You are Captives – and You Have Made a Captive of the World Itself

With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla? With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man? Here are the fundamental questions posed by Ishmael, as expressed by the front and back of a poster belonging to a talking gorilla. Here, I want to explore the conversation on what the book calls “Takers” and “Leavers”, and what we would call, in loaded language, civilized and primitive cultures. In my view, these distinctions provide us with important insights into our relationships with the world, with our culture, and with one another. Beyond that, we can see what this has to do with disenfranchisement, both as individual, and as a culture. I don’t want this to sound like a book report, and beyond outlining the stories of the Takers and the Leavers, it shouldn’t.
This book has an interesting meta-context to it. The narrator takes the role of student to a gorilla. He is the voice of the reader, who is the moderately educated member of the Taker society. He talks in the beginning about his search for a teacher to show him how to live. This relates well to the premise of the philosophy the gorilla espouses, which is that the Taker culture, as ruler of the world, puts itself on the rest of the world, assimilating the world into its one way of living, asserting an extreme and violent will to power. The book also has some very interesting things to say on writing and the academy in general, but this isn’t the place for that, or at least I’m not interested in writing about it here.
Instead, I want to provide an outline of the way the book establishes the Leaver and Taker cultures. I’ll start with the Leaver culture. According to Ishmael’s (“Ishmael” being the name of both the book and the speaking gorilla that provides what we can take as the book’s argument in a form of midwifery, both because of the name and because of the compellingly simple and familiar structure of the writing) version of history, which is the living embodiment of a still unfolding story, the Leavers have been here as hunter gatherers with some mix of agriculturalists since the dawn of man, or the dawn of the homo sapiens sapiens, about three million years ago. They write and live out one of the two stories of man, which has stayed on the same plain all this time.
Their story is based on the premise that “man belongs to the world.” Because of this, they see themselves as no different from any other animals in the world, believing they are to live under the same laws of the “community of life”. These laws can be reduced to the maxim that “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” Ishmael assures his pupil that the people who enact this story are not any more at the whims of nature than we are, and do not run some great risk of starvation or spend their full day at work, but instead they are well fed and spend minimal time at what we would consider working.
On the other hand, the story of the Takers is based on the premise that “the world belongs to man”. The idea here, though, is that the Taker culture took up a story- one which it cannot fully understand- for itself first told about it by the Leavers. This consists of two parts: the story of Adam and the tree, and the story of Cane and Abel. Ishmael provides a slightly different story of Adam and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In this version, the gods debate allowing Adam to eat from the tree. They fear that Adam, endowed with the knowledge of good and evil, will not have the wisdom to handle it appropriately, and will conclude, “Whatever I can justify doing is good and whatever I cannot justify doing is evil.” They see that the day Adam eats the fruit of the tree will be the day of his death, as he will devour the entire world and ultimately devour himself. For this reason, they forbid him from the tree. It is that the gods forbid this knowledge from Adam rather than thrust it upon him that suggests to Ishmael that this story is not a story of the Taker culture’s making.
Another aspect of this story is that Adam is given the fruit by Eve. The names here are key, Adam meaning “man” and Eve meaning “life”. Thus, man is tempted to eat the fruit by life, or the ability to reproduce in larger numbers. In the community of life, though, when one species grows its numbers it must grow its food supply, which results in a lot of death and carnage and through a chain of events, the massacre of the ecological system as a whole. It is this destruction of his world, on which he is dependant, which is his own destruction.
The story of Cane and Abel, Ishmael insists, is a story inherited by the Hebrews which they also cannot fully understand. The assertion is that the story is of the rise and spread of the Taker civilization and its brutal destruction and assimilation of those Leaver Cultures that surround it. Its being told by a Leaver culture, specifically the Semites, explains why Cane’s gift is rejected. It is rejected in opposition to Abel’s gift – an affirmation of the Leaver way of life. In a sort of Gadamerian hermeneutic, Ishmael posits that this is a living story as a way of calling for responsibility, for reflection and for action. The call is to stop the brutal murder of Abel.
Ishmael goes on to espouse Foucault’s allegory for society as a prison, claiming that we are captive to the society, the bars of which we cannot find. He claims that what is at stake in this search is “[our] captivity and the captivity of the world”. This serves as a kind of updated version of the allegory of the cave. “If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in,” he says, “the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.” He sites as his example the pseudo-counter-culture revolution of the 60’s, claiming, “The revolt hadn’t been put down, it had just dwindled away into a fashion statement”. The interesting thing of this is that even the rich and powerful among society do not have the authority of warden or even guard in this prison. Rather, they are simply atop the inmate hierarchy, still subject to the rules and incarceration of their jail.
Having explained the two stories of man, we should again consider the premises on which they are founded. The Leaver story is founded on the premise that “man belongs to the world”. If man belongs to the world, then man is subject to the world, is “in the hands of the gods,” and must live under the laws of the gods and their world. He has no right - inherent, natural, or what have you – to rule over the world, and his place is not above but in the world, not first, but, according to Ishmael, also not last. He, like other animals, is an integral part of an evolving ecosystem that promotes life itself.
