From Synchronous Events of My Absence, a New Hope

 

Woman sharing a bowl of salad. From “Living Apart,” a work-in-progress. (Canon T5 DSLR, Canon 18mm-55mm f/3.5-f/5.6 zoom, 35mm equivalent focal lengths 28mm-90mm). Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2015. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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I BRING TO today's long-delayed writing an admittedly embryonic but unquestionably powerful sense of hope, its strength defined by its metaphorical similarity to concrete reinforced with steel or iron, the rebar beloved of structural engineers since the 15th Century or so.

Like concrete itself,  my new sense of hope contains seemingly disparate elements compounded into a robustly functional whole. The elements include one of this year's U.S. election results, Beat Generation poetry and a European musical phenomenon that began in Germany probably 15 years ago but really started with the folk-music revival  of the 1950s. Think of the political elements and the poetry as the aggregate, the music as the rebar, and the bonding element as the groundswell of obviously rising anger against capitalism's ever-more-methodical victimization of the 99 Percent.

Alas – albeit with apologies to those whose concept of dialectical materialism still stubbornly excludes the (misleadingly named) “supernatural” – we cannot discuss hope of this sort without first considering the prophetic function of art.

Like the core wisdom at the heart of the present-day Gaia Hypothesis  – the now-revolutionary notion our planet is alive, conscious and self-regulating – the prophetic function of art is a breathtakingly ancient concept. Its origins are lost in the ignorance and suppressed knowledge that unfortunately shrouds most of our species' 200,000 years. But what we are learning of so-called “primitive” peoples suggests it, like the Gaian ethos, was among the definitive characteristics of human society until the advent of patriarchy – a tragedy Barbara Mor  convincingly defines as humanity's one and only unnatural act – the precursor to the cancerous shrinking of human consciousness to the zomboid moral imbecility  necessitated by and for the maintenance of capitalist profit and growth.

During the five or six millennia that followed patriarchy's emergence, the tyrannies essential to expanding and sustaining it methodically marginalized art to exclude public awareness not just of its prophetic potential, but of all its psychological and ritualistic potencies, which the patriarchal authorities (correctly) feared as dangerously subversive. This was – and is – the fear implicit in the persecutions of art and artists launched even now by the Abrahamic religions and by the patriarchal authorities in general. It is the real reason that under capitalism, which is revealed by its master-slave dichotomy to be patriarchy in economic disguise, art has been officially marginalized, first to decoration and/or entertainment, ultimately to an esoteric medium by which the One Percenters declare their financial and cultural status, mostly to one another.

But some ideas – especially those powerful enough to evoke the spinal-chill imprimatur that signifies an encounter with poetic truth – refuse to be suppressed. Thus, just as the scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would propose the Gaia Hypothesis in 1972 (appropriately, its name was suggested by the novelist William Golding), so in 1933 did Carl Jung rescue the notion of art-as-prophecy  from obscurity. Marshall McLuhan followed suit in 1964,  proclaiming art “a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

Enter, as exemplars, three categories of art: Edvard Munch's four versions of The Scream (1893-1910) ; Allen Ginsberg's  “Howl” (1956) and Faun's  “Alba” (2011), here on the album Eden.

The four portraits in the Scream series are expressions of stark horror, all the more intense for the fact we are left to imagine their source. Though the anguish in the opening line of “Howl” could surely describe what it was Munch found so horrific:

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...

But 55 years later in “Alba,” we discover the suggestion those seemingly endless years of unmitigated darkness may at last be ending:

Lauf nicht davon, ich lann den Morgen sehen
Wir liefen writ, nun lassen wir den Winter ziehen.

In English, in the context of the piece itself, this translates to:

Do not run [anymore from the cold and darkness], I can see the morning.
We ran far [enough], let the winter pull us [as it might].

McLuhan's art-as-warning hypothesis provided, as many OAN readers will no doubt recall my having said before, a key part of the conceptual framework of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which defined the 1960s Counterculture – largely on the basis of its art and its expansion of female-male relationship models – as the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. That book, the product of 24 years of research conducted mostly in the spare moments allowed by a newspaper career, went unpublished because its manuscript, photographs and research notes were destroyed in a 1983 fire, probably arson.

