Cesare Pavese - Lavorare Stanca

Here are some of Cesare Pavese, along with a loose translation from the Italian by your humble Peasant.

Traversare una strada per scappare di casa
lo fa solo un ragazzo ma quest’uomo che gira
tutto il giorno le strade, non e piu un ragazzo
e non scappa di casa.

Ci sono d’estate
pomeriggi che fino le piazze son vuote, distese
sotto il sole che sta per calare, e quest’uomo, che giunge
per un viale d’inutile piante, si ferma.
Val la pena esser solo, per essere sempre piú solo?
Solamente girarle, le piazze e le strade
sono vuote. Bisogna fermare una donna
e parlarle e deciderla a vivere insieme.
Altrimenti, uno parla da solo. E per questo che a volte
c’è lo sbronzo notturno che attaca discorsi
e racconta i progetti di tutta la vita.

Non è certo attendendo nella piazza deserta
che s'incontra qualcuno, ma chi gira le strade,
si sofferma ogni tanto. Se fossero in due,
anche andando per strada, la casa sarebbe dove c'é quella dona e varrebbe la pena.
nella notte la piazza ritorna deserta
e quest'uomo, che passa, non vede le case
tra le inutile luci, non leva piú gli occhi;
sente solo il selciato che han fatto altri uomini
dalle mani indurite, come sono le sue
Non è giusto restare sulla piazza deserta.
Ci sara certamente quella donna per strada
che, pregata vorrebbe dar mano alla casa.


Only a boy crosses the street to run away from home, but this man who is wandering the streets all day long, is no longer a boy and he isn’t escaping his home.

There are some summer afternoons when even the town squares, beaten down by the sun, are empty of people, but this man who seeks shade under the useless trees and stops.
What is the point in walking alone, only to be ever more alone?
Alone he wanders through the empty streets.
He needs to stop a woman, and speak to her, and persuade her to live together with him.
Otherwise, he will be talking to himself
Like some drunk who will talk endlessly, on and on about the plans he once had.

But he’s not going to meet a woman, hanging around the deserted square, so he walks through the streets, stopping abruptly from time to time.
If only they were two, walking through the streets, and in his home there would be that woman, and everything would be worthwhile.
At night the square is still empty, and this man who walks along, does not see the houses amongst the useless lights; he doesn’t raise his eyes to see:
Alone, he feels beneath his feet the pavement that other men with calloused hands have made, with hands like his own.
It’s not right to stay in that deserted square.
Out there in the streets that woman is surely walking too, who, if she were asked, would be only too glad to give him a hand at home.

Charity - Sundays With John Ball

One idea that is central to the Christian faith, the teachings of Christ, and the life of Christ, is Charity.
In some modern translations Charity is translated as Love. Unfortunately Love is too vague for such a great word as Charity.
Charity is giving in love.
Charity is the love we give to each other, not just those small tender words which are so important, but  the practical active love of providing for each other.
Charity is what God gives us through Jesus Christ. Christ's action of dying on the cross for us is the supreme act of charity, the supreme act of God's love. Through Christ's sacrifice we know that God is love.
God’s love is ever giving. He judges, but does not condemn. He provides us with all our needs. His love is unconditional. His love is life itself.
Jesus frequently told his disciples not to worry about material wealth, just to keep on giving.
Give all your money away. That seems like an act of insane faith in this age of buy and sell, this age of individuals isolated by their position in the Hierarchy, individuals used to looking out for themselves. But in the days of Christian communities that were genuine communities, giving was genuinely liberating, rather than merely suicidal.
Give no thought for the morrow. Just keep on giving, whether its your coins to Caesar, or your Widow’s Mite.
It was like floating on air, or walking on water.
It doesn't matter who you give to, rich or poor, powerful or weak, just give what you can. There's no need to means test your giving.
Yes, by letting His Son, indeed Himself, bear the burden of our sin, God gave us His supreme love, the greatest act of Charity the world has ever known.
And through his love we can return to Eden, to God’s world before the Fall, before the loss of faith, before the idolatry of Adam and Eve.
It is our lack of faith, our turning inwards that leads to the tyranny of hierarchy and authority. Our lack of faith is our sin, our lack of trust in God, our idolatry of ourselves, our passivity, our selfishness. But through faith in Jesus we can return to the state of grace before the Fall, a state of unrestrained Charity.  

