Walter Mosley (5 page)

Another way to look at the novel, rather than by its girth, is its depth. Most of the ideas of a novel exist beneath the waves of consciousness, deep in the preand unconscious folds of our experience (which, in its
totality, is also larger than the head—or conscious mind). Every time we begin writing, the door to this deep well of feeling and knowledge opens a crack. We peer through this tiny aperture and get down some words. For the rest of the day we might be completely oblivious to what we wrote that morning but the ideas are still there. Like invisible hummingbirds in a cave, the thoughts broached in that morning session send out subliminal vibrations that travel in the darkness hitting upon hitherto unguessed at notions and ideas that, in turn, shudder in sympathy....

Now we are at a crossroads. When we wake up the next morning that door of perception is still ajar, the hummingbirds are still aloft, and the ideas, once in darkness, are now faintly illuminated by what has gone on the day before. If we sit down at our desk and start writing again, these new ideas, one way or another, will work their way into the writing. But if we don't sit down and take advantage of what we discovered—seemingly by chance—the door will close and we will be, once again, locked out of our own ideas.

The best way, sometimes the only way, to succeed at writing a novel (or essay) is to write every day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. You don't have to write for a long time, just long enough
to peek into the darkness and listen for that sympathetic humming just beyond the range of what you can see and know for certain.

This exercise is not only of value to the artist. Returning every day to the subject of your life is the most important implement in the toolbox of the worker who wants to short-circuit the oppressive nature of the modern world. The economic, political, and governmental systems of the world work every hour of every day. These systems strive to maintain the definition and the direction of your world. They define the value of your labor and the quality of your education, the candidates for your votes and the timetable by which your streets are fixed. The powers that be are working all the time to organize your labor against your goals. And if you don't spend at least a couple of hours
every day
working to articulate and effect your desires, you will be defeated by the system's daily counter-attempt to destroy your individuality.

I don't want to sound paranoid in saying that it is the intent of the structures of the modern world to quash our distinctiveness, but I believe that this is an obvious fact. We are taught to
fit in
from the earliest stages in our schools, churches, workplaces, and just walking down the street. Our questions, our instincts,
our desires to live lives that are not defined by these institutions are pushed down and ultimately disabled.

It is the corporation's job to make the greatest profit off of your labor, not to make sure you have medical care, adequate retirement, or deep joy and satisfaction in your everyday experience of life. Sometimes a corporation might do something positive for you, but this is because of a conflict with a separate institution like a union or the federal government. Some more
enlightened
conglomerates realize that a happy worker might, for a time, produce more profit if given a chance at happiness. But even this chance will be taken away if it subsequently loses its profitability.

I'm not talking about good and evil here. I'm mapping out systems and the ways in which those systems work against the Free Will of their students and employees, soldiers and citizens (denizens). A CEO—Joe #25,362—might decide that he loves his workers and wants to make sure that they all get childcare. But that extra twenty-five hundred dollars per worker per year will show up on the corporate bottom line and the business will falter in its competition with similar firms; the CEO will be replaced by Joe #25,363 or the company will go out of business; either way, the chance for a corporate nursery will be lost.

The economic system
²
works like the internal systems of any living body: Needs are encountered and needs are met. It's just that simple. Resources are devoured and wastes are removed. The corporation is the Great Shadow Joe that hovers above our lives. It doesn't, it can't care about us on human terms because it is not human. It is a virtual beast, a humungous parasite that feeds off of our labor and off of the natural resources that by rights belong to us. It uses our technology, our language, our own image to manipulate and mime us but it can never empathize with flesh and blood, dreams and terrors.

This system is both intelligent and mindless. It works in symbiosis with our needs but it is not us. The Great Shadow Joe moves like a shibboleth through our lives, our bodies, our friends and foes, children and lovers. It creates us, or re-creates us, in its own image, leaving us with the notion that we ourselves decided to buy that red truck or kill that hill farmer seven thousand miles away.

Shadow Joe never gets tired because he is a virtual entity using our reorganized labor for his energy. Wake up at night and Shadow Joe will be waiting for you on
the TV. Walk down the street and he will call to you from billboards and display windows. Walk the fields of your ancient homeland and he might rain billets or daisy-cutters down upon you. He is nearly unrecognizable (not unlike the novel that lives in each and every one of us) and we aren't looking for him—at best we only suspect his existence.

The reason Shadow Joe isn't on everyone's lips is that he (like the novel) resides inside our minds. He is bigger than anything a normal human can conceive of in a single thought—or train of thoughts. He is everywhere in our culture and economy like a bad case of trichinosis.

The only way to remove this systemic infection is to work at it slowly and methodically—every day.

Every day you have to sit with yourself and try to figure out what is right and what is wrong in your life. You need to write these ideas down, consider them, edit them, then rewrite them. The world will not change without you changing. You cannot change without working every day to discover the secrets, and lies, hidden inside your Shadow Joe–fabricated mind.

The purpose of your life is to discover the great edifice of possibility and hope hidden in your heart. It is a treasure that has been buried there and then laid claim to by Shadow Joe.

Set aside ninety minutes a day to sit down to a journal where you write about what you think might be going on in the world around you, what you are worth, and where you would go if the barriers of everyday life were lifted.
³
From these down-to-earth questions you will have built a firmament that will, necessarily, militate against the Joes and their God (the Great Shadow Joe). Your hard work, strength, and youth have been used to build the power of the Joes. Once you take these fuels away, their system will dim and your potential will grow.

