Mark Sargent from Greece
LETTER FROM GREECE#18: “…and the living is easy.”
“It’s a lot easier to watch somebody make a mistake when they do it with their hair on fire.” Casey McGeehee, third baseman, Miami Marlins
Well damn, I don’t know. What’s easy about it? I love snooping around sports news for just these types of pronouncements, along with the metaphor laden slang.
Here in the Levant, especially in Turkey and Greece, we have a concept or theory referred to as the deep state. It’s a loose term and in Turkey it is used by nearly all factions, so the Islamists supporting Erdogan suspect the Islamists behind Gulen, the secularists are convinced it’s the Islamists and so on, though, of course, the CIA is behind everything. In Greece too we have the notion of the shadow government, the state within the state, which is nationalist, corporatist and deeply connected within the various intelligence services, the military and business mafia. Or think Pakistan, where the national intelligence agency, the ISI, appears to have its own domestic and foreign policy and pursues this without interference from democratically elected officials.
I’m not big on conspiracy theory, but I have been getting a growing sense of such a deep state within the U.S. government. More and more we realize that elected officials are not in charge anymore. The head of the NSA, James Clapper, can deliberately lie to Congress, or, as he put it, “speak the least untruthfully as possible” and he keeps his job. Same with the CIA director. And you have a president saying he didn’t know the extent of the surveillance program. Or, more obviously, second day in office, more than five long years ago, Obama signs a document closing Guantanamo. But the system in place says, no you can’t. Mark Danner, the distinguished investigative journalist and Berkeley professor, has a terrific series of articles running in the New York Review on Rumsfeld and Cheney and the secret intelligence organization they put in place and which is still there. Besides formally torturing prisoners[i] (others can do it), Bush’s war on terror program is still in place. The CIA monitors the computers of a Senate Committee investigating it? And they get away with it, that’s the part that smells deep. Last May Obama said he wanted the CIA out of the drone business, that this should be run by the Defense Department. So are they? Nope. CIA is flying drones in Yemen and Pakistan, for instance. At the kangaroo court being conducted in Guantanamo these days you have the FBI hounding the defense attorneys, pounding on their doors in the middle of the night and demanding answers to their questions. But better yet, in the courtroom is an emergency security light and the judge, the prosecutors and the defense team all have a button to control this light. The idea being that if testimony gets into the realm of really secret security issues the button can be pushed, the light flashes, the courtroom cleared and the matter discussed. So the trial is stumbling along and suddenly the security light starts flashing. Everyone in the courtroom looks up with a huh? Nobody had pushed the button. A bit of investigation revealed that unbeknownst to anyone the CIA had tapped into the system and given themselves a button too. Ha ha. Even the military judge was enraged with that one. But all they did was disconnect the CIA’s button. When it comes to these organizations, even when they’re caught they’re allowed to say, Oops, my bad and move on to their next devious act. Here’s something from Mark Danner.
“Though we have become accustomed to President Obama telling us, as he most recently did in the State of the Union address, that ‘America must move off a permanent war footing,’ these words have come to sound, in their repetition, less like the orders of a commander in chief than the pleas of one lonely man hoping to persuade.” New York Review, March 6, 2014
Perhaps, but, despite his projections of diminished expectations, he’s obviously well plugged into the war on terror with his kill lists, surges, and secrecies. But who plays the Cheney role now? It can’t be Joe Biden. No way. And when I hear people who should know better braying that they’re Ready for Hillary in 2016 I get a sinking feeling. She’s the ultimate status quo candidate, the champion of the same old shit: oligarchic control of public policy, constant interference in the affairs of other nations and a gush with the unique American hubris that the U.S. knows best.
“Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?”
The above from a short essay by Charles Simic that I strongly recommend.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/20/age-of-ignorance/
*
“How’s the apple?”
Mirella gestures, “It’s, you know,
softer than hard.”
*
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
That’s what we do. And we use the dead to give context to our images, like an appetizer, like Kafka quotes scribbled on loo walls or Lou Rawls or Too Tall Muthafucking Jones and it works because we can separate the living from the dead and because everybody is getting sick, inching towards death and
cancer is impermanent too
but it keeps knocking on the door, it is more insistent than we are, demanding our attention, which we don’t have to give because we are separating the living from the dead because no matter how long we stare at the dead they don’t speak, ever. They never come back to speak to us. They aren’t capable of reconstituting after dissolving into nothing or as Billy Preston once sang, “Nothing from nothing is nothing.” Nothing previous, nothing after. A friend wrote that she had decided to forgo the Mahamudra practice of 100 thousand prostrations. I wrote back, even after one hundred large times with yr face to the ground, even then, even then there is nothing. And how many times have you heard someone say prostrate when they meant prostate? I love it when people do that. Or the other fucking way around. How many prostate operations does it take before you piss your way to enlightenment? Dribble? Or must we all stagger into the void impotent and incontinent? Hello nothing, my old friend. A more nuanced nothing, mind you. Is cancer the herald of impermanence? Put the dead on the wall and adjust the lighting. They came from Zanzibar knowing they would never return. This is the 21st Century and it is time to let go of religion and its life-after-death conceits. They serve no purpose, now, and certainly later. Bardo my butt. The tool is not the product. Or is it? The tools Buddhism provides are well honed and ready for use, but to use them doesn’t necessitate the rest, though there are many self-serving teachers who will tell you differently. We arrive only to exit.
