1
        Our mother tongue, the language we consider ours from birth, is not as motherly or nurturing as we would like to believe. Often, rather than giving birth to meaning, it camouflages or censors meaning. It becomes an obstacle to communication, not a midwife of expression.

 

 

        2 
        In a nation's or region's dominant language or mother tongue, words like "order," "morality" and "sanity" don't express objectively arrived at truths. Rather, such words contain instructions that tell us how we are expected to act and behave B this is what orderliness looks like, this is what morality and sanity look like, etc. Any social structure that deviates from the existing way of things is viewed as disorderly or chaotic, any behavior that digresses from the officially sanctioned behavior is viewed as abnormal, and any worldview that detaches itself from the existing worldview is defined B either outrightly or through innuendo B as traitorous or psychopathic. 

 
        In this way daily language reinforces a way of looking at the world that pressures us to stay within society's dominant norms; deviations from these norms are depicted as indiscretions, crimes, etc.
 

 

        3 
        Democracy means "government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives." It is "a form of government in which people hold the power.” 

 
        There is nothing ambiguous about such a dictionary definition of democracy. But in reality such a definition is subject to what can be called pragmatic reformulation whenever democracy, which is by national definition "good," becomes an obstacle to the nation’s global or domestic interests. Example: Following the 1984 Nicaraguan elections, during which the left-leaning Sandinista party returned to power with 67% of the vote, the U.S. government intensified plans to overthrow the Nicaraguan regime in spite of the fact that the elections exemplified Nicaragua’s commitment to democracy. 

 
        The existence of similar interventions throughout U.S. history ultimately subordinated democracy's academic definition to its evolving functional definition -- i.e., serving the interests of democracy globally and nationally means serving U.S. interests as those interests are defined by the nation's leaders and elites.

 

 
        4 
        In contemporary English "to understand" does not predominantly mean, as it once did in its Old English and Proto Indo-European forms, "to stand in the midst of" or "to be physically close to," both of which phrases suggest that the grasping of a fact entails a physical/sensory aspect as well as a purely mental one.        

 

        Today, however, the dominant definition of to understand is more vigorously scientific in orientation and emphasizes mind at the expense of the senses. It means, in common dialogue, one of two things: 

 
        (a) to know or comprehend the nature or meaning of, or 
        (b) to perceive an idea or situation mentally. 

 
        In its noun form (I.e., understanding), the word’s primary meaning is 

 
        (a) the intellectual faculty; the intelligence; the rational powers collectively conceived; the higher capacities of the intellect; the power to distinguish truth from falsehood, and to adapt means to ends. 

 
        So much for the senses as tools of understanding. They are exiled. Like Geronimo and Cato the renegade slave and Rama the outcaste Hindu prince, they are condemned to prophesy to us in garbled-sounding voices from the wilderness outside of so-called civilization. 

 
        The meaning of “to think” is similarly shrunken today. 

 
        In Old English and Proto Germanic, it meant "to cause to appear to oneself," while even further back in Proto Indo-European form it possessed a dual quality now lost -- i.e., to reason/feel, as if analysis, touch and emotion were all bound up in a single act, cogitation. 

 
        Both these examples pertain to long-term historical evolutions of meaning. Yet they aren't, because of this, merely of interest to language historians. On the contrary, they display quite nakedly how our own culture directs us to look at acts of thinking and understanding. We are encouraged to view (a) thought as somehow detached from the body and (b) understanding as a purely “intellectual faculty” that, by inference, is primarily accessible to those experts who are trained in the "higher capacities of the intellect."
Such definitions/guidelines are convenient for the powers-that-be in our increasingly technocratic society -- a society in which the "truth of what should be done next" in any area of existence (e.g., education, going to war, the fight against crime, etc.) is seen as the property of those specialists who allegedly are best equipped to understand the challenges facing us. 
 
 
        5 
        Language's tyranny extends further than merely proclaiming this is good or this is a crime against the good. 
 
        Language also relegates whole areas of experience to nothingness, to invisibility. Language does this by refusing to acknowledge that those areas exist. When language obscures or abolishes areas of experience in this way, i.e., by not providing words for defining and evoking those experiences, then society is "freed" from having to deal with those experiences. Those experiences are thus rendered invisible, nonexistent. Then those people who claim to have been victimized or elevated by such experiences are viewed as mentally impaired. Hallucinatory. 
 
