THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “Thanks.”

  “But utopia paints a spurious picture. It, a utopia, can never be fully realized because it requires too much energy to maintain. The second law of thermodynamics forbids a sustained utopia—unless, of course, one is speaking of a utopia as envisaged by Orwell or Huxley. Regardless, Keens understood the problem.”

  “That a true utopia is unattainable.”

  “No, that it can only exist in the moment, perhaps only in the mind if you want to sound like a total jerk-off.”

  “I see. So he understood this.”

  “Yeah, you know, tenacity and failure are stranger bedfellows than tenacity and success, especially if one is capable of understanding limitations. If one is blind to the limitations of their chosen enterprise, however, perseverance and futility are brothers in arms.”

  “I see.”

  “As I've said, his aim was just to provide a venue. The parties were meant to be small, infrequent bursts of good will, perhaps guideposts to allow one to absorb the philosophy espoused by the group. It wasn't a palace of the sullen—you know, those types who spend their adult life whining over the fact that they didn't quote unquote fit in (while holding up a hand with two curled fingers) during high school. Those types can be the most self-absorbed assholes one can come across. Anyway, Keens sought to provide a place for spiritual fulfillment, the ability to feel involved in something. He wasn't aiming to be all-inclusive, nor did he want it to be some type of exclusive club like the Stonecutters, either. Moreover, he wanted to keep politics out of it because political organizations have a nasty tendency of creating divisions, especially when the organization has no real power. He succeeded in a way, though one could argue that the group was very political, just not in the sense that Americans think of a quote unquote political group. He wanted to have a place where people in the right frame of mind could participate in something greater than themselves without feeling repressed, that they could experience that sense of gemeinschaft, which, according to the Chicago School and Weber and Durkheim, is a necessary feature of urban, industrialized society.”

  “That sounds like the goal of Burning Man—or a rave.”

  “Well, I think we both know that rave culture is founded more on drugs that anything else—you'd have to have the intellect of a ten-year-old not to see that. Keens, on the other hand, wanted to pull away from the drug culture. He saw what it did to the summer of love. He had a lot of friends who ended up in jail or dead. And he was certainly familiar with people like the Burnouts, who had no real talent, no new ideas, and no vision of anything; they just thought that drugs, heroin in particular, would provide some kind of artistic catalyst—at least this is the excuse a lot of these people utilize in order to hide the deeper issues as to why they opt to pick up the needle as opposed to the fucking pen. The belief is obviously transparent. Some may say that it makes great players better, which I am more than reluctant to entertain, but heroin isn't more important to the cultivation of a sound than the hours each day that a true artist, someone like Coltrane and Evans or Burrows, must dedicate to practicing and writing. In other words, drug use and talent are not conditionally linked. It may be prevalent among the talented, but that has more to do with the Romantic idea of the artist as an outcast or a tortured soul in need of some means of escape, which, of course, breeds people who follow such an archetype. That's what I always found so funny about Camus' Meursault—he's not an artist, which, to me anyhow, indicates that the character is to be considered kind of an everyman. Everybody feels estranged. And what separates the artist from the common person is that the common person learns to deal with or ignore the feeling of estrangement. The artist, on the other hand, creates in order to vanquish his malaise. 'Why does an artist create?' so many have asked. Simple: He has to. If you don't understand this, then you're not an artist.

  “You clearly get it. What do you do?”

  “Well, I’m into journalism, obviously; but what I really love is music.”

  “Bass, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “What kind?”

  “You name it. I have an upright and two electrics: a vintage Rickenbacker, and this custom that my dad got for me on my eighteenth birthday. I can play the cello, too, but I've never owned one. Either way, I focus mostly on jazz—bop and fusion.”

  “Who's your favorite bassist?”

  “Well, Chris Wood is definitely up there, but I really love Eddie Gomez and Scott LaFaro. Ron Carter's a favorite, too.”

  “Right on, man. You don't meet too many jazz cats anymore.” He pauses. “You don't use, I assume?”

  “I used to smoke a lot of grass, but I've given that up. My only poison now is booze.”

  “A pure soul. That's good to hear.”

  “But about Keens. He wasn't one for drugs?”