Marching Men

Sherwood Anderson wrote his strange and  insightful novel, Marching Men, between the years 1906 and 1913. He saw the yearning of modern men for 'order' and the feeling of exultation the powerless individual feels when melded into the powerful mass. He foresaw the fatal years to come when the entire European and Anglo Saxon worlds, not to speak of much of the Far East, were peopled by men in uniform, when Man's greatest ambition appeared to be nothing more than to  become part of a vast killing machine under the orders of a homoerotic leader who demanded his submission and worship.
Marching Men was published in 1917, the same year that the great Progressive, Woodrow Wilson, brought the United States into the Great War, turning the Great Democracy into a police state that silenced and imprisoned opponents of America's involvement in a European war.
In this passage Anderson explains his admiration for those who wield the lash, and sympathy for those who yearn for death, those who love order and hate harmony. 

'In France after the great revolution and the babbling of many voices talking of the brotherhood of man it wanted but a short and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, of cannons and of stirring words to send the same babblers screaming across open spaces, stumbling through ditches and pitching headlong into the arms of death. In the interest of one who believed not at all in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word brotherhood died fighting brothers.
In the heart of all men lies the love of order. How to achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned, instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for accomplishment -- these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land, by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.'

Capitalism, The Highest Stage Of Patriarchy

Mary Malone writes;

Capitalism is the numbering of every object, the quantifying of every action.
An action is the affirmation of an individual's power. Once that action has been quantified and numbered it can be taxed, and the action is transformed into capital and expropriated by Patriarchy and its managers.
A small fragment of that person’s power is returned to them in the form of wages. In early capitalist Patriarchy women have little or no wages and hence little or no power. So, women have to beg, cajole or perform to wheedle money, the tokens of expropriated power, from men.
In the more advanced economies (those economies with the greatest degree of passivity amongst the population) women often earn a wage, but there is an even greater Denial of Woman.
Women's activities have been expropriated. The whole of society is colonised by capital. Child care, health care, the enjoyment of music, the making of clothes, medicine, the cooking of meals,  the forming of opinions, the dreams and aspirations of every individual are centralized by capital and then redistributed by the managers of power.
The early stage of capitalism, that of capital formation, is marked by the brutal subjugation and pacification of the native working class or the indigenous population and of women too. Land that belongs to everyone is taken away and turned into the private domain of the managers of capital. This has been the same the world over. Without access to land people become dependent.
The capitalist patriarchal state takes the independent power of the peasantry and transforms it into negative power, that is violence.
The capitalist patriarchal state turns activity into passivity.
In the past thirty years we have seen the mask of capitalist patriarchy slip, as the most advanced countries grow their economies, not through increased wealth creation, but through the colonizing and capitalizing of all human activity.
The inevitable consequence of capitalism and patriarchy is poverty and dependency, and the ever increasing Denial of Woman.

Turning The Gun On Themselves

There will always be an undercurrent of violence in a society that worships the gun.
There was such a situation in Europe until the Second World War. Europeans had spent many, many years massacring 'less advanced' peoples, murdering and enslaving those with less centralized political systems, whose priorities and technologies were less concentrated on murder and theft. Europeans, and particularly its ruling classes, claimed a cultural superiority based on conquest. Eventually, driven mad by their wickedness, they turned their guns on each other.
Early in the twentieth century Europe was full of idiots in uniform. Rulers liked to be seen in public wearing a uniform. Having gained its sense of superiority from its ability to murder, Europe was gripped by an ecstasy of death.
People subsumed their individuality in the mass of followers, marching all together to the orgasmic annihilation of death. In their worthlessness they welcomed pain, they embraced destruction.
‘Viva la Muerte’ was their cry, these faithless ones, these disciples of death.
The destruction of the Second World War seemed to calm people down. There were, of course many who still saw the uniformed man as a hero or a tragic figure, though most of us preferred peace and prosperity.
But in the United States of America the obsession with violence continues. Violence is actively promoted by the American regime.
The American regime is a rogue state dominated by its military. It exports violence.
America’s most successful manufacturing sector is its weapons industry. Weapons are showcased in Iraq and other unfortunate places and the tyrants of the earth eagerly snap them up. It is better to be a customer than a showcase.
For the United States capitalism does not mean trade, it does not mean competition, it means conflict and domination.
It is a society that sells its psychopathic films to the world via its American owned cinema chains.
Film after film shows the conflict between good, that is ‘us’ and bad, that is ‘the Other’. It is a conflict that can only be resolved through violence, through the death and destruction of the Other. The same basic plot runs through countless films, whether science fiction or war or whatever.
‘The Other’ is unreasonable, not 'us'. ‘The Other’ never listens, except when he hears the whistle of our humanitarian bullet. Might is Right, Might is Moral.
Now, like Europe a century ago, America is turning its violence on itself. Its government treats its citizens like a conquered population. Drugs, prison, surveillance. Like the old Europeans, Americans are reaping what they sow.
  