        Throughout most of U.S. history the dominant culture provided no norm for how blacks or other people of color should respond to racism. This absence of a norm occurred for the simple reason that the dominant culture wouldn't admit that racism was a problem. Consequently, blacks' anger against racism was viewed by the dominant society not as the emotional outgrowth of a legitimate analysis of race‑based unfreedom, but rather as a form of personal surliness or lack of self-discipline. Since white supremacist society had produced norms for certain kinds of emotional equilibrium, but no norms for how to evaluate traumas caused by racism, much of what blacks felt was reduced to social invisibility, and whatever was allowed to remain visible B i.e., surliness, etc. B was judged on the basis of social codes which ignored racism's role in U.S. society. As a result, blacks' racism‑related pain was viewed by the dominant culture as not real or of only negligible significance B i.e., invisible. Not surprisingly, such institutionalized racism was reflected in the nation's language, which remained white supremacist in character and impoverished in terms of developing a critique of race‑related problems. 
 
 
        6 
        When we do not have a language to express the turmoils, urges, experiences and histories buried within us, we become stunted, go insane or die. 
 
        The writer Kate Chopin told the following story years ago. 
 
        In Louisiana in the late 1800s a woman walked along a Gulf of Mexico beach in the hot sun. Her husband watched her from their bungalow in the distance. Finally the woman, accompanied by a companion, approached the bungalow. As she did so, the Gulf's water seemed far away, as if it was melting mysteriously into the blue horizon. The husband observed his sunburnt wife "as one looks at a valuable piece of property that has suffered some damage." 
 
        Days passed. Edna, the wife, grew distracted. She felt herself drawn in unwifely directions. She was no longer certain of her role as a mother. She ached for something that she could only obscurely imagine, something that she couldn't adequately express in words. One day she kissed someone whom convention said she shouldn't have kissed. But it wasn't the kiss so much as a sense of freedom which enthralled and unnerved her. By herself that night she cried. She believed she was in the grip of a new understanding of existence. "She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality." Something was happening to her, she could feel it, she wasn't the same as other women, she was odd. She longed to understand herself, but there seemed to be no frame of reference, no adequate vocabulary, for her experience. 
 
        Stay with her husband, abandon her husband, conduct an affair with R., love her children, disregard her children B she wasn't sure what to do. One day "she was seized with a vague dread." She felt eerily detached from herself; her experiences "seemed far away, unreal, half remembered." She went to meet R. but he wasn't there. She sat up all night. In the darkness after the light sputtered out, she sensed how profoundly her unorthodox passions isolated her from everyone. Where others saw comfort and security, she saw traps. Conventional existence intimidated her. She visualized her children as "antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days." 
 
        A few hours later, or a day later, or two days later, she went to the beach for a swim. She wore an old bathing suit. Standing alone in the sand, with no one else in sight, she removed her suit and "for the first time in her life stood naked in the open air." When she entered the water, she experienced its sensuality. She needed no language now, no analysis, no words. If the absence of these things had wounded and isolated her before, had made her feel hopelessly unexpressed and without a solid connection to society, now their absence liberated her. With strong strokes she swam toward the horizon. She wasn't thinking now, only feeling and being. As she swam, she heard noises from the past. An old dog, chained to a sycamore tree, barked. She had been a child then. Other sensations came to her now. A memory of bees humming. Also something else: nearby, there was a strange, wonderful scent . . . "the musky odor of pinks filled the air." 
 
        She swam until she was too exhausted to swim anymore. This was what she wanted. She drowned. 
 
 
        7 
        We take language for granted. We assume it is simply there. But it isn't there for all of us. For some experiences and historical realities, no popular vocabulary has yet been developed to make those experiences and realities visible in a widespread publicly accepted way. How many homosexuals throughout history have been tormented by "nameless" urges? How many "good wives" have suffered "vague" emotional disorders? Status quo languages often oppress us more than they express us. Rather than make the realities of our lives visible, these languages frequently hide or imprison those realities by refusing to evince them.
 
