The first and only time I voted was in the 1988 presidential election. I clearly remember walking in that little private wank booth and looking at this strange paper on which I was to mark my selection for this or that candidate. I remember feeling so small, so irrelevant, the process so dehumanizing.I was a nick on a prepopulated page, the same as every other: a nick in a series of identical nicks.

In an effort to overcome my reduction to a number, to reclaim my sense of humanity, I wrote in my choice for president: my grandfather, Isidore Englander. It was reassuring to see my handwritten scrawl on this institutional document and to see a name so close to me, so absolutely idiosyncratic. I was confident that this would be Gramps’ sole vote. This paper would not be one among many; it would be singular.

I never voted again. More than the irrelevance of the act, it’s the demand for anonymity that turns me off. Give me a chance to stand up and voice my opinion, declare my decisions before the masses, and I’d consider voting. But walking into a beaded room bereft of the should-be carnal candy? Eeesh.

I have the same experience when buying things. The exchange of money for goods is prescribed in such a way that seller and consumer need not exchange anything else. This coldness, this reduction of ourselves to mere function, freaks me out. I just can’t do it. I need to have some kind of personal contact — a quick joke, a non-consumer query, a smile,something that acknowledges our respective selves.

Mind you, this is not noble of me. On the contrary, it’s often obnoxious and certainly narcissistic. Some checkout dude at Walgreens shouldn’t have to suffer through my idiotic banter just to help me alleviate my angst.

Breaking personal boundaries is more difficult in the anonymous super stores. These places breed anonymity. Once inside, we become consumers, shopping to some prescribed algorithm. And the employees have no investment whatsoever; they barely acknowledge you. Their only desire is to get out of there as quickly as possible. What do they need, not to mention want, with my anxious interpersonal invasion?

Perhaps there is a freedom to such anonymity. By agreeing that we’re just numbers to each other, we are left alone to do as we will — no need to pass moral, religious, or aesthetic judgement on others. You do your thing; I do my thing. And so it goes. There’s no need for things to get personal.

This is one thing I enjoy about politeness — it allows strangers to be strangers with the least amount of friction. Sometimes, we need things from each other or, in this crowded world, we bump into one another — a simple “excuse me,” “thanks,” or “please” makes the interaction run smoothly.

Still, I have this deep seated desire to break through these barriers, to risk judgement in order to enjoy a whiff of intimacy, however slight. In that moment, there is the possibility of wonder, of the heartfelt and the hilarious, the witty and the surprising.

But that’s not why I do it. My need cannot be justified by anything other than itself: anonymity freaks me out. It’s as though I need the world to recognize me, not just this body, but me. Perhaps if those around me see me as an individual — not as just another customer, consumer, or constituent — then I’ll be better tethered to the earth, less likely to slip into the ether unnoticed.

Ah, yes, this is it: anonymity smacks of death. And, egomaniac narcissist that I am, I believe my individuality will be enough to keep me alive. But only if everyone notices.

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1. Everything has its way.  Scotch, after all, is not tequila and neither are gin.This is, of course, obvious. But I still find it profound and this seemingly simple dictum has had enormous repercussions in how and what I think.

2. The ways of things intersect and overlap.  I love spicy, perhaps a bit mineraly, clean boozes that are a little hot, a little complex, and never sweet: St. George Terroir Gin, Fortaleza Blanco, Glenrothes single malt, Old Potrero Rye.

3. Things have internal borders that need not unify.  The aforementioned boozes each enjoys, on its own, this fantastic array of flavors, each distinct — sun, fir, honey, black pepper. They don’t have to become one.

4. Moods come and go. Over the course of one drink, you may traverse despair, elation, resignation, contemplation, each with an emphatic umph.

5. The now is historical, forwards and backwards.  Drinking lots now can feel good now — then feel very bad the next day.  Sometimes, this is ok; other times, it’s not. In any case, there is a distinct correlation between this now and another now.

6. Everything has its occasion. I like my booze. I have a drink or two most days. But I don’t always want a drink — a midday beer or morning shot can be great but more often than not makes me sluggish and dumb.  

