A Trial of Ideas by a Man
Who Writes a Blog for a Website
Dedicated to Political Commentary
He says for himself what he says for himself when says what he says for himself, I have heard him say similarly, in words almost like these. He writes a blog for a Political Commentary Website. He is one of the founders of the site and one of the Publishing-Editors. Herein find contained an essay he has written that he is considering using in the blog, but how, in what way–but not too strenuously. He considers entering it as it is, all nine hundred words or so of it. He does.
Here it is in its entirety:
What does this essay say? Is this an essay, a trial of ideas in words on the page organized around a thesis, stated or inferred, perhaps only implied? What does anything said say on the page when words themselves often do not say what they mean at, intentions often fall short of their target, no? How to say what can only be said by me about me to you when you doubt that anyone can say anything about himself, for himself? Everything in the dialogue, but it’s not dialogue, it’s monologues we offer and exchange. We barter in monologues, each to his own solipsism. Could the solipsist ever be anything but self-involved? Never-ending monologues exchanged, collated, shuffled, dealt like cards in a night of poker. What else have we in the way of expressing how full of shit we are–and we are all of us entirely full of stinking shit.
I know that we do not want to believe this about ourselves, that is, each of us cannot believe this about himself. It always seems to come to this, how full of shit we are, and I guess people are sounder and happier when there is room to understand this full-of-shit we are, except we are living in a new fifties, you could say, and everything is–is what? A river of shit-lying, to ourselves, to each other, to the country, everywhere everyone maintaining one facade or another, like the government, like advertisers, like the banks, like the media, broadcast or print . . . now this is a diatribe, another kind of tirade–how like a character in a Racine play I have become.
What is it that anyone really says about anything at any time any where? One prepackaged string of words in phrases,slogans, received from one media pulpit or another, one government endorsed state pulpit or another? When is it that we think? It was thinking that writing mirrored we used too say, were taught to understand when we were in university, before college became a department store with student patrons. We do not write–we email or communicate by text or tweets or one or another form of truncated written–scratched, scribbled–communiques.
What do I see today in America, my hypocrite brothers? I see Moloch chewing babies that mothers have brought the great Capitalist Beast God devouring America. And try not to do the stupid American thing by concluding that any critique of contemporary American Capitalism must be a seething communist plot. America is the citadel of Western Bourgeois Totalitarian Capitalism, no less totalitarian than any other totalitarian communist or fascist state from our past or present, which is not to conclude that any one of them is the flip side of the other, that any one is six-of-one-a-half-dozen-of-the-other.
Where have we come, have you gotten, have I, what? I am, but mostly I am what I say I am when I write what I do, how I do. Enough. Cogs in the machinations of state, wound up and bound up in the machine of politics no less than Chaplin in his Modern Times. States as industries have their machinations that chew up the simple separate person that is never the focus or concern of capitalists or even the government today–even the great President of the People (tongue in cheek) is more the bitch of power and money than he is the guardian of the People, more concerned for serving the state than he is for protecting Americans or the Constitution. Nobody talks out both sides of his mouth better than he does; no one plays hop-scotch with greater dexterity. He will play with our safety to appear as if he were the great Americanist President not opposing resettlement of Syrian refugees, or supporting quarantine until it is certain that they are not linked with terrorism.
Where then does this writing of politics and history begin, and it is history that anyone writes when they write about themselves or another and another and another, each line creeping along, petty word after separate word until the last syllable; where does it end? How do we understand history apart from historiography? How do I understand my history–my story–all history is a story . . . what is our contemporary story unless it is how the state in America has pushed to undermine the People in America, promoting the benefits of becoming a State serving Public instead.
We might want to understand where my story begins or ends–I don’t think of it as such. Is there an E Pluribus Unum of history. Wouldn’t that amount to an uber-history, a super historum, une surhistoire? What then do I say? I say so much, do I mean less by saying more? I keep writing and writing and writing and commenting on what has been written and comment on the comments in the commentary.
I keep a journal. I have many, many notebooks, composition notebooks, hundreds of them, all of them filled with comments remarks observations experiences happenings reactions passions emotions arguments bile. What if I were to scan all those pages and collect them and publish them–what then would that say? More than ten thousand pages of journals, notebooks, sketches, poems, stories, essays, commentary and bile.
The Falling Leaf Review 