The Taker story has a very different sound to it. Built on the premise that “the world belongs to man,” it calls man to reign over the world, to play god; to decide what lives and what dies. There is another aspect of this story that relates well to the way man in Taker culture views himself. When he tells the story of evolution, it begins with the creation of the universe, moves to the earth, and on to the rise of life, which culminates and suddenly comes to an end with the arrival of man. This certainly does seem to suggest a formidable possibility of stagnation in the world, as it, like the rest of this worldview, fails to acknowledge the unequivocal importance of diversity in evolution and ecology. Without a wide range of species, life itself is at a much greater risk of extinction. The book, while never pushing it in the way one expects it to, suggests this mindset is responsible for the Holocaust. The themes are there: the view that man decides who lives and who dies, man’s self-defeating self-justification, and a critical disregard for the laws of the community of life.
Here I find myself something of an apologist for the Taker story, as I think it isn’t done proper justice in this account. The book fundamentally fails to acknowledge the very real and obvious distinctions between man and other animals. It also continuously refers to “the gods” as though we are made in their image, while I would posit the gods are made in our image. Making the gods in our image does numerous things that flush out what distinguishes us from other animals.
First, we have language. This allows us to communicate in a way that passes information from one generation to the next, which is an equiprimordial aspect of culture and society-building. It also allows us to communicate over vast distances. Indeed, we are able to spread ourselves over the world because of our ability to communicate, and because of the another thing language provides us; naming power.
Our ability to name things is what gives us reign over the beasts of the world. It is what makes “them” “beasts” and what makes “us” “us”. It is the authority of the gods. Adam – man – names the animals in paradise. It is his assigned task, assigned to him by the gods. The gods themselves we have named the gods. In our mythology, with its distinguished monotheistic God – an elder white man of great beard and phallic cane – we are in the image of God, but this can easily be seen as a metaphor for our fathers and the culture they bring us into and finally leave us to serve and to cultivate. We have mythologized ourselves with stories of very human gods who have our faults and our extraordinary power to mold the world in which we live. Even the gods in Ishmael’s story of Adam practice the uniquely human work of reason. With our mighty wealth of intellect, we are called – granted, by ourselves – to be stewards of the world.
This role, though, and the worldview that it at least appears to espouse, without doubt raises issues that ultimately provoke the possibility of a potent disenfranchisement, both for the individual and for all of his kind.
In Erikson’s terminology, this expresses a self-over-world psychology; a terminal illness leaving one in a hell of his own creation. However, it does not necessarily imply that end. If the Taker society takes up more of a Heideggerian approach he does not necessarily dig his own grave. While I feel the book and its advancement of the Leaver perception of the world underestimates man’s special place in the world, it does raise an exceptionally important point about man’s disregard for what it calls the law of the community of life (“You may compete but you may not wage war”). Man does have the power of the gods. He is, even, the creator of the gods. However, he is also in the world and with the world. He is deeply intertwined in the nexus of life that makes up his world. If he recognizes this – while he is still called to be the steward of the earth – he must acknowledge his colossal responsibility for and to the world. This would assemble a new kind of thinking for Taker society without completely disregarding and up heaving his history and what is possibly his nature, if we can speak to that at all.
What, though, is the relationship between all this and disenfranchisement? Assuming we take on the man-over-world mentality – Heidegger’s techno mind-set – in its full manifestation, we can return to the prison allegory. The relationship of the convict with disenfranchisement plays itself out very plainly in our laws. We must first recall that disenfranchisement is something more than a sense of a lack of control, but rather, is by definition a loss of one’s right to vote. While this loss of voting rights represents a loss of freedom itself, we can also recall that the only people of age in our society without voting rights are convicts. This is a very open playing out of a story that reads, “You can speak so long as you follow the rules. Once you act out of line, you are not allowed to speak anymore”. Of course, the story we do not show so obviously is that we are all imprisoned in a system of consumption which none of us control. We are, again, captive within imperceptible bars.
A culture of man with this posturing towards the world has the very real potential to obliterate the world, as well as him. But what about what it does for individuals in this society on a person-to-person basis? It leaves man bored with his work of consumption, anxious to act, and filled with vigorous desire for existence thwarted by an overbearing culture of inertia that isolates him from his cubicle mate. It is the anxiety of a man eight hours in front of a screen who has feet to dance and arms to flail. When this man takes up this self-over-world psychology towards his brother or sister he isolates himself not only from the surrounding community of life outside his species, but from mankind as well. He wraps himself in a separate world in which the good is what he can justify himself doing and he will stop at no end to rationalize his actions. He grows sick, moves underground, and excommunicates himself from society, from the world. Holderin, however, proclaims, “But where the danger is,/ Grows the saving power also”.