7. Some things have diminishing returns. Just because some thing makes you feel great doesn’t mean you can enjoy it ceaselessly — some pleasurable things become less pleasurable when consumed in the wrong proportion or quantity.

8. Things can interact in surprising ways. Booze is one thing. Now add this or that — sex, hooch, medication, driving — and the way of booze can be synergistic, a catalyst both good and bad, to say the least.

9. What was once right is not always right.  Starting in my early teens, I drank Jim Beam. A lot of Jim Beam. Now, I can’t touch the stuff.  I drink much less in general and rarely imbibe bourbon.  My body has changed, wants different things, needs different things.

10. Categories offer infinite internal diversity. Bourbon is relatively well defined — 51% corn, from Kentucky, I don’t know what else.  But try Makers then Buffalo Trace then High West and you’ll have three different, even if intimately related, experiences. Now take gin: other than juniper, there are no demands. Infinite variations is not only available but encouraged by the category itself.

11. Pay attention.  One drink too much, or the wrong drink, can be disastrous.  Booze has taught me to pay attention to what’s happening, to how I interact with the world.

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New Years Even, 7:40 pm, I’m standing at the ocean’s edge which simultaneously marks the edge of this silly city. The ocean seethes as it will — it may be infinite and seem eternal but we see it fluctuate with the moon and the weather.  We see its mode of temporality, how it distributes time: waves are a kind of metronome, keeping a cosmic beat.

Out in the middle of the ocean are several barges headed for the East. They move so steadily, so defiantly, so mercilessly — like the ocean, in a way. But in much more manageable, human terms. Where the ocean relentlessly verges on the sublime — precisely because it’s relentless — barges I can think.  I can grasp weeks and tons.

Above, planets and stars wink from past centuries.

Large rocks budge, a tiny bit, over centuries. To us, they just sit there, enduring. But slowly, they are eroding and moving.  I wonder if, to them, time flies.

Dunes line one perimeter of the beach, coming and going with the winds but over months, years, decades.

There are people scattered about the beach, huddled around bonfires. They seem as though they’re in for the long haul, relatively speaking — until the early morning.  The barges are in for a longer haul; the dune and rocks, an even longer haul; the ocean, well, it seems to exceed the haul.

These bonfire people enjoy a time so different from the time of the commute when everyone moves with such purpose and speed.  They’ll kill you if you get in their way.

Make your way through a city any day and see all the micro temporalities — the strollers, the sitters, the sleepers, the coffee drinkers, the runners, the cars, the freeway.  Cities are assemblages of so many different times, most accelerated but still with great, with endless, variation.

I can see Bergson’s duration so clearly: time is not outside of us, an abstraction that moves steadily and geometrically around its circle.  No, time is itself a dimension — I see it, know it at this moment: all these different temporalities, all these different durations, are time happening right now — a now that is all these different times, all these different nows, these nows that are different speeds and distributions of before and later.

Deleuze asks us to look at a moving image of, say, a man walking a dog by a river in the mountains. See all the different times: the time of the man, of the dog, of the river, of the mountains. All images have multiple times.

My friend, the poet Lohren Green, takes time to think, to write — it’s as if he has bovine digestion, moving ideas through four stomachs.  Me, I’ve always been fast: I write fast, think fast, digest food fast. When writing Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was the slow one, Guattari already having moved on to the next connection, the next node. Neither speed is better or worse: they simply (or not) mark our respective temporal tendencies.

Time is all the times of all the different things, each thing happening in its time, enduring as it endures.  Time is not a neutral abstraction.  Time is an infinitely variegated becoming.  This world and everything in it is in motion, happening, changing. This world and everything in it — including everything invisible such as moods — happens, changes, transforms, always and already.

In Burroughs The Place of Dead Roads, Kim Carsons advises would-be gunfighters, “Always take your time.” It’s not necessarily about being the fastest; go faster than your speed and you’ll shoot your foot or fumble all together.  Of course, if the other guy’s time is faster than your time, you’re done for. But then you were done for before the shoot out even began.

