On Results; not Causes — Reflections on War & the Wrath of Our Words w/ John Steinbeck.
“The western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The Great Owners, nervous; sensing a change, and knowing nothing of the nature of it…”
“…the Great Owners, striking at the immediate thing — the widening government, the growing labor Unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes.
The causes lie deep and simple — the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times. The last clear, definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is Man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of Man — when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, Man reaches, stumbles forward, painful, mistakenly, sometimes.
Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it, and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs; when crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall — the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling, while the Bombers live, for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop, while the Great Owners live — for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer & die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is Man, distinctive in the universe.”
— John Steinbeck, the Grapes of Wrath, 1939.
Every, single time I read this chapter — the fourteenth — from John Steinbeck’s expert exposition of the horrors delivered against the American people under the Great Depression, I sob. Even now, as I piece together a pale tribute to these three, simple pages — this beautiful, grotesque collective of pains put to paper — I feel the weeping sensation come over, and pass, and then come over back, again. Such is the way of pain, I suppose. Ebbing.
In my estimation — this chapter is the most perfect one. Deafening yet quiet — angry; wretched and timeless. While I suspect the original nature of the penmanship — its meaning — may have been written in English, I find no hint of a particular language in its translation. Anyone could look through those pages and know, instantly, the tongue of it and its dialect. Hurting.
Steinbeck wrote often of the Hurting but it wasn’t all he wrote. There are happy, little books about dogs and frogs and horses — and of the children. There are long, disheartening books about the nature of weird women — of bad men and their pursuits; of our folly and lack and of good fortune and grounding. With such peculiar and powerful muscle, he wrote extance into empty landscapes and zeroed-into the aliveness of invisible things — both organic & inorganic— with a deftness that confounds either states of being.
The stories, while uniquely American in their tellings, are ubiquitous and unnationalized in their reading. These wore-out and broken books have offered great meaning to my life. I’ve learned very much from my obsessive re-visiting— little phrases carried along and sayings, stole — taking in small ideas and massive concepts from his word choices. The wanton, political interludes slow down and breathe Truth into made-up “fictions” — fastening together volume upon volume of histories within the tautness of a single paragraph, or two. Some of them are light and descriptive while some are dark and meant, most definitely, to bother or perturb — others, indefinitely.
Words.
Meaning is one of those funny little paradoxes in our ‘verse: at once totally and disastrously contained to the self — contagious to the other. Go just a month without speaking — try to intimate meaning with silence —and then decide if the nature of any thing exists even one inch beyond one’s own skin.
Surely words communicate and contextualize — of course they do — but our words do not give meaning to themselves. They are inert — inorganic. Flat air against paper. Humans are the vessels of meaning and purpose — not things; not our massive concepts. Viktor Frankl said what is to give Light must endure the burning. If the flame dies, the light goes; a candle remains.
Frankl addressed this strange, solipsistic human contradiction head-long, believing the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. He continued,
“…I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
My belief in the “meaning” of things is rather simple — that we & the universe exist simply and only to experience Itself. What other purpose could possibly be? There isn’t. There is sacredness in this circle; in the cycle of birthing and extinguishment. But is there meaning inherent to it? Perhaps. Probably not.
Why don’t you tell me?
Wrath.
Any person need only be born alive to know this simplest of all the Truths — that a human being is a human being — no matter the place nor context nor quality of the character being questioned. This is important to remember. Sometimes we forget ourselves, our humanity, and there comes over us a mood, or a moment, in which we become forgetful and cruel; we become more, or less, thoughtful, and begin to evaluate — such a dastardly, human thing to do.
When we evaluate others, meaning is moved inside of us, shifted into or out of its itching, restive place. A small spurt of confidence, or a jealousy—the tenderness from damage left unrepaired. In either case, pollination occurs. Meaning can make us mean and kindly, too. Meaninglessness — much the same.
And when the bumbling bees of our words carry flecks of our sticky, sweet or sour thoughtfulness into and between the petals of the others — the sex of it all bears our given fruit. Our sweetness flowers. Our hurtings, holler. We can become butchersome and cleave one another to bits— like cows, pieced-apart on the bench — we can carefully set aside side-meat for sale and break open the bones; render fat into soup — we can hide our grit in the grounds.
Then, as the Butcher, we can take the first spoils of this boring, over-practiced little war — our right of refusal— and can stay well-and-fed from the guts and the Heart of the beasts we slaughter; from an honest, acceptable grifting: keeping unlisted cuts known only to our skill, knife and profession.
Or we could affect a bloom.
War.
Lincoln thought,
War is an extension of politics by other means.
I think the exact opposite. Politics is the commutation of our violence into language. It is how we introduce our natural intra- and interpersonal differences to the other, more softly, while still subjugating them to us — or ourselves to them. At least war is honest.
Politics is the falsely civilized conduct of the uncivilized nature of men — not women; it is the extension — recognition — of self-precedence over all others & things. It is self-transcendence. Politics is a way for us to fill the awkward stillness in silence and give meaning to the fair terror of meaninglessness.
This ancient, political practice of talking-at and not -with sanitizes and self-scrubs our true, inner voice; it bounces cheap echoes of our selfs around an over-crowded and dissonant void. We produce a racket.
Politics can be useless. War is not.
War is another of the funny little paradoxes — in that those conducting it are seldom those who should. And those who could? They’ve little interest. John Steinbeck published the Grapes of Wrath in 1939 — and it was not about war at all — at least not under a thinner definition of that word. It was about being pushed off your place. It was about machinations and systems and about them feeding for feeding’s sake. It was about tractors.
The simple policy changes or their weighted courts; a quiet dealing and investment made when they know and you don’t — these are violence, too. These are small seeming and even peaceable violences… but they are. And by now you should know that they are. Machinations kill like machines do.
I believe that the slickest trick they’ve ever played was to give all of these wars all different names.
We cannot forget that these words — the nationality descriptors & human labels — are but dancing shadows, cast short, resulting only from our pantomiming of them. These placenames we call were not stamped upon the Earth; the colorful, polyester flags do not hoist themselves. It is us who contextualize and frame them how we feel them — because they do not make it far passed our skins.
Jew. Terrorist. Settler. Murderer. Murdered. These words are just those — powerful pollinations occurring in the mind — and they will bear us fruit.
So what crop or tuber should develop — from the fucking of our bees — doesn’t much matter, anymore. They have been long since pollinated. Now and next is their sprouting. It’s become winter, and cold, but Spring will appear, one day, maybe. When it does we can reap it, eat it, greedily, and sow the good seeds anew for the seasons after — or we can just swallow them up — and let them stick in our teeth.
They say a whole tree fits inside of the seed. It might be in this sacrilegious circle from where the sacred nature grows — the meaning — rooting — of all the things that intend to, and do. It could be much further down, darker than we even realize; deeper and farther still into the pi.
May be that the seeds are poor. Maybe there’s rot in the soil; bad sun.
Couldn’t be the tractors.
“…having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it, and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs; when crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall — the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling, while the Bombers live, for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died.
And fear the time when the strikes stop, while the Great Owners live — for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know — fear the time when Manself will not suffer & die for a concept — for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is Man…