 
        8 
        Writers have often dealt with this problem of language as an imprisoning, rather than a liberating, phenomenon. The surrealists considered the "ordinary language" of church, school and government to be, not a neutral tool of communication, but rather an imposition on the unwary user. 
 
        Because the surrealists believed this, they developed writing methods designed to destroy language's oppressive aspects. Extremists bent on doing to language what Einstein's theory of relativity had done to space, time and Euclidian geometry, they saw traditional word-contents and grammatical structures as the containers of institutionalized ideologies and logics. Consequently, they adopted a-logical methodologies to disrupt the power of this linguistic tyranny. They wrote while in self‑induced trances. They searched for truth in the so‑called abnormal areas of neuroses and nightmares, rather than confining themselves to more conventional subjects like skylarks, museums, soup bowls or the history of philosophy. They wrote rapidly without first "thinking out" what they wanted to say. 
 
        The surrealists adopted such writing tactics because they distrusted the way conventional thinkers divided the world into neat categories that made existence appear more orderly than it was, or less "dense" than it was -- dense in the sense of containing teeming simultaneities and obscure interconnections that weren't as easily codified as the power's that be implied the world was with their simplistic moralities and self-serving authoritarianism. The surrealists also were suspicious of traditional intellectuals' conviction that thinking could be divorced from emotion and that "real knowledge" was limited to the passionless, depersonalized accumulation of scientifically verifiable data. In contrast to this, the surrealists believed the quest for knowledge entailed experiments in combining the inner psychological world (i.e., the unconscious, dreams, etc.) and the outer objective world (i.e., "normal" reality, history, etc.). They believed such efforts to bring together inner and outer realities would result in a higher reality or "surreality." In their quest for truth, the surrealists saw themselves as involved in a battle with social institutions that had substituted indoctrination for education. The surrealists wanted to use their writing as a means of destroying conditioning and thereby exposing readers to the surprising, often extraordinary, quality of the life all around them.
 
 
        9 
        In order to understand language, one must fear it. One can't treat a wolf like an ally unless one has first shown it the respect of fear, then reassured it and calmed it. Similarly with language. It has a wolf's personality. It is violent and not afraid to rip the entrails from meaning's belly. But if one is patient, one can befriend it. Then the wolf (language) becomes, as the Cherokee say, "The teacher of new things." 
 
        Language, even when it does our bidding and communicates what we want it to communicate, suffers from what everything else suffers from: impermanence. Only specialists know how to read Old English or Sanscrit now. Those vocabularies' poetries and nuances are locked into eras too long gone for the average person to grasp. Even in today's world, languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. Already, of the twenty Eskimo/Natives languages indigenous to Alaska, only two are still spoken. It is estimated by those who study such things (UNESCO, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and so on) that by the beginning of the new millennium's second century at least half of the languages currently spoken in the world will have disappeared. 
 
        The two facts just cited -- i.e., that language can't be blindly trusted to communicate our intended meaning and that even at its most useful language is transient -- add a sense of resignation or even mourning to much communication. (Note: this section is continued elsewhere as a separate piece entitled "Eating Black Mucous.") 
 
 
        10 
                                                           Go on your way. 
                                                           The evening raises its white baton above the pedestrians. 
                                                           The cattle’s horns in the abundant evenings sow terror on the boulevard. 
                                                           Go on your way. 
                                                           Now is the shining convoluted coil of the hour. 
                                                           A death struggle. The referee counts 70 . . . 

        “Go on your way,” the French surrealist Robert Desnos directs at the beginning of the above quote from his poem "Rencontre" ("Meeting"). 
                       
        But where does one "go o'”to? 
 
        Desnos' answer is clear: one must go on to where one already is, that is, one must reenter the ordinary in such a way that it is experienced differently, that its taken-for-grantedness is stripped of its overly familiar veneer and revealed for what it is: a violent sensuousness that overwhelms. This process of re-seeing entails the death of previous seeings. As a result, one descends into a redefined time and a previously lost but now unburied space. Desnos calls this combination "the shining convoluted coil of the hour." The shining here is the new light that floods in through the fissures created when an old habit of seeing is fractured. Now nothing is as it once seemed. The birth of new insights requires the cremation of an old way of life, the price of stability is to first experience the nausea of dislocation. As Desnos goes on to say 
 
                                                                             life's ashes dry my poem 
                       

and 
                                                                             noon the love hour deftly tortures 
                                                                             our sick ears. 
 