So the question is: What’s your time?

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Dear Doug,

What I find immediately interesting reading your three letters is this: there is enjoyment here. It is at once the reader’s enjoyment, the writer’s enjoyment, and the enjoyment of the texts themselves.

Of course, this “themselves” is an amalgamation of others things, a network of traces and allusions from Lacan and Zizek to Woody Allen and Doctor Who. What binds these diverse elements? What holds this network together? Your writing: your essays are little engines that assemble and stitch sense together.

Why do I find this interesting?  Well, we are discussing the possibility of enjoyment in this here life of ours, what we might call late stage capitalism but in any case can definitely call 21^st Century America.

As you suggest, we live in overwhelming times, a time of anxiety, without a collective narrative to orient us. We search for a semblance of certainty in the nostalgia of Instagram, something to protect us from the “bewildering strangeness of this improbable world.” You conclude: “We don’t need to enjoy ourselves or to make sure that our predetermined projects come off just right, but rather we need to get a sense of how our world is uncanny and unreal. We need to find or manufacture a new kind of space, a new gaze, a new normative principle, that will allow us to live with our anxiety.”

I want to suggest, however, that it is indeed enjoyment we need. Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure. To enjoy something is to live through an event whether it’s good or bad — it is a thorough way of moving through time. Pleasure is an effect; enjoyment is an action. And this is the task at hand: to live through this life without being subsumed by the spectacle or overwhelmed by the vertigo of it all.

So how do I find enjoyment in your writing? Your writing is — as all good writing is — a movement through disparate spaces — I might say “improbable” spaces — that makes sense as it goes. Your writing is a living through the network as you make connections here and there, across time and media and culture, across a network that by definition is not linear and hence is not strictly speaking historical: everything is all at once, a seething simultaneity. Where you find in Instagram a craving for nostalgia to help ground anxiety, I find a liberating vertigo in which the real of yesterday becomes an effect of today, another gesture in the endless proliferation of affects and effects that defines our lives.

The orienting narratives have indeed collapsed and given way to the delirium of the network. The way through the network, the way of the network, is the operation of writing and the proliferation of new kinds of sense. To write the network is to enjoy this life.

This remains cryptic. I will expand in my next letter.

L’chaim,

Daniel

____

Part 5: Politics From the Inside Out

Dear Doug,

Politics, at some point, necessarily entails a “we”: What is it we are to do? And how shall we go about this?

This “we” leads to a certain abstraction as the individual falls away, slips out of the equation. But “we” is always a group of individuals; “we” is not one but is many. And yet the tendency of this “we,” as with any categorical abstraction, is to erase the many, ignore the differences.

So much of what we think of as the political is premised on such abstractions — what is justice, what is the right economic system, what are the collective narratives, how will we rid our fossil fuel dependency.

My fear of such a tendency stems from two related effects. One is that any thinking that erases the individual tends toward violence, toward erasure of the difference that is you or I. The “I” has a difficult time fitting in the “we” and the “we” can be downright nasty in its response. I think of the Seinfeld episode (not to mention the Chinese Cultural Revolution) in which Kramer, marching in the AIDS walk, refuses to wear a ribbon and is pummeled.

And, two, thinking of the political as abstraction makes people believe that politics is elsewhere instead of right here in what he or she does and thinks day in and day out. And this is what matters — not what we do but what you and I and he and she do and think.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the self is a life unto itself, that it’s not created by the collective, by culture (whatever that is). Of course it is: the limits of my thought are defined by a collective discourse. So I am not suggesting that we just focus on the individual and ignore the structural and discursive issues. But I am suggesting that rather than beginning with the abstraction, beginning with “we,” we begin with I. I’m suggesting a kind of inductive politics.

Let’s think about it this way. There is a great mobilization around oil and the exhaustion of the world’s resources — all these people spending money and personal energy trying to rid our dependence on fossil fuels, looking for alternative sources, etc.

