Revolution (30 page)

Sisyphus was a Greek king who irritated the gods, mostly through hubris; he was up himself and constantly trying to pull a fast one. His primary offense, as far as I can see, was an attempt to cheat death itself when he was taken to the Greek underworld and chained by Hades, the bloke who looked after it. Actually, Hades was a god,
not some subterranean lavvy attendant; “bloke” might be reductive. Interesting that in Greek myth both hell and its chief administrator, which for us would be the devil, are seen from a much less pejorative perspective.

In Hellenistic myths, “the underworld,” where the dead are sent, is a complicit part of the human experience, not a fiery penitentiary, and Hades is a more neutral character, not a cackling horned beast, jabbing you with a trident. I prefer pagan ideologies like Hellenism; they’re more obviously symbolic and inclusive of human frailty. Monotheism is a bit too judgmental and reductive. It even sounds dumb: “Monotheism”—it’s only got one idea, what a durr-brain.

King Sisyphus, who has spent his whole life tricking people, engaging in scurrilous wars, having it off with his enemies’ kids, and generally being a real dick, really takes the biscuit when sent to the absolute terminus of the underworld. When enchained by Hades, he dupes the deity into releasing him by using the oldest trick in the book, the ol’ “Mate, show us how them chains work” number. Hades, who in my mind should be sacked on the spot by the god of gods, Zeus, for this fascinating incompetence, falls for it and in no time at all is chained up himself like Elmer Fudd or something.

Having made a mockery of Hades and the underworld, which amounts to “laughing in the face of death,” Sisyphus comes back to the land of the living and starts kicking off again like a royal hooligan—so like Prince Harry, I suppose, or Uday Hussein.

All the while that Hades is chained up, clenching his fist, and cursing that “damn rabbit,” no humans can die, so the earth is becoming overpopulated, the sick are suffering, and we are learning that death is a necessary part of the life cycle.

Zeus, not before time, decides to step in. To demonstrate the necessity and even favorability of death, Sisyphus is given the task of rolling a boulder from the bottom of a hill to the top; then Zeus, in a trick of his own, which might simply be called “gravity,” returns the boulder to the bottom, where Sisyphus must resume his fruitless and unending labor.

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish brainbox, reckoned it was a good
metaphor for addiction to materialism and sex: “It is comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it is comic that Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the number simply indicates that they have no value. Therefore, one should stay within one’s means in the use of the word ‘love.’ ”

This analysis is resonant: this book, to a point, is about my own disillusionment with the material offerings of fame and fortune, which include money and sexual opportunity. My mate Matt once said he heard me, from his place on the couch, skylarking and jesting with some female companions in my room and assumed I was adrift in hedonistic glory.

He then reported that I left the room, deadpan and hollow-eyed, somberly walked past him, fetched some lubricant—either mental or anatomical—from the kitchen, and glumly trotted back to the bacchanalia. When the door closed, he said, the trumpeting of decadent splendor continued as before. Whilst I don’t recall that particular incident, I do recollect that what began as the pursuit of pleasure or at least an escape from pain became a joyless trudge through flesh, at the summit of each coital march no certainty other than that the process must begin again.

How Sisyphus and his myth of pointless endeavor chimes with me now is as a tale of recognition of the cyclical nature of all things, even and perhaps especially enlightenment. This commitment must be renewed daily; it is never permanently arrived at.

The poet Rumi has a line: “Tomorrow you will awake frightened and alone.” When I heard that recited, I thought, “Fuck. I will an’ all; I always do.” Each morning, a new commitment is required to hand over my will, to relinquish my own ideas as to how my life should be, knowing that method always leads to trouble.

Bill Hicks said, “The world is like a ride in an amusement park. It has thrills and spills and it is very brightly colored, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have remembered and they come back to us. They say, ‘Hey … don’t be afraid, this is just a ride,’ and we … 
kill
those people!” Rumi, Kierkegaard, and perhaps Bill himself have left clues and codes for us to help us to disentangle
from the pain material, sensorial fixation. All prophecies stripped of acculturation and geographic ornamentation seem only to be saying, “Journey within; look behind your feelings, beyond your pain; fashion your world from what you find there.”