But, most importantly, you will have to go through this exercise every day. In doing this you will begin to understand that many of your thoughts and aspirations don't come from you. Your true desires have been rerouted and tied off. Many of your ideas today will seem simplistic, or even wrong, tomorrow. This is the process of creativity at work. You try one thing and realize that it's wrong but you learn from the mistake and try something else. Months after writing a line you come back to it and realize that there is a whole paragraph behind it—a paragraph that says something altogether different.

If you work every day at trying to understand the world in which you live, the growth you experience will be exponential. Shadow Joe is large but he is not truly great. We are the building blocks of his systematic repression of our lives and our needs. When we push back with regularity and burgeoning comprehension, he must ultimately transform into something closer to his aggregate parts.

 

One thing to remember here is that the system thrives when its parts are all the same and therefore replaceable. The ideas that grow from your every day exercise need not equal what others have found in their selfinterrogations. We must be able to communicate with each other but we don't have to share the same ideas. We need to come to terms but not to fit into molds that provide false security.

A
merica is an oligarchy in democratic clothing. Our body politic is amorphous and intangible and therefore our actions cannot match our intentions; this disconnect is due to the fact that our political leaders are vetted by special-interest corporations that say they are political parties (i.e., Democrats and Republicans). These special-interest corporations dominate all three of the major platforms of federal representation (also state and local governments); they are owned by clients (the Joes) who pay for services rendered. They divide us by taking specific differences and unfounded fears and using these to drive wedges between the working-class denizens who should see
themselves as one people rather than as innumerable castrated tribes.

People often tell me that America is a democracy because people have the right to vote. I reply that people voted in the old USSR too—but so what? If we are unable to come together in our voting, if we are ruled out of real choice by so-called party politics, then how can we say that we're living in a democracy? If millions of dollars have more power to influence than the truth does, then how can we honestly say that we have a working democracy?

Justice in America is more a commodity than it is anything else. The rich have better lawyers at their side and people who understand their inner turmoils sitting upon the bench; they have prosecutors who can be overruled by backroom politics and enough dollars to pay for special treatment if they happen to receive a lesser sentence.

And if there is no balance in justice, how can there be democracy? If we, in our hearts, accept the disparity of our own system, then we abrogate our rights as citizens. But don't get me wrong—this is not a condemnation of the will of the American people. The only mistake we have made is that we believe that the system is insurmountable and that wealth somehow has to
have its privileges because there is an indefinable and inescapable affinity between capitalism and democracy.

In truth, capitalism is closer to totalitarianism and fascism than it is to the democratic process; that's why unions appeared and why Congress once led a campaign against monopolies and cartels. Democracy has nothing to do with the decision-making process in the organization of capital. The wealthy would like us to think that it does. That's why they build monuments to themselves, name foundations after their families rather than after the people they set out to
help
. The only affinity that the wealthy have with democracy is their money and their control of the media. They tell us the news, dress up the candidate, set the value of our dollars and our labor until the poorest among us join the army to slaughter other poor people in the name of freedom while the wealthy are safe and richer each day.

But, like I said, this is not condemnation of the American people. The economic system has so deeply insinuated itself into our everyday lives that it seems impossible to dislodge. Billionaires and their millionaire-minions control the majority of newspapers, TV shows, movies, and magazines, Congress, the army, the police, and even the schools and schoolbooks to
promulgate their message until there seems to not even be a toehold that we can manage in order to resist the overwhelming pressures brought to bear on us.

The earth is flat, just look at my carpenter's level.

But all is not lost.

Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford tell us that not only technology but also technique (the way in which labor is executed and imagined) have toppled more civilizations than any creed or revolutionary outcry. A simple technological invention like a superior screw can so alter the economics of a culture that the old ways are forced to fall by the side of the road, making way for new organizations, politics, and governments.

It is my fervent belief that the cigar-smoking backroom politicians of the latter half of the twentieth century are about to meet their fatal screw.

 

The problem with true democracy in America is that our nation is far too large for the plethora of political interests to organize themselves against the fairly small range of interests pursued by big business. On one side you have a group of wealthy individuals, families, and corporations that have the simple goal of wanting control of the means and the mode of production. They achieve these ends by bringing about lower salaries,
buying up cheap mineral rights, breaking unions, outsourcing labor, and convincing us to give them a healthy bailout if these machinations go awry. On the other side you have the abortionists and anti-abortionists, separatists and integrationists, universal marriage constituents and those who believe that gay marriage is somehow immoral, PETA adherents and the rightto-bear-arms hunting enthusiasts. There are ten thousand other interest groups all of whom can find as many iterations of their opposites in the spectrum of our so-called democracy.

How can we, the People, stand against the highly organized and simplistic needs of the Joes when we are so separated and fragmented by ten thousand thousand conflicts?

The answer is (at least from my point of view) to use the Internet (that new screw) and an equation that will allow us to stop working against each other and begin to work together on the topics where we agree.

What I propose is a website called The Democracy Initiative. On this website each of us can identify our ten most pressing political interests in order of importance—for example, (1) the right to bear arms, (2) equal rights for women, (3) universal marriage rights. Once we've identified our convictions in a national
(and international) database we can find those others who are of a similar state of intention
without
having to know about their commitments that are antithetical to ours. As the song says,
accentuate the positive
. This will allow the black nationalist and white supremacist to vote together for the rights of poor children to have medical care; the anti-abortionist and the pro-choice advocate to unite against the war.