Meanwhile, the fuel of human existence is being extinguished right before our very eyes.  Americans are dying — or, better, they’re dead: we are zombies. We work 70-hour weeks and barely make enough to pay the debt on their house, car, 98-inch TV. We are, literally, an impotent society — we need a pill to f-ck.

But still some moron from Greenpeace wants me to give money to save some seal — which will mean I have to work more, further draining the resource that is me.

Our deductive politics keep us at the corporate level, thinking about things in these abstract, dehumanizing ways. But inductive politics, politics that begin with me, what I do every day, what I can do every day, the limits and possibilities of my time, my freedom to think and act and f-ck, then we get the seeds of a truly radical, transformative politics.

Capitalism demands so much of our time — all our time, in fact. We have become indentured servants to the Citis and Chases and Googles of the world.  And none of that will change as long as people think politics is over there, in Iraq or Washington or Wall Street.

If each person considers his or her life, what they are obliged to do just to survive day in and day out, then the shape and functioning of our political structures will emerge. They’ll begin to see what McLuhan calls the environment, the invisible conditions of life.

Being political is not knowing the issues and voting for some creep. Being political is demanding the time to lead a healthy, beautiful life. Being political is demanding basic dignity and civility. Being political is demanding the right, and the time, to enjoy this life.

This is politics from the inside out.

L’chaim,

Daniel

 ____

Part 6: A Politics of Experience, or Cassavetes vs. Ron Howard

Hello Doug,

I wrote to you last time about an inductive politics, a politics from the inside out.  I’d like to flesh that out, as it were, by talking about this very strange thing I will call “experience.” (I’ve been rereading Georges Bataille recently and in particular, “Inner Experience.”)

What’s so strange about experience is that, in many ways, it’s invisible. It’s what an individual lives through. It’s not what happens to someone because the same thing, more or less, can happen to different people. For instance, all of our parents die eventually. But to say that we all experience the death of our parents doesn’t say enough in that that experience will necessarily be different for each of us.

There is this radical particularity to experience: is that how this distinct body happens in the world. It is irreducible and at the same time multiple: I experience many things all at once but it is this particular configuration of multiplicity.

I want to say experience is interior but I don’t want that to mean it is “deep.” And if I say it’s private, I don’t want that privacy juxtaposed with what’s public. Which is to say, I don’t want to create a public/ private or inside/ outside dichotomy. What I do want is to reserve this special space, this special category, for what an individual lives through.

Experience ruptures. It tears at categories and cliché. It will never fit neatly into a bucket and it can never be known beforehand. The problem with Hollywood films is that they present experience as a common event — as a cliché. This is why I come back to Cassevetes again and again. In his films, people experience things in absolutely distinct, unique, and strange ways. This is as true of his viewers as it is of his characters.

Cassavetes doesn’t unite us in a common wave of good feeling or nostalgia the way Ron Howard does. Cassavetes gives us a vision, and an experience, of difference: we don’t walk out feeling elated and sharing a common experience. We walk out of the theater feeling as we feel, each of us distinct.

And here, in Cassavetes and Ron Howard, I see a fundamentally different politics. On the one hand, there’s Howard’s desire to create a grand American narrative: We all lived through the hopes, fears, and dreams of Apollo 11!  On the other, is Cassevetes, who honors experience over collective narrative, difference over sameness.

I see Cassavetes as a great politician, trying to change the way Americans live and interact with each other. And it’s not by isolating us through experience — because experience, while happening alone, does not isolate per se: it merely happens. No, Cassavetes gives us a different kind of politics: a common viewing of difference. It’s not every man for himself. Rather, it’s: every experience is valuable. Live through it!

I suppose my point is this: By focusing on enjoyment, I want to create such a politics of experience.

L’chaim,

Daniel

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I never cease to be amazed by the magic of words — these contrived scrawls, these guttural mutterings that somehow conjure, entice, explain, seduce, confound, convey, reveal. Well, I suppose sometimes I do cease to be amazed but that’s only because I’m not paying any attention, am distracted by the obnoxious din of my own blabbering brain.

