Survival

A writing assignment

We are all wondering about survival. Our survival is in question. If I find my survival in question I find out I care about surviving, and then when I am surviving again – due to how I have gone about caring about surviving (or due to how I have cared to survive), if I have managed survival to the extent that it is no longer front of mind, then I find I don’t care about surviving again. Other times, when survival pounds on the door, the only relief is dancing. I start to move, and then suddenly a remix with Neil Young’s voice: I’ve been to a desert on a horse with no name. The CYRIL remix. “In the desert. In the desert.” We can’t solve being human, I think, we’re in a death dance. Like Frankenstein, whose story I recently reread with 70 students, is trying to think about this death dance, of science and love. The book itself a patchwork of dead authors.

Philosophy says we become aware of the tool as an object when it breaks. The bill of rights is in tatters, and that is a civics lesson. If I am surviving, I don’t need to care about surviving, I survive. But once my survival is threatened again, I begin to care again about surviving and I try to figure it out again – how to survive. Survive financially, survive emotionally, survive relationally. Sometimes imagining not surviving is a way to survive, sometimes when it’s hard to survive, giving up on surviving becomes a paradoxical way to survive. When everyone’s survival is threatened then everyone might begin to recognize interdependency.

Surviving is a constant topic for everyone. We’ve learned that collective survival is on the same map as individual survival. But sometimes we are so busy defending our own burrow, we forget that our burrow is in another burrow, in a world of branching forms.

Then we become miniature security-statists like Kafka’s creature in The Burrow. Or we might become nihilists, like the current federal government, or a Dostoyevsky character. I read Dostoyevsky voraciously as a teen, as if in a black out, the way one eats after a long fast. During my Dostoyevsky seizure, around age fifteen I worked in a restaurant, shucking oysters, preparing dessert plates, but mostly making something I ate constantly called pizza bread, a thickhead inducing combination of thick pizza and thick bread and selling it out of a small window.

I read The Idiot on my lunch break. Some of my coworkers saw the book and took to calling me the idiot, as if I was reading a manual on how to be myself, and I was.

There is an unwilled element of existence and thought. And some things return to nonexistence after taking form, leaving no trace, like the sound of music, with which the hills are alive, but unlike the body, which takes a long time to decay, being decadent. What wills? Who decides? When I was a teenager, I ran off from San Francisco to New York for a while, lived with my godparents on 86^th and Broadway, and wandered around. I made a few friends who were adults, in the sense that they had identities formed around well-honed disciplines and long-term jobs, a jazz musician, a software coder, a photographer, and an academic who taught philosophy, while I was 17, just completely adrift. It never occurred to me that the reason they were all so much more self-possessed than me, confident, well dressed, decisive, was because they were decades older. Sometimes I felt quite pathetic in comparison to them, but I liked hanging out with them, and I got to see, talk about, and do things I wouldn’t have gotten to see, talk about, and do otherwise.

When I was with the philosopher, I especially felt that I was in the presence of someone special, someone superior, though physically she also seemed almost to fade into nothing. She had a distinctness about her manner, while her face and form were vague. But it was her way of speaking, her clipped manner. All her studies of old European philosophy had given her the aura of someone from another time. She had continued to read and teach the old masters rather than moving along and updating her dossier with some contemporary theory.

She found value in continuing with the dead greats, though it made conversation challenging, and not just for me who couldn’t have been expected to follow. Her references were as foreign even to people her age as if she was speaking another language. Maybe she didn’t feel that way around other philosophers, but for those of us who were not professional philosophers, we had a kind of understanding with each other concerning our collective non-understanding of her. Not necessarily of the ideas she cared about and studied but the way those ideas, or her commitment to them, combined with her characteristics.

But I admired her. She had a decidedness about her. She had a decided sense of humor, for example, as if she had chosen it. This chosen sense of humor of hers was part of what made her hard to understand. But it seemed like it was OK if others didn’t understand her. She had enough self-understanding and self-knowing that others’ lack of understanding didn’t unsettle her. Or she may simply have not noticed.

Here is your essay assignment: what would Walter Benjamin write about the now pervasive automata.