THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “The point, though, is that he began to feel disgusted by the left, too. He couldn't accept what they were espousing in the wake of the war, at the advent of the Cold War. Even the less political rebels that came later, during the fifties and the sixties, he viewed with skepticism. He thought their counter-culture to be just as contrived as the rigid mores of the squares. True, these people, he felt, were onto something; but he believed that an ethos founded upon hedonism and anarchy and placed under the specious banner of love was doomed to fail. The truth was that the majority of the hippies did not want to actually destroy privatized industry and subsidized murder. As Robespierre said of Danton, they wanted a revolution without the revolution. They didn't want to overturn anything; they just wanted an endless vacation from it. Endless summer—as though these fucking idiots were children between seventh and eighth grade. Soon enough, all the revolutionaries were on CBS.

  “And now that's all you see—the summer of love, when everything was fucking groovy. When you read something like Roth's American Pastoral, it seems unreal, overstated—because you rarely hear about the few real radicals during that decade. You don't hear about the bombs. No, it’s just the fucking saccharine: Sonny Bono as opposed to Sam Melville, the Moody Blues instead of MC5. Get what I'm saying? Rock replaced by pop; radicalism replaced by infantile recalcitrance. All of the rebellion of the sixties has been defanged, eviscerated, repackaged. And your generation and my generation eat it up. The Sixties was about the music, say the infomercials. No, it wasn't. The radicals of the Sixties attempted to wrestle civilization from the hands of plutocracy, but the hippies weren’t up to it. And so that generation fucking failed. They gave up, became immured to the atrocities taking place around the world, and fell in line. Yes, they became everything they hated; they became the bourgeois cows grazing out in the suburbs because they grew up. Grew up. Matured.” He sighs. “And now the elite are too strong. They own everything—everything has been subsumed by the monolithic nature of capitalism. As Floyd said it most succinctly, we're all just bricks in the wall.

  “So there's no hope now. Hope for a better world is a fucking pipe dream. Any serious critique of the elite and the institutions that they control will eventually be disseminated by the elite and the institutions they control. If it's successful, they benefit—they make money. If it fails, they benefit—their crimes remain unknown. They always benefit. But that's not what bothers me. It's the complacency of the people.

  “Do you realize we're about five decades away from having an environment so denigrated and polluted that only a fraction of the people on the Earth will be able to live above poverty, and yet there is no effort to confront any of these problems. Why? Because it will hurt profit margins. Who the fuck cares? The longer we wait, the more sacrifices we will have to make in order to live a life that is worthwhile. You can give up the joy of owning a car now, or in fifteen years you can give up eating anything grown in Kansas because the entire fucking state has become a desert. And what do people decide? They keep their car. Fuck the future. It’s the myopia of capitalism—the type of consequentialism that even Bentham couldn’t endorse. These people are like the fucking Munduruku—a people with a language that lacks any word for a specific number greater than four.”

  Okay.

  “It's this type of myopia that drives me crazy. Why would someone make such an irrational choice? It's not simple laziness. It's more insidious than that, more virulent, more surreptitious. It's because modern capitalism has turned happiness into a series of commodities; people equate their status, not just their economic status, but also their social status and their sense of integrity, with the things by which they are surrounded. Do you see what this means? The context in which modern man finds himself is one of anonymous consumption. Every facet of his routine—his routine!—reminds him of this, and this profound emptiness that man feels in this society is only nurtured by the manner in which he performs his labor, the manner in which he consumes his food, the manner in which he experiences leisure. He is robbed not only of his spontaneity, but of his will to create, too. And it's only the most incorrigible who will be able to endure in this environment without being dehumanized and subdued. And this incorrigible person is the artist. It is only the artist who will be able to maintain. People will call him eccentric, which is nothing more than a polite way of saying, 'You don't know how to follow protocol.' Dick always found this amusing. Artists are almost always eccentric. Do you see? It's because they still have the will to create—and maybe that's all Nietzsche's will to power really is. It's the capacity to shape…to create oneself, even if almost every component of that creation is determined and imposed. It's that tiny bit of autonomy, of freedom, of play, within a predetermined system that makes an artist an artist, a philosopher a philosopher. And maybe that's all Nietzsche's amor fati really amounts to, too: having the power to appreciate your own impotence.

  “And that's what makes the artist stand out, what makes his existence necessarily tragic—his desire to be liberated from a world in which he is necessarily confined. But the majority of people in this country have not proven themselves capable of remaining independent in the face of so relentless an enemy. And the result is a pitiful, vacuous, and passive consumer, what a lot of thinkers, most notably Ortega y Gasset, have called mass-man,” he says, now with less passion. “The emptiness of which I speak results in what Wilhelm Reich called the emotional plague, which is more of a personality type defined by extremely antisocial tendencies than a disease.