One of my favorite philosophers of language is Maurice Merleau-Ponty (a melodious name I do enjoy saying — it’s somehow perverse and exquisitely so): “…language never says anything; it invents a series of gestures which between them present differences clear enough for the conduct of language to the degree that it repeats itself, recovers and affirms itself, and purveys to us the palpable flows and contours of a universe of meaning.”

I love that: “language never says anything.” To think that language is a vehicle that carries our ideas, our facts, our messages is not just to reduce language but to miss it all together. A word does not stand in for something, for a real thing that exists elsewhere. A word is real, too.

Take any word, say, dog. The word dog does not stand in for the idea of dog or even for the asshole dogs who bark incessantly in my backyard. The word dog, the idea of dog, every dog I’ve ever known, the smell of dog, my faint dog allergy, my cynophobia, the movie Cujo, chien, mut, wolf: all these terms, and more, form a network. They exist in various and complex relations with each other (these relationships can be considered tropes — but that’s another topic).

A word is a body — and a strange body at that. It’s visible, in some sense, but its visible components do not convey very much. It is invisible, as well, drenched in affect, memory, and meaning. But its invisible components would be nothing without its visible ones, its marks and sounds.

A word, then, is this incredible assemblage point that is also a condensation point. After all, words are so pithy. Melodious. Cloying. Flabbergast. This. Hi. Foment. Singe. Fecund. So much in so little, each an entire world (pace Lohren Green).

And I love the different shapes they make — they can flow so softly, so gently, then turn on a dime and pounce your face, hard and angular before becoming knotted clumsy stumble. Think of Nabokov, then Bukowski, then Garcia Marquez, then Celine, then Ashbery… all these constellations, all these possible configurations, all these ways of distributing emotion, mood, affect, meaning.

We reach for a word, says Merleau-Ponty, as we reach for an itch. Language is not a tool we use. It’s an element we prehend just as we prehend air and food. A word has a body, a density, a weight, an inclination. A word is a strange fluttering (or not) creature that houses an entire cosmos, suspended (or not) in the ether. When we declare or proclaim or inscribe, we enter its world. And then, in some sense, it speaks us.

But language, while insidiously coercive, is rarely so dictatorial. Words move with us, go with us. In fact, William Burroughs says they’re a virus and humans, their host. There is a creepy aspect to this but there is also something beautiful, a symbiosis, a giving and taking — even if it’s a relation rife with tension. We all know this tension — so-called writers all the more: we wrestle words and they wrestle back.

And then, sometimes, you find a beautiful rhythm with them — you reach, they reach back, they offer themselves to you and you offer yourself back, receptive to their fluttering, a mutual generosity, an intertwining of bodies human and linguistic. Oh, these are glorious moments, profoundly erotic, a making love — yes, love — with words, surfing the undulations of this strange body we call language.

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My favorite quote from Emerson, and one of my favorite quotes in general, is: “Our moods do not believe in each other.” What’s amazing about this is it undoes the sanctity, the unity, of the self: if my moods are absolute, then I am wholly different depending on said mood.

We all know this experience. We get a little depressed, or a lot depressed, and everything looks like a huge pile of sh-t. When we picture every possible path to the future, each leads to a pile of sh-t, or death, or both.  And there is no consoling that will deter us: we know that life is a pile of sh-t.  Other times, we feel like everything will turn up roses: we feel smart and powerful and sexy and it’s as if the world were our oyster there to be shucked and sucked.

Of course, there are any number of moods that are less extreme — confusion, anxiety, reasonableness, and so on.  But the point is: each feels as though it were right.  Even if one mood acknowledges that another mood exists, that other mood becomes, well, just a mood. And this present state becomes the truth, the way things really are.

Now, is there a mood of moods? A mood that knows that life is mooded? What might such a thing look like? And doesn’t it just beg the same epistemological dilemma:  Isn’t the mood of moods just another mood with no privileged access to the real way of things?

I want to say that Buddhism tries to establish such a mood of moods but the result is no mood fluctuation at all — to the enlightened Buddhist, all is a steady hum.  No manic highs, no manic lows: just a state of perpetual contentment.  Which, I have to say, sounds pretty good. Sometimes.  Sometimes it just sounds creepy and nihilistic, a kind of avoidance of the flux of life.

