A world of Bartlebys: some words about corporatization, pylons, detritus, hot gusts, via considerations of Herman Melville, Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent, and the recordings of Mississippi John Hurt

Tuesday 7/8/26

The passive recalcitrance of Bartleby in Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," is like a pit of nullity over which the narrator hangs. The narrator may be the main character of the tale, which seems an apt word to me. "Tale" suggests something both parabolic and realistic. Those rare people of kindness--which is active and outwards--in today's world face a greater risk, a harder life, and less succor, for Bartelby is legion, not an isolated example.

Viewing recommendation: Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977). Watch it in the morning before work to guarantee some extra spring in your step later on. This is a joke. But you should see it. Shepitko said she had to make this film, as if she had no choice were she to remain alive, which she actually didn't for that much longer. She intended it to reveal some portion of the very meaning of life. Imagine trying to do that with a work now in this world of generalized corporate plasticity?

The corporate world is more opposed to originality and critical thinking and freedom of imagination than the Communist Soviet Union. The corporate world is everything now, including the non-corporate world. Everyone has become mentally, emotionally, personally, and spiritually corporatized. We see it in the hatred of those who are smarter than us. We see it in the only people and things we'll back and support and "consume." We see it in the hatred of greatness. We see it in the privileging of blandness and mediocrity.

Corporate doesn't mean corporation any longer. It's a way of thinking, a way of being--that is, a way of not thinking, a way of not being. The leftist indie press can be as corporate as the most corporate of corporations. It's in the lack of vision, the shunning of anything new. The thralldom to mush-mouthed speak. Saying what's said because it's what's said. Doing what is done because it's how it's been done.

Musical recommendation: Mississippi John Hurt's 1963 version of the Carter Family's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" for the Library of Congress. Hurt takes a recitative-like approach to the song. As with Gene Vincent at times ("Over the Rainbow"), he's both singing and speaking. The vocals are remarkably close. You can feel the breath against your ear. Such a warm sound, like the sound of the Grateful Dead's 2/14/70 Fillmore East show is warm, even if the subject is cold death.

I began listening to Hurt in college. Specifically, his 1928 sessions. They were a marked contrast to the works of Charley Patton and Son House, and also Skip James and Robert Johnson (in different manners). The carefree melodic lilt as Hurt intoned "Some of these mornings I'm gonna wake up boozy, gonna grab my gun, gonna kill old Suzy"--which he recorded on Valentine's Day--as he staked a claim to his privacy no matter what he was doing was unique.

This reaching out--a perpetual broadening--was basic to me. Here was outstanding music. I'd discovered it because I'd gone looking. No one I knew, certainly, told me to listen to it. No one I knew would have ever heard of it. It wasn't "trending." The internet basically didn't exist. Wasn't anything I came across on Reddit. It wasn't hard to learn about or locate. If one thought, wanted to, mad the point of doing so.

This was simply what I'd always done. I found good things. Be they in literature, film, music. Anywhere. Why wouldn't you if you could? And anyone could. What? You're just going to watch, read, listen to the same few basic pieces of pablum? Why would you do that if you don't have to? But it's what just about everyone else does, if they even do that.

I immersed myself in them. They became part of my life. I learned everything about them. It was very doable. Things weren't instantly in reach just by typing some words into a computer. There was some leg work. I didn't miss out on such and such because I was busy doing these things. It was, to me, just how you were supposed to be. Something natural.

And here we have a world in which people know nothing about anything. When so much is right there at the tips of their fingers. Accessible as you ride on the subway from Park Street to Harvard. Or you could look up and be present in the world. You can see so much about life on a random subway ride just by using your eyes and ears and your brain and being present. But we learn nothing.

That person on the subway is never not looking at their phone. Next time you're on public transportation, look up and look around. You'll be the only person whose head isn't down staring at a handheld device. This person is actively wrecking their brain. They're watching some fourteen-second video of someone shitting themselves, then something similar. You're lucky if they're doing it while wearing headphones, but often they care so little about people that they're not. You can almost guarantee that not one of those people in your subway car is doing anything to enrich their minds or lives with what they're looking at.

Then we weaponize our ignorance. We try and make of it a virtue, which is easy enough to do, because you have a million people who are this way, dictating the norms and rules of society, by their plurality, for every one person who isn't. Ignorance then comes to rule us and to help us in being ruled without us having the perspicacity to know that we are, which gets the overlords who manipulate us constantly, without us knowing it, and with us playing along, exactly what they want. Which is also very corporate.

Bartelby "quietly quits" his job but with a wrinkle impermissible to the accepted methodology of quiet quitting--he says (after a fashion) what he doesn't wish to do, rather than finding a soundless way to not do what he doesn't wish to do. He, at least, communicates something truthful, which is more than most of us do. But he hasn't just quietly quit at work. Not nearly. He's quietly quit life.

What do you think Bartleby's quality of mental, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life is? His life within himself? He's an object of passivity save in his one expressed line of what passes for his agency. He doesn't act but is acted upon. He's a pylon in the road. Not a moving vehicle. His inactivity provides, though. He isn't cast out. He's carried, "no student left behind" style. You can be illiterate in today's school system and you won't stay back. What? We're going to hold just about everyone back? Do you know how few ninth graders, for instance, read at a ninth grade level? They read at a second grade level.

Do you know what reading at a second grade level looks like? You couldn't read and comprehend any of this entry. You couldn't read anything this long (it's a ten-minute read). You couldn't physically do it, just like you couldn't physically run a mile in five minutes. You wouldn't be able to sit still in one place long enough to do it if you even had the requisite brain power. You're usually just trying to sound out the words or read the words for what they are as words, not for comprehending.

