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A Rabbit Walks By
Show Boat opened last night and was a total success. Our best production this season, if you ask me. Everyone seemed somehow to be on the same page with this one. Great sets, costumes and performances all around. We even have Al Sharpton’s daughter playing the part of Queenie in this one, along with another great guest artist playing Joe, the character who sings Old Man River. My favorite part of the show is towards the end when Queenie is talking about how Joe hasn’t changed in forty years and Joe says he doesn’t need to, that the river (the Mississippi) doesn’t change, so why should he?
After the show, I rescued some perfectly usable metal crutches from a garbage can outside McDonald’s. I just imagined in my head some poor invalid earlier that night having somehow found the strength to throw them away, to move on and to walk under their own strength from then on. I guess that somehow connects to how I feel. There’s a line in the Tao Te Ching - which I don’t have handy right now - it says something about how in the pursuit of the Tao, every day something is lost. The crutches, I thought, would make a good prop someday.
Last night I dreamt of preparations for some kind of wedding, which was taking place outdoors and which required the purification and sanctification of a large container of water which was to be poured out in a rectangle in the grass. Some kind of chymical wedding, some kind of inner union, I presume. Right in time for the Full Moon. Wednesday is our day off. I was thinking of going to the beach for a few minutes this afternoon. Maybe do some juggling, maybe bring out my guitar into the sunshine. The last time I played it down there, I could feel the sea air accumulating on the fret board.
We watched some video last night on YouTube of, I think, North Korean dancers. I haven’t got an internet connection as I’m writing this, so you’ll have to find it for yourself. But it somehow perfectly summarized a lot of strands of thought I’ve been following. So many bodies acting in perfect unison. So many people bound together in one giant performance, one giant event. This is the essence of religion, from the Latin religare, to be bound together. Performance traditions, especially high theatre, fulfill what Durkheim called “social cohesion”, the binding together of many individuals under unifying narrative architecture. Our modern culture, I think, comes out of this: narrative performance traditions being bent to the service of the nation state. What once consisted of small cults of people glorifying a particular story, a particular god or mythological figures exploits in a worshipful setting turned eventually into the unifying story and performance tradition of the Catholic Mass and the social structures which perpetuated that system of performance and the mythos surrounding it. With Protestantism, that unifying story fractured and splinter groups re-aligned the stories they told to underclasses to serve more directly the interests of the princes and nobilities who were trying to break away from the control of the Papacy. Morality plays and mystery plays gave way to secularized dramas patronized by kings and queens, and which - in the case of people like Shakespeare - ultimately transmogrified into a corpus of national literature, a literature which gave a unifying cultural identity to a coalition of diverse groups of people. Fast forwarding into the modern age, the nation state as the leader of narrative performance culture turns into straight out nationalist propaganda, as best evidenced perhaps in the mass spectacles of the Nazi party, and the warring narratives of the United States versus the Soviet Union, the Evil Empire. Every hero needs a villain. Now we seem to be in the post-nation state era {See the board room scene in the movie “Network” - also on YouTube}, in which it is the corporations which tell the stories that bind us one to the other. The movie Wall-E has a great scene about this: where they’re on the space ship and the little fat babies are being educated by the corporate robots who root an understanding of the very alphabet itself in corporate propaganda.
But really, things are not so different. It was always the rich, the nobility, the upper classes who have the money and the means to put on pageants and mass spectacles, who tell the stories which bind people together. And it’s only to be expected that the stories they choose to celebrate above others would be ones which serve their own interests, which further their own ends. Things have always been the same. The drama plays itself out over and over again. Only the players change.
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July 17th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Well,
Plays and pageants and storytelling in general predates any type of nobility or elite. But since there has been an elite, yeah.
If you go to a “KUSTOM” village in Vanuatu, all they do is dance and sing and run through various festivals according to the seasons.
What we have in the west are ancient institutions and traditions that were transformed to fit a feudal/patronage system, and then Democracy and capitalism took over supplanted patronage and “high culture” and pretty much killed it by transforming it into a mass produced commodity.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:38 am
So several revolutions back, you get to where people just celebrated life.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I think your are probably correct. I can imagine the psychopathic types that created havoc in the tribes were banished (if they weren’t killed?) and over the years a few met up, exchanged knowledge, invented the system of weighing gold, and later money (they founded the priesthoods and nobility?), and the old ways of pure human spirit grounded pageantry were systematically bought out and or stomped out.
July 19th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Well, thing tend to happen in the only way that they can happen.
So you can look back and say “this is how it happened, these people were evil they did this and that..”
But at the time it was different and things were unfolding the best way they could at the time. I mean there is something to that about the psychopaths. “Mongol” is playing now. the story of Gengis Khan. And that’s pretty much similar to what you are saying. A lot of people have speculated where these various groups of mounted barbarians of the Northern Steppes came from. The Mongols were one group and the Indo Iranians were another group. Recent archeological evidence shows the two groups inter married.
But anyway, I am descended from some of these types. The Normans in particular. They started out as Vikings and then became French and then English, by taking over places through conquest. They were very adaptable culturally. They were Christianized early on.
So really, you have these warlike people, and other people are telling their story through time and fitting them into a narrative and the narrative is a lot more poetic than “these are a bunch of barbarian psychos that keep overthrowing everyone.”
In some sense its true. But there are forces at work much larger than these various barbarians. The barbarians were an instrument to a larger end. They built networks, spread culture. There is a dark side to it but also a bright side.
In a way they were psychos lusting after gold and at the same time they were brave knights fighting for honor.
July 20th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I’m glad I met you Ted. I used to think people who talk about their ancestors the way you do were White Power wackos but I never questioned it when I did it. Anyway, I’m Greek, Irish and Swedish. My Dad always made sure to remind me that I was a Spartan and was better than anyone else but he said I got my brains from my Mom. I think he meant I would always best others in a fight but he wouldn’t have been comfortable telling that to a girl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta
I wouldn’t like it but I could figure out how to live in a police state pretty quickly. I guess I can thank genes for that too if it ever comes to it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia
July 20th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
“Well, thing tend to happen in the only way that they can happen.”
that’s a vague statement. If they only tend, then that seems to imply to me that you are allowing open possibilities.
I suspect there are infinite possibilities open in every moment and that a few of those have much higher probability for occurring than others. I think magic is largely about understanding these possibilities and manipulating things so as to push towards a chosen outcome.
“But at the time it was different and things were unfolding the best way they could at the time.”
I think this unlikely. I think large scale social trends were probably consciously manipulated by a knowledgeable minority from early on for the benefit of those small groups, and not necessarily for the greater good. The good and finer things that have occurred in such an environment would then generally (not always) be those that were sympathetic and useful for the manipulators.
The idea that things have evolved naturally and towards a more civilized state is, I think, the generally accepted view. I suspect it may not have been that way for a long time. In the dim past we may have been much more humane as a group. Warring has perhaps become much more common through time.
The Catalhoyuk site in Turkey is incredibly compelling in this way. It documents a semi-agrarian society, not yet far removed from hunter/gathering, that lived in uninterrupted peace (at least on the scale of a local society) that lasted for at least 1200 years, beginning about 7000 BCE! The “common wisdom” is that civilizations are only stable for a few hundred years, as that is what the historical record tells us. Well, the victors write (and delete) history, and that kind of history is an inconvenient truth for those that derive profit and satisfaction from war and destruction.