An Animal of Suicidal Pride

I've been going over the lyrics to "No Children" in my head and out loud since I woke up today, as I want to do the song as open mic tonight. Doing so reminded me of an instance where I expressed more of myself than even I am comfortable doing.

There is a line in the song that goes, "I hope that if I found the strength to walk out, you'd stay the hell out of my way." One night, drunk, shirtless, soon to fall over the back of a couch, I sang along with that line in this way; I hope that if I found the strength to hold on, you'd stay the hell out of my way.

It got a laugh. But it wasn't at all intentional.

On a second note, there is the name of the band, The Mountain Goats. John Darnielle was on the Colbert Report shortly before the Atlanta show and Colbert asked him, "Why mountain goats?" He says something to the effect of, "Mountain goats are great. They're very interesting animals. They are very strong and fast and can climb very steep mountains because of their great strength. They can jump, too. But they're very prideful. Sometimes a mountain goat will get to the top of a tall mountain and there will be some wide riven he will see and think he can jump, so he will try to jump it. Of course it would be impossible for him to make this jump, and he falls to his death."

The Catcher in the Rye

When I was coming up with a reading list for this study it seemed like every book on my shelves about adolescence was a perfect fit. But instead of doing This Side of Paradise, Ham on Rye, The Outsiders, This Boy's Life, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or even Maggie Cassidy, I decided to keep that influence minimal and go with the proto-adolescent story, The Catcher in the Rye.

The reason all those books seemed so perfect is pretty easy to see. They are all books about the time in the human life-span that leaves everyone feeling like the sort of outcast that Holden Caulfield was. I know. I'm really blowing minds here. What new thought do you have to contribute to the conversation on fuckin Catcher in the Rye, hm?

Actually, that's not at all what I'm trying to do. I want, instead to take from it and put it towards what I'm doing here. That's what I'm trying to do with all of these books, which is why anytime I write on the books there will be extensive quotes. The ones for Salinger start here:

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has.

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it?

Stradlater was more of a secret slob.

You don't do one damn thing the way you're supposed to.

In every school I've ever gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.

Boy, did I feel rotten. I felt so damn lonesome.

I put on my red hunting cap when I was in the cab, just for the hell of it, but I took it off before I checked in. I didn't want to look like a screwball or something. Which is really ironic. I didn't know then that the goddam hotel was fullof perverts and morons. Screwballs all over the place.

What's different about it? Nothin's different about it," Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. "It's tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake."

"They can't just ignore the ice. They can't just ignore it."

I don't even think he knows any more when he's playing right or not.

All those Ivy League bastards look alike.

All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.

The truth, I'm a virgin. I really am. I've had quite a few opportunities to lose my virginity and all, but I've never got around to it yet.

I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell.

It's terrible to be just in your pajamas when something like that happens.

All he had on underneath was a phony shirt collar, but no shirt or anything.

The kid was swell. He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the curb.

It didn't seem at all like Christmas was coming soon. It didn't seem like anything was coming.

"Did you ever get fed up?" I said. "I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?"

Old Luce. He was strictly a pain in the ass, but he certainly had a good vocabulary. He had the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton when I was there. They gave us a test.

It wasn't too far, and I wasn't tired or even drunk any more. It was just very cold and nobody around anywhere.

If somebody at lesat listens, it's not too bad.

"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Pheobe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."

He didn't even give a damn if his coat got all bloody.

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.

If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world.

All of a sudden I wanted her to cry till her eyes practically dropped out. I almost hated her. I think I hater her most because she wouldn't be in that play any more if she went away with me.

My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way.

She looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

A Note from Underground

I want to post these occasionally. They are attempts at notes that would come from someone like the underground man; someone supremely self-aware, who grapples with salvation anxiety and a dark will to power. Hopefully it gives an honest, however dark, look at what it is to be a human. They might or might not be far from home. That's not the point.

"I'm a real, live human,"
who pisses and who shits into the exposed end of a sewage pipe,
who uses more water than he should in showering,
who has come on many faces,
who is madly in love with you from one moment till, perhaps, the next,
who will go away one day,
who will die one day,
who will be consumed by the eather,
who, in the meantime, enjoys the blood of innocent animals,
bites his nails,
wipes shit from his ass so it doesn't crust, s
pends his existence in front of a screen,
chases ass,
cries, sometimes, as he uses his own hand to bring himself to orgasm before wiping the juice -
the juice capable of creating life -
with a pair of boxers.

Salvaging the Oppressed

This post will focus on the relationship between disenfranchisement and salvation, but first I want to note that I have again- just a few minutes ago- updated the creative pieces It Flaps Over Heavy and A Brief Reprise. I suspect these will be the last updates on them for a while.

In any case, a couple of different conversations today made me consider the importance of salvation when talking about disenfranchisement. Then I remembered it was hinted at slightly in the post on Ask the Dust. I want to first look at this in the mythical or religious sense, and then explore how what we see there can be used in our being with others.

First, what does "salvation" mean? It is defined in several ways, and these are some:

1. the act of saving or protecting or saving from harm, risk, loss, destruction, etc.
2. the state of being saved or protected from harm, risk, etc.
3. a source, cause or means of being saved or protected from harm, risk, etc.
4. deliverance from the power and penalty of sin; redemption.

