Something About Occupy: (With a Primer)
There are few answers to be found here. For a while now, I’ve been setting out to write about the much discussed Occupy Wall St. movement. I have written here and there little bits, no more than notes, about my impressions of it at any given moment. I have cautiously spied local iterations of the group, half-heartily observing it from a block or so away — not interested in engaging with it here on a street level. I have discussed it with friends, some who see it as a force for good, others who see it as the reaction of entitled youth or just entitled do-nothings. I myself have seen it in various lights: as well-intentioned but ultimately unimportant; as the next great movement of the left; as desperately doomed to fail, ill-conceived.
I have read every other article from my favorite writers, journalists, and politicians, attempting to triangulate my position a bit better. A part of me figured my uncharacteristic lack of defined opinion was simply due to having not read enough about it. Yet, the more I read, the more I tried to impose some order on this movement, the more my opinions shifted their legs.
And then I realized something: the problem wasn’t my inability to find the solid ground of an opinion; it was the ground itself quaking. The cacophonous rattling and shouting from directions left and right was sending my mind reeling. I have never experienced a real earthquake but what was happening now seems reminiscent of the stories from those who have lived through them; that ominous onset of the rumble slowly gaining power, resonating through the ground, the walls around you, a sense of panic that there is nowhere you can run to find the steady safety of solid ground — I ran regardless.
But why has the ground been shaking to begin with? What am I or we running from? And what are we running toward? What and why and how: these are all good questions and as with any good question there is rarely an equally good answer — usually just another hard question. I think this may be why I was running. I was looking for company, looking for someone to talk about these questions with, someone who may have had some previous experience, or at least knows what I’m feeling right now.
I have been searching for that solid ground but the Earth still has not settled and there are dangerous cracks and fissures that go to the deepest depths all around, traps for those running after something to grasp. I think I may have fallen in a few but, luckily, I’ve found good company in each. My hosts in these holes have been those who fell in during other historic quakes of society, for their kindness I’m grateful.
In the beginning of my search for answers about Occupy Wall St. came the question of what is the right course of action? My instinctual reaction to the Occupy movement was that it was doomed to failure. Here was a group of well-meaning individuals like myself gathered together attempting to engage the attention or energies of nation because of a sense of moral and social injustice committed by that system we had bought into being was not returning the favor it promised; I saw this act of occupation as frenetic, scattered, and lacking a sense of what Henry David Thoreau called living deliberately, or in this case acting deliberately. By and by, I still feel the same way. I still feel like they are lacking in deliberate action but I also realized that in this way they were no different than myself. Just as I was running in search of solid ground, so were they and of course there is none. Occupy was a futile pursuit in that they, like me, had missed what was really happening.
Thoreau then is good company for them and I. He too felt the quaking ground beneath his feet and I can’t help but see now that his experiment by Walden Pond was him searching for solid ground as well. A couple of years before moving to said Walden Pond and writing his book of the same title he wrote a small, but absolute essay titled “Civil Disobedience” where he denounced the state of American government and its imperialism, at the time embodied by the Mexican War commenced by then President Polk largely at his own whim. But what strikes me most about this essay is that it is as much about the coming American Civil War as it is the Mexican. Written some ten years before the start of the Civil War Thoreau felting the shaking of the ground that would lead to one of the greatest fissures in the history of America. A quake that would pit a young nation against itself tearing states, families and individuals apart. The gut feeling I get from reading this essay is that Thoreau was just as unnerved as I am now, just as unnerved as those camped out a Zuccotti park. Just as they have occupied that space after feeling the earth shift beneath their feet, so Thoreau went to Walden Pond to occupy his own place of the world. He too took off in search of solid ground.
