Originally written on 17 June 1996

I had a dream with my father in it. He was young. My age and he was very handsome. We seem to get along quite well. I seem to have also been travelling with another buddy who appeared to be like Nick Nolte. We were flying in a plane and it would switch back and forth to a bus.

I couldn’t ever get comfortable in the plane/bus and was constantly annoying this woman who seemed to be one of those annoying type of girls from my childhood. Nick and I decided to get off the bus/plane early before it arrived at LAX.

We got off at Venice beach because Nick thought I might enjoy the break from it all and go play badminton or volleyball but I had to get back to the bus/plane because of my carry-on luggage and stuff I had strewn about the cabin.

At about that time a shoe came floating down the street and Nick asked if it was one of mine and I ran after it, picked it up and found out that it was not mine but it was a size 13. This old man asked to see it and I asked him if it was his because he had asked me the same question.

He said it was not but just wanted to see it never the less. I knew the airport was just down the road and we could walk if we wanted to but I found a tractor trailer truck to drive so I turned around to find Nick and we headed for the airport.

While Nick went for my carry-on luggage I went to the trailer to sleep. That is when I noticed that I was in the trailer that was behind my brown Ford truck and the engine was running and I was parked in a loading zone at the airport.

I was worried about being towed so I moved it to special parking for trucks with trailers that carried planes. Even though my truck was hauling a boat I parked there anyway. It was about this time that I noticed I was at my dads apartment because he lived just down the street from the airport. We were watching videos of some sort and I just look at him and noticed how young and healthy he was.

Today my son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.

My earliest memory is undefined as such. There is no one memory that sticks out from the rest. To me they are the pictures in the box in the attic of my relative’s houses. I look at them and understand what they are of and who is in the pictures. I don’t remember the time for the time itself.

I have always been by myself. Before my father and mother got a divorce they were always around. After the divorce my mother was around more than my father. That didn’t change the fact that I was always by myself.

The memories before the divorce are very few. The memories after are more concrete. I was nine at the time and in my own world. Puberty didn’t set in until very late and all the worry that goes with it never was my problems. I was in my own different world.

So when Proust remembers in Swann’s Way these memories to the nth detail I have to only believe him for I cannot relate to any of his emotions.

I remember images and places very vaguely. My nostalgia for certain places in time makes me now wish I had acted differently.

For instance, when I was thirteen, without a sign of pubic hair or cracking of the voice, I spent a hot summer on my grandfather’s dairy farm in southern Missouri. I have read many descriptions of what hot summers in the Midwest is supposed to entail for a young boy of such age as thirteen. I remember meeting the kids of the area and going exploring with them in the woods of the northern Ozarks. If I remember correctly there were about two boys, me making a third, and four girls. They were a collection of brothers, sisters and cousins. Some of them were my age and a few of them were either older or younger. I remember running around, exploring and going swimming with them. I don’t remember how I related to them or they to me. I just remember them being there.

Looking back this would have been a great time for me to become aware of my innocence and perhaps lose it. But I just kept swimming and running. To this date I do not know when it was that I lost my innocence. Am I still innocent? I can’t be. There must have been a time.

Throughout my growing up there has never been one person with whom I’ve emulated. When I find someone I respect I try and figure out what it is about that person that makes me respect them. I will look a this new found virtue and see if there is a way I can add this to my life. If there is I will do so. Likewise but vice versa will I do so if I meet someone with whom I cannot respect? I’ll look for that one aspect of them that makes me detest them so and then look to see if that is in my life and then remove it or change it. I do hope this makes sense.

I don’t remember his name but he was a few years older than me. He worked in this office that I was temping for. We would chat very socially at times and at times he would point out idiosyncrasies in my speech patterns. I enjoyed listening to him speak that I respected his awareness of my speech that I took to heart what he said and made changes in my speech patterns. To this day when I am conscious of my speaking I remember him.

I was only at the office for about four weeks. I have never seen him since. It is people like these that influence my life.

These days I’m always in the present rarely looking back, let alone looking forward, however for me that is a different story.

Do you know the quote about knowing history so you don’t repeat it? Well I agree with knowing of the past and remembering the past, yet repetition is not always so bad a thing. After all that’s what revolutions are all about.

This article was originally written in October 1997. I really liked it and always wanted to publish it. Ta-da!

Utopias have always been a favourite escape of mine. Whether it is in the future or in the past, from early childhood I have continually searched for a better world to live. Is this escapism? I have reservations about the negative meaning that the word “escapism” has in language. For a prisoner, to escape has always been a good thing and an individual escape can be a first necessary step toward a collective escape. In a sense this is Utopia.

