I'M NOT A DOCTOR ANYMORE, I'M AN UNDERTAKER!
So what? You're bored. Watching some B-sci-fi on one of the B television channels. At one point, an embittered doctor on a faraway planet looks at his population-charges' aspiring rescuers and tartly pronounces, "I'm not a doctor anymore, I'm an undertaker!" He looks at the scene of suffering behind him. Dozens of women and men, deep red blotches on their faces, walk around like dazed zombies. Apparently, nothing can be done for them. The disease is incurable. If the visitors from earth don't come up with a cure, the entire planet will die.
Funny, you think. You've felt that way yourself. Not that you're influential enough to cause even a miniscule change in the lives of those who surround you. It's that you feel the passion to do something, anything, that will somehow make a difference on this earth. You see sick people around you, people who need a difference to reveal itself, people who need a surprise, a development, a real change in a world of increasingly suffocating circumstances. But what can you do?
Sure, that need to make a recognizable difference might be a male obsession in USA culture. USA Males don't really make any direct, nature-dictated contributions to the world anyway. Instead we in the USA have to invent new ways of looking at the world, new expressions to describe qualities that have escaped the hovering masses. Women produce our children, and their production stems directly from God or from Nature or whatever it is that allows this miraculous dream to continue even after our thousand-petaled blossom of perhaps 75 years has wilted and turned to dust in a cement casket. Men have nothing do do but search for ways to make the women and children more comfortable.
There, of course, are sages among people in the USA. As you peruse this self-evident mystery, you are drawn by memory to the sages of China, the men who, when the responsibility of family was behind them, retired to the wilderness to become sages. This was an acceptable routine in ancient China. It persists today.
In the USA, sages are much less visible. We do see pretenders to the title "Sage" on television political talk shows. Opportunists and futurists who have produced a bright and witty book about, well, opportunity and the future, mewl like kitty-cats from behind politely polished news desks. They pontificate until their eyes are literally crossed in pleasure. Their voices prowl the vicinities of confidence like lords of the jungle, the jungle of rhetoric. But their prattle is a con: What such men and women excel at really involves social politics, the politics of the personal. Those pretenders are merely graceful among the movers and shakers of our age. Still, their words and their presences are like shadows of the great Rasputin. Their brushy eyebrows raise under the camera-lights; the eyes of a nation fall into a thralldom that is essentially meaningless.
Where, then, are the "real" sages in the USA? Each man (and many women) I know is in a continual battle against anonyminity. This battle is not about being invisible per se in a veritable sea of voices and persistently distracting information. Instead it is a battle against death. Against anhilliation. It is a struggle for survival in a milleu in which struggle has been all but eliminated. Sages, of course, emerge from the authentic culture. Sages appear to us daily. In one way or another, we are all sages.
Perhaps because we all pursue some sort of wisdom in our alienation (because that is what a sage really is--a person who has withdrawn from the mainstream of society in order to pursue the authentic struggle as revealed to him (or her) in a vision, dream or sudden brainstorm), we tend to adulate sages who stand above others. This mass tendency has a strange neighborhood effect: In the USA, we have a conventional wisdom or generally-accepted notion of whom or what constitutes a sage; those who don't share in the conventional wisdom of the great majority of Americans see through or miss completely the meaningfulness of various sages.
Take, for example, Anthony Robbins. For thousands of Americans, Robbins is the ultimate expression of the 21st Century sage. But those who don't share this notion surrounding Robbins and his kind of charisma either find him a fraud or a poster child for a pseudo-culture that has been prefabricated by market forces like a Potomkin Village--all in the name of consumerism. Of course, such "individualists" could be deceiving themselves. Maybe they miss Robbins' appeal. Perhaps they simply don't see how deft and limber Robbins is in the so-called realms of success. In many ways, the motivational speaker is an ultimate demiurge in the cult of the American Dream: He's tall; his televisual features are chisel-sculpted to look good on camera; his entire image is almost an exaggeration of the appearance to which most American males aspire; he's clean-shaven and neat; his smile is intimidating. Moreover, people adore him. His public appearances are so popular he can fill basketball stadiums like American Airlines Arena in a matter of hours.
What if Anthony Robbins stepped out of his relatively tame role of American Consumerist Sage and into the realm of politics? Suddenly, we would have a charismatic, near-Aryan demogogue; somebody worse than Ross Perot to subdue. The Anthony Robbins self-motivation movement would become the American exponent of National Socialism. It may have gone that far already.