          Along with such images, Desnos also provides one that at first sounds almost sentimental when he asserts the existence of "supernatural children [who] dress like you and me." But by supernatural Desnos doesn't mean the sappy pre-adolescent "inner child" romanticized in late 20th century America by New Age therapists. Rather the child he conceptualizes is the reborn self stripped of delusions. The word "supernatural" doesn't imply, in Desnos' hands, a traditional otherworldliness but rather a state of unfetteredness, a freedom from socialized consciousness. This is why the child dresses "like you and me," because it exists as a potential within all of us. The self that has achieved this state, or that longs to achieve it, aches not for la-la land or for Marx's famous opium of the people, but for reality, albeit a newly opened-up reality. It wants to confront the world in all its rawness -- its naked infrastructure, its bleeding facts, its disconcerting, but mind enriching, flood of sensations. Yet developing such a relationship with the world isn't easy. The self feels crippled by what it has been previously taught is true and untrue. In despair, the self recognizes that authentic liberation requires understanding what it does not understand: realities that have been ruled off-limits by the status quo. It is precisely such realities with which Desnos is preoccupied. He is obsessed with what the indoctrinated eye can't see and with what the indoctrinated mind can't fathom. He is therefore on a mission to rediscover reality, to locate the invisible -- i.e. the ignored, the taken for granted, the censored, the hidden -- and to make it visible. He knows there is something "out there" that, because it is sensed by us but not known by us, haunts our existence. This sense of being haunted by an undefined reality is communicated by Desnos when he proclaims in another line from the poem --  

                                             On the deserted square invisible madness leaves its footstep on the wet sand. 
 
          A madness that is invisible? What is he talking about?

                       
          When Desnos uses the phrase "invisible madness," he knows he's presenting the phrase to an audience that, for the most part, believes all madness is visible -- visible in the sense that madness' symptoms are identifiable/seeable, since they are, besides being evidenced in the acts of madmen, listed and explained in textbooks. This visibility, which makes madness subject to study and analysis, guarantees that madness can be cured, if it can be cured at all, only through methodicalness -- i.e., through specific dosages of certain medicines or through shock treatments, etc. -- not through impulse or indiscipline or unsanctioned techniques. Any other type of madness, any madness rumored to thrive outside the existing categories and therefore not subject to the remedies suggested by them, is by definition (from the dominant culture's perspective) unimaginable, unreal. It is this unreality that Desnos challenges when he proclaims that the symptoms, the footprints, of invisible madness exist. He is proclaiming that the theoretically unreal, that which has been left out of the vocabulary given to us by the powers that be, is in fact REAL. It may be undescribed but it is THERE. It EXISTS. 
 
          But what is it, exactly, that exists? What is the unreal? What is invisible madness? What point is Desnos trying to make to us across the decades? 
 
          In general terms, invisible madness is the nameless anxiety that exists beyond the borders of what we have been taught is true. It is the madness, pain and trauma that come from dreaming unsanctioned dreams. In the contemporary world, it is the mind that becomes damaged because the heart yearns for fulfillments that have been labeled taboo by the existing authorities: homosexual satisfaction, the Sioux's urge to live at one with the prairie again, the underclass's "irrational" rage, etc. But because such invisible madnesses live in exile, excommunicated from official history by preachers and teachers and politicians and government bureaucrats, they can only express themselves in apparently "unreal" or "meaningless" areas: in the silence between the depressed person's words, in the emptiness at the edges of a junkie's blissed-out smile, in the anxiety dreams of homeless people sleeping in an alley where U.S. history has turned the color of a rat's gray eyes. It is precisely here -- i.e., in the world of the allegedly meaningless -- that we begin to unearth the profoundest meanings. But unburying what is buried or making the invisible visible is not merely a momentary act of will. It requires something more sustained, more systematic: it requires a vocabulary capable of naming and describing its actions. A great wrenching apart and recreation of the existing language is needed. More so than the boulder that supposedly blocked the entrance to the tomb of the mythological Jesus, society's official language blocks and prevents us from resurrecting buried meanings. So, the time has come for us to pulverize language so we can unbury and then define realities that for too long have been secret and hidden, "not there." 
 