The idea that the utopian element can be gone from contemporary anticipation is of mixed parties. Some may say that Utopia has no place in current political thought and theory, and there are others that would say Utopia belongs only within socialistic paradigms. I am of a different party: I believe the tool of Utopia is vital towards understanding and educating ourselves. I find its specific uses as a literary instrument perplexing and necessary; yet, there exists a trap that I believe many people fall into when reading utopic literature: they read it as a literally specific blueprint of a proposed societal structure and jump to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be feasible. “Prose is bad when people stop to look at it” (Lawrence 1940). When someone reads of a Utopia there seems to be some sense of them that believes they can take the Utopia with them as they close the book. While reading they may be taking part of the spirit of Utopia and even believe in it. But when they close the book and the Utopia doesn’t leave with them, they become disgruntled and disillusioned.

What writers write is either part of, or the whole of the writer; but there is another part that is not theirs. It belongs to the collective of their society. It is with the anonymous work of the milieu that spurs literature. No one is innocent. All we do and say is, and has, an underlying motive. To be aware of these motives is the essential element in beginning to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are — that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.

“Society today demands that the writer raise his voice if he wants to be heard, propose ideas that will have impact on the public, push all his instinctive reactions to extremes. But even the most sensational and explosive statements pass over the heads of readers. All is as nothing, like the sound of the wind. Any comment appears no more than a shake of the head, as at a naughty boy, everyone knows that words are only words, and produce no friction with the world around us: they involve no danger either for the reader or the writer. In the ocean of words, printed or broadcast, the words of the poet or writer are swallowed up” (Calvino 96).

Utopia gives a voice to those aware that freedom implies a society on the move, in which a lot of things are changing (for better or worse;) in this case, too, what is in question is the relationship between the message of Utopia and society, or, between the message and the possible creation of a society to receive it. Utopia is one of society’s instruments of self-awareness —not the only one, but nonetheless an essential instrument, because its origins are connected with the origins of various types of human emotions.

“I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world” (Havel 22).

When in the course of human events there comes a point where the sacrifices of one outweigh that of another, there is injustice on a grand scale. Suffering is equal to despair and where there is despair there is hope. Hope is a human condition that leads to ambition The challenge is take these hopes and desires and transform them into vehicles that can transcend the blockades of our limits. When the blockades are structural constructs of political factions the soul can lose hope quickly. In writing his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Walter Benjamin revealed the purpose of hope: “It is for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us” (Quoted in Bronner 131).

Utopia is often cited as an impractical and useless way of thinking, however Utopia in the past has been favoured rather than the more practical forces that failed before them. The Reformation and the end of the French Revolutionary War are two examples of times past when Utopia sat upon fertile ground (Calvino 246). But what has become of Utopia now? Calvino believes that, “Utopia defies time by setting itself up in a no-place, rejecting relationships with the ‘other’ world…” (Calvino 247) This may be the case however it does not defy change or redefinition.

Murray Bookchin shouts out in The Ecology of Freedom, “The Republic is not a Utopia.” He is referring to Plato’s Republic. He believes that it does not fit with what his view of Utopia is: “a vision of a communist society, or in any sense of the term a democracy.” (Bookchin 1991) Had the word and concept of Utopia been coined before Sir Tomas Moore and during Socrates existence existed, I’m sure as well that Plato, through the tongue of Socrates, would stress that his society was indeed an ideal societal structure, yet not utopic. In order for this idea to stand, Utopia must be understood as a rational approach to formulating visions of understanding our potentiality. Rational versus realistic introduces the question, “What is realistic and what is Utopian?” (Bookchin 1991) When one introduces their ideals on society, their individualistic and/or altruistic ideals, and lays them down with the title Utopia, it is assumed their idealism is rationalistic.

The society of Plato’s republic falls into three distinct divisions: statesman, general civilian and the executive force. These are the natural divisions found in any society, generally. It is hierarchical and dominating. Without these three qualities, according to Bookchin, there can be no order.

“I love order. It’s my dream. a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust…I’m doing my best to create a little order” (Clov in Beckett 57).

What the world is like and what we would prefer the world to be like has a very careful line in between. The ideals of past leaders and their dreams have consistently gone against the ideals of the collectives. For instance, Genghis Khan wanted his empire all for the sake of his people. This was his interest and turned into his necessity. His ideal society, his Utopia could not have attained the potential that it did without this logic.

“Just as King Midas transformed everything he touched into gold, so consciousness is itself determined to transform into the imaginary everything it gets hold of: hence the fatal nature of the dream…the odyssey of consciousness dedicated by itself, and in spite of itself, to build only an unreal world” (Sartre 1972).

Italo Calvino has some beliefs of the politically right and wrong uses of literature. Using his argument and Utopia being a sub-product of literature, I see the same relation with the use of Utopia; specifically that there are two wrong ways of a possible political use for Utopia. The first is to claim that Utopia should voice a truth already possessed by politics; to believe that the sum of political values is the primary thing, to which Utopia must simply adapt itself. This opinion implies a notion of Utopia as pretentious and redundant, but it also implies a notion of politics as fixed and self-confident: an idea that would be disastrous. This would lead to bad Utopia and bad politics.