Nutters With Guns

There are moves in America to reinforce the State's monopoly on violence by severely limiting private gun ownership. Not surprisingly Americans agonise over random shootings, but the surprise is not the occasional shooting in a school here and there, but that there are not more shootings.
That the society of the self centred, the loner, the person who knows the kiss of desire but not the kiss of tenderness, the call of possession, not the call of freedom, should throw up the occasional psychopath is not to be marvelled at.
A world of regulation throws up detached irresponsible people.
They are hemmed in at every step, controlled, monitored, drugged, taught to see themselves as sick and yet at the same time the centre of the universe.
They are taught to believe in their own importance, when clearly they are not important to anyone but themselves.
Nobody really cares about them, except possibly their parents, if they are lucky.
It is not surprising that they are full of self pity and hate.
Normally, these overgrown children, raised for dependency and dumb obedience, a generation of zombies shuffling numbly and nastily from one automated task to another, can let off their fury by binge eating and playing video games, and if they still cannot fill the unforgiving minute the doctor will drive the evil thoughts from their brains with some medication.
Does gun control make sense?
Who does the controlling? Those Who Know Better Than Us?
A hierarchical society is a society of the irresponsible, a society of children. Guns only make sense in a free society. A free society depends on its own militia for its defence. Only tyrants want to take those guns away.
People in a free society are responsible. But America is not a free country. Zombies cannot be free, especially fat zombies. Children cannot be responsible. They like to eat sweets and have fun. They like to be naughty sometimes. And the children are stuffed full of mind bending drugs. There are 6.4 million American children on drugs for ADHD. One out of five male secondary school students in the USA, overwhelmingly working class kids, have been diagnosed with ADHD. They are drugged up to the eyeballs,  prepared for a life of drug dependency and passivity which will later land them in jail.
Should you let these children play with guns? Of course not.
But who are the adults in this hierarchy of repression and irresponsibility and where are they?

Vertical Nutters

Back in the fourteenth century the nutters and psychopaths were in the army, somebody’s army, somewhere.
These furious men were the foot soldiers of the robber barons. Instead of doing anything productive they preferred  to spend their days burning and looting.
These days wars are fought with high technology weapons that enable the nutters to massacre people in relative safety.
There are certain situations that breed psychopaths and the vertical society of the hierarchs with its regimentation and its reward and punishment is breeding ground number one for murder, rape and torture.
For the last three hundred years western civilization has been destroyed by the intensification of the principle of expropriated power.
Factory discipline and compulsory ‘education’ made the First World War possible.
The Second World War was grimly inevitable in a world of degraded beings who only knew how to goosestep in time.
Break a child like you break a dog, they used to say.
It’s different now, not so brutal, more drugs, less dogs, more fun, less pain, more carrot, less stick.
But if anything, society is more regimented than ever. Very few people work independently. Nearly everyone has a boss. Many, many people are direct dependants of the state.
In a vertical society we have social relations based on domination. We have a boss, we obey. We are managers, we are obeyed. In a vertical society we are in conflict with our neighbour, we compete with our neighbour, we do our neighbour down. We see a neighbour and we see what small advantage we can gain.
Perhaps our gain is just a small thing. Perhaps they simply amuse us. But there is little that binds us except mutual exploitation.
In a vertical society there is only the ‘I’, standing all alone.
In a society with horizontal social relations we co-operate with our neighbour, we are able to have friends.
But in a world of obedience people become things, commodities who consume and are consumed. Like the soldier we only relate to the puppeteer who pulls our strings. Friendship is well nigh impossible.
Non aggression pacts are the best we can hope for.
Even marriage is redefined by the government as two people who enjoy each others company in a sexual way, that’s all. Jerking each other off is about all that remains of marriage.
Isotoped and atomic, isolated and atomized, emptiness inside and out, the children of the hierarchs, seven billion of us, going mad in our loneliness with people all around us.
The nutters, the depraved, the degenerate, the damned were in the army once. Now they are all around us, everywhere. Drugged up and psychotic, unable to relate to each other, we are all nutters now.