An interesting note in the definition is that the Cultural Dictionary section begins: Being "saved" among Christians; salvation is freedom from the effects of the fall of man.

This brings back the question of freedom, but I don't suspect I will get anywhere near answering much about that relationship here.

What is the etymology? It is rooted in "salvare" or "to save". This is related to the words "salvage" (the recycling of waste material) and "salver", which is from "salve" or a 'tray used for presenting objects to the king".

I think the relationship with "salvage" is interesting, in that when we salvage something, we reuse it, we recycle it, put it back in the cycle, rejuvenate it, we breath new life into it. Salvaging, though, brings with it the sense that the thing has already been destroyed - it almost seems to require a brokenness -, but also that it contains a potential. If we go to the salvage yard in search of an engine for a car, we may find one in a totalled vehicle, but when we put it in our car, the car runs perfectly.

In religion, of course, salvation is that essential thing that thrusts us for eternity into heaven, or if we fail to accept it, hell. Beyond the fire and brimstone, the heart-searing terror of hell lies in the complete and irrevocable denial of a human being by his creator; the one he wants the acceptance and approval of more than anything else. This is founded in the refusal on the part of the man to accept his creator's salvation. The man has refused to be saved. The man has refused to be saved from nothing more than himself and his natural condition, as molded by the very same creator he is to go to for salvation. Man requires salvation from himself for "freedom from the effects of the fall of man".

What is the fall of man? It is man's fall from grace, when he eats from the tree of knowledge against his creator's command and gains consciousness, which gains his banishment from paradise and his introduction to mortality. God's commentary on the matter consisted of, "For they have become like us, capable of knowing everything." There is no going back for man, and he is left, so he believes and so it appears, alone and heading towards his own obliteration.

So he learns to struggle and to gain for himself. In order to survive, he he has to do this, and in his community this is a virtue because hard work leads to prosperity. Yet, he is also taught that hard work gains only the things of the earth, while he must only go to his creator and ask forgiveness for being what he is in order to gain eternity.

This sounds like rambling to me, but hopefully something can be pulled from this.

What are we saved from? We are saved from, it seems like, two things; hell and ourselves.

What is the difference, really? If we remove the supernatural aspects of these stories and make them a purely human endeavour, then we end up with the story of a man who is born into sin, and who will gain consciousness of his sin and his mortality and will react in one of two ways, although they both might manifest themselves in a multitude of fashions I am both too lazy and too ignorant to explicate:

He will revert into himself and his thoughts from disgust or anger or fear of the world or culture he lives in - and who could blame him - possibly to the point that there is no going back, in which case he will recognize his independence and his limiting absolute freedom from and find himself completely seperated from what he was born into and wants the acceptance of more than anything else.

Or he will accept that he is human and that the virtue of hard work, when put to the task of gaining salvation gains him nothing but solipsism and loses everything. His pride, so necessary to his day-to-day living, only hinders his existence. It causes him to grow cold and absent of warmth. In his broken state he is able to, without hubris, acknowledge his position and go down to his knees, where he finds salvation in his defeat. His salvation comes without cost, brought to him as the fruits of his savior's labor as a token of her love.

I know, I know, it's filled with holes and entirely insufficient as a study of such back breaking work, but it's all I have.

Ask the Dust

Yesterday I intended to massage out some meaning from the etymology and definition of "disenfranchisement," as well as to write on Fante's Ask the Dust. In any case, I didn't get around to either.

One thing I find very interesting about the definition is that it relates pretty much excusively to voting and freedom. This shows the limiting power of language, as we know off-hand that we use the terminology of disenfranchisement well beyond one's right to vote. Beyond that, it sets up an interesting discourse on the ability to vote, freedom, and the Other that possibly transcends the duality conversation on "freedom from" and "freedom to."

Unfortunately, I don't feel secure in my language or in my understanding of the concept, as yet, to talk about that as pointedly as I'd like to, so hopefully over the course of the next several entries I can begin to approach a meaningful discourse on those terms and their relationships with one another.

The work towards that today consists of exploring disenfranchisement in Fante's Ask the Dust. I bought this book on the recommendation of Bukowski and I wasn't let down at all, even after Bukowski described Fante as his god and wrote of the book, "the beginning...was a wild and enormous miracle to me." The most interesting thing he writes on it, for my purposes, is "Not long after reading these books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, 'Don't call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!'"

Arturo Bandini is Fante's young and struggling Los Angeles transport from the Mid-West there living on his destiny as a great writer and the publication of one short story by a critic and publisher he admires. He resides in a dump he can't afford and hates the way his talent goes so unappreciated, keeping his head in a world of cloudy delusions of granduer. He falls in love with a Mexican waitress, Camilla, who is in love with a dying bartender, Sammy, who moves to the Mojave desert and does not want that "little spick," Camilla in his shack. Bandini struggles with love, makes himself callous and isn't able to get his dick up with her. When another woman,Vera-a woman with great scars whom he takes pity on- wants him, though, he sleeps with her under the pretense that she is his Mayan Princess, Princess Camilla.