Rereading “Civil Disobedience” with some of these questions in mind about what Occupy Wall St. is or what it should become led me to one particular passage that resonated with me about as strongly as anything I have read (though the essay as a whole can have this effect), “Action from principle, — the perception and the performance of right, — changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was.”.# This quote seemed to sum up the argument I had been looking for in my critique of the Occupy movement. It captured my understanding and appreciation of the movement’s principles, a movement truly of and for the people. But it also captured the issue I saw with the group, namely that it was not taking action, or at least not acting in the way I believed they should to initiate real change. The movement “perceived” what was wrong with the system and understood that it was not operating in a way to benefit the nation but only a select few, to use their term, strictly the one percent. My issue was that they were not taking steps to perform the action that would ultimately lead to the righting of this wrong. It seemed to me a movement that merely acknowledge the wrong being done but with only the commitment to go that far, not to follow their principles to their logical conclusion of change — one way or the other.
My answer in Thoreau’s quote then only led me to other questions. Why was it that this movement wasn’t going any farther than it was? What was holding it back? Was I a part of this problem as well? What the hell kind of action was I taking? Here I was reading, writing, criticizing and damning people who had at least taken the action to gather collectively to make their presence known. I had failed to even do that much. Who was I to talk? During all of this I was questioning the actions I was performing, primarily who and what I was working for. Not only was I not taking simple, basic actions on my shared principles with those of the Occupy Wall St.’s ninety-nine percent but I was waking up, spreading my attention desperately thin, and working for the one-percent.
Overly dramatic? Maybe but not really. I started to wonder if a part of my problem with the movement was some sort of knee-jerk reaction to watching people do what I knew was right but scarcely had the principles to follow through with on my own. I still suspect that is true on some level.
Much like the broken financial system Occupy was rallying against, I was leveraged to the hilt, with an ego too big to fail. I had been running again and had tripped into another crack in the earth; luckily it was at the same time I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”. Fitzgerald was another author well aware of the quaking ground, writing during the moment in America’s history that is most often tepidly compared to today’s: The Great Depression.
I was raptured by his writing in the essay and clung to every other word and thought as if God himself had reached out and said, “Was this what you were looking for?” Why yes, it was. Fitzgerald seemed to have captured exactly what was going through my head and reading his words felt like a weight off of my shoulders that I again was not alone and in fact had superb company in my plight of wondering where the hell the easier answers had gone and the confusion that comes with being unable to find that impossible, solid ground.
I thought Fitzgerald also gave me another vector to attack the Occupy Wall St. movement so that I could better articulate my thoughts on where the group should head and, even more insightfully, why I thought they were struggling to find the same solid ground as I. Fitzgerald opens the essay saying, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”.# Eureka! Another moment of my brilliance! Fitzgerald had given me the bullets and the gun and I was going to pull the trigger and solve the whole damn problem of “today” in one little essay that would take the country by storm and my life would make sense finally; the Occupiers would see the missing piece of their puzzle, course correct and be on their way to Thoreauvian principled actions — the Earth would cease to shake!
The whole trouble had been that America was trying to hold two opposed ideas in its head but was failing to do so successfully; the trouble was that America had cracked-up and was no longer whole. Ditto for myself. It made perfect sense. Fitzgerald’s metaphor worked for the individual (me); it worked on a generational level; and it fit perfectly with the collective whole of the nation.
Those two ideas?: America had always believed that its future was destined to be better than its past but now it was faced with the daunting contradiction of a future that wasn’t necessarily better.
But, as always, easy answers rarely hold true for long. The issue with my eureka was this: America has always struggled to hold these ideas together but what has made this country so different (or as some would argue exceptional) is that somehow it has managed to hold these ideas together, “cracking-up” rarely. As I puzzled through the equation to balance out whether we were successfully doing so at this moment or whether that was the explanation for the sense of uneasiness I couldn’t seem to shake, I realized those of the Occupy Wall St. movement — the ninety-nine percent of this country — were the very ones holding this idea together. They saw the potential for a better future; they saw the potential for a lesser future and they weren’t “cracking-up”. They had balanced the two. I realized their desire to work outside the contemporary political machinations was their act of balancing the two and navigating the hazards to a future that is simply different.