*
AT THE JAM
“Play more.”
“But I’m just repeating myself.”
“Ah, cicada lips, you must repeat yourself
until it sounds different.”
*
I know too much of too little.
And yet, when I consider the expansion of consciousness, I hesitate. Is that what I want? What I’m conscious of now seems like plenty, I’m having trouble keeping track. Yes, I know the argument that with expansion will come the ability to keep ever more balls in the air: look Ma, no hands! But I got my hands full, do I need more?
*
My wife, who paints quite well, is as utterly without artistic pretension as I anyone I have ever encountered. She considers her paintings paint on canvas, and nothing more. If they are nicely rendered, she’s happy about it. Having lived an artsy life I find this attitude luminous and alive.
We’re discussing a friend of ours. She’s unhappy with her life and regularly comes up with a new plan, which generally requires moving to a new town, ever farther from her mother, among other things.
“She doesn’t know what she wants, neither do I,” M says.
“Really? I know what I want to do, and I’m doing it.”
M tsks, “Everything is so easy for you.”
Huh? Is that true? I’ve never thought about it in those terms. Easy? I wouldn’t say that my life has been hard. Sure, we all suffer, that’s a given, but this question is more about the mechanics of living. Certainly anyone born into white middle class America in 1950 to a stable nurturing family has already won. And bonus points if you’re male and heading out to compete in the marketplace. Competition, that’s something I’ve avoided. I mean, how does one compete in the poetry/art world? And what would the rewards be, in poetry? Oh, you can contrive to compete, of course, but I have remained on the periphery, unknown, my reward the doing of it. Now deigning not to compete is, I realize, a different type of privilege. But back to easy. I’m wary of artists who talk about how hard they work, especially writers. Certainly there are those who slave away night and day and more power to them. But I’ve dug ditches, baled hops, swung a hammer, and to me, that’s what hard work means. You stink and ache at the end of day, maybe you’ve been carrying sheets of plywood in the rain through six inches of mud. That’s what I’m talking about. Sitting at a desk just ain’t the same. Perhaps this just reveals my lackadaisical work habits when it comes to the creative process? I don’t know, what the hell, it’s not something to worry about. That is, hard or easy, little or lots, whatever. The world is not waiting for my next poem or movie or reading, it will percolate along very well without. So why not take it easy and work at one’s leisure?
I’ve been reading Albert Camus’ Notebooks. They’re great. Here’s something I got out of volume one. It comes from Edgar Allen Poe and A.C. just modernized it a bit.
The Four Conditions of Happiness.
1) Life in the open air
2) The love of another being
3) Freedom from all ambition
4) Creation
According to that formula,
I should be exceedingly happy. And sure, but it’s not a term I use, ‘happy’.
Probably because it smacks too much of infantile American attitudes and the desperate pursuit of it, a circle with smile drawn on it. Fulfilled, engaged, balanced, at ease, perhaps—happiness is not something that requires consideration, is it? But nevermind the term, the four conditions are interesting. Note that it is ‘the love of another being,’ not loving another being. I would probably flip that one. Moving to Greece 24 years ago allowed me to make a life defined by those conditions. That and independent funds, of course. Camus again.
“For a man who is ‘nobly born,’ happiness lies in taking on the fate of everyman, not through a desire to renunciation but with a will to happiness. To be happy, you need time. Lots of time. Happiness too is a long patience.
And it is the need for money that robs us of time. Time means having time to be happy when you are worthy of happiness.”
‘Worthy of happiness,’ aren’t we all worthy? What is the criteria? I don’t know. Camus was never sentimental about poverty.
Near the end of the television drama True Detective, the character Rust Cohle asks, “What’s the point in cake if you can’t eat it?” It has been said that water buffaloes look at you as though you owe them money. Yes, water buffaloes as the arbiters of value. You owe, Markos, you owe big time. Certainly, but no matter, we all pay with our lives in the end.
*
“False comforts have their uses. In fact they are all we have.”
Nathaniel Rich
5 May 2014
Sargent
[i] Sarah Palin says, Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. An awful sentiment, to be sure, but rather clever. Someone else must have written it.