Like every other subject in the land of Mammon; you seek succor; you bite the hand that feeds you; or you kill the farmer and take his seat at the table for your episode of “Animal Farm.” Unless you, as I seem to be, are haunted by the ghost of Don Quixote, in which case you reconnoiter the battlefield (planet earth); muster your forces (anyone capable of love); and liberate the ungrateful (the 99% waiting in line at “Club 1%”). However, you’re reading because you have a curiosity about meaning as it pertains to writing in a capitalist society - that’s easy, memorize a few billion lines of advertising until you can spit copy out like it was your own, slap some rugged individualism on it as though you didn’t care a whit what anybody thought; add a splash of testosterone (gender neutral if you’re really gifted) - stir and serve chilled as though you invented the word blasé. Who you serve it to, however, is the key, and whichever “man” you choose must be a deity from the temple of “The 3 Attributes” - one, he must be richer than g_d. two, he must be successful. three, you are unable to defy his will. If you can find a patron possessing these qualities and gain his approval, write as though your soul depends upon it, for it most likely will.
Sounds a little like Faust, don’t it. Who else spurned the offerings of the most high in order to satisfy greatness? That is not a rhetorical question; it is one which has plagued our species back, and prior to King Hammurabi in his role as "protector of the weak and oppressed.” Only in those days kings had more than money - they had heart and soul. Whereas by the time the legend of Faust was gaining a head of steam, royalty had been whinging for many centuries about not having it all . This bait and switch excuse for vacating positions of responsibility for unrealized or unacknowledged appetites has become more than a breach in the dike of the human condition held in place by a highly responsible Dutch boy, for it is coming down to whether the human species can serve each other and survive the coming apocalypse or bow before the all high god of Mammon and perish in the cauldrons of our own arrogance. Writing use to have a place in this discussion, now it is the bean counters who are calling the shots and the writers simply line up behind who is parsing the largest pile of beans. Previously, as was the case of King Hammurabi, one's beliefs were paramount and the medium simply a representation of the purity of one’s convictions - thus the “Code of Hammurabi” was inscribed in Basalt which if you have any knowledge of stone or how it is worked is no mean feat. Today this nobility of purpose is reduced to Bob Dylan’s undeniable observation, “You know, capitalism is above the law. It say, ‘It don't count 'less it sells’”.
Then again Mr. Dylan asked, “What’s money? A man’s a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” Our imaginary patron of “The 3 Attributes” has so far outstripped this modest ambition as to chase at the heels of 'the' real g_d, like some sort of lost canine, yet still manage to hoodwink 7 billion human beings such that if they too affect airs of superiority; claw and scrape their way to the top of the heap (however local that may be); or slit the the throats of all those threading their way from the bottom of whatever heap one's clambered atop surrounded by rising tides; then and only will they consider your petition to step into the ring of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal”. The magic of this success is the illusion of free will be stamped inside the forehead of every manjack popped out of each fetus factory the sanctity-of-life franchise has brilliantly positioned on every street corner of the planet - replete with the delusion of strength-in-numbers nationalism piped into every nursery training future soldiers for the gladiator wars all the rage in our bored-to-tears dying planet. I’m still astonished how the ruling class with so little gumption, bereft of any distinction other than an obscene predilection for amassing everything, could conjure the fiction that they are happy, when they, any one of them, possess no more capacity for feeling of any kind than one might find on an uninhabited asteroid in apsis of its orbit away from our Milky Way? - and yet they rule our planet or enough of it so as to render the planet virtually uninhabitable for those on whose sweat they float.
Talk about your blind obedience, but then again here I sit laboring under the same delusion of success and hoped-for-freedom; save the fact my patron is a female god impoverished by her male oppressors and too timid to express her undying love for my gentle heart and stalwart ways - ah the sweet 'dame irony' of human existence, or as I prefer to think of it, the rich humor of m’Lady G_d. As to obedience, she has only to point to a mountain and say climb and I commence, or point to the sky and say jump - I ask only “how high.” It is she - this goddess of love, who has forced me to denounce the fiction of literacy through this hackneyed myopic whinge about all the good work that has been crafted by earnest hearts seeking understanding in a world wanting no more than to be told "thangs" will be alright - a world willing to listen to any siren song representing a surcease of the illimitable grief that is part of breathing - a world that will claw one to death for speaking the truth unless it can be made to laugh at the same time. How is it possible to compete with the well-heeled big shots willing to pay copious amounts of money for any sequel that echoes or even whiffs of the bliss of success and harmony; of any prosperity regardless of the hollow sound released from the caverns of disbelief and betrayal fed daily by the inexorable reality of death and gratuitous suffering wrought by a handful of ciphers disguised as humans. Our dumb luck, as it happens, is the mortal coil from which we shuffle, for it contains the only law we must obey - even suffering is a fiction for which we have no one to blame but ourselves - there I’ve gone and said it, sharing why I will likely never succeed as a writer - can’t keep my mouth shut or my keyboard hushed.
However, this essay is about what it means to write in a capitalist society. I don’t know, may never know - not sure I want to know, but for the sake of amusement, let’s assume some of what I’ve written means something; I live on a capitalist planet, and I write. Some of our world’s most popular entertainment evolves around virtual voyages through galaxies in a starship “Enterprise,” or one of its many avatars, not to confuse enterprise with capitalism however useful that sleight-of-hand may be to the ciphers amongst us. This same planet and its Freedom Fighters have also recently managed to dethrone the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” or at least underwrite their transition to market economies - talk about your fictions. Herein lies the rub, the real fiction is that there is any sort of market economy - we are a Thralldom, or what used to be called a Kingdom before Napoleon began fucking around with semantics. If we were a truly capitalist society there would be market forces very much in play - there are none. We buy what we are told, like it. We may grouse, even saber-rattle because we see it done on the flickering screen, or what was once a flickering screen - now just a +5v/-5v twitch affixed at the end of our wrists fed from the mothership's servers in our rigidly controlled, vertically distributed network (though not actually a single network, the distinction is too fine to parse in this essay). The writers for the tractor beam of this highly effective Death Star are today’s much sought after, and well compensated high priests and priestesses of “content.” My concern and reason for this essay is born of an insatiable appetite for meaning of which there may be none - that the coalescing of resources and decay surrounding our existence is exactly what is found in nature with no other meaning than what one might find in the protoplasm of a flattened ant at the bottom of a rockslide which had come unhinged by another ant clambering up to the pinnacle of the topmost stone in an effort to satisfy an inexorable, insatiable, and ceaseless existential hunger, I just don’t know . . .
jts 1/4/2018
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