is shipped to them from Maine, and blush when they hear certain words. One would think them incapable of farting or shitting due to the tightness of their sphincters.
“I'm sorry if I got too heavy there,” he says. I didn't realize people still used that word.
“It's all right, man.”
He drinks from his bottle of water. He looks to it, takes another sip, and then looks back to me. “Sure you don't want that drink?”
“A glass of water will be fine. I think I have to meet someone, and I don't want to show up stinking of booze.”
“That's probably a good idea,” he says. “I think I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine.” He stands and begins for the area that contains an island, a sink, and the majority of the household appliances. As he opens the refrigerator, he turns to me. “Where did you meet Patrick and Daphne anyway?”
“I took out an ad on Craigslist to see if anyone could help me find Coprolalia. Patrick responded.”
“Yeah, that sounds like him.”
“We met at a bar on Bedford before going to this party in south Williamsburg. That's where I met Daphne.” He stops abruptly after uncorking the wine. He turns to me with an incredulous expression. “It was held by the A-R-E, if you've heard of them.”
“Sure,” he laughs. “Did you have a good time?”
“It was a bit strange, but it was certainly a lot of fun.”
“You spent an evening with the Avatars, Reincarnations, and Eidolons, and you thought it only a bit strange?”
“I though they were called the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener.”
“Wait…was this Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“The costume party.” He nods. “Not exactly the thing that Dick would have wanted, but…well…whatever.”
“Wait…but about the other name. What about the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener?”
“They've been called that. Some people have even said that the initials actually stand for Astral Resurrection Entities or Astrally-Resurrected Entities. Either way, these people are profoundly mistaken—to the point that it's almost silly. The A-R-E is more about the celebration of life—you know, a carnival, a Dionysian celebration, a Coney Island of the mind, a circus of the soul…a step beyond what the Germans would call Gesamtkunstwerk. It's different than a total artwork—to translate the term without recourse to nuance—because it seeks to integrate the audience into the work of art, as well—it's not just the utilization of several mediums. I know that the concept is a bit outdated—probably because it's been a buzzword for literary critics, sophists, and philologists for well over a century now—but that was, or is, the most straightforward drive behind the group. It is the attempt to create a new community, and I’m defining community in the way that Cohen has. This requires the abolition of everything that alienates individuals, that separates them. Keens was of the opinion that the community in which we as Americans live has become pernicious, and that the full, exclusive participation in this community has made people anxious, spiteful, emotionally bankrupt.” He laughs to himself. “You know, Mordy got a lot of his ideas from Keens.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Keens was particularly annoyed by what he called assumed historical identifiers, things that highlight the disparities between individuals: you know, class, race, gender, or any of those things in which so many people take so much pride. But people were skeptical of his intentions. As I said before, to abandon one’s status as, say, a woman, who faces persecution as a consequence of the myriad power structures that have been in place since well before the advent of capitalism, not to mention the ones that have come along since the modern age, as well as the paternal and phallocentric nature of language or langue…well, this type of second-class status within the social hierarchy understandably makes them suspicious and not unjustifiably hostile to any form of assimilation as it’s, again justifiably, presumed to be male-oriented.
“They’re right to be suspicious. I don’t want to say that they’re not. But Keens’ hope was that, if everyone could abandon all of the elements within bour
geois society that define people, the community with its symbols and the meanings derived from them…well, they would be able to truly associate with the other, the people by whom they are surrounded; they would be able to experience a type of context that would eliminate pretences that are largely based on the imperious nature of the other—the other who dictates what is desired, even if this other does not know it. But he knew it couldn’t be done without some type of pretence of his own. And, to a certain extent, he was right. Even among hard-core Marxists and radicals, there is that need to intellectualize everything in order to gain, at the very least, the respect of the community. If you just talk like a normal person, there's a good chance that you'll be dismissed as, at best, a fool, or, at worst, a reactionary.”
“So Keens was something of spiritualist, a guru?”
“No,” as he closes the door of the fridge. “He was an artist first and foremost. His aim was to turn people into pieces of living art, or living pieces of art—I forget. The idea was that people needed to be granted a context within an environment that was neither repressive nor artificial. He thought that all humans really sought thee things: love, creative work, and knowledge. He wanted a community that provided these things, but he was grounded enough to know that such a paradigm simply is not possible in any zeitgeist or episteme or whatever you want to call it, that promotes competition and discourages candor. He wanted a society without antagonisms, whether based upon class or sex or gender or race, and he wanted to allow it to flourish within the framework of leisure, as the freedom to participate in leisure, among the non-aristocratic or mercantile classes anyway, is one of the most important elements within twentieth century capitalism. He wanted a place in which there was nothing but people, people stripped of status and categorized, social identifiers.”
“A utopia.”
“In a manner of speaking.” He hands me the glass of water before he sits.