Here is where I discovered what was shaking the ground beneath my feet: the fear that I was failing to do what they had. My search of solid ground was nothing more than a form of hyper-paralysis hampering me. I had been the one failing to hold these two opposing ideas together. I was the one losing the ability to function. I had ceased to see that one could only work towards a better future with the fire of something less burning at your heels. I was in the process of resigning my life to fate, relinquishing my sense of agency, and diving head first into fatal determinism.
I suppose this battle of an individual’s agency versus determinism is the real key to the great American juggling act. Whether or not we have a better future comes down to whether or not we’re interested in making it better ourselves or simply tossing up our hands to fate, closing our eyes, and hoping for the best. This is what I had been doing, following the lead of most people today. I had heard the beat of the drum marching us off the deep end and began stepping in rhythm without even stopping to think. No man or women has a morsel of their being that wishes to follow the command of another. We are each individuals; there is you and there is nothingness. To not follow the muse of your own genius is to reject what it means to be an individual. It is from this thought that the story of America was predicated.
So here I was trying to write some “obnoxiously long essay”, ostensibly about Occupy Wall St., essentially having some sort of weird quarter life crisis that had left much of my worldview in pieces like a broken plate and I was not even half through writing the damned thing. Fortunately, or maybe at the rate I was going unfortunately, being left in pieces is a pretty good starting point itself for an essay — I’d say that follows some sort of essay writing tradition, yes?
Indeed, I was in pieces but they were at least swept up somewhat tidily together and I knew why I had come apart: I had failed to see that one can simultaneously face both a better and worse future at once. In my infinite wisdom, I had failed to mobilize my faculties of self like those of the Occupy Wall St. movement and chart a new course, a different third course. Knowing this still meant I had to find my own way down an untrod path, a lonesome endeavor.
I was spread thin, tired, and beat. Yet, in spite of my best efforts to isolate myself, I found further company — a whole generation of company in fact. The ringleader of those keeping my company during this trip was none other than Jack Kerouac. Tagging along was Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and the rest of the Beat Generation.
Before falling into the trenches of the Earth with this bunch I had been at a local bookshop looking for some reference point, some road sign toward the path of less broken-in-pieces and more kinda-shoddily-stuck-together and had wound up picking up Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. I read the short novel in just under a day and quickly realized that while there was something here for me down the road — maybe not even that far off — but that right now this tale of detachment was certainly not going help me break from the chains of fatal determinism.
Luckily, before my one night stand with Maria Wyeth (pronounced Mariah — get it right) I had also crossed paths with Kerouac’s On the Road and in a quick attempt to escape the “nothing — it doesn’t matter”# I ran back the next day to see if Kerouac might be better company. And so I have found that his quick jaunt across America is, in many ways exactly what I needed.
I had not initially been drawn to Kerouac in particular but rather to the Beat Generation. Looking back in search of other moments characterized by this sense of trembling earth, I was attracted to the Beat movement because it seemed that what they had spawned came from that same sense of trying to find a new, different course to stabilize their ground.
Much like those of the Occupy movement, they felt that the current system of society in the late 1950’s and 1960’s was failing them and, much like the Occupy movement, there were no formal leaders, only figures a little more central than others — although I’m not sure such figures have emerged from Occupy. What I found in my research on the Beat Generation were two particular pieces of language that I found formative in its development — at least in my less than informed opinion — namely: “beat” and “The New Vision”.
First, “beat” seemed important because it was the summation of a generation’s experience in one word; it provided an identity that one could not only associate with but belong too. In that sense, the Occupy movement has been able to generate something similar with its use of the term “the ninety-nine percent”. While not as succinct as “beat”, it’s pretty close and provides a shelter of identity, unity, and inclusion (that is unless you’re a part of “the one percent”).