I had a roommate in college who decided that a diet of liquid acid, and little else, was a wise thing. After a few weeks, he became pronouncedly manic, convinced that he was the smartest, most gifted human being alive (and that the FBI was following him and bugging the walls). He was sure of it.  I mostly wanted to punch him in the face. Why? Well, because he was annoying but also because he refused to recognize that he was in a mood.  But of course there is also a genius to mania, a willingness to commit absolutely to a mood. And not just any mood but a manic mood (Buddhists commit to one mood — a subdued, even if enthralled, mood).

I reach for a mechanism that allows me to navigate the flux of moods: irony.  With irony, I can articulate the state I’m in while recognizing that whatever I’m saying is full of its own kind of sh-t. Irony doesn’t take any thing that seriously because it knows that everything is flux, everything gives way to change — so to be adamant is to be foolish, to be ironic is to be wise.  (I realize irony is often thought of as cold or nihilistic but it can also be warm, understanding, and profoundly resonant.)

When I was younger, I would commit — submit — to a mood more readily. I’d get carried away. And it was beautiful. These daze, I am less prone to get so enmeshed in one mood, this flux replaced by a more or less boring, more or less bourgeois, sense of propriety.  Even when I get lit on this or that, my mood is tempered: I know I’m just buzzed and that it, too, will pass. My irony prevails over my adamance.

Sometimes, this feels like wisdom.  Sometimes, it feels like weakness.  It depends on my mood.

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A conversation is different than a discussion. A discussion is everyone talking about something — “Jane Eyre” or the latest Spoon LP or whether balding men really ought to shave the whole thing or not.

But a conversation is a beast of another sort. A conversation is a relentless back and forth in ever different rhythms — one party holding the floor, followed by a brief interlude, only to surge forth again; then, later, a rapid pitter patter of banter, each urging the other one in a frenetic frenzy of excitement or understanding or revelation; and so it goes, shifting registers, rhythms, tones, and topics.

A conversation demands great generosity. On the one hand, it demands the generosity of listening. And perhaps not just of listening but of assuming that the other person is saying something of value, something worth listening to.

I will admit that most of the time, I am listening to other people — not friends, mind you, not persons vetted by experience — with a bit of hesitation, with imminent or silent judgment or assessment but in any case not with pure openness and generosity. I don’t assume they’ll say something interesting; on the contrary, I assume they’ll say something familiar, boring, cliched.

Now, I may be right and perhaps that is often the case. Still, a good conversation demands generosity, demands that each party assume the best of the other. (The beginnings of conversations — say, at a party — are tenuous affairs, each sniffing out the other for signs of value, signs of a good conversational partner. I tend to use a few different techniques to suss out whether this or that person will give me the conversational goods. Probably, I just come off — or I am — obnoxious and the other person can’t wait to flee.)

But the conversation demands another kind of generosity, too. It demands the generosity of your own lively intellect, your willingness not just to listen to this other person but to take what they give you and move it into new territory. It’s not just a matter of listening but of giving — and giving wholly of yourself.

A conversation is what Deleuze and Guattari might call a bloc of becoming: together, the conversationalists move each other and, in so doing, create something new, a wave of the world emerging through the magic of their mutual generosity. It’s as if the two — conversations are difficult enough between two people; add more and things get exponentially more complex — the two conversing become like a multiheaded beast — not fused but still sharing a common body: the body of the conversation.

A good conversation demands a certain strength — the strength to feel comfortable with someone else; the strength to remain in and of oneself even while being so intent on another; the strength to enter strange, new realms without getting lost. It demands that peculiar posture of poise, leaning neither too far in nor too far back but standing strong while always ready for what may come next.

It is erotic, yes. And musical. It is as physical as it is intellectual, even if seeming to involve only words (as if there such a thing as “only words”).

Oh, man, a good conversation is a rare and beautiful thing.