  “I don't know. It's not that he wanted to forbid drugs; he just didn't think they were necessary to induce the type of experience he wished to provide. If drugs helped some people get into the right state of mind, then he saw no reason to discourage users, but it’s not like he spiked everyone’s drink with acid to melt away the…well, whatever’s supposed to melt away when you take that shit.”

  “I see. But I guess I'm still a little unclear as to what you mean by the right state of mind.”

  “I don't mean to harp on LSD, but I’m sure you’re familiar with LSD, and that, back in the sixties, it was considered a wonder drug by both the CIA and the emerging counter-culture, especially Timothy O'Leary and his adherents. This is because it dissolves the social structure with which everyone has been indoctrinated, or at least allows the various symbols within the community to lose their meaning for a time. Furthermore, it very often introduced users to a spiritual dimension that had not previously been accessible.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Some people, however, are too stupid or immature to understand just how profound the experience really is. I mean, for every Pink Floyd you have ten thousand Monkees. This could be said of psilocybin, too. Regardless, these types cheapen it in a way—it ceases to be an experience and it becomes a high. Keens did not want people like this involved with the A-R-E. While it is certainly the case that some could have learned from the practices of the group, he thought it more likely that they would simply go through the motions without taking anything away from the experience. In other words, he didn't want dogmatists, and, perhaps more importantly, he didn't want the organization to be overrun with degenerates.

  “Now I'm not saying that LSD was a big part of the experience. I'm just comparing the two: The A-R-E was not meant to be a frivolous organization, just as LSD should not be considered a frivolous drug.”

  “Okay. But I still don't understand this experience he wanted to provide.”

  “No one knows exactly. There's plenty of speculation, no doubt, but no one actually knows what his big goal was.”

  “What about the JOKE?”

  “Well, that's just what the goal was called. Some people within the A-R-E believe that the JOKE was his suicide—that there is no higher purpose; the JOKE is that people think there is.”

  “So no one really knows why he did it?”

  “Did what?”

  “Why he committed suicide.”

  “No. I mean, people claim to know, but there's no universal consensus on the matter. The more nihilistic sorts have their reasons, you know, they think it’s because there’s nothing else. But other fractions have their own conjectures. There are those who think that his death was made to look like a suicide. The supposed culprits behind the conspiracy range from the CIA to the KGB, the Mossad to the Vatican. Trying to even explain some of these theories is something of a cluster-fuck if you ask me. I don't really want to get into them.”

  “That's fine.”

  “Anyway, most people aren’t so quick to jump to such paranoid conclusions. Some think that it was caused by guilt. Others purport boredom. Still others claim that it is the ultimate expression of freedom, which,
in a sense, is true, but it’s irrelevant. I’ve even heard that his death was made to look like a suicide because Keens was under the impression that he was the second coming of Christ. As you must surely know, suicide is a pretty serious sin. You can't resurrect yourself with that type of baggage—in fact, you can't even get out of the swamp around the walls of Dis, according to Dante. That's why some people portray Judas as a saint rather than one of the three doomed to spend eternity examining a Satanic palette—or, if you're Borges, as the real Son of God.”

  “Okay, but I want to go back to the A-R-E. I still don't understand what it even is. I mean, Keens wanted to promote laughter and what sounds like some kind of venue out of one of Foucault’s wet dreams—I can understand that. But what does context have to do with anything?”

  “Context is very important to people. They seek it because they need to wrap their heads around their place in the world. Think of Lacan's Big Other.”

  “I’m not really familiar with Lacan.”

  “Okay. Well, here’s a brief explanation. Think of the super-ego. Think of how it tells the ego, the self, what to do. Okay, now remove this individual superego, and place it in the social world as some ultimate authority figure. This is the Big Other. It issues objective imperatives, and it can be an institution, a person, or even a deity. The most important element, though, is its objective status. This means that people heed its ethical, spiritual, artistic, etcetera, commands without question. The heavy duty Marxists put their lives in the context of historical progress. They believe their actions will eventually bring about a future free of the injustices that are perpetuated by class antagonisms. Their Big Other is history; it, to them, is objective. Christians place this life in the context of trial that is meant to sort out the wicked and the virtuous, and that all people will be judged accordingly either in death or when Judgment Day comes. Their Big Other is the Holy Trinity; God is granted objectivity.