What we inhabit now is a world built upon the feelings and fears that the prophets are telling us to overcome.

Sometimes when I’m alone and West Ham have been particularly shit, I shamefully fantasize about supporting, maybe, Arsenal. I can’t do it for long, though, because it feels wrong, disloyal, perverse, indecent, like incest or something incalculably taboo. Like prepubescent fingers in a matriarch’s knicker drawer while the babysitter watches
Bullseye
downstairs.

Reality responds to consciousness. Reality may only be consciousness, for all we know—for all we can ever know—so we must be free to imagine new worlds. Of course, we will be attacked. “Oh, yeah,” they’ll say, “what will it look like? How will it work?” The current system, of course, was given time and space to evolve and was not subjected to scrutiny from some haughty panel in an aloof gallery, because they were the people who devised it.

There have of course been loads of successful Revolutions in history, where people have come together and overthrown a system that no longer represents them. The problem, you will have noticed, is that they are usually replaced by another system that doesn’t represent them. Like in Egypt in 2011.

What this implies is that any worthwhile Revolution has to have an inbuilt protection against any demagogic exploitation and that the will of the people needs to be perpetual and perennial, constant and continual—not some blind orgasmic flash that yields to postcoital lethargy.

As Bob Dylan wisely said, “Don’t follow leaders.” Leaders will let you down, the role itself corrupt. He did go on to say in his very next line, “Watch your parking meters,” which many might think undermines the line that preceded it. I disagree. We could regard it in a few ways: One is that Bob, by saying something nuts and trivial, is demonstrating that we oughtn’t start looking to him as a leader or kind of folk prophet. “I like this Dylan guy; he’s able to
spell out a rhyming ideology in an appealing nasal twang. Tell me more. Watch yer parking meters? No, the man’s a twit.”

Or he could be saying that it is these mundane, municipal inconveniences, like parking meters, that truly outrage a modern, urbanized population.

Are you not more incensed by ATM charges than by oil spills and deforestation? When it comes to the crunch, aren’t you more wound up by Apple mendaciously changing their chargers every fucking time they bring out a new device than by apartheid? I mean, how much money do they want?

Do they have to wring us out like a vagrant vampire with a tampon in his fangs? When will it be enough? Aren’t you deep down more pissed off about unnecessary and financially motivated parking fines than about child sweatshop labor? I am. I know I’m meant to care about children in Palestine, and if you sit me down and explain it to me I get annoyed, I might even squeeze out a furious tear, but when I can’t use my phone abroad because of some intricate admin around roaming, I’m ready to pick up a gun.

What’s terrifying is that our petty frustrations and these awful global transgressions are intimately connected by the same dominant profiteering system.

These miserable inconveniences somehow prevail.

That’s why the
Daily Mail
and
Fox News
are so effective, because they reach right through our liberal bullshit and into our dark, animalistic, selfish, well-nourished core. And as Solzhenitsyn and the Native American wolf allegory demonstrate, we all have that capacity for darkness within us. The devil has all the best tunes, and
Fox News
has access to the most responsive buttons.

This is why spirituality is not some florid garnish, some incense fragrance, wafted across our senses but part of the double-helix DNA of Revolution.

There is a need for Revolution on every level—as individuals, as societies, as a planet, as a consciousness. Unless we address the need for absolute change, unless we agree on a shared story of how we want the world to be, we’ll inertly drift back to the materialistic, individualistic magnetism behind our current systems.

M
Y CONCEPTION OF REVOLUTION, PROBABLY LIKE MOST PEOPLE’S
, comes from old-fashioned ones where the state is overthrown by a vibrant, sexy, chanting horde and then reassembled, like the eighteenth-century French Revolution.

