I feel pretty pathetic for having taken this long to even attempt to get back to writing anything, not just for this blog, but for anything. It isn’t even as though I haven’t had anything to write about. I just haven’t wanted to try.
I think the sense of not even wanting to try leads into what I want to consider right now. The topics I’ve wanted to write about for here lately have been 1) the concept of a “government takeover” or the use of “they” or “the government wants” in reference to the democratic republic government, 2) Sex as the currency of the terminally lonely, 3) Shaving, 4) the unnecessarily explicit exclusion of me from an event, 5) the books I’ve been reading for this class, which include The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Discipline and Punish, and especially The Practice of Everyday Life, and 6) the writer’s inability to access a real sense of disenfranchisement.
In all of these things, for me, there is the sense of an aimless muddling about in revolt against a breath-numbing purposelessness that constantly borders on giving up; the doing and the quitting. I’m going to try to look at each of these six things in this light or one of a similar shade and see if anything comes out of it.
First, there is the chasm between the voter - the enfranchised, to get back to the definition of enfranchise - and herself, in the notion of a ‘government takeover”. The whole idea of a democratic republic is that the citizens control the state. We have a tendency to create things for our benefit, forgetting we made them, taking them up with a great reverence towards the tradition, and enslaving ourselves to them. Government itself is man-made. It is there to serve the populace, unless the populace loses sight of that and begins to see it as a separate entity that rules over us. This threat, it seems, is more likely to be realized by entities that play within the system we orchestrate for ourselves to live in, such as the corporation. The thing about democracy, though, is that is requires an educated and informed populace. When it fails to first educate, and then inform its citizenry, or fails in either area alone, the structure itself falls. If one is educated but not informed, she might know how to consider things, but has nothing to consider. If one is informed but not educated, she has the things to consider, but doesn’t know how to properly take up that work. With the relationship between education and assimilation, one could only believe that a well-educated people might also provide a more congruent society. I know this serves as, at best, a basic outline for a much more complex discussion and that it also covers over a number of equiprimordial questions concerning the individual, the collective, the tradition, the sovereign, the access to critique and renewal, and what this has to do with the next five things. I hope to clear up this last part by the end of this, but I want to do so without bringing forth a decisive explicit answer, as I not only don’t know how to do that, I don’t know if it’s there. This is also avoiding a topic I’m known to rant about, which is the lack of sidewalks in our neighborhood in conflict with the police oppression of the area filled almost exclusively with poor people who are either black or Latino. That will have to be an entry in itself, though.
The second topic of recent concern is the idea that sex is the currency of the terminally lonely. Per our habit of creation towards some reversed sub servitude, we take up something as trivial as basic buy and sell economics and apply it to something it has no place over. Economics is a cold game, functioning purely to maintain certain power. In the mean space it provides goods and services to those requiring them. Of course, this only feeds into the previous idea. What we do with it beyond this, such as charity or investing in our morals, we do with the application of sentiments or theories outside the realm of economics to buying and selling. Applying a trade mindset to the body objectifies both one’s own body and that of the other. Not only are we then incapable of examining the other as the unique individual other, but we fall under the dreadful gaze of the other of both the legitimate other and our own suspiciously judgmental eye with a view towards disgust.
Our third topic is shaving. I’ve thought a lot about this. The last eight or nine days I have been shaving. Before this stent, it’s never happened two days in a row. I have no chin and have always been acutely aware of this, my round face, and a small scar whenever I have shaved. Also, my neck is prone to wretched razor burn. I also feel as though I have lost a certain amount of character. Physically, the beard represents a coming of age, an ability to produce something only produced by men, excluding women and children. It has also been seen as a sign of wisdom and integrity. Certainly there have been negative ways of looking at beards in the past, but we aren’t going to get to the point nearly as fast if we stop to consider these. There has been a several-hundred year near-banishment of beards in western culture. One reason for Dostoyevsky’s great beard is that he was a part of the rebellion against the westernization of Russia that required the gentry to keep clean faces. I’m doing this in preparation of the army, where for the better part of four years I will have to wake up every day and shave before putting on one uniform or another. We do this, though.
I hope this is beginning to show itself. The fourth topic, the unnecessarily explicit exclusion of me, comes somewhat from this study. The philosophy department was hosting a guest lecturer on –and I thought this was rich with irony – moral phenomenology from Aristotle to Heidegger. After the lecture, certain students had been chosen to attend a nice dinner with the faculty and the lecturer. The group consisted of Phil, Anna, Charlie, Alice, Igor, and I think some new guy I don’t know. In any case, Phil and I had joked about my appearing at this dinner uninvited. The joke was based on a scene from Notes from Underground, and was that I would reserve the table next to theirs, ordering only wine, up to and beyond the point of belligerence towards the group. If you’re not familiar with the scene, this isn’t very funny, but we had a good laugh. In any case, the joke somehow made its way to faculty and the message was delivered to me that if I were to make an appearance I would be made to leave. I want that story, like the others I’ve written as attempts at literature, to stand on its own. I also can’t begin to describe the feelings it gave me.
The fifth topic isn’t so much the content of the books I’ve been working through for this class, but the act of reading them. This probably most closely relates to the discussion on doing and quitting. These books, I think, are bringing me closer to the marrow of why we are disenfranchised, as well as what it means, but they also have me ready to stop questioning it all together. It’s become difficult to pick the book up and make my way through one new concept at a time. It’s become much easier to take a friend out to Bowdon for eighteen holes. This moves towards the relationship between enfranchisement and responsibility.
Lastly, I want to talk about the poor ole’ writer’s lack of access into an authentic disenfranchisement. Disenfranchisement has to do with not only one’s loss of a voice, but one’s lack of faith in his ability to have a voice again. First of all, writers are educated, and education provides access to a future, as it provides for the sharpening of one’s ability to think, among other things. Secondly, writing is the writer’s voice. It is about the most empowering thing a person can do. The loser who writes the story is the winner. Another note on education: it provides access into one world, but it also closes off another, that of the truly voiceless, who work their fingers to stubs and smoke their voice box into decay.
“Hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment… We are all divorced from life; we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it… You have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves… We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.”
