#35. On Your Marx, Get Set...

Bohemian Hustle PART 3 (of 3): Thoughts & Prayers from The Edge.

Aug 03, 2024

Dearest Reader,
It’s been a while! I started this essay (‘Bohemian Hustle: A One-woman Attempt to Subvert Late-stage Capitalism by Supporting The Arts and Small Businesses - Including Her Own’), over two months ago. Coming to any conclusion about how to live a ‘good’ life in a world where practically every action is a transaction, has been, well… nauseating. I’ve been avoiding it! But also true (courtesy Margret Atwood):

”Ah, yes. Writing. When? Where? How? That's the problem. You can have a life or you can do some writing, but not both at once, because although life may be the subject of writing, it is also the enemy.”

With no space to think (let alone write) these past two months, I sheepishly present the third and last part of this meditation. Sheepishly because it’s unlikely anyone was holding their breath and I am not sure any of it will be useful. Except to myself!

The thoughts (and prayers) arrived as poky little shards as I caught a flight to a climate-vulnerable island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, ‘had’ to buy water in plastic and use ribbons of new roads in my city that cost several times the Union budget for the environment to build.

But since I am here to make Order from Chaos I must now tweeze these irritants out from where they have lodged in my flesh and flick ‘em into the void! If you have the time/inclination for a refresher, you can find Bohemian Hustle Part 1 here and Part 2 here. But really, you don’t have to.

Life’s short! And brutish. And exquisitely beautiful, as is obvious from the daily miracle that you and I are still here, still breathing, still reading.

With compassion for all beings including myself,

~ TS

Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

―Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 2005.

In Part 2 of Bohemian Hustle I know came off cavalier. “If you are rich, be Henry Sugar!” I said. “Stand on your balcony and shower your utterly undeserved wealth on the washerwoman!”, I said.

I know we can’t just throw money at the world’s problems! It’s much too late for that. Too late because the washerwoman, like us, wouldn’t have the foggiest what to do with it, addled as she and we are by false advertising, enslaved to the relentless cycle of consuming and producing and warped ideas of “worth” and “value”.

In our duty as workers, we have forgotten how to serve anyone but Queen Bee and perhaps the Hive itself. Ourselves? Our comrades? Our planet? Ha! We throw away our little lives and our limited natural resources in exchange for a gold watch. We amuse ourselves with trifles! With TikTok! We fiddle while Home burns.

We, after all, are the perpetrators we rage against, and to avoid facing this reality daily, we poke out our eyes and buy a one-way ticket to the room of smoke and mirrors and call it The Fun House. Silly little clowns!

In cohorts with Denial, that Goliath, we pretend we can’t find the catapult. Because we know that if even by some miracle of People Protest (the only thing that has ever moved the needle) our polar regions refreeze, poverty vaporises and all war ends, you and I won’t be around to see it. So why bother?

But for some (maybe all but six?) of us, we find that no number of skydives over Machu Pichu, summers in the Caribbean or winters in Saint Moritz can hold off the feeling that something is very, very off. So, we do what we can. We segregate the garbage and have shorter showers. We donate loose change to organisations we (think) we can trust. We give old toys, books and clothes to the “needy”. We treat our employees well. Or as well as we can, under the circumstances. The circumstances of having been raised in deeply feudal societies with misguided notions of “charity”.

We do all this only one day to find out that not only will the washerwoman never get out of the suds, but also that shifting the responsibility to YOU to fish her out all on your ownsome has been the cherry on the cake at the Restaurant at the End of Capitalism. You have GOT to hand it to Them though. Genius! But also - as a famous sage said - “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool; all the people all of the time. “

Okay, so we’ve known since at least the 90s that we can’t trust Corporations or their advertising aka “the news”. This has been a pain, because goddammit, we have to think for ourselves now. But we also know that even if someone puts psilocybin in the aquifers and we all collectively stop shopping and start loving, bad things will happen.

The “economy” will crash! Jobs will be lost! The world of men will crumble as the wild things party like it’s 2020. But that’s hardly ideal. Humanity, however irrelevant, cruel and misdirected, is capable of great beauty, a subset of Nature and deserves to be protected! So what to do? What to do?

What if we stopped seeing Capitalism as a cancer cell (infinite growth, no matter the consequences)? What if we saw it instead as a stent (a quick fix, temporary)? What if while we accept that without some form of it, the heart will collapse, we revisit those pesky “lifestyle changes” that our Boomer doctor doesn’t believe in, let alone believe we could pull off?

