Standing in My Emphases

                My two emphases are Environmental Studies, and English. Each of these disciplines is rich in occurrences of the standing metaphor. One of the most prominent features of each of these institutions are standards. In English the standards are grammatical standards, like the Oxford Comma, which is a manifestation of humans in an ivory tower dictating in a totalitarian way what the rest of the world is supposed to think. In Environmental Studies standards are set in place as a means from keeping rich, powerful humans from doing whatever they want. Both disciplines require great understanding as well. The mechanical rules of English dictate that we adhere to standards, and understand them if we are to succeed. I took a class this semester called “Imaginative Writing and the Creative Process.” For our final project we had to write a complete work, or a few complete works and send them along to publishers.  Being that the Beat Generation has come and gone, we are back to a period of time in American literature that requires a mastery of grammatical rules. Imagine if I had sent a ridiculously unorganized paper, with commas spread unevenly and nonsensically throughout. iT co,ulddd ge,t re!aallY aBSURd!

 And all of human life has benefitted greatly from environmental controls that have been obtained through hundreds of years of the scientific method. We’ve mastered many environmental problems which have led to the proliferation of our species. We obtained the understanding sometime in the past few hundred years, and the understanding has led to a practice of standardization which has served to benefit all of humankind. For example, there is a systems program called the ISO 14000, which is headquartered in Switzerland, and it standardizes all of the engineering regulations. What this means is that all the components of everyday life: toilets, electrical wires and switches, screws, light bulbs, wrenches , engineering controls for water systems, solar energy systems, nuclear energy systems, etc. are going through a continual improvement systems plan. What ultimately means is that we are trying to bring these components up to a global standard, so that a global manufacturing base can be implemented to create components for mass-production, and the service of more people, and the spreading of an increased quality of life. To standardize, according to our metaphor, means we will set in stone the specifications for parts. Therefore, the blueprints will be easy. The stage is set.

                A Buddhist economist named Ernst Schumacher wrote an article called “Small is Beautiful”, discussing the need to decrease the amount of resources we consume, all the meanwhile working to promote as much happiness and well-being as possible. He invokes the standing metaphor magnificently when he writes, “It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things, but the craving for them.” So there is something standing between us and liberation, obstructing us. When we view obstacles in our lives, it’s funny that we invoke the standing metaphor by saying, in essence, “The only thing standing between me and happiness is…” Why is an obstruction something that stands? Why not something “lying between me and happiness”? Or something “squatting between me and happiness”? I’ll tell you why: Because standing is POWERFUL! It’s a position of dominance, and when a big wall is standing between me and China, (I’m a hording Mongol,) and I can’t rape and pillage, I’m extremely disappointed. It’s easy to see how the metaphor can be used to express dissatisfaction and disappointment.

                Another powerful article concerning my Environmental Studies emphasis is “Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy” by Arne Naess. This is a really phenomenal work, and could by itself exhaust the requirements of this essay. For space purposes I will keep it relatively brief though. Naess discusses the universal right to self-unfolding and the correlative intrinsic value of every life form. This refers, of course, to all biota—so plants and animals fit within the sphere of protection Naess proposes. Naess writes, “To have a home, to belong, to live, and many other similar expressions suggest the fundamental milieu factors involved in the shaping of an individual’s sense of self and self-respect. The identity of the individual, ‘that I am something’, is developed through interaction with a broad manifold, organic and inorganic. There is no completely isolatable I, no isolatable social unit.”

                This paragraph from Naess describes to me one of the deepest elements of this semester in our class, Standing as a Metaphor. Man is a wandering primate—intelligent, to be sure, but also an animal. We’ve stood up, we’ve created myriad languages and technologies as a means of self-expression, but there is something about us which can never be independent. Our consciousness depends on the external world. There cannot be an observation without an observer, and vice-versa. This relates specifically to the formulation of metaphors generally, as well. Because we interact with an exteriorized environment  we construct linguistic methods of dealing with what we see, thus allowing ourselves to communicate. Naess writes, “To distance oneself from nature and the natural, is to distance oneself from a part of that which the I is built up of.” If anything can be said for man, it’s that we’ve dominated nature. But we are not outside of nature, and any time we do something to harm the environment, we are hurting ourselves by hurting our perception.

                Naess also said, “The emergence of human ecological consciousness is a philosophically important idea: a life-form has developed on earth which is capable of understanding and appreciating its relations with all other life forms and to the earth as a whole.”

