There is at least one thing that the kids in Oregon who live in trees and occasionally come down to burn SUVs are probably right about. It's easier just to gather your food where you may and run around free as the goddamn breeze. The link between John Zerzan, Kropotkin, and Thoreau is most basically about the ills of civilization. And this always comes down to cities. The Rousseauian undercurrent to all this is that civilization is not an inevitable development toward the better but a burden, a big mess that it is difficult if impossible to turn around. Witness a few lines from one of Zerzan's interviews.

"The human condition . . . changed only ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture, which led to civilization. Since that time, we have worked hard to convince ourselves that no such condition ever existed, that we must accept repression and subjugation as necessary antidotes to "evil" human nature. According to this school of thought, authority is a benevolent savior that rescued us from our precivilized existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance. . . . The problem with those images, of course, is that they are inaccurate. There's been a revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past thirty years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication - of animals and ourselves - was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health."

One shudders a bit for the aforementioned kids in Oregon when Zerzan mentions "sensual wisdom" but the point is taken. The period before civilization was something of a Shangri-la. OK, it probably wasn't a Shangri-la, and the gender equality that Zerzan boasts of seems dubious. But there is something there. In a far more scholarly work by H.W.F. Saggs called "Civilization Before Greece and Rome," there is an interesting chapter called City-States and Kingdoms. It all started in Mesopotamia. But not as a function of inevitable progress. Saggs writes about the Neolithic revolution:

"Humans, left a free choice, prefer to remain hunters and gatherers and do not settle permanently to the toil of farming until it is forced upon them. . . . It was probably because the environment was so favorable for a hunting-and-gathering economy, that the Egyptians saw no advantage in changing their way of life until population increase compelled it."

The modern defenders of the modern ought to remember that. Civilization has always emerged out of constraint and failure. It is, as Walter Benjamin liked to say, a continuous frickin' disaster. But, it is our disaster. To dream of "leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health," is to dream that by canceling what actually exists one will be propelled back to an originary perfection. But can that dream really hold together its statements of fact and its statements of value? The life of human beings before civilization was certainly more engaged with nature, in obvious ways. But was it intimacy? Why use the word intimacy? Probably it was often also characterized by terror, outright fear. As any reader of ancient texts knows, the earliest writings we have are replete with laments about the shittiness and arbitrary brutality of nature. Now that we want to preserve nature we forget about how much human effort went into dominating and controlling it for the simple fact that it is mean and uncaring. Nature isn't human, it doesn't care what happens to anyone. It is meaningless. When everything is going well and the forests and streams are plentiful then it is perfectly possible for human beings to live free and easy. It is perfectly possible for them to get it on in various ways and consider it 'sensual wisdom.' But it doesn't always last. And then you have to enter into the ambiguity of civilization or perish. And then there is a new logic and you can't look back. Or if you do look back, look back in amusement and delight, but never look back in nostalgia. Because when human beings look back in nostalgia something black and terrifying comes out.
More on this in the months to come.

- posted by Editor @ 7:00 PM

 
Many of the tributes to Marlon Brando now being published around the world make some mention of what a lazy, fat, jack-ass he was for a good portion of his life. Robert Brustein, writing in The New Republic, chastises Brando for neglecting his talents. Likening him to Fitzgerald, who lamented his own inability to make the most of thea moira and the gifts of the divine, Brustein thinks Brando should have gone back to the stage instead of leaving it behind after his seminal role as Stanley in Steetcar. But Brustein is fond of him all the same, as is everyone else. It is impossible not to like Marlon Brando. Saying you don't like Marlon Brando is like saying you don't like islands or pictures from outer space. It is a fundamental expression of humanity to like Marlon Brando. Very few people have the opportunity to live a life that transcends the particularity of human existence and can be talked about as a force of nature. But Brando has to be talked about in that way.

Brustein is right to focus on Brando's greatness as an actor and his ability to define acting style for an era. But it is this fundamental likeability that I would like to say a word about. Especially because it affords an opportunity to discuss one of the strangest performances in a horrible movie that I know of. This is Brando's performance in what may be one of the worst movies of its period, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996). The movie is a train wreck from start to finish. There's no point in discussing it, really. It is doubtful whether Brando ever even looked at the script. He simply received his check in the mail and showed up on the set in a huge white Muumuu.

And then he started making lines up. Half of the time you can see the other actors he is working with attempting simply to make it through the movie without bursting into laughter. He sings songs with mutated midgets and lumbers around his compound with strange contraptions strapped to his head that he makes up stories about as they keep the camera rolling. He's basically a fat piece of shit with a sheet wrapped around his prodigious girth. He is simply unconcerned that there is a crappy movie to be made. In that sense he is like a God, a Greek God in particular, the kind of God who has nothing better to do than mess around with the mortals but is nonetheless markedly superior to them and unable to fully, in the end, give much of a shit about what they are up to at any given moment.

That kind of bigness, the kind of bigness in deities and deep gorges in the earth (Kant sometimes talked about such bigness as the sublime) cannot be ignored. It won't be ignored. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, Brando gets killed off relatively early on (he may have had that written into the contract) and Val Kilmer is forced to attempt to imitate him through the rest of the movie. No offense to Val, but that is when you feel the real pain of the movie. It is like someone sucked up the ocean and replaced it with an aboveground pool. Such are the treats and tortures of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Anyway I'm sorry that the fat old piece of shit finally died. Whatever greatness is, he was truly that thing.

- posted by Editor @ 5:42 PM