This is, in my reading, Fante's 1939 L.A. version of Dostoyevsky's underground man. (I should add that I intended to make Notes From Underground the first book for this class, reading Ask the Dusk for myself, before realizing its value.)It has the necessary parts to constitute an account of the educated, or at least well-read and intelligent, disenfranchised youth. There is the constant need for funds, the lack of family financial support that put the young genius where he finds himself, the sense of angry entitlement, the smug moral superiority that comes with misreading Nietzsche, a failure to acknowledge his own humanity, and the possibility for salvation by way of a whore, which combine to lead to disillusionment and what could be argued to be salvation.

As I only have to write as much as I want, I'm going to pretty much stop here so far as the theory goes, but will add quotes from the book that I think are important to the topic.

First Paragraph: One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle lof Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving accute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you.

The thoughts of your father before you, lash across your back, hot fire in your skull, that you are not to blame: this is your thought, that you were born poor, son of miseried peasants, driven because you were poor, fled from your Colorado town because you were poor, rambling the gutters of Los Angeles because you are por, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?

At least she had identified him as a man.

You're cleaner than me because you've got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh.

My plight drove me to the typewriter.

I wanted to hurt her.

Not everyone who comes into this dive is a bum.

There was none, there was none at all, only the retreat to Hackmuth's letter and thoughts that remained to be written, but no lust, only fear of her, and shame and humiliation.

Love wasn't everything.

You're dancing with a freah, an outcast from the world of man.

"Then you too know about me!" she said. "You're like the rest of them. You know about my wounds, and that's why you won't kiss me. Because I disgust you!"

I deserve more than your disgust.

She fell on her knees before me and begged me to tell her she was not disgusting.

There I let go, crying and unable to stop because God was such a dirty crook, such a contemptible skunk, that's what he was for doing that thing to that woman.

"You're a Mayan princess." "I am Princess Camilla."

It had to be my way or nothing.

She had been nice to Arturo Bandini, and she was poor.

Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths.

For all things there shall be forgiveness when I return to my homeland by the sea.

I ran a few steps towards the sea. Then I ran back.

Because this was being alive, this looking into the black eyes of Camilla, matching her scorn with hope and a brazen gloating.

I thought that would be delightful: order her hour, she so wonderfully beautiful in her own way, and forced to leave because I ordered her out.

Men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them...In my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence, toward which he was being hurled...I stood at the mailbox, my head against it, and grieved for Sammy, and for myself, and for all the living and the dead.

I helped her to her feet, dried her eyes, smoothed the hair from her face, and felt responsible for her.

I felt the pain, the sharp agony of the flesh of my feet torn by my own weight.

Etymology and Definition of Disenfranchise

Disenfranchise: "deprive of civil or electoral privileges," 1640s, from dis- + enfranchise. Earlier form was disfranchise (mid-15c.). Related: Disenfranchised; disenfranchisement.

Dis: (assimilated as dif- before -f-), prefix meaning 1. "lack of, not" (e.g. dishonest); 2. "do the opposite of" (e.g. disallow); 3. "apart, away" (e.g. discard), from O.Fr. des-, from L. dis- "apart," from PIE *dis- "apart, asunder" (cf. O.E. te-, O.S. ti-, O.H.G. ze-, Ger. zer-). The PIE root is a secondary form of *dwis- and is thus related to L. bis "twice" (originally *dvis) and to duo, on notion of "two-ways, in twain." In classical Latin, dis- paralelled de- and had much the same meaning, but in L.L. dis- came to be the favored form and this passed into O.Fr. as des-, the form used for new compound words formed in O.Fr., where it increasingly had a privative sense ("not"). In English, many of these words eventually were altered back to dis-, while in French many have been altered back to de-. The usual confusion prevails.

Enfranchise: 1530s, from O.Fr. enfranchiss-, extended stem of enfranchir, from en- "make, put in" + franc "free" (see franchise). Related: Enfranchised; enfranchisement.

Disenfranchise: –verb (used with object), -chised, -chis⋅ing. 1. to deprive (a person) of a right of citizenship, as of the right to vote.
2. to deprive of a franchise, privilege, or right.

Old Boxers

Post coitum omne animal triste
(After coition, all animals are sad)

When I was five, my mother and I went to a fair. Being afraid of the rides, I’ve always had an attraction to the booths at these sorts of things. One of the booths at that fair that day was for fingerprinting. This attracted both of us; I had a chance to stick my fingers in ink, and my mother had a chance to have a copy of my fingerprints, which was important, the man at the booth explained, in case anything happened to me. My mother had her prints done as well. These came on a paper with basic information about the person: age, race, sex. When we got home I looked into the bag with our prints in it. I studied my fingers on the page against my fingers. I read the information.

AGE: 5
RACE: White
SEX: M

I looked over my mother’s information.