Another good example of the American Sage is Jerry Springer. Here's a man who, in the 1970s, had been pinpointed by pundits and other politicians as one of the most charismatic politicans since FDR or JFK. Then, after a scandal, Springer disappeared, only to reappear as if out of a mystery. No one quite understands how such an apparently principled man as Springer can produce a show as low-spirited and mean as "The Jerry Springer Show." Some commentators point to what some have dubbed "The Gawk Factor": people like to rubberneck at auto accident sites and gossip about other people's problems. Springer, then, has co-opted those basic American instincts to create a television show that literally roars at mainstream American culture. Then, to top it off, Springer summarizes the lessons we are to learn in a short piece at the end of each hour, and the piece only highlights Springer's apparent wisdom. It's said Springer writes his own editorials.
As you sit here, your mind in the no-man's land of a daydream about the power of the sage in American culture, you feel important. You are engaging yourself in the wider issues that confront us all. Still, you can't help but see through all the Sages of America: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Andy Rooney, Oprah Winfrey and Doctor Phil, and Doctor Joyce Brothers and Doctor Laura Schlessinger, and all the big newspaper and magazine pundits. To you, they seem unreal. You don't know who they're talking to, but you know it's not you. Even some of America's noteworthy actors are vying for the position of Sage in America: Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Tim Robbins, Sting.
You realize: Those men and women aren't doctors; they're undertakers. Where are they really leading America? Back into itself? Where are we following?
Yes, the flowing river we once fondly knew as the American Experience has coagulated, and the so-called Sages of America--all of them more interested in the getting of power than in the giving of wisdom--have become buryers of the dead. And we, in all practicality, are the dead. As shovel after shovel of dirt washes over our little bubbles, we see less and less of the real world.
You think of yourself as a poet. The poet in your mind is a revealer, a conveyor of wisdom, a kind of spiritual doctor. You have information, important information, others need to peruse. But look at where you appear in the picture: You're way over on the side of the picture, almost out of the screen altogether. This is an intentional placement. Someone beyond your range or your scope has planned it this way. Yes, the information you carry with you is important information. Hence, the careful manipulation of the social pecking order that provides you a harmless sphere of influence. Your wisdom usually only goes as far as earshot. Then it stops. God only knows if anyone took anything of your words away with them. Remoter still that anyone actually did something with the information they received.
Until you change this dynamic, until you step outside of the conventional role into which you have been placed like a little nail or a wood screw, the funeral of America will continue. Part of you wants to like that idea. Better sense--that and the need to cheat death--mandates you become even greater than you are. Not that you're great. Greater than right now. The poet's role: Greater than right now. Anything less is, of course, complicity with the undertaker.
Funny, you think. You've felt that way yourself. Not that you're influential enough to cause even a miniscule change in the lives of those who surround you. It's that you feel the passion to do something, anything, that will somehow make a difference on this earth. You see sick people around you, people who need a difference to reveal itself, people who need a surprise, a development, a real change in a world of increasingly suffocating circumstances. But what can you do?
Sure, that need to make a recognizable difference might be a male obsession in USA culture. USA Males don't really make any direct, nature-dictated contributions to the world anyway. Instead we in the USA have to invent new ways of looking at the world, new expressions to describe qualities that have escaped the hovering masses. Women produce our children, and their production stems directly from God or from Nature or whatever it is that allows this miraculous dream to continue even after our thousand-petaled blossom of perhaps 75 years has wilted and turned to dust in a cement casket. Men have nothing do do but search for ways to make the women and children more comfortable.
There, of course, are sages among people in the USA. As you peruse this self-evident mystery, you are drawn by memory to the sages of China, the men who, when the responsibility of family was behind them, retired to the wilderness to become sages. This was an acceptable routine in ancient China. It persists today.
In the USA, sages are much less visible. We do see pretenders to the title "Sage" on television political talk shows. Opportunists and futurists who have produced a bright and witty book about, well, opportunity and the future, mewl like kitty-cats from behind politely polished news desks. They pontificate until their eyes are literally crossed in pleasure. Their voices prowl the vicinities of confidence like lords of the jungle, the jungle of rhetoric. But their prattle is a con: What such men and women excel at really involves social politics, the politics of the personal. Those pretenders are merely graceful among the movers and shakers of our age. Still, their words and their presences are like shadows of the great Rasputin. Their brushy eyebrows raise under the camera-lights; the eyes of a nation fall into a thralldom that is essentially meaningless.
Where, then, are the "real" sages in the USA? Each man (and many women) I know is in a continual battle against anonyminity. This battle is not about being invisible per se in a veritable sea of voices and persistently distracting information. Instead it is a battle against death. Against anhilliation. It is a struggle for survival in a milleu in which struggle has been all but eliminated. Sages, of course, emerge from the authentic culture. Sages appear to us daily. In one way or another, we are all sages.
Perhaps because we all pursue some sort of wisdom in our alienation (because that is what a sage really is--a person who has withdrawn from the mainstream of society in order to pursue the authentic struggle as revealed to him (or her) in a vision, dream or sudden brainstorm), we tend to adulate sages who stand above others. This mass tendency has a strange neighborhood effect: In the USA, we have a conventional wisdom or generally-accepted notion of whom or what constitutes a sage; those who don't share in the conventional wisdom of the great majority of Americans see through or miss completely the meaningfulness of various sages.