Here’s a plan. We keep the stent but also (slowly, gently) start to lift heavy things, walk outdoors, help people that we don’t even know, find work that we actually enjoy and meet people we actually like. We decide that mending our broken hearts will be fun! We plan to exchange our Chicken of Depression for a Bluebird of Happiness. For a few dollars less, we could take a shot at a ‘better’ life while also flapping around the filthy coop (into which we never asked to be born.)

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

~Jean-Paul Sartre

If we did in fact decide en masse to exit The Palace of Illusions, desert The Queen and her mingy little Hive, I think we would step automatically into the Magic Porridge Pot. Not that The Magic Porridge Pot would care. Or notice. Busy as she always is, rebuilding herself, moment by moment, bubbling away, making a stew out of every piece of shit or sprinkle of stardust we throw at her.

Is there a recipe? Who knows! Probably Stone Soup. You know, the one where you make a miracle broth - from just water and stone - by adding potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, salt and pepper?

Metaphors aside: We know what has to be done. It is not rocket science. We have to stop being mean to ourselves and others. And also, to Marx! Because at the very least he was on to something. Something incomplete. Something terrible, maybe. But Something. Those other guys, they’re on to Nothing. Oblivion! (Mars?) But how to get off their Magic Carpet Ride? How to stop being the wind under their wings?

Pull the chain! Bring on the train wreck! End it all? I don’t think that will be necessary. Maybe (thoughtsandprayersthoughtsandprayers) if the biosphere doesn’t collapse before we manage it - we could revisit The Wonderful Story of The Redistribution of Wealth. We could declare and then truly believe that whether we were born to Sweet Delight or Endless Night, we did nothing to deserve it. We could also see that Endless Night could include both the man pulling the cart and his boss’s daughter.

This bit of imagery is helpful because then we could stop jonesing for what the boss got, which - other than good medical care - is a pile of poo. We’ve all seen enough poor little rich people to understand this idea. Two ex-sad wives, a yacht, a plane and a porn star? A pie hole so deep it devours him whole, Oroborous style? The 1% are the LOSERS when we get a good look. Sometimes we just have to look in the mirror.

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922.

The maids we pay well to do the housekeeping so we can do the work we want? Abundance. The fugly bag we’re considering spending one month’s rent on? Scarcity. Breakfast and dinner with our kids and/or cats? Wealth. The charity gala on a Sunday night and the Monday morning meeting we attended instead? Poverty. Porsches turn to pumpkins! Golf courses and manicured gardens to marshlands and mangroves! Soy fields to feed cattle to make beef that we will eat in quantities that will kill us back to rainforests. Arctic ice, our global insurance policy.

The shift won’t happen overnight. But what it doesn’t have to? What if it should not? Even the ten-year-old who made those sports shoes in that sweatshop in Vietnam would be bummed to lose her shitty job all of a sudden. But perhaps she’d be pleased to know that something far-fetched was afoot. Something far-reaching. Something that starts now and ends where we can’t see it. Something that would enable her great-great-grandchild to eat fruit off the trees that line her street where she will live till 98 because she had access to clean water, clear air, poison-free food and life-saving medicine even though she had exactly no money.

A shoemaker can dream! And so can we! We can even dream of shiny things. But we could redefine shiny. To illustrate, a poem I wrote called Teaspoon about this effort, in the collection CapitaLipstick:

It’s a Punjabi thing -
We like shiny stuff.
But as I’ve discovered,
Cutlery shines too,
In the right light.
Plus, forks are not responsible
For grizzly deaths in Africa,
Or the rape of the earth in general,
Nor are they the preferred currency
Of evil enterprise everywhere.
Maybe I don’t know what I am talking about,
But I may wear a teaspoon to tea today.
There is such beauty in utility.

Let us realise that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

To conclude: If you, like me, rarely make it to the picket line, perhaps we could just draw a line. Or an arc. We could remember that this arc is long and that it bends towards justice. We could Support the Arts (revolution from the inside). We could Support Small Businesses (reclaiming the catapult). So that when we die (of old age or from climate change, however this cookie crumbles), we can say with pride that sometimes and when possible, we resisted. We disobeyed. We hung on for dear life to the Bendy Side. And that like Marx, we were, at the very least, on to Something.

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“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

~ Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855.

“…colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”