                Language is a fascinating tool. We belong to the Phylum chordate, which means we share a recent (in geologic terms,) common ancestry with any animal that has a spinal chord. It’s impressive to think of how different we became when we became bipedal, language-using monkeys. Suddenly our world become an object of inquiry and fascination. I imagine that after we had named one thing we wanted to name them all.
                Here's where I jump the rails slightly, but it's still a valid scientific theory, and worth considering in this context. Terence McKenna is a thinker I'm particularly fond of. He has a theory about the evolution of language that I consider to be worth entertaining. McKenna talks about how we were once canopy-dwelling monkeys on the African savannah, staying in the trees for fear of predation. Along the way there were harsh dry seasons in Africa which caused a lapse in the fruiting of the trees. This led our monkey ancestors to leave the trees and go out in search of food. According to his theory, we came upon psilocybin magic mushrooms growing on the dung of ungulates, and we ate them. This led to a distortion of normal consciousness and the awakening of tonal perception. He theorized that when these apes got stoned they were then able to differentiate between different tonalities in their grunting. McKenna thought this was the origin of human language. I'd be interested in hearing a correlative theory of Standing, if one exists. Of course, it would contain different components, but something radical must have happened along the way.

 

Family Structureless

                The traditional family structure is entirely undermined in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, The Marquise of O  by Heinrich Von Kleist, and Iris by Mark Jarman. Each of these authors employed the standing metaphor as a means of storytelling, displaying emotion, and displaying dominance hierarchies within family structures. Each of the stories has a delightful grossness about them, as well.

                Our first gross story is The Metamorphosis. “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.” Thus begins The Metamorphosis. To better understand the origins of this story it helps to realize the situation Kafka was born into. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His father Hermann was described by Kafka as a “huge, selfish, overbearing businessman,” and as “a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, and knowledge of human nature.” Kafka’s relationship with his father was troubled. In his short “Letter to His Father”, Franz complained of being profoundly affected by his father’s authoritarian and demanding character. Indeed, the story of The Metamorphosis is quite inseparable from Kafka’s daddy issues.

                He awakens for work but cannot go. His mother, who has been so dependent on him to provide for the family, calls to him at a quarter to seven, “Gregor, don’t you have a train to catch?” From the beginning we see how Gregor’s family has become so dependent on him. When he awakens in the morning, of course,  he finds that he is now the one who requires help. “It occurred to him how easy everything would be if someone lent him a hand. It would take only two strong people (he thought ofhis father and the maid); they would only have to slip their arms under his vaulted back, slide him out of the bed, crouch down with their burden, and then just wait patiently and cautiously as he flipped over to the floor, where he hoped his tiny legs would have some purpose.” We see how he has been forced into a moment of helpless subordination due to his circumstances, and how in order to get low enough to help one as low as Gregor, somebody would have to crouch down. That’s how low he’s become.

      
         Throughout this morbid tale there are so many examples of standing and lying down as being integral to the relationships between the characters. Gregor was once in the army and sees a photo of himself standing in his uniform, “demanding respect for his bearing”. This device issued to emphasize just how low Gregor has sunk. At the beginning of the second section is another example of this device. “The glow from the electric streetlamps produced pallid spots on the ceiling and the higher parts of the furniture, but down by Gregor it was dark.” Clearly his posture as a bug has removed him from the light, both literally and figuratively.

                 The Marquise of O is an extremely gross story. For me, (and I don't mean to be a harsh critic,) the redeeming quality of that story was when the dad and the daughter were making out. It was extremely disgusting,to be sure, but I appreciated the dark Freudian surrealism,especially in a story so old. The standing metaphor is prominent throughout, but again, is most meaningful in the scenes regarding the gross dad and the daughter. When it refers to the father as being "bent over double", we see how he's been broken by the whole situation with the Marquise and the soldier. But as the story unfolds we see how his blessing has become the cornerstone of the entire piece.

              Jarman's Iris has a different kind of family structure than the others, since Iris' male family members are killed early one. She does search out her poetry teacher and have the little fling with him, sort of as a filler fantasy. But that's not all that important to the story, except that it lends some credence to her overarching obsession with Robinson Jeffers. It seems like, throughout the whole story, Iris is depending on men to make her happy. Her family life is completely jacked up-- except that she and the junkyard guy  raise Ruth to be a very good kid. When she finally gets to visit Jeffers' property, she knows that of course she was a prominent figure in his life too, since he so painstakingly planted a row of irises. Ahhhh.

