Je M’enfoutisme

Jim Leftwich
January 2018

The Baroness left Germany to work as a subject of Berlin in the marriage of dome and farm in which Kentucky changed to New York, barely liberating her shortly embarked French act. While the next extraordinary notorious engraved her scuttle on the streets, she decorated postage stamps for a living, first with New York artists’ models and later with hair and facial fashions. By 1923 she was sleeping in the tuned weather, beans carrion von herself, therein a chorus of chocolates for the architects. She eventually abandoned presumably elitist prisoners’ heroic apartment, outlandish memories strapped to her forgetful tomato like a bird cage, prose in the nude assembled as discarded sheets in the plumbing. Blasphemous in the first Dada, lives in the source of Dada, loves her dogs and pickles, has never been intentional or speculated too far, her inflated bark riding moon’s mica.

“Orchard Farming” endeavors in content-reflective sentences to indicate the strokes of purgatory exits, obverse from the extant, to emphasize the vertical penultimate no longer than typographical machine teeth. Reading beside the lines:

lesson each that
to contrast that
to age legs
droops seed
mourners countenance
pig beast bite eros
snotty gestures bloom
dung youth expression
5 spring-she

Stanza one is contained in a sketch of a fractured box with two blotch-stains at the lower-left and bottom-center. It reads: “lesson / to / mourners / snotty / youthsnobs”.

In a letter to Djuna Barnes, Baroness Elsa wrote “the strokes or lines are long and short spaces between words and sentences”.

Stanza one, version two, reads:

LESSON’TO:
MOURNERS – SNOTTY
YOUTHSNOBS.

Associational improvisations while reading through Astride, Pastoral… …read:

A Flugh Brink
Fougt
Fouq-/ Bog
Thgh Sunk
Through
into sink
into hush bated
Hugh Falls
Bated Rush
inflated
mate
squblls
Bullfrog
BGLATED
After
Nap
A Flush Brink
of foggy into bog thorough
They glink
Tubough
Mink into they sink
Hugh Bated
Throb Hugh Faces
Truck Crlls
Pugk
Vapor Stuffed Rush
Mounture Ranted Hug

Sappliny
Straddling up from ping
stirrupclink clink clink
silverbugles coppertrimmed
Heathbound piim clink blink
rush glim Budda HUG rimmed
straddling
rongs aswoon
hgathbound
roves
poves as woon
titter swaying
glitter loon
moon pink
straddling upon neighing stallion
HUiSSUiSSUiSSSSOOOOHUiiiHiHi HiiiiAAA HAO HAOHAOURRRPRSHPRSH PRSN
PRRR PRPRPRPURROAHOACHHOACHOACHOACHOARMHMHMNPROACHNOROO
HOO HOOOO NPR2SHRCHRMNKM CHOT! HU HU HU!
Saddling up from ping
nightbrimmongo
(wakstirrup chink chink

undated (1913 – 1927)
Tristan Tzara, Dada manifesto 1918
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing – hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluff-madonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring. The love of novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je m’enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a cause.

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto On Feeble Love And Bitter Love (1920)

A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretensions is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it’s always right, it’s strong, vigorous and logical.

The “I don’t care attitude” (je m’enfoutisme) is always part of a vast disinformation campaign. If you have worked, as I have, for most of the past 45 years at jobs located beneath the bottom of the economic totem pole, then you have spent a lot of time in the company of people who profess the “I don’t care attitude”. It takes only a few minutes to learn that all of them are lying, all of them, all the time. This is immediately obvious to everyone except supervisors, managers, and owners — and that is the only point and the complete meaning of the “I don’t care attitude”.

What else was said about it, when all the talking was said and done. The continual propeller is an automatic spiritual “meant factory”. It has never been and will never be in best regards of how well the same is timed to wonderment, the same necessary virulent stratospheres of doubt. Now it is revived and reviled to channel illuminations thus recognizing and reorganizing the spiritual vision no constructive history can inform. The splendor of catastrophic evolution, for ourselves, where the cosmic self is stretched from one decade through another, from one generation through another, propelled, unnatural, psychic and fundamental, to judge the word whether underground or on the skids, the known virus manufactured and imbricately available, the unknown increasingly booted in a different age, turns away in understanding to a time of decisive achievement, of alternative existence curled in difference and motion. Every one of us produces the letters that we carry away from the rose of movement, upon the serenity we asked as shoulder to our music, dissecting the term “temporary autonomous zone” as if it was a poem or a koan — if autonomous, then temporary, that’s the kind of playfully desperate thinking we have attained, that we must insist on temporary if we want to take ourselves seriously about autonomous — since our neuroses are rational tactics in the province of denial and dread-enough.

from ON THE PHENOMENON OF BULLSHIT JOBS (2013)

David Graeber: “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.”

from Bullshit Jobs, the Caring Classes, and the Future of Labor: An Interview with David Graeber by Thomas Frank (2014)

David Graeber: I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ’60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse. I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better. I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen.

[..]

Call it the revolt of the caring classes. Because, after all, the working classes have always been the caring classes really. I say this as a person of working class background myself. Not only are almost all actual caregivers (not to mention caretakers!) working class, but people of such backgrounds always tend to see themselves as the sort of people who actively care about their neighbors and communities, and value such social commitments far beyond material advantage.

floshing steel
puriard burrien
in
flexible tenderness webb
abominal
of
systems equal steel
shoped:
female
a plirt
mar5’h
burried steel
kegrisgss receptine
into
keenness’ agressing
aristocratic fit.
octopus charms
alluring
rubberdisktenacity
sockinq:
fayer
soft – creryetoc
into
systems

The caring classes overcome this kind of thing by nurturing the confused children. The fact of dishwashers, cooks, cashiers and delivery drivers is the sort of thing we communicate in our caring as revolt. To care about bullshit is not to care. To not care about bullshit is the necessary beginning of caring. It’s as if a precisely socialist ancillary provision expands through unprecedented telemarketing to human resources ballooning in China, a century of sneaker-phones and toy pleasures in the performance of America, like capitalism in the Soviet Union, all-night pizza security, we have witnessed managerial servants echoed whirring tomatoes to the letter of the lattice, who talks about the damage of working — maybe you know what they’re talking about. Power is the ability to waste someone else’s time. Managerial power. Capillary control-freak sadistic pissant power. Bullshit jobs transform the what is (quiddity), valuable as the paradigm redefining engaged imaginations (haecceity — not this, not that), as the first stirrings of specific commitments sort themselves (I want, I want — Blake climbing his ladder to the crescent moon), supported by assemblies and traces of other people: I do this, I do that. We do what we need to do. Then we do what we want to do.