  “But even the most destitute vagrant has a context, something apposite to an identity. See, an identity is merely the consequent of an individual’s context within a community. Seen in this light, the question 'Why am I here?' is a question of context. Furthermore, it suggests that you should be somewhere. 'Why am I here as opposed to there?' 'Why am I here at all?' These questions are posed because people want to know how they are supposed to fit into their surroundings, not how they are actually supposed to be. 'How am I supposed to be?' is easy—happy. 'How am I supposed to attain a perpetual state of happiness?' is simple, too—feel at home. And how do you feel at home? You find your context, and you love it. Amor fati.”

  “And how do you do that one?”

  “That’s the hard one. See, people feel that their freedom is a burden. There is a vacuity in freedom because it provides no answers; it actually eliminates a tangible sense of context. This point is very often ignored because the vast majority of people believe freedom to be, necessarily, a good thing. But it isn't always good, especially for people seriously trying to discover themselves. Freedom, in thought anyhow, opens up a lot of possibilities because it is dialectically opposed to the acquiescence to dogma. True freedom seeks to abolish the a priori, thereby making the proper way to behave a deeply personal and subjective question. Truth is subjectivity, as Kierkegaard said. But proclaiming there to be truth only in subjectivity is nothing more than an admission of ignorance, not to mention an open invitation for anomie and extreme and debilitating alienation. In other words, all context is abolished. This is why people often reject true freedom; they turn to dogma and ideology, to archetypes, to mores that provide the comfort and security that such alienation denies.”

  “So Keens was a nihilist.”

  “No, absolutely not. A person who refers to him or herself as an “-ist” of any sort clearly possesses a series of tenets, or at least one tenet. Buddhists believe in the teachings of Buddha; Marxists believe in the teachings of Marx, in history. Most nihilists, however, are their own confused brand of believers. I mean, the proposition 'I believe in nothing' is grammatically vague. Do you believe in something that you are referring to as 'nothing' or 'nothingness'? Do you deny yourself any attachment, any cathexis, and espouse a dogma of criminality like some type of metaphysical insurgent? Do you believe in the worship of science and progress, like one of Turgenev's characters, thereby making you more of a Positivist than anything else? Semantically, any of these positions can be true for one who asserts the proposition, 'I believe in nothing.'

  “I don't know about you, but I have a hard time taking nihilists seriously. If one renounces dogma, and the tenets of any form of morality, that's fine. But to exhibit such a great deal of pride in one's renunciation reveals that the process is one of negation, not of abjuration. And that's what bothers me.

  “To negate all beliefs is not to not-have beliefs. This is something the adolescents who posture as freethinkers fail to observe. To be free is to be lost. And to be truly lost, in the existential sense, is to lack contextual relevance, in your mind, anyway, to any community, any archetype, anything at all, and this means that you don't believe in nothing—you are incapable of possessing a belief, incapable of cathexis, incapable of empathy, sympathy, etcetera. This is far more severe, far more terrifying, than relativism. Relativism can become a dogma like anything else, as it proclaims, in absolutist terms, the non-existence of justifiable deference. The sense of estrangement to which I am referring is something far more profound, but it is not sustainable. You just can't mentally do it, no matter who you are. No, man: see the idea is to jump into this abyss, to abolish all beliefs, but only for a short time. From the abyss one assesses their life, their place within society, their ideas, their opinions, in the attempt to generate a belief structure without contradiction. All great philosophers, most recently Žižek, have suggested that this type of existential quest is a necessary stage in the development of an adult, of what, in Freudian language, is called the genital stage. And, yes, I know Freud is often called phallocentric. But, if you think about it, there is patriarchal control over discourse even now, so it only makes sense for him to be phallocentric. Perhaps he even understood this, which does not make him phallocentric; rather, it means that he understood that the discourse of the community would shape preferences and personalities, and, as the discourse was phallocentric, preferences and personalities would consequently share this tenet.