          Fact: Our language lags behind evolution. 
 
          Fact: Our language is a penal system in which the only crime for which the death sentence may be given is the search for unsanctioned meanings. 
 
          And so everywhere turmoils seethe beneath surfaces we incorrectly think possess no depths. Although many here in the U.S. cherish our English, take a weird pride in being a one-language nation that hates bilingualism, and laugh at those cultures which aren't as "advanced" as we are, we sense, against our wills, that something is wrong with the world we have created. Yet ironically, given our pride in our "down to earth English" and our "American way of thinking," we don't have at our disposal the words to express the dangers we sense all around us. Instead, we refer vaguely to lost values and the lack of respect for traditional institutions, as if replicating the past in the present was the only way to redeem the present from itself. When such replication reveals itself as useless nostalgia, the nation resorts to stridency and bullying to prove its "advanced" moral character. 
 
          Nationally, we are on a collision course with a suicidal destiny that none of our pundits can find the words to describe. Therefore, unable to define where we are going, we remain incapable of confronting, analyzing or reinventing our destiny. Except for the noise generated by self-deceptive vocabularies rooted in imperial delusions of grandeur, we are condemned to silence. 
 
          To transcend this fate, we must ransack the graveyard outside language's traditional boundaries. It is there that meaning is buried. We must claw the dirt to uncover what we are. 
 
 
          11 
          So, language can oppress us. Yet it wasn't always this way. At some point in pre‑history, human beings, craving for a way to communicate their thoughts and experiences, began the long syllable‑by‑syllable process of transforming their urges and perceptions into uttered sounds. Words were magic, they had raw power, they were the organic offspring, the comprehensible form, of experiences that without language would have remained entirely inner and private. Language was the end product of the species' efforts to communicate what it felt, dreamt and saw. 
 
          Such a vision of language's beginnings simplifies human development. Still, it possesses the virtue of recognizing that words are tools for rendering human experiences intelligible. Experience comes first; the words for communicating that experience come afterwards. This is the theory, anyway. But the language we use today, the language that has been manufactured, pre‑packaged and given to us by those institutions responsible for educating us from cradle to grave, controls us more often than it liberates us. This language has codified its contents and limited its definitions to suit the needs of the authorities. Consequently, it restricts meaning rather than expands it; it dictates to the users of the language what experiences they are supposed to have and how they are supposed to view the world. In other words, language today, rather than being an organic outgrowth of people's experiences of the world, is a vehicle through which people are robbed of their ability to fully experience the world. 
 
          None of this is new. Such a robbery -- of our ability to fully experience the world and to fully realize our own potential -- is what happened to Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's 1899 novel, The Awakening, cited in section 4 above As stated in that section, Pontellier had access to no vocabulary capable of clarifying and giving meaning to her anti‑social urges. The only vocabulary available to her suggested that "normal" meant, in her case (and in all women's cases), good mother and obedient wife. She was strangled by the absence of an analytical vocabulary that could place her impulses into perspective. But Edna Pontellier's tragedy was Kate Chopin's triumph. In creating a trapped women doomed to gender defeat, Chopin helped to develop the beginnings of a language for defining what had not yet been adequately defined: the way women are damaged by the patriarchal notion that women possess one, and only one, biological destiny: marriage/motherhood. In evoking this reality Chopin recaptured the initial motivation for language in pre‑history: to render the contents of human experience intelligible. 
 
     

          12 
          Yet for every effort to subordinate language to the task of clarifying the human experience, language is employed by economic elites and political bureaucracies for the purpose of doing the opposite: obliterating language's clarification potentials and turning language instead into a vehicle for dictating to us how we are supposed to think and see. 
 