Breathing Space

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke expresses the role of time in the life of the artistic work. One day when we discussed it in class I had a really magnificent experience. The British author Colin Wilson refers to it as “breathing space”. We spoke about that moment when the bow is pulled completely back, at the fullness of tension, and there is a split second of nothingness when the draw is released, but the arrow has not yet begun to fly.  When a person is going to jump into a pool, there’s the moment when they’ve begun their thrust, when they’ve decided to jump, sprung forward, there is the moment of tension between the decision and the action. There is the moment when the very tip of their first toe touches the water, but is not yet wet—not yet submerged.  T.S. Eliot referred to this as “the still point at the center of the universe,” like an axis around which all of existence revolves. When we discussed this in class I had this sensation that Colin Wilson expressed—this notion of “breathing space”. This is a feeling one gets when one transcends ordinary reality, and as it persists one achieves a state Wilson referred to as “Faculty X”.

Faculty X is the place to be. According to Wilson, and Rilke, all great art arrives from this place: a place that exists beyond time. Rilke said, in the Seventh Elegy, “Truly being here is glorious.” The italics were from Rilke himself. To my mind, truly being here is dramatically different than just being here. 

And this is where Rilke says the angels live for eternity: beyond time, truly here. This is a state of heightened consciousness, of hyper-reality, and of true understanding.  Eliot wrote, in the Four Quartets, “Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.” So love exists beyond time, along with other mythic, heroic, and ethereal qualities.

Could it be that everything  we perceive as reality is only a projection from this deeper realm, but it’s snapped into the finite via our imperfect senses? My good friend Tyler McDonald seems to think so. He talks about how, when we perceive something, our perception is only an illusion—or, a way to make the infinite, finite.

So I wonder whether this is the responsibility that has fallen on the poet: to bring the infinite a little closer. The poet creates linguistic structures which convey hyper-real sensory experiences, thereby bringing us a bit closer to that realm of angels, and to Faculty X. But how do we arrive there, and how can we stay? Or can we? Is this a domain only habitable by hyper-real entities? Can man ascend to such a high state of consciousness that this is where he always exists? (Women too, of course.) Eliot asked, “Where is the summer? That unimaginable Zero summer?” Does it exist, and can we arrive there?

Rilke seems to think we cannot. In the Ninth Elegy he asks, “Why then have to be human—and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate?” So, why do I enter heightened consciousness for a little while, only to be snapped back unwittingly? He answers his own question a few stanzas down: “Because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some way keeps calling to us.” This requires us to question a statement from the First Elegy, when Rilke said, “We are not really at home in our interpreted world.” He seems to think we can enter the angelic realm for a moment at a time, but then we snap back into our reality, because, in a way, we are needed here. This is where the philosophy of Tyler McDonald comes in. When we arouse Faculty X we see with the eyes of angels: we see the infinite, if only for a few beautiful, fleeting moments. But our sensory perception of the hyper-real, the extra-dimensional leaves us struggling with our language, our “shabby equipment”, Eliot called it. We can only explain our experience through metaphors, and metaphors are extraordinarily imprecise, inaccurate, and clunky.

“Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction,” wrote Rilke. That’s one of my favorite passages I’ve ever read anywhere, by anybody.  It rings so true. One of my hobbies is boundary dissolution—so to see the experience articulated so beautifully—well, it feels good.

 So what is this extra-dimensionality? After all, “Trees do exist. The houses we live in still stand.” T.S. Eliot phrases it perfectly, (as per usual), “Not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after, but a lifetime burning in every moment.” And a few lines later, “We must be still, and still moving into another intensity.” This is the same conclusion that every great mystic has ever reached, I think. There’s a Buddhist saying that you don’t have to climb to the top of the mountain to reach enlightenment. You can do it from home. And Eliot and Rilke and Wilson and T. Mac all arrive at the same conclusion. The time is now. The place is here, right where we stand. “To have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing,” wrote Rilke. “And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.” Rilke knows, though, that it’s not out there waiting for us to find it; it’s in here waiting for us to look at it. “And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.”  

Twelve Stones, Twelve Stanzas

Leslie Norris wrote “The Twelve Stones of Pentre Ifan” celebrating the megalithic monument in  Wales. The monument itself is a four-stone structure in the middle of eight smaller stones. A notable feature of Norris’ poem is that the poem itself is twelve stanzas long—twelve stones long. The word “stanza” is itself notable in this context. A stanza is: "a group of rhymed verse lines," 1580s, from It. stanza "verse of a poem," originally "standing, stopping place," from V.L. *stantia "a stanza of verse," so called from the stop at the end of it, from L. stans (gen. stantis), prp. of stare "to stand”.

