Some thoughts that came to me as I worked on my new performance piece, THE THINKING OF THE INFATUATED ONE, this afternoon. Seven years ago, come this November, my life changed because of an act of betrayal so strongly rooted in cruelty and disrespect that I couldnt process it. I havent recovered from That Day but I am finally coming to terms with it. I am finally beginning to appreciate the lessons I was taught That Day. It revealed things to me about the connections between the non-profit system and global finance capital. It helped me emotionally understand why so many Americans turn a blind eye to American Imperialism and economic exploitation. It helped me understand why fascism was still a valid political choice for so many in this world. Lots of shitty things have happened in the past seven years and had That Day not happened I would have been able to deal with them better. That Day people hurt not only me but the lives of all the people I would touch for the next seven years. Ideologically, this was perhaps their unconscious goal. I do not mean they knew this, my friends somehow convinced themselves they were being rational, pragmatic, realistic, however they were simply being reactionary. They were fulfilling their place as guardians of the bourgeois order. As Marx would say of that day, they knew not what they were doing but they did it all the same. The goal of that day was to erase me. The goal was to push me into oblivion. My crime was that I would not toe the bourgeois line that the emotional comfort of the economically entitled has more value than the material existence of the working class. I had made a rich white person consider her entitlement. I had critiqued her racism and her elitism. She was forced to think about her entitlement and how it related to her behavior. That was my crime. I survived That Day. I am still here. I was able to recover and at least partially put my life back together. I have even be able to maintain relationships with some of the people who participated in betraying me. I have been able to forgive the individual actions of people but I have not compromised my belief that the working classes deserve respect. If I had it to do all over again I would still be loyal to the working classes. I have learned that bourgeois morality is an oxymoron. Certainly, people from the bourgeois class can behave ethically as individuals but as a class they will always gravitate towards cruelty, injustice and exploitation. Even our close friends will betray us. That is the role of our class. That is why our class must be destroyed. My solidarity remains with the subaltern, the oppressed, the occupied, and the exploited. No bourgeois friendship can replace that bond. THE THINKING OF THE INFATUATED ONE is one way of processing That Day. Of taking control of it and of moving forward. I didnt realize this until I began to more deeply explore the core text Thomas Manns DEATH IN VENICE and Luchino Viscontis film adaptation of that novella. This is going to be a very challenging project to work on. https://youtube/watch?v=1e2_MvwLTI8
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 22:04:32 +0000
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