Take, for example, Anthony Robbins. For thousands of Americans, Robbins is the ultimate expression of the 21st Century sage. But those who don't share this notion surrounding Robbins and his kind of charisma either find him a fraud or a poster child for a pseudo-culture that has been prefabricated by market forces like a Potomkin Village--all in the name of consumerism. Of course, such "individualists" could be deceiving themselves. Maybe they miss Robbins' appeal. Perhaps they simply don't see how deft and limber Robbins is in the so-called realms of success. In many ways, the motivational speaker is an ultimate demiurge in the cult of the American Dream: He's tall; his televisual features are chisel-sculpted to look good on camera; his entire image is almost an exaggeration of the appearance to which most American males aspire; he's clean-shaven and neat; his smile is intimidating. Moreover, people adore him. His public appearances are so popular he can fill basketball stadiums like American Airlines Arena in a matter of hours.
What if Anthony Robbins stepped out of his relatively tame role of American Consumerist Sage and into the realm of politics? Suddenly, we would have a charismatic, near-Aryan demogogue; somebody worse than Ross Perot to subdue. The Anthony Robbins self-motivation movement would become the American exponent of National Socialism. It may have gone that far already.
Another good example of the American Sage is Jerry Springer. Here's a man who, in the 1970s, had been pinpointed by pundits and other politicians as one of the most charismatic politicans since FDR or JFK. Then, after a scandal, Springer disappeared, only to reappear as if out of a mystery. No one quite understands how such an apparently principled man as Springer can produce a show as low-spirited and mean as "The Jerry Springer Show." Some commentators point to what some have dubbed "The Gawk Factor": people like to rubberneck at auto accident sites and gossip about other people's problems. Springer, then, has co-opted those basic American instincts to create a television show that literally roars at mainstream American culture. Then, to top it off, Springer summarizes the lessons we are to learn in a short piece at the end of each hour, and the piece only highlights Springer's apparent wisdom. It's said Springer writes his own editorials.
As you sit here, your mind in the no-man's land of a daydream about the power of the sage in American culture, you feel important. You are engaging yourself in the wider issues that confront us all. Still, you can't help but see through all the Sages of America: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Andy Rooney, Oprah Winfrey and Doctor Phil, and Doctor Joyce Brothers and Doctor Laura Schlessinger, and all the big newspaper and magazine pundits. To you, they seem unreal. You don't know who they're talking to, but you know it's not you. Even some of America's noteworthy actors are vying for the position of Sage in America: Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Tim Robbins, Sting.
You realize: Those men and women aren't doctors; they're undertakers. Where are they really leading America? Back into itself? Where are we following?
Yes, the flowing river we once fondly knew as the American Experience has coagulated, and the so-called Sages of America--all of them more interested in the getting of power than in the giving of wisdom--have become buryers of the dead. And we, in all practicality, are the dead. As shovel after shovel of dirt washes over our little bubbles, we see less and less of the real world.
You think of yourself as a poet. The poet in your mind is a revealer, a conveyor of wisdom, a kind of spiritual doctor. You have information, important information, others need to peruse. But look at where you appear in the picture: You're way over on the side of the picture, almost out of the screen altogether. This is an intentional placement. Someone beyond your range or your scope has planned it this way. Yes, the information you carry with you is important information. Hence, the careful manipulation of the social pecking order that provides you a harmless sphere of influence. Your wisdom usually only goes as far as earshot. Then it stops. God only knows if anyone took anything of your words away with them. Remoter still that anyone actually did something with the information they received.
Until you change this dynamic, until you step outside of the conventional role into which you have been placed like a little nail or a wood screw, the funeral of America will continue. Part of you wants to like that idea. Better sense--that and the need to cheat death--mandates you become even greater than you are. Not that you're great. Greater than right now. The poet's role: Greater than right now. Anything less is, of course, complicity with the undertaker.
posted by Faceshaker at 3:49 PM
2 Comments:
Gordon, it's POTEMKIN.
BTW, what you said about the poet's words only going
"as far as earshot"...a doctor can only prescribe
the medicine--he/she can't make a patient take it,
and can't take the medicine for them, either.
Same thing goes for the poet.
Thanks Jack for the spelling correction. As for the commentary, I can only add this: If national television networks spent as much money on poets, their lives and viewpoints as they do on commentators like Andy Rooney, et al, America would be getting a completely different perspective. As it is, America's official media is only feeding an informational avalanche that dulls and trivializes life in the nation. Interesting, an entire segment of the blogosphere is devoted to defeating that "official" strategy of oppression.
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