AGE: 23
RACE: White
SEX: F

F? I buried my face in my arms on the table and started to cry at the shame of having a mother who had an “F” in sex. She had failed, had had sex. I was there with her as proof to everyone that she had done so.

When I was seventeen, I picked a girl up from her house while her parents were at work. We were on spring break. She was a redheaded virgin with large breasts who liked to talk about books, so we would talk.
That night my mother knocked on my door to hand me the phone. “It’s somebody named Timothy Phillips.”
“Who?”
“He says he’s Lauren Phillips’ father. Who’s Lauren Phillips?”
“She’s a girl. OK. Hand me the phone.” She gave me the phone and stepped outside. I could see her shadow under the door.
“Hello.”
“This is Timothy?”
“Yessir.”
“I want you to stay away from my daughter. She’s not allowed to date. I don’t know if you knew that or not, don’t care, but I know she went off with you today and you’re not to contact her anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. (of course I knew) Yessir.”
“Do you understand? No calling, nothing.”
“Yessir.”
“Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye.”

Wright was my mother’s maiden name. It didn’t belong to her. It was her mother’s husband’s name. But he wasn’t my mother’s father. My mother’s last name is Roberts. My father’s last name is Denney. Wright, my last name, is mine, alone.

There is no sex until twenty-one, but there are blow jobs. There are many blow jobs by many girls, topless, in many poorly lit parking lots behind the tinted windows of my Explorer.

Like Lauren the day I picked her up, red hair done up in pig tails in the back seat, coats thrown in the seat next to us, mid afternoon under cover of the new hospital parking deck, touching a penis for the first time. I ran my hands through her hair and said her name quietly. I watched out for people passing by, hoping that if they got close they wouldn’t be able to see through the tint. She didn’t want to taste it, but wanted to rub it into her skin. When it was over, I kissed her on the cheek and we sat there for a long time before I had to take her back. She lived on a dirt road, and just to be safe she had me drop her off a quarter mile down from her house and walked the rest of the way. It was the middle of the day and her neighbor saw.

Then there was Carolyn. There was Carolyn in the dark, pulled over to an empty gas station parking lot to finish what she had started on the road back from the airport after she’d been gone for a month. I laid the seat back and massaged the back of her neck, noticing the price for gas had gone up again.

There was Carolyn in my bedroom floor, on blankets and a sleeping bag before I had a bed in the new apartment. There was Carolyn on the road from Andalusia Farm to Savannah, five days before she was to leave for good, red dress pulled down to her waist, refusing to finish in a church parking lot. She told me later she was mad at me that day, that she had become suddenly aware I could treat her, use her, like all the others.

When I jerk off there are scenes of girls sucking me off.

A few years ago my mother told me that my father was having an affair with one of the nurses that dealt with my mother regularly during her pregnancy.

I have a brother twenty minutes from where I grew up who is less than a year younger than me. His mother later married. He took that man’s last name. When I was nineteen I heard he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. We’ve never met.

Samantha in the milk cooler at the grocery store we worked at in high school, smock thrown over a palate of sixty boxes of milk that hold four gallons a piece, rushing to swallow me before the manager comes to the stockroom for a smoke, nipples poking through her shirt from the thirty-four degree cooler. After, I walk out first and check for managers and stray customers. When I see we’re O.K., I open the door and hold it for her to walk out. She heads to the left, towards the bathroom, and I head to the right, towards the front of the store.

Carolyn is on her knees in her bedroom floor; first hers, then mine. She locks eyes with me and licks the shaft.

I come.

Carolyn was my first. Afterwards, she lay on top of me, holding my head, trying to calm me down.

Three months later, irate, she punched me over and over in the chest and called me a mother fucker when she found text messages that I couldn’t explain.

Six months after that, she stood silently over me while I explained how I wanted to be honest with her about the blonde in my class. Nothing had happened, but I couldn’t promise nothing would happen.

Nine months later, she came to my door at 6:30 in the morning with bacon and eggs and bread to make us breakfast after leaving the night before in a rage from having gone through my emails.

Three months ago she told me about her new abstinence. When I didn’t understand, she explained. She told me about the guy at work who had gotten her and her friend Rachel drunk, had managed to get rid of Rachel just long enough to get Carolyn into bed. When Rachel got back they were still in the bed.

She told me about the other guy at work, Jeff, whom she had known was a jerk, had thought was seedy, had known just wanted to fuck her; how she had went over to his place, gotten drunk, didn’t use a condom.

She told me about the girl’s night with all the girls from work where she got drunk and yelled “I had sex with Jeff!” and how they didn’t talk to her now.

She told me about the night, sober, she let Jeff come over, knowing he had stolen $40 dollars from her the last time, and sober, had sex with him again.

I come.

There is my mother, my brother’s mother, Carolyn, and an old pair of boxers pulled from under the bed to wipe my hands on.

It Flaps Over Heavy and Clashes Down

I’m living in an old textile mill a man converted to apartments rented out to liberal arts majors willing to overpay for the novelty of the thing before he lost it to the bank. My window faces north, looks over the railroad tracks where the trains run coal southeast towards the power plant. When the train isn’t running you can see into the houses of the poor blacks on the other side.

