Saturday 30 August 2003

Angst (yet again) about writing


I knew that for Marx himself, Communism never meant less than the means for freeing human creativity in all persons to the fullest: he believed that the release of that very creativity would ensure than no revolution turned in on itself, stagnated, and froze; that in "revolution in permanence," "new passions and new forces" would repeatedly arise as the creative currents of each and all found voice. You could say that the passion for human creativity forced Marx into the study of how Capital, by its own internal laws, had suppressed the flow of human activity and passions (Adrienne Rich, 2003).

I don't think I've given enough emphasis to the concept of alienation when I teach Marx. I guess it's because I falsely presume that it's an intuitive concept -- what else is capitalism but dehumanising? But it's hard to teach that to students who feel no need to problematise or even question things as they are. If any questioning is done, it's mostly introspective, lapsing into the self, deliberately detached from the 'dirty' themes of oppression, inequality, and social injustice.

Levels of freedom are arguably more absolute than ever before, and yet we are unaware of the levels constraint that underpin our daily lives. It's easy to understand and mark the enemy as the other during past historical periods, with martial law, nationalist struggles, and revolutionary ideologies. Much was at stake then, but what is at stake for me, and for my generation, now? Our regress into postmodernist language by problematising definitions, even our own identities, furthers my inability to speak about something for some purpose. In this day and age, when they say there is no truth, what is left to talk about?

I must remind this to myself, especially at my whiniest moments --

The history of the twentieth century prompted many poets to design images that conveyed their moral protest. Yet to remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter is one of the most difficult puzzles confronting a practitioner of poetry. It calls for a cunning in selecting one's means and a kind of distillation of material to achieve a distance to contemplate the things of this world as they are, without illusion (Czeslaw Milosz, 2001, emphasis mine).