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“Passionate indifference” is a phrase I’ve been passionate about for a while now.  It came to me first after first watching Pulp Fiction.  Here is a film that is cold, that seems to enjoy a casual brutality.  We may  feel for John Travolta but he gets shot, as an aside, while taking a shit. Uma Thurman takes a syringe to the heart. “Flock of Seagulls” is shot mid conversation.

And yet the film itself is absolutely passionate — every scene brims not with pathos but with vim, with verve, with vigor. It has a certain indifference to the plight of this or that character and an indifference to our identification.  The film gives us something else: the passion of film making, the passion of the event, the passion of a humanity that is not mired in bathos but in the very flow of the world — or at least of the moving image.

The best of nature shows and nature commentators speak with passionate indifference. Nature, after all, is neither kind nor brutal: it just is.  There is such intense drama — the large cat taking down a gazelle, hungry polar bears bearing the burden of an infinite winter, flora fighting for survival. And yet nature is absolutely, mercilessly, indifferent.  We can hear this in the voice of the great nature documentaries we know so well thanks to PBS.

And we see it in the great new book by Matthew Deren, “A Forgotten Wilderness: Nature’s Hidden Relationships in West Central Idaho.” You can see this passionate indifference in the sub-title: the hidden relationships.  For this is what Deren finds: a world that brims with ever-shifting relationships between animals, weather, insects, flora, man.  There is no good or bad.

The ancient Native Americans, Deren tells us, came to the New World, found it over run with large beasts — mammoths and saber tooth tigers — and slaughtered them all in a matter of a thousand years or so. This, in turn, gave way to different environment where food was to be found in more elusive forms of deer and plants.  Which, in turn, gave way to a culture of humility and interconnectedness.

Now, this is a beautiful argument. And one we are tempted to judge, to read through a moral lens. But Deren doesn’t do that: to him, it — nature — and a nature that includes man — is simply, or not so simply, an ever shifting set of relationships.  These may not always be obvious unless you know how to look. His book teaches us to see everything — the berries and birds and beasts — with passionate indifference, with an unbounded love and respect but utterly free of moral judgement, of bathos, of cloying human sentimentality.

There is a certain coldness that is, in fact, sizzling hot.  It is cold to the insularity of humanity and its self-absorbed sense of self. This perspective grasps the bigger picture: man as one beast amidst the beasts, amidst the fray.  And as our gaze takes in these “hidden relationships” that teem, we experience a surge, a vitality, a passion — a passion that is indifferent to the bullshit and utterly alive to life.

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I love this phrase — it’s what I named my would-be think tank when I was 22: The Society of Individuals. Twenty years later and I still cling to, and seek to elucidate, what such a society might be.

In my last apartment here in San Francisco, I’d occasionally get a note slipped under my door, asking me to participate in the neighborhood group. I recoiled at such a prospect — partly for aesthetic reasons (I feared great tedium) and partly out of fear: I always imagine that I’m the one that will get run out of town by the barrio posse.

OK, you can call this paranoia. And no doubt it is. But it speaks to my greater issue with groups of any sort. Any time there is bonding around a common issue, it invites interrogation and condemnation for those who differ.

Take fans of a sport team. I, for one, like sports — at least some sports. But I’m not a fan of being a fan. It just seems strange to me: I want my team to win! But what makes it your team? And isn’t a good game better than your team winning?

I’ve learned the hard way that this is not a popular position. Which is to say, I’ve learned not to watch 49er games in a bar. Jesus! The violence of that community is palpable, seething, imminent. The night the Giants won the world series, I was sure I’d get my ass kicked for not giving the right high-5 to a drunkenly deranged stranger.

My point is this: I imagine a different kind of community, one that is not united in sameness but which agrees to enjoy difference. I like having a neighborhood; I lived in the same neighborhood for 20 years and enjoyed the company of barristas, bar keeps, shop owners, and locals. But what I enjoyed is not that we are all the same. What I enjoyed is how different everyone is, all the quirks and oddities, the tics and predilections.