Do you understand the difference? I don't speak German. It's like me trying to read German. My concentration would be on the sounding and the saying. I'd have no idea what it means. That's how most Americans read texts. They have no idea what those texts are saying. So they don't read texts (essays, long articles, short stories, books). They read what they see on social media.

Social media uses nothing but word modules. Word groupings. We talk about them again and again here. Love that for me, hill to die on, rent free, fever dream, if you know you know, checks notes, didn't have that on my bingo card. These are word shapes--almost akin to colors--that people recognize as such, not as words of meaning. They're like basic toy blocks. Then they use the blocks.

A life as a mental zombie starts in the home. It's the parents' fault as much as anyone. It's not the teachers' fault. The teachers have no chance. They're cooked before the kids get there. You can't educate a child who is poorly parented and raised on screens. That child will grow up to be an illiterate, unthinking, brainless clod. They will then procreate and raise their children to be what they are. Virtually every single person is a product of their environment. They aren't self-made. Who they are doesn't come from within. I had wonderful parents but I could have been raised by wolves in a cave and I was going to be the person I am today. I made that person. It came from within. But that's me. There's your population. This is how the population becomes what it is. One of the reasons.

You can't leave the population behind. Bartleby's employer chooses not to leave him behind. It's a case of one. The employer goes out of his way. He makes a special choice. But in our world, it's a case of the entire staff being Bartlebys. What's the narrator of this story--if we transpose him to our world--to do then? The case is a totality, not an isolated example. So everyone must be indulged, excuses must be made for everyone, there are few standards and expectations, and the baselines for those are buried in the dirt and going lower and lower, and everyone is carried in a society where no one can do any lifting for themselves.

Anything the pylon experiences--learns, if you will; is made aware of--has to come to the pylon. The pylon doesn't go to anything unless, I suppose, it's moved there. We are these pylons. That which makes it to the piece of asphalt where we, this orange cone sits, is all we'll know now. You know what makes it over to us? So much common trash blowing in the hot wind. Wrappers. The detritus of living. The paper-thin surplus of a society without thought, agency, people of vision and purpose, interests, passions, individuality.

In Typee, Melville talks about a group of people who all think alike. When people think alike, they don't realize that they're essentially the same, because that, ironically, requires self-awareness, and in order to have self-awareness, you have to be on your mental game. Often more on that mental game than you need to be for things that don't pertain to you, because there's a pain factor now.

What we think about Joe Smith doesn't sting or hurt us like what we might think about ourselves. Think of how you feel when you read about someone being "canceled" or whatever. Your heart rate doesn't change at all. Let's say they're being unfairly canceled. But if you were reading about yourself in this manner, you'd be spiraling. Your heart would be jackhammering. It'd be harder for you to process everything, have perspective, be rational.

Something similar happens when it's time to think about who we are and face things about ourselves that might not be great things and can be very bad things. Or shortcomings. We may wish to think about ourselves as something we simply are not. Or want to think we have a talent that we don't in the slightest.

The world is designed now for people to never have to face what they are and aren't. They're helped along by everything in our society in what's essential their Bartleby-ing. The monsters, the villains, are those few people out there who don't help them in these endeavors of self-delusional and avoidance of anything real and anything truthful. That doesn't mean only conversationally. It also means by that other person's example. What that person represents to the Bartelby.

A person who doesn't know music and wants to think of themselves a certain way as this music expert, this person of impeccable taste--a "show me your hall" pass guardian/gatekeeper of musical knowledge and liking "cool" stuff in their own minds--is going to hate the person who writes something about music that shows true expertise and is expressed in a manner that the other person could never come close to. They're going to take umbrage with that person.

What can they do about it to feel better and scratch that animus itch, as it were? Post some passive aggressive, miserable, envious person type of comment, if that's an option. Definitely not buy that book. Despite it containing these amazing things they'd love to be able to know and have the mental acuity to have come up with on their own, which would make them smarter, deepen their listening experiences, add to their lives, their leisure, their understanding of art and life. Something that can help make them "more" than they were previously, if you follow me, while expanding and getting more out of being alive.

But someone comes along with something hacky, cliched, vanilla, and basic, then this person I'm talking about, who gets nothing out of what this other person has, which is itself nothing, prefers that person. And if that person is wrong in what they're saying, that's great, too, because it allows the person who loathes the better person to feel good about themselves. Smarter. Or not lesser, anyway.

That is nothing. That does nothing for you. It adds nothing to your life save to give you that feeling of not being lesser. And that is what we reward everywhere in our society: the works and the people who do this. Who embody in what they, who they are, what they create, the detritus that is then made to blow up against the traffic cones, the Bartelbys, by those cultural winds of our world. This isn't fresh sea air of the Maine coast.

You ever walk past a building in a city and there's that air coming out of some louvered vent at your leg level? You don't know what produces it. It's like that steam coming out of a dishwasher in a musty factory basement type of kitchen, with particles of food residue in it. That's our cultural air.

People choose to be those pylons. The preponderance of pylons means more of the gusty air with the vague smell of wet, rotten potatoes, because nothing's circulating, no one's on the move intellectually, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and, we might as well add this, physically, often enough ("I'm so old" and "Wanna feel old" and "God are we old" is very similar in nature and intent to Bartleby's line of "I'd prefer not to"). People just want to tap out. Insofar as they go looking for anything in life, it's excuses to tap out.

For such people, there's nothing else other than what happens to blow up right against them. They're at the mercy of detritus, and those hot, bad breath-style winds, as they've become detritus themselves. What is a pylon when it's not marking a hole in the road where men are working and is instead tossed into the weeds at the road's edge but detritus?