The other mistaken way is to see Utopia as an assortment of eternal human feelings, as the truth of a human language that politics tends to overlook, and that therefore has to be brought up from time to time. This concept leaves more room for Utopia, but in practice it assigns it the task of confirming what is already known, or maybe of provoking in a basic way, by means of the youthful pleasures of freshness and spontaneity. Behind this way of thinking is the notion of a set of established values that Utopia is responsible for preserving, a classical and permanent idea of Utopia as the library of a given truth. If it agrees to take on the role, Utopia confines itself to a function of consolation, preservation, and regression — a function that could do more harm than good.

The ultimate ethical goal of human life is utopia, that is, a world in which meaning and life are once more indivisible, in which man and the world are at one. (Jameson 173.)

Just as there are two wrong political uses, there are also two right ones.

Utopia is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude. I mean aspects, situations, and languages both of the outer and of the inner world, the tendencies repressed both in individuals and in society. “Utopia is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of the language of politics; it is like an eye that can see beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics. Simply because of the solitary individualism of his work, the writer may happen to explore areas that no one has explored before, within himself or outside, and to make discoveries that sooner or later turn out to be vital areas of collective awareness.” (Calvino 246)

This is still a very indirect use for Utopia. The writer follows his own road and chance or social and psychological factors lead him to discover something that may become important for political and social action as well. It is the responsibility of the socio-political observer not to leave anything to chance and to apply his own method to the business of Utopia in such a way as not to allow anything to escape him.

Now indeed that nostalgic vision of some golden age in which an epic wholeness was still possible gives place to a view of history which sees men as already implicitly reconciled to the world around them, in the sense in which that world is itself necessarily the result of human labour and human action. (Jameson 190)

Utopia remains. Only, with Benjamin, it is a potential yet a physically unattainable condition ripped from any connection with progress. And that is because progress does not simply extend into the future, but depends upon the manner in which the past is appropriated. I offer Benjamin’s Angel Analogy as a metaphor:

“Shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating . . . His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin 258).

By this example, history and the continual appearance of barbarianism is to blame for the regression of society. Shouldn’t this give Utopia a solid foundation of validity? It is only from the past and the presence of today that allows for Utopia to be used.

Every element of the past becomes open to redemption on the Day of Judgement. “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgement day.” (Benjamin 254)

A theological notion of remembrance contests the perversion of history by totalitarianism. It becomes the only way to deal with that “single catastrophe” on which one gulag after another “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” (Benjamin 257)

Neither transforming the political judgement into one of utopian possibility merely an evasion, nor is Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image sufficient; indeed, if reference to the struggle is insufficient for evaluating the techniques employed in the work, the use of those same techniques will not depend upon a particular political insight into social reality.

“Suicide is the achievement of modernity in the field of passions.”

Walter Benjamin

WORKS CITED

“A standard to which I may look and by which I may measure actions.”

Plato

• Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1985.
• Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. New York: Black Rose Books, 1991
• Bronner, Stephen Eric. Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
• Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Syracuse University Press: Syracuse NY, 1996.
• Calvino, Italo. The Uses Of Literature: Essays. Translated by Patrick Creagh. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
• Havel, Václav. “From a New Year’s Day Speech.” New York Review of Books, February 15 1990:
• Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1971.
• Lawrence, T E. Men in Print: Essays in Literary Criticism. Golden Cockerel Press, 1940.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination, Section IV. New York: Citadel Press, 1972.

I’m quite content that now there is a going to be a BarCamp in Croatia. The have their own site, but there is also the wiki version. It’s been over a year since my departure, so I regret that I’ll be unable to attend. I wish them well.

I brought an empty litre plastic bottle past the great TSA today, filled it up at the water fountain on the other side, and thus didn’t have to overpay for a basic need, transport of water.

That’d be the good news, because the bad news was encountering another blocked off area in an airport without access to fried food, or any good qualifying meal of empty carbohydrates that’ll allow me to sleep on a plane.

Ms Jen wrote that when travelling, one is set apart from home or your destination, it is a passage of sorts. When I travel, I experience this moment in time similarly, with a growing trepidation that each passage, journey, is that destination and the two points come together with the real purpose of helping me find what is really important to me.

You show up in a local coffee shoppe, or any place of business, and you will be greeted by the most jaded clerk ever. Irregardless of which shoppe, it’s sometimes perfunctory for normal folks to make weird out-of-place comments about inane arbitrary moments in time. This doesn’t happen in big cities. Folks there, normal or other, don’t have time to say weird things even if they do have time. The small towns that litter everywhere between the metropolises are ripe with folks who rise up to the common task of throwing witticisms to complete strangers, full of kind gentry who will smile and acknowledge ones vain attempts at humour or sardonic commentary. Santa Cruz has seen too much of that. Keep Santa Cruz Weird? Not right now. Don’t get me wrong. The town is great, just not weird.

It’d be nice to be in Las Vegas this weekend for Interbike, however I wait and pray that Dirt Rag will do a good job of covering the deal. What would one do if they were there anyway?

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant, for they, too, have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be, and whatever labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keeps peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

Found in Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore: dated 1692