  “Look, the point is that the will of most people in contemporary society lacks uniqueness. This is not an accident. The volition of mass-man is manufactured and polished by an economic system that seeks efficiency in both consumption and production. It's just the nature of capitalism, especially now in its more mature stage. So maybe the elite are not evil; they just don't realize that the mechanisms that they endorse and get rich from squelch individuality. We have been surrounded by forces that seek to prevent critical or existential thought, that seek to diminish any knowledge of history seen through a universal or unpatriotic lens, that seek to ingrain in us the idea that capitalism is not confined to an historical epoch, but that it is the natural order, the only condition under which man will not end up in the throes of ignorance, superstition, and penury. The education system encourages this. The media encourages this. The pharmaceutical industry encourages this. And these industries not only own the means of production in their respective fields; they own the government as well. They have come to control every element that comprises the context of mass-man's daily life; consequently, they now control the definitions of symbols, the symbols by which man navigates through this world.”

  “This sounds like a cult.”

  “What?”

  “What you're telling me. This sounds like the introduction to a cult. It's good versus evil, us versus them. It's not that simple. It's not like the richest people in the world got together and concocted this plan to control the entire population by removing Thucydides from the curriculum of every high public high school in America.”

  “Look, the A-R-E is not a cult. The A-R-E is about more than that. Look, what I'm saying is this: To Keens, the paradigm of the slave and master was outdated, bunk. The master, one with an orientation of domination, will be capable of justifying anything because this person sees everyone else as a slave, a pawn. This is a person without integrity, a person of caprice and malice. The slave, one with an orientation of submission, is equally repulsive. The slave capitulates to irrational power structures, not out of fear, but under the impression that such cowardice is moral, even virtuous. He claims these virtues to be founded upon integrity, but there is no integrity in slavery, just as there is no integrity for the master for whom ethics is a practice in rationalizing whim and fancy.

  “The two are obviously dialectically opposed. Moreover, neither is desirable. Keens felt that this could not be internalized; one cannot be either master or slave without acceptin
g an absurd form of dualism. So, to him, the A-R-E was an attempt to find a synthesis between the two that would consequently abolish the two not only on a societal level, but on a personal level: the abandonment of egomania on the one hand, the abandonment of irrational deference on the other. But it was more than that, too. It's difficult to explain, but here's the long and the short of it:

  “Every individual is an amalgam of experiences. These experiences create the individual's personality and preferences, the way in which they interpret the world in which they live in, the meaning they predicate upon symbols and signifiers. Now, a lot of people have personalities that are founded upon archetypes within any given community. John Wayne's typical character in his movies, for example, is an archetype, which, mind you, is more significant than a personage. Many American men have come to identify him as an archetype, perhaps even the paragon, of masculinity. They consequently strive to replicate his behavior and mannerisms. But this desire is not entirely genuine. They feel as though society wants them to do this. It is the desire to be the other that the other desires, but it is simply not a possibility. As a result, any individual who follows this road will be forever in a state of becoming, even though there is no possible way to satisfy this desire. On the one hand, it is simply impossible—you can’t be what you are not. Furthermore, no individual fully wishes to be like any one archetype. Each individual wants to emulate several archetypes, and these archetypes are often at odds with one another.

  “Eidolonism is the attempt to remove the impulse to become one or several archetypes. Most instantly recognize the contradiction in the argument—if one is an amalgam of experiences, then their experience of wishing to be an archetype is a necessary part of their personality. This is true, Keens would concede, but it misses the greater wisdom of an imperfect, perhaps only nascent, philosophical movement. If the various archetypes that one seeks to emulate are in contradiction, then one cannot ever exist without some form of inner turmoil that leaves the personality in a constant state of agitation. How do you extricate the individual from this dilemma? Simple: strive to remove the archetypes. That's the goal. It's virtually impossible to achieve it, I know, the A-R-E is supposed to be about realizing the beauty of a human in his or her individuality—this includes a person's past, present, and future, as well as everything that is either corporeal or spiritual, but it does not include the numerous archetypes imposed upon those who live in this or that society, nor does it include any meaning cast upon a symbol that the individual feels is dubious or inauthentic.

  “But to fully appreciate oneself, one needs to appreciate others. One needs to feel comfortable, to have a context within a community of which they feel unencumbered. Furthermore, one needs to appreciate the greats from the past—not only because they are brilliant, but because that's how one comes to really understand the individual self in a historical manner. Then again, Keens wanted people to abandon their prejudice, which, in a sense, meant that they had to abandon certain elements of their history. Prejudice, after all, is created by history.”

  “So one must realize the beauty of history by abandoning it?”