The apartment's walls don’t go to the ceiling, so it’s too big to cool, and at seven o’clock it keeps me in a sweat. So I take a beer and a few Bukowski poems and head down to the deck that’s part of the new building they added here a year or two ago. There is a table there, and a few chairs, and hardly ever any people, so I can go there and sit and read and drink before the sun falls.

I get out there, facing west, towards my building, and sit for a while, and sip on my beer and read a little Bukowski. He goes to a whorehouse and skips on the whore and gets kicked out of the place, after he pays.

Then some folks walk by and catch my eye. A man and two women, Mexican, the man, in front, wearing a cowboy hat, on his cell phone, and the women, one young, one old, in grey jogging pants and sleeveless t-shirts, pushing a couch on rollers. I watch them pass by and turn at the tracks, up towards the dump.

These people live two doors down from us, at a discount they get for cleaning on Saturday mornings before we wake up. We know them best from the morning after Halloween, when we went into the hall to assess the damage of our party the night before, and saw countless cigarette butts and dripping beer cans, and the older one walking with push broom in hand, followed by the younger girl with a mop. We meant to apologize, but the moment wasn’t right, and by Christmas, which we’d all agreed to remember them on, it seemed too late.

They wheel the couch down about seventy yards, to the dumpster, and leave it there with two others. The man, still on the phone, takes a stick and lifts the top of the dumpster and I hear it clang against the metal side. The women toss trash bags over the top and laugh. Then the man, still on his phone, takes the stick and goes to push the cover back over the top. He fumbles with it. It bounces on the stick for a minute while he keeps trying to push it over from his toes. “You gotta take it from the bottom up,” I say to myself. Then he lets it drop low, and he runs it high with the stick and it flaps over heavy and clashes down.

There is a field out another fifty-or-so yards beyond them, and somebody in a red pickup drives out in it and tracks up dusk and it rises high and runs far. It makes the sun, sitting behind the old brown silo in grey clouds, look closer to dusk, and it makes the older of the women cough, and the three Mexican workers come back my way.

They stop about right in front of me and the man gets off his cell phone. The older woman rolls down the bottoms of her grey pants, the younger woman looks my way and smiles a little, and Bukowski reaches to the left “for the last glass of the Blood of the Lamb.”

Desert Fighting

This is an excerpt from one of the letters to David. It has a theme I intend to explore here over time.

Don Juan is a most sentimental man. He has the fear of change deep in him; the fear of penance, or the outright rejection of it. Or the lonely fear and resignation that comes in the unfulfilled promise of approaching the fulfilling thing. Perhaps he never asked his father, for fear, if he might love him. Perhaps he needed to know. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps the Man denied him, ignored him, and accused him in his innocence.

Tragic scene of the fourteen year old boy having his spit swabbed for his mother’s case for child support moves to scene of boy in courthouse, missing school, complaining, worried he might miss school for first time in years and might see Man. Move to scene of boy playing baseball, not knowing Man is in stands, and striking out each at-bat. Tears Follow. There is, here established, the boy’s desire to please the society by working in and fulfilling its norms in attempt to please said culture that is so connected to rejecting Man.

Does boy ever make it into Man’s Waffle House at the appointed hour?

Or does he die in a foreign desert, fighting, knowing his fight is unjust, for the society that rejected him?

A Brief Reprise

When I graduated college nearly everyone I knew and loved was on a plane to Europe, and they left behind a core group of depressed single white guys in their early twenties who had nothing to do but drown each other in loneliness and study philosophy. Kierkegaard had a quote about the student of philosophy, “Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth spent in these deliberations. Life has not acquired any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy.”

There was Dave, who was leaving at the end of the summer to go to grad school, who was spending the summer reading Heidegger and asking girls if he could make them dinner, in an attempt to get over both the girl who disappeared from his life that spring and the general sense of total isolation that a good student of Heidegger so often has when he finds himself alone at night.

There was Phil, who had spent the early part of spring laying out of class and generally slacking off to be with the girl he loved, and who had spent the latter part of spring standing in the rain in front of the loft, smoking a cigarette and staring miserably across the street at that one light coming from her bedroom window.

Then there was me; a bright, fresh young college graduate ready to take on the world and make it my bitch. I had been president of everything, lived off a scholarship and had plenty of references to get a job. Except I had a degree in philosophy and the economy had crashed the October past. I spent the summer sending out my resume, regretting watching Carolyn board a plane for the last time, and waiting for her or any of those companies to acknowledge my existence. None of them did. I even gave a speech for a group of donors to the school and made it all about the difficulties of finding a job. I started having strange Tom Stoppard dreams about dead cows dressed as London Yard inspectors.

The three of us struggled through by making every attempt to be at every party through the summer. Out of money, we would walk to the nearest gas station, buy a forty or a bottle of cheap wine, and walk on to the party, where we would ultimately stand in a group amongst ourselves and loathe those fucking people with their dancing and talking and hugging and sex before ducking out early. We, or I, would make the long, drunk walk home all the longer with the occasional public urination stop filled with the usual “I’m better than these people!” rants.

