Preferring Not To

Reading through Saul Bellow's letters this morning, I came across one he wrote to Lionel Trilling in 1953, one of the era's foremost literary critics whom Bellow credits for some of the success of his famed Augie March.

Bellow cites a passage from Emerson's lecture (1842), "The Transcendentalist." What struck me is how clearly it speaks to a persistent attitude in our time, epitomized in the very marrow of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.

'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.'

'We have none.'

'What will you do, then?' cries the world.

'We will wait.'

'How long?'

'Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.'

'But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.'

'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_, (as you call it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command. If no call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie. In other places, other men have encountered sharp trials, and have behaved themselves well. The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite Counsels?'

Like the stoical and at times pained solitary Transcendentalist in Emerson's lecture, the OWS movement refuses to participate in a morally and democratically bankrupt political system. By refusing to translate its message into the popularly coherent corporatist language of two-party politics, the corporate media and the corporately benumbed society of its peers, it refuses to play the game according to the rules. It refuses to play the game at all. There are no touchdowns and glory for the protesters; the game was not designed for them, merely the menial duties of managing the upkeep of the field.

Henry Miller recognized "the game" long before he made splits with NYC, repositioning himself in the scummy, aesthetically mad and artistically alive Parisian Bohemia of the first half of the last century. His daily participation in the life of inequitable labor and economic servitude moved on his soul like gangrene a bloodless limb. He said enough, fini, and he left. He would play no more.

Just before Miller's arrival the Dadaists made a full frontal assault on classical definitions of great art. Their contention: If one mark of high civilization is the artwork it produces, than it would be dishonest to produce art that appears highly civilized. The inexplicable obscenity of WWI transformed all of Europe into something of less moral vision than "R. Mutt's" (i.e. Duchamp's) widely lambasted "Fountain." Like Miller, the Dadaists said, you guessed it, FUCK YOU.

Miller and the ideas that informed Dadaism are simply two examples of "just saying no," though it doesn't end there. The Beats displayed in their lifestyle and output something of this nature, too. Of course, we trace it also to Emerson's time, the era of Melville's Bartleby "preferring not to" engage in the bureaucratic, soul-killing swill of his office job.  Thoreau, whose notions on the efficacy and political imperative of civil disobedience informed 20^th century giants like A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr, is also a part of this tradition. Of course, in that he wasn't a pacifist, Thoreau goes a step further than the non-violent civil-disobedience of King and Gandhi, as evidenced by his support of the uprising at Harper's Ferry led by the abolitionist John Brown in 1859.  

Returning to Emerson, how his words and ideas resonate today, providing, for those interested or with the privilege of education to look, a grounded historical lineage: "Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me … If I cannot work, at least I need not lie."  Isn't that what OWS is all about, speaking truth to power in the as-of-yet uncorrupted language of revolt? Like the ghost armies of the restless dead summoned by Aragorn to combat his enemies in The Lord of the Rings, the OWS would be wise to summon their own armies of the past in order to secure the legitimacy of the present and the high enlistment needed in the armies of the future.  

Again from "The Transcendentalist:" "If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I will not molest myself for you. I do not wish to be profaned."