Earlier yesterday I read this fragment of Schopenhauer via Zadie Smith: semen is “a clear manifestation of the will, seeking only its own replication and continuance.” I said in the margins, “I bet.” (Bent this week, I am, by a refreshed crash course in heterosexuality; the interchangeability of women it encourages, meaning the time of ours it wastes; the double standards for consistent pleasures and personal integrity it leaves unconfronted). Smith doesn’t appear to hold the philosopher with the disparagement I do, a function either of having sat with him more thoroughly or being more mature, or both, or neither. Perhaps she’s simply skilled at severing the idea from the guy who keeps talking it at you without even the decency to hitch on his own hypocrisies.
Then I went to the campus encampment and turned around the word “disclose” in my mind, absent, saying things I believe but hearing my voice beneath my mask like it issued out of a radio elsewhere. Dis-close: end the ending-of, wrench a hardcover back open, something evocative of burgundy red leather and high-ceilinged rooms.
The gaggle seemed today particularly teenage, not literally but in its protestations. It’s true in two contexts, at least, that to witness punishment inspires a certain allure. To see suspensions effected over First Amendment rights—this justly becomes gasoline hooping rings of fire called solidarity. To covet something you know will get the book thrown at you: well, now the thing is not the thing itself but the myth.
(Don’t listen to me; I never learned how to sneak out).
We enumerate and re-enumerate and applaud, chant “Ga-za” with that quickening push of breath, we pass hours in some sort of sedative repetition. Not that I’ve got a better idea. Beyond something impractical and ultimately purposeless—something like renouncing our degrees en masse, which only makes us unemployable and thus invisible. And doesn’t anyways erase the years of education, which is to say self-alteration, they attest to, nor the payments funneled for it from one source or another. It’s mostly an offshoot of an idea I toy around with sometimes, that a well-orchestrated boycott of streaming could really put a dent in things, which can seem equally oblong and deserting after not too much time. Do Americans—because this is, largely, an American money problem—need two weeks of boredom to speak up about something? Are not children lorded over in this way? By any means necessary, yes; it’s just sad to think about what turns tides. An eternal pride month: a company could platform mass killers one day and, hypothetically, in some elsewhere universe, claim the next an abstemious disregard for the same.
Not that I dismiss the value of this moment in the slightest—canary in the coal mine of fascist surveillance and money and power; articulation of alternatives and priorities; widening consciousness of mass oppression; opportunity to intersect personal with political lives—talk to your crush at the rally—that it offers. But can’t a lady question why, after the first night, she slips off her sneakers and sits down next to them in the ugliest light her apartment can offer? Knee to chin, letting the face fall, putting the hot water off another forty minutes? Emptied of any sense that things will work out. Self-centered enough to extrapolate this into the web of the globe—hear it in the speeches thrice repeated—only as main limbs of her life shake no leaves, a residual dusk emptiness.
Schopenhauer, as I understand it, would say something in return not devoid of glazings putridly anti-feminine. Which is to say I’d not get a clear answer out of him, which is perhaps in turn the clearest answer imaginable. (And so the students follow the money, their keen nose for its papery green odor of hands, well-trained and intrepid into backrooms, they know it is not enough to rescind, some grander foul tea party needing declassifying). But anyway, he’d say something that would make me think about gluttonous policing, about a conspiracy of X-Files nature, that it could be the state salivates at this kind of rebellion: it gives people the illusion that they’ve got anything like determining say. The force is not just for show, but the many idling squad cars in a dying climate are. “For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”