A society of individuals is a communality built on difference. Now, that may seem oxymoronic but it’s not. It only seems that way because of the overwhelming prejudice for the sentimentality of agreement and unity. A society of individuals is a group of people who relish the fact that we are not the same, that we don’t always agree, that we are different.

Nietzsche says he only wants those who sit atop their own peak — not those who sit at his feet on the same mountain peak. This is how I imagine the society of individuals: each on his or her own peak, strong enough to bear the winds and solitude.

I only want to cavort with such people — those who hold forth with their idiosyncratic beliefs about life and love and goats and gin; those who spend weeks naked in the woods, building their own shelters and tracking mountain lions while covered in mule piss; those who make insane, beautiful films that emerge from the interaction with the camera, and who contemplate love at the same time; those who write poetical dictionaries and text books on atmospherics because it seems so, well, obvious; those who write avant normal pop songs in their basements at night, weaving together Led Zeppelin, The Cure, and Thelonious Monk. I want those who follow strange, uncharted paths and have no shame about it.

My politics is dedicated to creating such a society.

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Life in a city is permeated with peculiar, oft overlooked, intimacies with strangers. Take windows.  As you walk through the city, you may casually glance up and see someone on the phone, a father playing with his kid, a family eating dinner, everyone everywhere watching tv.  You might see someone wanking his willy but he’s probably doing that so you can see so that doesn’t really count.

But it’s not just windows.  This intimacy is everywhere, all the time.  You can smell your neighbors’ cooking, are privy to their parties, their taste in music, when they wake and when they sleep and when they go out.

In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec has a great thing on apartments: you’re eating your dinner and right on the other side of the wall is someone else’s bathroom. Or mere feet from where you sleep, a stranger is sleeping, as well, your two heads almost touching.  If you think about it too much, it will freak you out.

When we go to the bathroom at work, in restaurants and bars, in train stations and airports, we piss, shit, pretty ourselves, change clothes, groom our nose hairs as strangers come and go inches away.

In elevators, we spend time in an incredibly small space — with strangers and their smells and ticks!  Which is a little odd!

On streets and subways and buses, we are inundated with the private selves of strangers — those hangdog faces, those looks of exhaustion or interest or exuberance or malaise. Now think of all the conversations we hear all day every day about god knows what.

For the most part, we pass through these streets with one ear and one eye, if that. We have to let this teem pass us by, even if bits here and there ricochet into our consciousness.  I find it’s usually the hilarious rantings of the insane that penetrate the veil.  The mad don’t know the rules of space, of sound, and so their private worlds collide into ours with more vigor.  (I can still hear the old grey haired white dude, shirtless, ranting in the West Philly streets: “I’m gonna raise an army of lesbians and take over McDonalds!”)

Sometimes, you catch someone looking at you longer than they’re supposed to and with a bit more interest than is prescribed.  It’s always a poignant, if understated, moment when your eyes meet and the other person looks away. The speed of the encounter is everything — did they hold your gaze for a moment or did they look immediately away?

As a little boy living in Manhattan, my mother always told me not to make eye contact with strangers. Crazy things happen when strangers lock eyes; it can have the most powerful effect, tearing down protocol and inviting sudden intimacy: violence, sex, laughter, understanding.

When you think about all the lives that intersect us with surprising intimacy, it is overwhelming. It is an incredible skill we’ve all learned, this tuning in and out (mostly out), this ability to be ourselves within the impossible density of other people’s lives.

I used to do my laundry at this laundromat on the corner.  I’d sit outside on a bench as my clothes tumbled. A young woman — 20-something — lived in the apartment across the way. As I’d sit there, she’d saunter back and forth in less and less clothes until she was naked. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in the city, even if quite beautiful. But what was truly beautiful was when we’d see each other face to face, on the street or even in the laundromat, exchanging not even a glance but sharing this very strange kind of intimacy.

Sometimes, it’s distance that affords a certain kind of closeness.

From a one angle, it may seem sad as if we’re ignoring each other, turning a blind eye to humanity.  But it’s not sad. On the contrary, it’s amazing and beautiful: to be able to live amidst such a swarm of humanity, taking in snippets here and there, all without being swept away.

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