            Norris’ nearly translates the stone monument literally by memorializing it in stanzas. Like the ancients who originally stood the stones endwise and arranged them harmoniously, so also did Norris create a monument by standing objects on end. The characters  the ancients wrote their language in were tangible objects, dense, with specific gravity, and cumbersome. By some engineering device they raised the capstone (about 16 tons,) atop three erect stones and raised a monument.

            The tools Norris utilized were significantly different than this. Norris’ tools were much, much smaller. Rather than recording the language of his moment in heavy stone, Norris employed small angular tools, which represent little mouth noises fashioned by linguistically-advanced primates. Are words less cumbersome than stones?  Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are not. The question which remains to be answered is whether linguistic stones will stay standing as long as those of granite.

            Wendell Berry commented, indirectly, on the plight of Norris. In the beginning lines of his poem “The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments”, Berry writes, “Always, on their generations breaking wave, men think to be immortal in the world.” And a few lines later, “He will not be immortal in words.” The work of our hands will outlive us, of course, but Berry seems to think our immortality is better chiseled in stone than in the simple mouth noises we articulate in the moment. “His words all turn to leaves,” he writes, “answering the sun with mute quick reflections.” And to end the poem Berry writes, “In autumn, all his monuments fall.” I interpreted this as a reference to death, and how death is the great author and finisher of our lives. When autumn comes, all of our monuments will fall.

                Melendez seems to approach this with a different sensibility. She writes, “I oppose temples, object to the mountainous externalization of might.” This is a truly beautiful expression. Rather than meditating on the erection of temples and the existence of stone, she rejects these forms of masculine self-identification. She approaches it with a newness that violates the male sentiment expressed in the building of temples. “Might in me,” she writes, “is not erected, but absorbed.”
            Perhaps the purpose of our life is better represented by the philosophy of Melendez than by Berry or Norris. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that I thought was apt: “Leaving your mark is overrated.” Perhaps this is the basic truth of our existence: that we will live a while, then we’ll die a while, and all things external have always been external, and will remain external forever. Perhaps we are only here to observe. Our monuments are bound to fail. Even the language of stone is indecipherable after a gap in history. We are doomed to pathetic contributions, and our names will die no matter how high our skyscrapers. It’s best to accept that and adopt a non-interventionist attitude.

A quote from Novalis:

"There is only one temple in the world and that is the human body."

Style, by Charles Bukowski

style is the answer to everything---
a fresh way to approach a dull or a
dangerous thing.
to do a dull thing with style
is preferable to doing a dangerous thing
without it.

Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Christ
Socrates
Caesar,
Garcia Lorca.

style is the difference,
a way of doing,
a way of being done.

6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water
or you walking out of the bathroom naked
without seeing
me.

..........from the book "Mockingbird Wish Me Luck", page 156.

This poem reminded me of the Heidegger article we discussed in class, "Off the Beaten Track". Heidegger wrote, "To be sure, the painter, too, makes use of pigment; he uses it, however, in such a way that the colors are not used up but begin, rather, for the first time, to shine. To be sure, the poet, too, uses words, not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who must use them up, but rather in such a way that only now does the word become and remain truly a word.

Bukowski also said, "An intellectual is a person who says a simple thing in a difficult way. An artist is a person who says a difficult thing in a simple way." There is a way, as Heidegger described, to build a temple of words that contains within it the Holy Spirit, or whatever the hell you want to call it.

Mid-Term

The Human Body, Before and After

My favorite Bob Marley song is “Get Up, Stand Up”. The chorus repeats the lines, “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight.” Bob Marley was, of course, a Jamaican reggae star. One might wonder from where political oppression arises in a small island country known mostly for its music. Why would Bob Marley need to sing about standing up for rights on a tropical island? When most of us picture Jamaica we imagine white sands beaches, palm trees, margaritas, and cannabis use. So, from where does the political oppression of which Marley sings, arise?

The history of South America and the Caribbean is a long, bloody history, of slavery and colonialism. Indeed, 98% of Jamaica’s population are the descendants of black slaves.