Now, particularly with the addition of Jung's observations, the notion of art-as-prophecy applied to Faun (and thus to the renaissance of goddess-centered paganism that is sweeping Europe), gives us a profoundly reassuring glimpse of our post-apocalyptic future. It tells us the capitalists were not able to kill the Counterculture after all – that its anti-patriarchal aesthetic is thriving in Europe and, despite the vehement opposition of the One Percent, is now by a kind of cultural osmosis seeping back into the USian homeland – all of which, especially from the Jungian perspective, suggests our species is making psychic and psychological preparations for its future. The long term implication is that we will survive the disasters thrust on us by capitalism, and that we will eventually emerge from the shark-womb of capitalism's toxic darkness with a genuinely healing vision of ourselves, our Mother Earth and the universe of which we are part.

The point at which all these seemingly random impressions coalesced into a synchronistic whole was an apparently coincidental conversation with a much younger woman named Suzanne at the 15 Now Tacoma election-night party celebrating last week's vote by a 70 percent majority of Tacomans (see here,  here and here)  to raise the minimum wage.

Though the proposed $15 minimum wage did not win – the (obviously intimidated) voters overwhelmingly chose the $12 minimum instead – the victory was clearly 15 Now's. Their campaign so frightened theTacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, it ordered the Tacoma City Council to put the $12-eventually option on the ballot in competition with the $15-immediately proposed by initiative.

Persons unfamiliar with USian municipal government should note that “ordered” is most assuredly not hyperbole. As in most cities of the imperial homeland, the overwhelming economic resources of the local chamber of commerce grants it absolute power. Tacoma is no exception. Note the lockstep opposition the chamber mustered in its unsuccessful effort to unseat City Councilman Anders Ibsen.  In essence the chamber owns outright seven of Tacoma's nine city council members – precisely as a medieval baron might have owned the lesser aristocrats who were his vassals.

The result was a ballot that first asked whether the voter supported a minimum-wage increase and next asked whether the wage should be raised to $12 per hour or to $15. The chamber obviously hoped the question's complexity would result in a negative vote. And the chamber's hope was a rational one: Washington state voters have a long history of rejecting any ballot measure that requires careful thought.

But...as Bob Dylan prophesied back in 1964, “the times they are a-changing.”

The magnitude of that change is apparent in how a small and profoundly dedicated group of women and men – a cadre of about 25 people supported by about 115 additional volunteers (most of them avowed socialists) – gained a victory for the Tacoma Working Class that two years earlier was unimaginable.

(Disclosure: I was one of the original 15 Now Tacoma volunteers, but dropped out late last year after a potentially fatal kidney infection taught me to be less forgetful of my age – then 74 – and to be more miserly with my time.)

The broader significance of the minimum-wage victory lies in the fact approximately 60 percent of the Tacoma's workers – individual women and men but mostly families with children – are officially “lower income.” This means they struggle to survive on earnings of less than $30,000 per year. Forced into poverty by outsourcing, downsizing and other expressions of capitalist savagery, they (like so many other members of the USian 99 Percent) originally saw themselves as powerless to resist.

But the victory of raising their own pay by the electoral process has shown them they have the option of fighting back and winning.

Their triumph – and that is truly what it was – thus provides a potent object lesson in how organization and solidarity translate into a restoration of the collective power formerly provided by unions – the very power the local Ruling Class imagined had been abolished forever.

Suzanne, whose eyes, depending on the light, wondrously change from blue to green and back to blue again, broadened the focus of our conversation to what else might be done to foster Working Class resistance. It came to me then that in the wildly growing popularity of music by Faun and other such unapologetically pagan groups and individual musicians – all of them agitator-bards in service to the re-emergent Muse and the revolution she symbolizes – there is the promise of the far more elemental transformation necessary to bring about a society in which the ruling ethos is not infinite greed and selfishness but rather the ancient notion of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Which – never mind the fact Faun is a continent away – makes especially appropriate its transformation of the chorus from “Alba” into an anthem of joyful defiance.  On the foregoing linked video it follows, most appropriately I think, Yulya Ayuna Kholeva's exquisite but too-brief Belorussian fire dance.

      ...I can see the morning. We ran far...

LB/30 September-9 November 2015

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