Second is “The New Vision”, a philosophy largely of another Beat, Lucien Carr, who introduced it to the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg. At the heart of the philosophy was a response to a perceived decline in Western Civilization and sensation that the West was inherently a restrictive force against humanity.# “The New Vision” sought to fundamentally upend Western society and to refocus on the deliberate act of creation in and of itself (not creation as production). This “New Vision”, in many ways, was what I was looking for as my path toward solid ground and in-so-far as what works for me, works for others, a possible solution to a generational quest to ease our weary legs.
That being said, while “The New Vision” seemed attractive, the few remaining pragmatic parts of my broken self knew that it held little in the way of practical advice. In light of Occupy and a sense of the constructive, what seems to me to be the important take away from “The New Vision” is a sense of a different course of action and a realization that society is indeed transient and its imperfect nature allows for continual refinement. Just as it important for the individual to never become static, society, as a collection of individuals, should never be allowed to remain in stasis. While the hegemonic model of Western capitalism and its close relative, globalization, are now seen as the accepted norm, to accept these models as final, to submit that nothing better can come after, is to deny the human element of civilization.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, however, has little to do with that philosophical thought experiment and has more to do with that sense the of fierce urgency to run aloof after the elusive terra firma that I and others seem so desperate for. What separates Kerouac’s search in On the Road from the searches of those like Thoreau is the quality of deliberateness. Thoreau’s Walden is an exercise in the deliberate. Jack’s trans-American journey seems deliberate to the extent that he wanted to travel and then did so. The nature of Kerouac’s hitch-hiking escapades on the back of truck, darting through the mid-west, drinking and starring at the midnight sky with a group of fellow searchers, was that it allowed for the unexpected. As the saying goes “Life is what happens when you’re making plans”, Kerouac went with the flow of life with no hesitation to let plans go by the wayside.
In a similar way, I found my plans for this essay equally going by the wayside. This had become a very ominous search, with overtones of extreme personal danger. No amount of course correction was going to get me back on my original track at this point. Once you get locked into a good line of questions, the tendency is to push it as far as you can — and that’s what I did.# I had raised too many questions to allow myself to turn back. Call me Ahab and this essay my albatross.
And as with any tour of obsession, prudence quickly flees leaving one dropping to absurd, desperate places for answers, finality, sound earth. I reached this point still surrounded by Kerouac and his ilk which left me exploring another central, unavoidable element of the Beat Generation and its spawn, the hippies, psychoactive drugs. The Beats’ interactions with drugs were largely experimental, an extension of intellectual curiosity, if you will. For better or for worse, the use of these drugs became a central part of the Beats’ search for enlightenment and one cannot avoid the impact that their use had on those central to the counter-culture movement.
This use of psychoactive drugs by the counter-culture injected, at least now — looking back — a certain level of disorder. This disorder from a merry generation of pranksters was a product of a society not yet sensitized to the adverse effects that hallucinogenic disorder can induce. Today, we are highly sensitized and what was once legal now, is now relegated to the fringes of acceptable action or discourse — and by law, relegated to overcrowded prisons. This disorder interested me. What tools had we lost as a society when we rejected this mode of altered experience? Had we lost anything?
One of the primary attacks on acts of civil disobedience like Occupy Wall St. is that it induces disorder and while this is not something strictly new since the end of the counter-culture, we have no doubt become less open to disruption of the status-quo on any level. We live in a strict, vertically integrated society that slots individuals into largely class defined rolls and, as they cement, social mobility disappears. Further, we place no sense of importance on lateral mobility, much less alternate modes of enlightenment or spirituality that psychoactive drugs may introduce or accentuate.
Well, with all that being said, the next thing I knew “all I had to do was lean back and relax my soul and roll on”, as Kerouac says.# I had reached the moment when it was time to go Beat or go home. Suddenly, everything was upside-down. The problem was I had been on a kick of The Doors after reading Joan Didion’s essay The White Album which had led me down a rat-hole of its own leading me to cue up Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which, all things being equal, wasn’t an entirely inappropriate choice given the search at hand, trying to make sense of it all and what have you, but I was hardly on the right track and I was certainly in a place I would not have otherwise been.