Perhaps the story begins in the late 15^th century, when European sailors began exploring the globe. The Portuguese explored the western coast of Africa, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain and discovered the “New World” of the America’s, and Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the globe entirely. This spirit of exploration was coincidental with economic interests and the pursuit of profit. The expeditions led to domination of indigenous peoples and monopoly of natural resources. The first colonial powers were set up by Portugal and Spain, though certain economic terms led to these nations being guided by English and Dutch interests. Relations with the indigenous peoples became strained, and so among these seafarers there arose a new type of person: a conquistador, or conqueror. These men were inspired by a potent mixture of motives, including a thirst for wealth and power, religious fervor, and adventure. As a result of this capitalist dogma, many high civilizations in the West Indies were severely decimated. The Catholic church enacted laws to protect the natives, which led to the importation of African slaves to South America and the Caribbean, where they were forced to work under brutal conditions on plantations by the white ruling class. Most of the profits obtained in this manner were returned to countries in Europe.

“Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.” Che Guevara was a young Argentine Marxist, revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. In 1951, along with his friend Alberto Granado, Che took a motorcycle journey covering most of the South American continent. Che was a medical student at this time and had ambitions to volunteer at a leper colony in Peru. While he traveled he was confronted with extreme cases of poverty and alienation. He came across small farms where the tenants lived meagerly, though they worked extremely hard. He learned that they lived on the land, which was owned by greedy landlords, and performed all the labor while the landlords made the profits. He met a young Communist couple who had been ostracized and banished from their home in Peru, and had no possessions—not even a blanket. His experiences during this trip had profound impact on Che, and led him to conclude that South America’s ingrained economic inequalities were a result of capitalism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism, and that the solution was a worldwide Communist revolution. Together with Fidel and Raul Castro, Che staged a coup and overthrew Batista’s U.S.-backed regime.

Thereafter, Che became one of the most prominent Communists, and anti-capitalists, in the history of the world. He was extremely vocal and active. Once his situation in Cuba had solidified, and Che was performing many roles in Castro’s government, he traveled to Congo and Bolivia to help them in their revolutions. This man became a huge thorn in the side of imperial powers.

Che’s subsequent story becomes a tale of an empowered revolutionary, fighting the superpowers of the world with minimal resources. He met his untimely death in 1967, being captured and executed by Bolivian special forces, (with help from the CIA.)

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The photograph of Che Guevara’s body speaks volumes. In studying Che, the photograph grows in profundity. Che was an intellectual, raised in a home of over 3,000 books. He cited many influences in his intellectual development: Marx and Engels, Nietzsche, Sartre, Gide, Kafka, Camus, and many more. Yet, as we can see, all of that has been stripped entirely from his lifeless cadaver. It reminds me, somewhat, of Van’s discussion in class about Holbein’s depiction of Christ in the tomb. That was a striking discussion for me. Van said, “We look at the Christ, one of the holiest symbols in the entire world, and we see him dead. It’s something we have to confront and deal with. He’s DEAD! He’s very dead!”

As I’ve studied him the past few weeks I have become a huge fan of Che Guevara. This was a profound man, with decent morals, and what I believe were good intentions.

At the risk of sounding informal, I’ll now critique this photograph as it pertains to the standing metaphor. Che’s lifeless corpse stretches across a wooden table, while decorated soldiers stand over it and examine it. Indeed, the very process of standing over implies examination. There are many levels to this standing over. It seems reasonable to assume that the person directly over Che’s body is the highest ranking soldier in the room, as he has the most access to make observations. The other soldiers wait, with twisted faces and enigmatic expressions. Indeed, some historical perspective renders this photograph entirely new—not a photo of Che’s corpse, nor of a military tribunal—but of the domination of State over its people. And indeed, in Che’s case, this photograph might represent the domination of one specific State over the rest of the world.

To me, this picture is representative of a larger notion: social Darwinism. The realm of ideas is very much like the biological world: it’s not always the good guy who wins, but whoever has the largest teeth. Ideas compete exactly as biotic phenomena, and sometimes one idea must die in order for the other to thrive and proliferate. Indeed, this photograph of Che’s dead body represents Communism vs. Capitalism, and capitalism has some enormous teeth. Che is dead. He’s actually dead. And with him died the dream of hundreds of millions of people.

It is not difficult to see in the eyes of the soldiers surrounding the corpse, that killing is a necessary aspect of life on earth. The two men whose faces we can see at the far left, hold guns and ponder over what they’ve done. Whether they pulled the trigger or not, these automatons are complicit, guilty by association. It’s impossible to get too psychoanalytical on a portrait from so long ago, but I like to imagine that these two men have never seen a dead body before, and are only now beginning to realize the true implications of their military service. What they do is not simply firing into crowds. They kill people. They create corpses, entirely stripped of life. And now they know it.

