I found my writings.
I'm putting together a screed against modernity. You see, I hate current events and current politics and the serious effluvia that we consume on a daily basis to maintain our standing in our semiotic meritocracy. It reduces us to presentism. It flattens history and scientific discovery. The proof of it is how valuable, yet worthless are the presumptions behind the Green Movement - basically that we can control the weather and that there is virtue (and economic growth) in the attempt. Ironic that scientific discovery is natural philosophy and that greenism is antisocial as well as anti-nature. But more on that later. My point is that I was looking for a poem that I wrote to describe my own documented feelings of anomie, trapped in a modern pod, and I finally found it.
Along with a half finished novel, 6 dozen other poems, writings from The Well, rap lyrics, standup comedy routines, socratic trialog, and free-associative verse. It's a bit much to take. As it stands, Cobb has over 7500 entries. I've burned at least 12,000 hours around this blog. Finding my writing reminds me that I was doing the same thing during my 30s and late 20s as well. And I knew so much less. I stand in awe of my longing, of my desperate need to make sense of everything that passed through my head. And so I have volumes and volumes of observations, rationalizations & articulations. It all makes sense to me, but I pity the fool who must spelunk it should I find my place in history of English literature. It makes sense to me because I know now what must be, in this great opus, minimized, emphasized, ignored, expanded or taken as sarcasm. I only hope my writing gets better as time goes on.
A liberal intellect is the only intellect I was able to know. That is because it is that great liberal hand that lifts the modern man from the dust of peasantry and gives him a pod-place in our expansive meritocracy. There is implied a pledge of allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the non-God of the humanitarian ways of equality
and to the regimes under which they are administered
one people, disarmed and loving, multicultural
with standing and decency for all
The liberal intellect owned all intelligence so far as I could imagine. So what I discovered in all of my discovery was yet another way to underline its premises. And my every fear, shame and failure bolstered the liberal narrative. If I was unhappy it was because I lived in a world polluted by diversion from the pod-place of my citizenship. It was them, the non-believers in the humanitarian ways of equality, that poisoned my environment.
For me it was racialized, culturalized, economically specified. 'They' were fouling the box. So everything I wrote (and why should a computer programmer be bothered with writing anything other than code for machines) reinforced that worldview. I wanted to get smarter and figure a way out, but I kept looking for liberation in all the wrong theologies.
It wasn't until I was self-employed, taking a day off because I felt like it, wearing a suit and tie, walking around downtown Atlanta with a hefty five figures of cash in the bank that I realized I was becoming something else. I could engage in business with anyone I wanted to. A lightbulb flashed. It was a different kind of freedom than I had ever known or expected. And suddenly I knew something was up. I never wrote the same kind of poetry again. I was a married father of three. There would be no dreams of poetic stardom for me. I lived in the South and I bought flannel shirts. The last book of that old progressive sort I purchased was 'Pushed Back to Strength'. I bought it at the same time I bought 'We Are Overcome'. And I couldn't eat it any longer. No more of the narrative. That was 1996.
Next for me was the pursuit of money and career - and during all that time I suppressed all the urges to show off my verbal acuity except for the ends of selling software. And so I did for the next five years. And then there was the custody battle and the tax fight and then the job loss and 9/11. And I suffered and thought about death and finally climbed back to a reasonable perch in 2002, or thereabouts, when I finally came to epiphany. It took six years of hustling until I got back to five figures of cash and then I got fired in Houston while reading Koba The Dread and experiencing the meltdown of Enron. The other shoe fell. I realized that the capitalist was vulnerable - that risk was our business in a world of peasants and commies who wanted guarantees. I realized that trust was our currency in a world of libertine cynics who only knew the discomfort of their pod-place - the same kind of clever ass clown poet I had been back when making 50K and having a two-bedroom flat in Brooklyn was all any single bohemian could expect or desire.
In my writings of 1992. Before family. Before independence. I wrote an essay that I could never finish or publish called 'White Flight Friday'. It was about, essentially, the ineffable nature of watching outsiders react to the world that became Los Angeles during the riots. It was about my attempt to play my part and marching in the streets of New York City with William Kunstler. It was about realizing finally that whole thing about 'voice' and the ability to communicate something about community was practically impossible. All that and I couldn't get it to say what I wanted, and it was 'too long' and so nobody would publish it. That was back in the days when we all wanted Spike Lee to tell it like it is, but he didn't quite answer all the questions and if he did the studios would manipulate his box-office figures, or so went the conspiracy theories.
Yeah. I found all of those writings. And in them I see that which was me, and that which was trying to be intellectual but couldn't be because I had not yet had my fill of the rhetoric. I hadn't disproven it myself. I had faith in certain human powers - powers of dissent and complaint. Powers of intellectual insurgency. And I kept wondering why it took so long for me to explain my position. Well, that's because I was trying to deal with the whole truth. The whole truth doesn't fit into the narrative. I kept reading The Nation and realizing I kept reading the same four or five dudes. I kept reading the Village Voice and realizing that Greg Tate and Lisa Jones weren't going to get to be editors. I started to sense the dimensions of the industry and the word 'cultural production' became part of my vocabulary. I went with it for a short time and then I realized who the producers were. And Umberto Eco was the smartest kid on the block and I finally realized that Foucault's Pendulum wasn't so fictional as it seemed.
That's when I stopped using my own name. I stopped using capital letters. I stopped hoping to get into the New Yorker. I stopped pretending that hiphop was more than it was. I started reading James Baldwin so I could get love in my head and venom out of my blood. Cultural production was just another hustle with little patience for the whole truth. Now six years out of college I realized what the BA students were doing - they were learning the rules of that hustle.
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Today's strange realization is that all of my desire to be a serious and important writer is challenged by the fact that it is my avocation and not my vocation. I write very much like the first essayists. It is not a profession, I don't need the money for doing it. It makes me more truthful in some ways, and more lackadaisical in others. Beyond my own peace of mind, I can't really suggest what all of these thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of words mean on their own. It's all just effort. What it accomplishes is a puzzle I have no editors or researchers to help me sort out. I just know what creative engine I have and what I blurt is writing, and what you are doing is reading it and hearing my unique style and tenor.
I will never put the entirety of my writing into context. I just put it out there. I'm a writer.
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