Questions still swirled, probably more than before. My experiment had not been quite as enlightening as I had hoped, but I did have more data than before, so that was something. What I realized more than anything was the tiresome nature of my constant running, searching. I was back at that state of hyper-paralysis after dropping into a dangerously deep crack — regardless of whether or not I was in good company. My insight is only that I suspect it is easy for one’s pursuit of answers to quickly become a desire to escape the questions that plague us. There is a thin line between searching and escaping. I would wager that those of the counter-culture did not see their “experimentation” as escapist in this sense but as an escape of the status-quo, an escape of the constraints of everyday human experience. There may well be some merit to this argument but that would require more experimentation. Doesn’t it always.
So, Ken Kesey, I am not.
I only had a few more days to find all the answers but I had one last encounter — I had stumbled upon the first man to occupy Wall St.: Bartleby, the scrivener.
I had missed the roads signs leading to this man on my Occupy search but a last minute detour accidentally brought me right where I belonged. Specifically, I was brought to the chambers up the stairs at No.—Wall St. where a scrivener by the name of Bartleby had taken up residence, copying documents for a safe and prudent lawyer not so much unlike myself.
If the shouting cry of today’s Occupiers is “We are the ninety-nine percent!”, then Bartleby’s was, “I would prefer not to.”.# It may lack the revolutionary flare of today’s, but its effect on those around Bartleby was just as powerful. Gazing peacefully out his window with a prison like brick wall for a view, he occupied his space and, in his flute-like tone said to society, “I would prefer not to.” Unsurprising, that made people crazy. Just like those today who are no longer interested in being a part of a system that dehumanizes its participants, Bartleby attempted to reinsert the individual and its notions into a society that had forced it out.
Bart — as I’ve grown to call him — is only one part of Melville’s short story and in my search again found what scared me the most, myself. The other main character is Bart’s boss, a lawyer, who describes himself as “an eminently safe man” who secludes himself away in his tight chambers, going with the flow. However, through Bartleby’s act of occupation, the lawyer begins searching for answers about the man and what in the world could be causing him to act so peculiarly. The lawyer’s inability to examine himself and his role in society, however, leave him fleeing Bartleby and Wall St. for safer ground. Sound familiar?
Oh the horror — I was the lawyer! Just as he first remonstrated Bartleby, so I did to Occupy; just as he felt his earth shake from Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.”; so I have felt mine; and, in a most eerie fashion, just as he chose to run from Bartleby in search of safety; so I have run in search of safety from the Occupy movement.
There has been a recursive quality to this search. I am at the end of whatever this has become but, in essence, I am back at the beginning and so it will continue on. I had set out to write about the relatively new movement Occupy Wall St., running frantically through space and time, stopping off occasionally to make friends with those smarter, and at the finish line found that the Occupy movement was, in fact, not new at all. If I have learned anything, it is that almost nothing is new. Bartleby was occupying Wall St. before it was cool. My questions aren’t new. My sense of unease isn’t new. My desire for answers isn’t new. The only thing new is my own particular amalgamation of these old experiences.
The vagaries of this essay may prove to be evidence of that fact. What Occupy Wall St. is and what it means are not the points. The point is what Occupy Wall St. is to you and the meaning you derive from it. For me, Occupy Wall St. turned out to be Thoreau, Fitzgerald, Melville, never ceasing to ask questions and following them wherever they took me — even if that means seeking enlightened union with the Beats while watching Apocalypse Now. Occupy Wall St. is allowing the clarion call of some “paramount consideration” of your own individuality to prevail over the noise.# The only thing finite about us is the time we have to assemble our own amalgamation of experiences. There is the same old nothingness and there is you. Or as Dennis Hopper said:
I mean, what are they gonna say when he’s gone? ‘Cause he dies when it dies, when it dies, he dies! What are they gonna say about him? What, are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man! Am I gonna be the one that’s gonna set them straight? Look at me! Wrong! … You!
The whole Earth is shaking and all you can do is ride it out the best way you know how.
Occupy Wall St. is certainly something.