The two men just above Che, and to his right, both seem repulsed by the corpse. They keep rough company, and they know it. Ask the General, though. He’ll tell you that when agitators arise, they must be dispensed with, or we run the risk of systemic change, (and God only knows we can’t have that.) The States stands tall and points out the agitators, and if you hope to remain standing alongside your fearless leaders, you must stand with the State, or soon you’ll be lying beside Che.

In a 1964 address to the U.N., Che invoked the standing metaphor: “Although we reject any accusations against us of interference in the internal affairs of other countries, we cannot deny that we sympathize with those people who strive for their freedom. We must fulfill the obligation of our government and people to state clearly and categorically to the world that we morally support and stand in solidarity with peoples who struggle anywhere in the world to make a reality of the rights of full sovereignty proclaimed in the UN Charter.” Looking at the picture of Che’s corpse, though, sounds a clarion call that it was the “standing in solidarity” of State power, that ultimately won. The U.N. address is worth reading in its entirety, because he states very clearly his reasons for resistance to State power.

Which call can be heard, resounding throughout paintings of political figures throughout history. Take, for example, this painting of Napoleon:

Since Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in 1821, he has been the subject of over two hundred thousand books. According to one historian, “Probably more has been written about him than any other historical personage except Jesus of Nazareth.” It’s especially interesting to me, because the veracity with which Jesus sought spiritual enlightenment, is mirrored in Napoleon by the amount of material enlightenment he sought. “And while Jesus persuaded with words and ideas, Napoleon conquered with muskets and cannons.”

When he was 10, Napoleon was awarded a scholarship to the military school of Brienne. His stay there was painful, because he was extremely short and spoke very poor French. He proved to be a very mediocre student, but had a passion for history and geography, and most especially, the life of Julius Caesar. From an early age he considered Julius Caesar as an ideal statesman, warrior, and writer. To Napoleon set to work cultivating these virtues in himself, though we must now decide whether or not they were virtues or vices in his hands.

Napoleon graduated and went to University in Paris. He became a much better student at this level, and excelled in mathematics. He graduated and received a military promotion immediately, (which usually took at least two years of service.) He performed well in combat situations, received a promotion to First Consul, and before long, staged a coup d’état. Within 5 years, Napoleon was declared Emperor of France.

After the first decade of the 19^th century, the French Empire, under Napoleon engaged in a series of conflicts—the Napoleonic Wars—involving every major European power. After a streak of victories, France secured a dominant position in Europe, and Napoleon furthered the influence of French culture by establishing extensive alliances, and appointing family and friends to rule other European countries as client states. Even today, Napoleon’s campaigns are studied at military academies throughout much of the world.

The painting “The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries” by Jacques-Louis David, is a painting designed to promote State power, indeed, the same State power that killed Che Guevara. It wasn’t the same country, of course, but the killing of Che arose from the same philosophy of imperialism and subjugation that Napoleon espoused.

I usually try and avoid injecting my own political philosophies into essays, but paintings are interpretive, and in order to state my interpretation, I must state my bias. I’m sure it’s already entirely transparent, but I’m not a very devout capitalist. So when I look at a painting like this one, filled with symbols of wealth, extravagance, decadence, and all the trappings of high living, I don’t see nobility, but insecurity. The truly confident man must stand naked before God, as it were. (I’m also an atheist, but you know what I mean.) The need to be surrounded in adornments indicates a flawed philosophy. And this is ultimately the dehumanizing thrust of capitalism: that a human is only as important as what they possess.

Here Napoleon stands, the emperor, the man of power, the warlord, and the general. See the teeth on the beastly table? See the phallic height of the golden grandfather clock? See the eagle inscription that may just as well have been yanked from a Nazi flag? The golden table, the golden hilt on the sword, and the luxurious green carpet—so many symbols of power, but what kind of power really exists here? Is true power based on the exteriorized world? If I were typing this a plush green rug right now, would I somehow be more powerful?

Whereas, Che Guevara, was a young doctor when rode a motorcycle across the South American continent in search of lepers to serve, and developed his ideology. Guevara sharpened his teeth on the stone of severe economic inequality and how to correct it. Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his power and gold, on the other hand, earned his living by learning how to murder better.

Which state do you prefer? Which state should we prefer?