In June the loft had a visitor. A bird came in through the front windows, but the apartment was so big he got lost and when he found a new set of windows in my room that were too high to open, he got stuck. He would fly as far away as possible, before building up speed and ramming into the window. When it wouldn’t work, he’d do it again, and every time he did it, it knocked chips of wood down into my bed. One day when he was flying through the living room, we led him into the extra bathroom and closed the door. We found him two days later, starved, dead on the shower rug. We left him there for rigor mortise.

At the end of June, the halfway point of our friends’ rumpus in Europe, I walked out of the bathroom and said to Dave and Phil, absent-mindedly, “Well, let’s go, then.”

“Where we going?”
“The beach,” I say. Of course, we live five hours from the beach.
“We could do that. Where would we go?”
“I wasn’t serious...”

So ten minutes later, I was in the shower. I should have known better. Over spring break Phil had walked into the kitchen while I was making my lunch. “Go to New Mexico with me,” he’d said, “I’ll buy the gas and we’ll take turns driving, let’s just go right now.” A few minutes later we’d been on our way on a forty-four hour, twenty-seven hundred mile trip to the western desert.

We pulled into the public parking at Tybee around 11:30 that night and realized we needed a ticket for the overnight parking, but that none of us had cash. Then a family came off the beach. There were four children, all young, and an overweight mother, her weave damaged in the swim. Seeing us there, the mother offered us their ticket, which was good until 9:30 the next morning. We sat up our site; we lay out a blanket, opened the first bottle of cheap wine, sat up the travel grill and got down to our shorts.

It took thirty minutes to start the fire because the wind off the ocean was against us. Then we grilled massive burgers, loaded them up with all the good stuff, and bit in. They were crunchy. The wind hitting the grill was full of sand, and now the burgers and our mouths were filled with sand. But the wine washed it away.

The wine washed everything away, inhibitions included, and soon the three of us were running bare-assed towards the ocean. Occasional passers-by would walk through, hear us out in the ocean, see the grill fire and notice the boxers scattered from the fire to the water, but even if they were looking for company, it wasn’t us.

After the swim, we figured we were too close to the dock and would have more privacy if we moved down the beach a little more, so we packed up our stuff and started walking down the beach, still no clothes. On the way to the new spot we ran into some teenage kids who, not seeming to notice the dangling dicks, used subversive code in an attempt to sell us some sort of illicit drug. They would have had a shot, but we couldn’t understand what they were trying to sell us, so we kept on towards the new spot, where we would stay the night on the blanket.

We sat up the new site and took to more drinking and naked dancing until around 3:00 am when we knew the sun would rise too soon and we needed to sleep in the space between. When we lay down, though, we realized our second great folly. The sand was wet, which meant the blanket was wet, which meant we were wet. Shortly after that, we saw our third gaffe. We didn’t bring a big enough blanket for all of us. It wasn’t the temperature that was going to make our attempts to sleep so futile, it was the sand bugs.

A few hours later the sun started its ascent over the ocean and we gave up pretending and walked our tattered, red bump-clad bodies down to the water for our morning constitutionals. While we were in the water the first worker on the beach that morning drove past. When he spotted our site he slowed down to a fat retired woman’s pace. That didn’t stop him from driving over our blanket, though. We watched him periodically, not wanting to stare. He clearly seemed to suspect us of spending the night, and possibly even drinking and cooking out, but we had moved sites after that, so there was no evidence of anything except that we were early risers. He had no option but to drive on.

Soon we were hungry. We hadn’t planned ahead far enough to consider today, and we didn’t have food or money and we were hours from home. Our mission was clear.

We lugged our stuff back to the car and moseyed over to the hotel. We came in through the front, just three young patrons of a fine establishment back in from their morning swim. We said good morning to the concierge and walked into the breakfast buffet.

Here was a room filled with decent people, middle-aged couples in Wal-mart sandals and bathing suits under XXL t-shirts, fresh and awake to start the last morning of the weekend getaway they took in place of a week’s vacation, looking to take advantage of the complimentary continental breakfast. And here were three guys, wet and sandy, with young bodies and wallets protruding from Banana Republic shorts, filling plates with sausage, eggs, biscuits, gravy and bacon, glasses with milk and orange juice, and bowls with individual cereal boxes. We owned the place. The gravy was too cold for us, the milk too warm. Ours was the conversation of the room. We were the inheritors of all the continental breakfasts.

Three hours later, long after our parking ticket had expired, Phil at rest, Dave at the helm, me with no pants, we were pulling out onto the road home; the road back to people who didn’t know we had left, the road back to careless people, the road back to sweeping up stiffened bodies of dead birds from stained rugs.

Introduction

This blog should (if I keep to my guns on projects that I come up with in five minutes (and I don't)) be a page where I make regular updates concerning my study on disenfranchisement.