This was pretty hard core as Revolutions go, because an all-powerful leader, Louis XVI—I’m pretty sure that means “sixteenth”—got his head cut off. Once you’ve called fifteen kings “Louis” and it’s still the only name you can think of, it’s quite clear you’re an institution that’s bereft of ideas and a bit of noggin-chopping is required.

I note that if that baby royal they’ve just done in Blighty were to ascend to the throne, he’d be George VII. Seventh?! We’ve already had six and we’re gonna have another one. How long do we intend to let this silliness persist? Surely it’s time for us to invest in a Fisher-Price guillotine.

At the time of the French Revolution, the powerful were corrupt and wealthy, whilst the poor were becoming more and more disenfranchised, with no legitimate means for creating real change. Well, apparently that’s what’s happening now, according to Ol’ Piketty. Our system, capitalism, is designed to behave like this: It generates wealth for the wealthy and further impoverishes those with nothing. Asking it to behave differently is like asking a microwave to wash your car.

In pre-revolutionary France, if the
Dogtanian
cartoons are to be believed (and if we’re going to start questioning their veracity, my entire philosophy will unravel), the clergy, monarchy, and aristocracy
had become too rich and unaccountable, and the French got so wound up that the axes came out.

There had been unpopular wars, bad harvests, and a financial crisis, yet the upper tiers of French society were scoffing croissants like there was no tomorrow. It turned out they were right: For most of them, there wasn’t—they all had their head lopped off in the Revolution.

After which there was a lot of faffing and enlightenment-inspired political thinking, until the post-revolutionary ideas that dominated were nationalism and democracy.

These ideas have evolved to become the veils behind which a comparable elite are able to enforce an exploitative system that benefits them to the detriment of everyone else and the planet.

Instead of clergy and aristocracy, we have corporations and the financial sector. Instead of bad harvests, we have the decline of the manufacturing industry, and instead of a financial crisis, we have—well, a financial crisis.

When the French folk chopped off the king’s head, it sent shockwaves around the world; it was an unprecedented event, a hybrid of the 9/11 attacks and the death of Diana.

If
The Sun
had been in existence then, there definitely would’ve been a commemorative pull-out and Elton John would’ve sung a sad reworking of “Candle in the Wind” at the Bastille.

You get the idea. Anyway, aside from a lovely, carnivalesque period where Paris became a sort of urban Glastonbury, with folk hanging out and sharing and some bloody helpful ideas about human rights, recognizable power structures were soon reasserted under transitory leaders like Maximilien de Robespierre, who sounds like an untrustworthy Gallic Transformer. Then there were
a few committees before Napoleon took control of the situation and became emperor, which doesn’t sound sufficiently different from “king” to have warranted all the bother. Except he was really good at wars and did his own butchery. Plus he was well into his missus, wrote her filthy letters insisting she keep her privates unkempt and unwashed. So there you go.

That may not be the most academically satisfactory rendering of the events around the French Revolution, derived as it was from the adventures of Dogtanian (and the three Muskehounds), one episode of
Blackadder the Third
and several “hunches,” but whatever it was that went down in revolutionary France, it has led to what’s happening in France now, and France now is once more as in need of a Revolution as anywhere else.

In the 1970s, the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai was asked if he thought the French Revolution was a success. “It’s too early to tell,” he said. Very clever. Well, I don’t bloody think it is and neither do the French; they can’t go half an hour without a riot or getting swept up in nationalism or crazy upside-down Sieg-Heiling crazes.

Professor John Dunn thinks our yearning for Revolution is a secular version of a Messiah fetish. The same as Mary Midgley’s assertion that Dickie Dawkins’s “Selfish Gene” theory is a retelling of the Protestant Genesis myth, that the sins of the father will be visited on the progeny and that man is condemned to follow a predestined path outside the uteral comfort of Eden. Or Joseph Campbell’s observation that all creation myths have a “cast out of paradise” component that is resonant for human beings who are “cast out” of the lovely, cozy womb, where all our needs are automatically met, and into this mad, chilly world.