          Take the word "terrorism" as an example. As E. S. Herman reported in The Real Terror Network, the U.S. government has a history of tinkering with the meaning of the terrorism concept in order to orient how the U.S. public views world events. Consequently, the word terrorist usually spurs a predictable image in people's minds: a dark-skinned Middle Eastern fanatic with explosives strapped to his belly or a bomb in a briefcase. He is headed toward a restaurant where innocents eat or to an important business building in one of the planet's major cities or is preparing to board an airplane filled with unsuspecting passengers soon to meet their doom. 
 
          Such pictures emphasize terrorism as a form of outlandish violence perpetuated by crazed individuals who belong to one or another extremist organization run by inhuman demagogues who possess a chilling disregard for human life. As Herman pointed out in his book, what's wrong with this picture is not only its racist implications, but also how it obscures the fact that the majority of the world's terrorist acts are committed, not by marginal individuals or small organizations, but by what Funk and Wagnall's Standard College Dictionary refers to as "systems of government that rule by intimidation." 
 
          By foisting on the U.S. public a shrunken definition of terrorism that leaves out state or government terroristic violence, the U.S. power elite, under the leadership of different presidents, has paraded itself over the years as anti‑terroristic while in fact allying itself with governments ‑‑ El Salvador, Iran under the Shah, pre-liberated South Africa, etc. ‑‑ responsible for large‑scale terroristic oppressions and butcherings undreamt‑of by individual terrorists. The Real Terror Network efficiently documents how such figures are manipulated. For instance, during the 1960s and 1970s the CIA recorded 3,668 deaths as resulting from what it called "international terrorism." During that same period, however, international agencies estimated that approximately 90,000 people mysteriously disappeared in the 1960s as the result of rightwing government/military policies in U.S.‑supported Latin American countries alone. Yet by the simple trick of altering the definition of terrorism to suit its own purposes, the U.S. government rendered tens of thousands of victims of terroristic violence invisible during the 60s and 70s. As it did this, it simultaneously patted itself on the back for crusading against terrorism, by which it meant of course, not U.S.‑supported governments which oppressed whole populations through the use of military and government violence, but rather anti‑American Islamic "fanatics," Palestinians, and anyone else the State Department didn't like. Almost without exception, for years U.S. news analysts have parroted this linguistic opportunism like toy poodles gleefully wagging their tiny tails after receiving a dog biscuit from Master. 
 
          If there was ever any doubt regarding the U.S.'s willingness to use terror in Central America to accomplish its ends, it was eliminated in late 1984 with the uncovering of a CIA pro-terrorism manual written as part of the government’s efforts to build a proxy army (i.e., the Contras) to overthrow the Nicaraguan government which was run by the Sandinistas who in 1979 replaced the Somoza regime, a U.S.-backed dictatorship. The manual, entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War," advocated the assassination of "Carefully selected, planned targets — judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc." It also promoted riling up anti-government protests and then employing agent provocateurs to pressure "demonstrators into clashes with the authorities," thereby inciting "riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as martyrs." 
 
          Because of outright White House/Pentagon lies as well as tampering with the very meaning of the word terrorism, U.S. support of terroristic policies abroad during the period cited above (and since then) remained/remains for most of the U.S. population an unknown reality. And for those of us who claim to have some understanding of this "unknown," our self-admiration is our death sentence, since we are as self-deluded as anyone, being too absorbed in our own self-esteem to recognize how accidental and tenuous our so-called knowledge is. In this way, the whole population, all of us together, is doomed to express the world and ourselves through a vocabulary consisting of mass produced facts and definitions that organize our thinking for us before we utter our first word. And so we become, for all practical purposes, our -- in Adorno's apt phrase -- "own voluntary and zealous overseers." Condemned to think with a mind that was constructed by the very forces that we must overcome in order to think clearly, even our "freest" thoughts are shaped by those forces and are therefore forms of suicide. 
 
          As a result, critical analysis has been replaced by the art of polishing stereotypes. Therefore, we continue to view Islamic countries as breeding grounds of bomb‑toting scraggly-bearded psychopathic baby‑killers while ignoring the U.S. terrorism implicit in the CIA’s orchestration of mass murders in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. We've been turned into a population whose favorite breakfast cereal isn't Wheaties but ignorance. We soak it in milk, slurp it up and hope we don't choke. 
 