  “Regardless, the point is that the most brilliant philosophers of the past few hundred years have felt that it is necessary for one to abolish all beliefs and to build them back up again in order to truly progress as an individual. Heidegger advocated it, as did Kant. Descartes most explicitly did. Spinoza certainly did—perhaps a bit more implicitly than the others—, as did Wittgenstein. I even believe that's what Nietzsche was always referring to whenever he spoke of climbing to great heights. Zarathustra is the name one can attach to a person who has acquired wisdom as a consequence of this procedure—one who is immoral because morals have become irrelevant; he is not antipodal to morality, he has transcended it.

  “But Keens was a far way off from all of that for a long time. I remember him telling me about his life prior to the A-R-E. He was lost in the truest sense of the word. The sixties certainly advocated anomie, but for all of its haughty language it failed to replace all of the alienating forces in society that so many French sociologists and anthropologists and linguists condemned. Just the fact that people continue to speak of The System and The Man should articulate this rather clearly.” My brows narrow. “Look, think of it in terms of definite descriptions—Russellian, not Strawsonian. There is an organizational dynamic, x, that is a System. There is no more than one organizational dynamic that can be truthfully called a System. Finally, if x is an organizational dynamic, then it is a System. They cannot think beyond it. It is The System. They cannot conceive of another System, which is why it has been denoted as such. The best they can hope for is nihilism; furthermore, the best thing a nihilist can be—, what one could say the ultimate vi
rtue of nihilism is—, is martyrdom. They both cannot conceive of a world in which they willfully participate in the System, and cannot conceive of a world without the System. There's no dialectic that can be fashioned out of this contradiction. The existence of any system will always be The System.”

  What?

  “Keens did not want to be a martyr, nor did he want to participate in capitalism, as he felt it was essentially evil. But he did not want to die. Even if he couldn't come up with a workable alternative, a real revolution, he still felt that he could alter his surroundings enough to be happy. Some would argue that this made him more of a Romantic than a Modernist—and certainly not a Postmodernist. This would have essentially placed him fifty years behind the times. But this criticism simplifies his vision. It has more to do with creating a new understanding of how one interacts with others, as well as a new way of interacting within an environment and a community. But this all came later. For most of his life he just knew that he wanted something, it was on the tip of his tongue, and yet nothing would materialize for him.

  “I think it was sixty-nine that he finally went into seclusion. He did not feel as though he had the capacity to freely associate with another person unless one speaks in vulgar, market-oriented terms. He became increasingly withdrawn. He found himself internalizing, becoming narcissistic. He was horribly cynical about the direction of the world because he felt that there was no longer a place for individuals unless one wanted to jump on the Rand bandwagon, which is a state of denial as opposed to a philosophical system, one that's little more than a weak, ethical buttress for Smith's rudimentary capitalism, which, of course, didn't even exist at the time she, Rand, was writing. On the other hand, the concept of living in a hive didn’t really appeal to him, either.

  “I guess it all really started in his youth. Back then, Keens believed in the Messianic message found in Marx and Engels, as well as in the propaganda of the Bolsheviks—of a future society that finds its generation in one glorious revolution that eliminates all of the injustices of the world, that dismantles the oppressive machinery of the capitalists and reassemble it into an efficient and equitable system managed and run by the workers. Even during the thirties he was hesitant to accept that the Bolshevik revolution had degenerated into a Kafkaesque Inquisition, into a despotism in which the State's ability to perform surveillance on the population was about the only place one could find infrastructural efficiency. He wanted to believe, you see. He wanted to think that there was some potential for a return to Eden, for a return to innocence, for a return to peace. But this had been lost in Russia. He finally turned his back on the Bolsheviks when they formed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. 'How could an alliance with the Nazis be expedient to the global revolution?' he thought. And so he was once again without hope. The War came and went without any great change. If anything, he become more misanthropic, less sympathetic to the idea of there being some kind of integrity that is inherent in each human. By the way, if you've ever read Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, then you'll understand his complaint—a lot of American soldiers could have killed a Nazi with nothing more than a noose. But that's neither here nor there. He had always hated the right. I guess he just never realized how pervasive many of the tenets of Nazism are in America, especially the Midwest and the Plains.