  “No…I mean, yes. But not how you put it. One must recognize their place in history, but one cannot dwell upon the history. If one is living in the past, then one is stuck in a state of becoming. The goal is to be. And one can only really be when they see themselves within the context of their surroundings.

  “Have you ever heard of Ewen Cameron?”

  “No.”

  “He was a psychiatrist. He worked up in Montreal during the fifties, and the CIA funded a lot of his research—you know, MKUltra shit. You've heard of that?” Nod. “Okay. Well, he realized that a patient's sense of self could essentially be eliminated by electroshock therapy—which destroys short-term memory—and sentences of total isolation. In other words, a mind that is forced to retreat into itself will inevitably collapse. This seems to buttress what Hegel posited: If one is liberated from all of the structures of society, then that individual ceases to have an identity. Identity is sufficient for a community.

  “Keens would say that the greatest artists are those who are humans being. Get it? And that's the spirit of improvisation, and real art is nothing but improvisation. 'If you understand 'Trane,' he once told me, 'not just the notes he's hitting, or the theory behind the changes, but the force, then you will perceive his eidolon. The eidolon reveals itself in art.' Spontaneous creation is an instance of autonomy, perhaps humanity's only means of true autonomy—unless one claims that creation is just another example of an individual existing as an agent of the social forces around him, which is certainly possible, but this entails the complete absence of free will, which is something that no human can accept once they step out of the classroom. Regardless, that's what Keens wanted to do: He wanted to provide the venue for people to embrace that force within themselves, not just when it was directed at a canvas or through an instrument or onto a page, but in life, and he wanted there to be a community that shared this ethos in order to allow for a new understanding of the world in which we currently live.”

  “The party just seemed like a bunch of people having fun.”

  “Fun is kitsch,” he says stolidly. “So, too, was the spiritual awakening of the majority of the hippies in the sixties.” He pauses. “This is similar, only it is substantive. There are exceptions, of course.”

  “Mongo?”

  “Onion Man?” He laughs. “No, Onion Man is on his own page.” He lights another cigarette. “You said you know Winchester, right?”

  “Yeah. He was the one who—”

  “Told you about the Astral Resurrection Entities. You should have realized that the title doesn't make any sense. Onion Man came up with it to fuck with Winchester.”

  “Why?”

  “He, Mongo, had recently seen some documentary on the Yanomamo. In the film, the ethnologist or anthropologist tries to figure out the genealogy of various members of the tribe. After a few weeks, he finally realizes that the whole village was fucking with him, and that none of the information he'd been given was accurate. Onion Man thought it'd be funny to do the same type of thing to Winchester.”

  “Why?”

  “Humor.” Caesura. “Look, I don't know why Onion Man does half the shit that he does. I don't know why he's pissed away so much time trying to recreate one of Reich's orgone boxes. I don't know why he cans his own beer as opposed to bottling it. I don't know why he believes Gravity's Rainbow to be a continuation of V. Regardless,” as he drags from his cigarette, “Mongo's the reason why Winchester refuses to believe that Mordecai is Coprolalia.”

  “What about him and Daphne?”

  “Who?”

  “Winchester.”

  “Yeah—he wishes. They, Poot Moint, ended up playing a few sets at the party Winchester attended. They exchanged numbers. That's about it.”

  “What about the Russians?”

  “What?”

  “The Russians. Sean said that—”

  “Oh, that's because it was down in Brighton.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “I was there. Back then I spent a lot of time with the A-R-E.” He laughs. “We ended up sacrificing a pig on Brighton Beach—another one of Onion Man's brilliant ideas. Winchester ended up hightailing it back to the City after that.” He becomes quiet for a moment. “But you understand what I'm saying, right? About Keens and the A-R-E?”

  “It's like a religion.”

  “Only in the sense that it seeks to provide a spiritual experience without recourse to God. Have you ever thought about the conditional relationship between man’s soul and God? Does either one suffice for the other?”

  “Well, it seems like God needs to exist for man to have a soul. Where else would it come from?”

  “Has science proven that God didn’t create the Earth?”

  “Well…no, actually.”

  “I mean in seven days. Is Genesis accurate?”

  “No.”
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  “So it’s possible that the material world can exist without God. Why not the spirtitual, too?”

  Caesura.

  “Look, the A-R-E was established to attempt to answer some of the questions that have plagued the human mind since it first became conscious of itself. The spiritual experience that Keens aimed to create was to be generated by the free association of eidolons among other eidolons. You know, because Keens always believed conversation to be the highest form of art. He was not fond of the now famous quote of a Nobel laureate, who claimed that hell is other people. Then again, the same laureate once said that an adventure is an event that is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary. So I guess he didn't have it all wrong.”