          Goodbye  
          language
          thinking
          hope. 

        Something is wrong. Our national egocentricism, our white supremacy, our perpetually deflected class angers, our inability to respect other cultures, our hatred of quietude, our worship of militarism, our "sophistication" which is in fact a combination of cynicism and nihilism, all sentence the nation to current and future spiritual malaise. 


        13
        Death equals silence. Or does it?

        Is it possible that out of such a death/disintegration, such an apparent silence, a new life with a more highly evolved B and more accurate B language can emerge? 

        Of course. In history there are no absolute ends; everything is flow and development. 

        But what does it sound like, a new language's beginnings, the start of a new way of expressing the world? 

        Blind Willie Johnson knew. 

        Blind Willie Johnson was a gospel singer with a country‑blues guitar style and a voice like a piece of oak‑bark scraped across a washboard. The proof of Johnson's knowledge regarding the art of moving from silence to communication was his 1927 song "Dark is the Night B Cold is the Ground," a haunting duet between a slowly played slide guitar and a raspy, wordless voice making lonesome hummed noises. The song, a series of aching sounds stripped down to the bare essentials of a dirge, is a meditation on Christ's death on the cross. Johnson's voice, paralleling and interacting with his slide guitar's distended notes, seems barely able to hover above the death and spiritual silence it is attempting to sing about. Yet rather than being sucked down into the inaudible, into the autism of an unsurvivable grief, Johnson's husky humming gathers a bleak but somehow still exhilarating energy from god's death. However, this energy, this dark jubilation, isn't sufficient to drive the voice into words, but only to drive it into a pre‑word or pre‑language state of crudely uttered emotion. Yet the force and clarity of this emotion is so powerful, so articulate, that we sense, in the moaning interaction between voice and guitar, the very beginnings of language. 

        This is what we must do at the start of a new era. Go down that low. Give birth to a new language. 

        Blind Willie Johnson is our friend, our guide. 


        *****


        14

         (Postscript on need to reexplore the invisibility/visibility issue outlined in Section 10 above)
        

        Extinguishing a thing by exiling it to the realm of the invisible is one crime. But retrieving it from the invisible, which seems like the right thing to do, can also be a crime -- the crime of setting in motion a chain of events that ultimately forces the retrieved thing to disappear into the visible.
 
        This -- i.e., disappearing into the visible -- happens in accord with the following formula: when the state is involved, the invisible is only allowed to become visible if that part of its content which condemned it to invisibility in the first place is eliminated. It is through an endless process of doing this, i.e., of digesting fragments of the real in order to defecate edited versions of these fragments, that the power structure establishes its openness through the production of images engineered to curtail openness. 

        An example.  
 
        In order for schools or shopping malls or bridges to be named after Walt Whitman, his image had to be purged of unacceptable phenomena. This meant airbrushing away his "unnatural" sexuality and assuring that his call for a revolutionary literature that "cheers up slaves and horrifies despots" was reframed in such a manner that it posed no danger to the existing state of things. 
 
        The procedures employed to activate sanitized substitute images as replacements for originals that don't fit mass society's needs must be recognized for what they are: sophisticated methods of rendering the unseen in visible form by burying it within a lobotomized image of itself. As a result, people like me who rail about the need to make the invisible visible frequently set in motion token unburials that do little more than swap one form of false history/memory for another. Which leads to the question: how does one rebel when rebellion itself, although allegedly an act of negating the unacceptable by replacing it with the preferable, is merely an anti that can't survive without being attached to what it opposes and, what's more, is an anti that inevitably becomes the mirror without which the thing opposed could not be reflected in all its glory as the ruling power. 
 
        What we need is a transrebellion that exists so far outside of what we consider either rebellion or acceptance of the status quo that it demolishes oppression through efforts that, although organized, look more like pure chaos than emancipatory activism and that produce a vocabulary of upsurge characterized by (a) an utter simplicity that contains more layers than the complex and (b) a coherence/eloquence achieved by acknowledging that only a fractured language possesses the structure necessary for evoking the world.