#38: Abdullah Öcalan, Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, & Gene Wolfe
Hello friends! Last Sunday I finished my 34th circuit around the sun. 34 isn’t such a bad number. It’s the eleventh semiprime, a number composed of only two prime factors. It’s also a member of the first semiprime treble cluster, (33, 34, and 35 all being semiprime compose the cluster). The next semiprime treble cluster is at 85, 86, and 87. There’s a solid chance this is my last time in a cluster, although I’m aiming to make it to 100. It’s also the ninth member of the Fibonacci sequence and you likely have 34 vertebrae in your spine. But 34 is a pretty bad number.
Being 34 years old though feels fine. I am happy to be growing older and navigating new chapters of my life. Today I fly to Athens to begin a European tour with the first new Glue material since our LP in 2017! To my very few euro readers, find me here:
I’ve regrettably become much worse at creating time for reading books and writing this blog. I’m actively working on that, as reading is my primary source of fulfillment and self-actualization and writing is becoming very fun for me. However, with the pace slowing down, I feel my writing about books becoming more distant from the texts themselves, which is upsetting to me. I hope this distance isn’t too marked for the reader. Now, having established the perfect excuse, I would like to tell you about some books that I have read since my last newsletter.
Beyond State, Power, and Violence by Abdullah Öcalan
When I was living and studying in Guatemala at the Proyecto Linguistico Quetzaltenango, I had a sudden revelation that now strikes me as particularly embarrassing. It occurred to me that what we call democracy in the United States really may not be one at all. I was becoming aware of the way that the U.S. has and continues to undermine the will of the people in Latin America. I began to wonder about little things like the possibility of democracy in a world where the quality of education is not distributed equally. Is electoral democracy really it? Isn’t there something more? It all seemed so novel then, but it feels so rudimentary now.
For a moment I was spitting on the name of democracy. After all, the only democracy I have known is the electoral form here in the U.S. and I have never got what I wanted out of an election and I don’t like the way daily life plays out here. Then I began to realize that democracy may actually be some sort of gold standard and what we have here is not actually democracy.
Abdullah Öcalan, ideologue and founder of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), would agree. He writes here that democracy and the state are in direct opposition to each other and then when one is strengthened the other is weakened. The power of the state is strong and our democracy is incredibly weak. He writes this while imprisoned alone on the small Turkish prison island İmralı where he has been since in 1999.
Beyond State, Power, & Violence is a hefty book that encompasses a wide array of Öcalan’s commitments including women’s liberation, the ecological society, the state and democracy, self-criticism, and contemporary and ancient history of the Middle East.
To Öcalan, “democracy means governance that does not become the state, the capacity of communities to govern themselves without a state.” Encountering Öcalan, a practical and contemporary anarchist, has been so incredibly refreshing and this definition feels like a paradigm shift for me.
We distinguish our definition of democracy from democracy as a bourgeois veil for the state. Even when addressing Athens and the first Sumerian urban democracies, we must carefully differentiate between true democracy and the state. One cannot be an extension of the other; the proliferation of one decreases the other, and the end of one represents the complete victory of the other. The kind of democracy the US and its partners impose is the bourgeois-feudal democracy of a very small group that relies on the extensive military-ruling power apparatus. On the other hand, although relying on a society’s minimal defense forces, the forces of societal freedom regard democratic politics as their main work. Democratic politics subsumes all the activities, including education, organization, and action, of all individuals and social groups suffering at the hands of the dominating power. The means used to achieve political, legal, and economic goals can range from demonstrations, rallies, protests, and uprisings to war, should it become necessary. These activities are generally necessary daily tasks or ongoing undertakings meant to achieve reform or change. When they include major qualitative change, they can be considered revolutionary. The more the dominant system strives for power and control over democracy, the more intertwined and confrontational the freedom forces efforts for democracy will become.
Lakdas Wikkramasinha
Lakdhas Wikkramasinha was a Sri Lankan poet who identified the poet not as mere bystander responding to the times but as a terrorist who was tasked with restructuring society.
The poems in this collection embody this terroristic spirt through anti-colonial, anti-authoritarian tones.
The body that you and five policemen // Pull out of the Beira — // That you saw early this morning // Floating in the lake, // Had, at seven o’clock in the twilight // A mind thinking: my loyal disciple follows me, // He is at my footsteps, at my back // My disciple follows me—
But his mind was not too quick // To know, the knife I buried in his back, // His mind was too slow to think— // Like the saffron light I flashed before him // That I showed the way for him— // For him, for you— // Only the knife I buried in his back // Knew I followed no one, // Knew, and was not too late to feel.
Sword of the Lictor & Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
At this point, I no longer have the patience to review these two books separately. They increasingly became more fun, but I still just did not care. The main problem was expecting Gormenghast from these sci-fi novels. Still, the experiment of using language to tell a fantasy story in a science fiction world is cool. This idea is captured in a line at the end of the book where the narrator writes: “even now I cannot help but wonder how much any of us sees what is before us…”
Apparently I’m supposed to reread the books because they are wildly different the second time around. I’m not doing that anytime soon, unfortunately.
Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard
In the middle of this movie, two girls got up from their seats and one of them yelled “this is fucking dumb” as they walked out of the theater, smashed the door open, and let it slam shut behind them. They were right. For one, Godard’s Contempt is a failed feminist film wherein he tries to mock Hollywood’s objectification of women and ends up reproducing it. Secondly, the dialogue in this film is stilted - nobody is listening to each other, statements are repeated ad nauseum, and people are unable to meaningfully connect with each other.
Contempt came out in 1963, 2 years after the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life (see my last 3 posts). Whether or not Godard is working from Lefebvre’s ideas (though I would bet that he is), it is clear that the notion of alienation resulting from a burgeoning form of materialist capitalism was a primary concern of the avant-garde. Godard’s explores this through an intentionally frustrating dialogue that feels “fucking dumb” to watch. This is the genius of the film. Pop trappings, flashy cars, and highly saturated Kodak film make a mockery of capitalism and Hollywood and the end result is a frustrating experience.
While the capitalist experience plays out on screen, the protagonist, Paul, struggles with his capacity to make art for a Hollywood studio. Here is where Godard reproduces the misogyny he’s mocking. Camille, played by Bardot, becomes a metaphor for artistic purity that is time and again pawned off to the hyperbolically American film producer. The frustrations between Paul and Camille which forced those two girls out of theater come from Camille’s disappointment in Paul’s wavering between making money or making art and his half-assed attempt to do both. Eventually, Camille leaves Paul and hitches a ride with the American film producer. They crash into an oil tanker and die, bloody heads hanging out their respective windows, symbols of artistic purity and capitalism forever unable to connect their gazes. Godard’s objectification of a beauty icon reproduces the misogyny he mocks in the opening shot of the film.
Bringing some books on tour - Halldor Laxness, Felix Guatarri, etc . More when I return!