{"id":123765,"date":"2018-12-10T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=123765"},"modified":"2018-12-07T13:30:12","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T13:30:12","slug":"sometimes-a-pair-of-pants-can-give-you-vertigo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/sometimes-a-pair-of-pants-can-give-you-vertigo\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes a Pair of Pants Can Give You Vertigo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBetween the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.\u00a0 The desolation lies there, not in the facts.\u201d <\/em>
\n\u2013 John Berger, \u201cA Man with Tousled Hair\u201d in The Shape of a Pocket<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

6 Dec 2018 – <\/em>A few days ago, as I stepped into my pants to start the day as is my habit, I happened to notice the label at the waist band.\u00a0 It read \u201cGap,\u201d and the sight of this word sent my mind spinning into a whirling contemplation of this void that lies at the center of life today, a subject that has disturbed me for a long time.<\/p>\n

I had earlier that morning made the mistake of checking the news headlines on the computer.\u00a0 This too is a habit that I no doubt share with millions of other people.\u00a0 It is a dastardly habit no sane person should inflict on oneself.\u00a0 To rise from one\u2019s night dreams and step into a litany of hyperbolic headlines shouting doom and gloom at every turn is to inject oneself with a poisonous drug before the sap of life has a chance to rise in one\u2019s veins and one\u2019s imagination might give birth to new possibilities.<\/p>\n

Standing in my pants, I felt as though I were hovering over Berger\u2019s enormous empty space, and if I didn\u2019t wake up, I would tumble endlessly away.\u00a0 Thoreau\u2019s words floated up:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So I stepped over the hole at my feet and tried to shake the monotonous clatter of the monstrous media\u2019s messages from my mind.\u00a0 In my vertiginous state I dared not look in a mirror.\u00a0 So many of the media\u2019s lying words that I had already ingested with coffee seemed to float around and within me in an unreality disconnected from the actual world, even the world they were ostensibly reporting on.<\/p>\n

I too had written many words about the drastic condition of our world today, thinking somehow my words, different from the corporate media\u2019s, could move the world by pulling back the curtain that the powerful have created through clich\u00e9s to conceal the sordid reality they have made of this beautiful earth. \u00a0Yet the presentation of facts seemed to make no difference.\u00a0 Very little, if anything, made a difference.\u00a0 Most of those who read my words more or less already agreed with me. And many, even friends and family, just ignored them, anticipating that they would disturb them. \u00a0And the mainstream publications shunned them like the plague.<\/p>\n

Between my desire for a changed world and the world that seemed to change only for the worse lay the desolation Berger identified.<\/p>\n

Many people feel it, I know, especially dissidents who fight in various ways against the powerful. \u00a0But we prefer not to go there, to see what it consists of and how we may transmute it into acts and words that might make a difference. We prefer to make believe we are making a difference by repeating ad nauseum the same prefabricated responses, usually directly political, to the atrocities committed daily.\u00a0 We are caught in what Czeslaw Milosz, writing in a different context, called \u201contological anemia\u201d \u2013 \u201camong this illness\u2019s symptoms is the nothingness sucking from the center in.\u201d\u00a0 We try and try but seem to devour ourselves by repeating the same approaches, as if all the slaves know is what their masters have taught them.\u00a0 Milosz knew this because he was an artist and a spiritual seeker, not just a political analyst, and also had personal experience with the totalitarian mindset that is descending on the West.<\/p>\n

The twists of history can make one\u2019s head spin.<\/p>\n

In writing about Vincent Van Gogh, whose hunger for reality drove him to produce works of achingly loving beauty, John Berger, the quixotic Marxist, writes:<\/p>\n

Reality, however one interprets it, lies behind a screen of clich\u00e9s.\u00a0 Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power.\u00a0 Reality is inimical to those with power.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet while Van Gogh sought reality by breaking the mold, the rich and powerful have devoured the results of his efforts and have transposed them into commodities.\u00a0 Last year, his painting, Laboureur Dans Un Champ<\/em>, painted from an asylum where he had committed himself, sold for $ 81.3 million at Christie\u2019s after a frenetic auction.<\/p>\n

A humble peasant working in a field becomes a trophy for the rich, who keep the working man slaving away.\u00a0 Words and deeds are turned upside down on desolation row where<\/p>\n

Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
\nAnd nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row (Dylan)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We need to think again. Imagine!\u00a0 Today we are caught in a void of clich\u00e9s and in the clutches of rapacious elites.\u00a0 Only acts of creative imagination will free us from their clutches.<\/p>\n

I look to my right and on a shelf I see a vividly painted Matryoshka doll.\u00a0 It startles me into the thought that like Matryoshka dolls, so many of our personal habits that deaden us to imagining a way across the gap to a better world are nestled within social habits of thought, speech, and action. We are so often encased like tiny cloned dolls in the social clich\u00e9s that make us smaller versions of the powers that we say we oppose but which we mimic.\u00a0 We are carved and painted in their likeness, and caught in the habit of reacting to them in ways that reinforce their control.<\/p>\n

We must disrupt our routines.\u00a0 We must find new ways, not to just respond, but to take the initiative.\u00a0 When we react according to habits, although we may not realize it, we are being controlled and not in control.\u00a0 Habits, like the word\u2019s etymology reveals, may reassure us that we have, hold or possess a position of strength from which we can move the world in our direction, but the only Archimedean lever and fulcrum capable of that is inspiration.<\/p>\n

That involves a new way of seeing, not vertiginous but visionary.<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ll change my pants.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 Dec 2018 – Between my desire for a changed world and the world that seemed to change only for the worse lay the desolation Berger identified. Many people feel it, I know, especially dissidents who fight in various ways against the powerful. But we prefer not to go there, to see what it consists of and how we may transmute it into acts and words that might make a difference. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}