If This is a Man

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
   Hot food and friendly faces:
   Consider if this is a man
   Who works in the mud
   Who does not know peace
   Who fights for a scrap of bread
   Who dies because of a yes or a no.
   Consider if this is a woman,
   Without hair and without name
   With no more strength to remember,
   Her eyes empty and her womb cold
   Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
   Or may your house fall apart,
   May illness impede you,
   May your children turn their faces from you.

--from Primo Levi’s preface to his Holocaust memoir, translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf

An archaic definition of "to strike" is to lower a sail, since disgruntled sailors formerly struck sails to disable a ship. Thus, to remove from production any tool, including one's own body, is to go on strike.

One retaliates, flails at the man by doing nothing, since this refusal is the most convenient weapon at one’s disposal. A striking worker is not dissimilar to a sulking child if not an abbreviated saint. Withdrawing into myself and becoming immobile, I’ll not play, chatter, buy anything or fuck anybody any more.

No one wants to hang with you anyway, asshole.

From every fresh or foul mouth, an invitation, every dusky door, lolling, expectant figures on some funky couch. Fingers beckon. I see bright teeth. In this come-on universe, it takes strength or satiety to just say no and turn away, but many have never been invited to the gorge now, pay-later-with-interest bash. Worldwide, a billion people live in slum conditions. In 2005, the wealthiest 20% accounted for 76.6% of private consumption. The poorest fifth, 1.5%. Ten million starve to death each year, thirty thousand a day. Enough already, stop getting so righteous. Who do you like in the World Series? I say Phillies in six games. They’re hungrier.

No protest is as desperate as a hunger strike. An incremental and invisible suicide, it lacks the drama of self-immolation. No one sees or cares. Often, there’s no conscience to appeal to. The victims also transform their jailers and torturers into rescuing angels, “guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into ‘restraint chairs,’ sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers,” as the New York Times reported in 2006.

In 2003, American David Blaine went without food for 44 days while suspended in a plexiglass box near London’s Tower Bridge. For this stunt, he was paid nearly 200,000 Dollars by British television. His inspirations, I kid you not, were Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi and Irish Republican Army’s Bobby Sands, who had died at age 26 after 66 days of a hunger strike in a British prison. Blaine also mentioned Kafka’s 1922 story, “The Hunger Artist.” Before his lucrative affliction, Blaine declared, "I'm an artist—nothing more, nothing less. I don't fear life and I don't fear death." The locals weren’t overly impressed, with some trying to shake the box, aiming laser beams, throwing eggs or driving golf balls at it. Others disrupted his water supply, banged on drums, played loud music or detonated explosions nearby. Men mooned, women flashed. A remote-controlled toy helicopter hovered, dangling a burger. Barbecues were staged. Farce over, Blaine confided before sobbing, "This has been one of the most important experiences in my life. I have learned more in that box than I have in years."

The first American hunger artist was Dr. Henry Tanner. In 1880, he fasted in public for 40 days, his gray hair turning completely white. Without fanfare, Moses had done the same, And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water (Exodus 34:28). Promised $1,000 for his ordeal, Tanner only got 500. Tanner’s inspiration was Mollie Fancher, most famous of the Victorian “fasting girls.” After a street car accident, she lost the abilities to see, feel, taste and smell, but could go without food for up to twelve years, or so she claimed. Blind, she could sometimes see through her forehead, the top of her head seemingly on fire, light pouring into it. Contemporaries said she could read letters through sealed envelopes, witness distant or future events. In 1888, John Zachar of Wisconsin went 53 days without food.

After Blaine, a Chinese fasted for 49 days; a Russian, 50, but who cares, really? Kafka on his hunger artist, “For he alone knew […] how easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world.” These stunts shouldn’t count unless you starve to death, really. Put your corpse where your mouth is. Push that envelope, dude. Die, or shut up. Eliot Weinberger on St. Catherine of Siena:

At sixteen she began to eat only raw vegetables, bread and water; at twenty-one she gave up bread; at twenty-five she gave up she gave up vegetables for bitter herbs and water and lost half her weight. Forced by the Church, which suspected her of witchcraft or vanity, to eat, she would vomit what she had been fed. At thirty she retreated from the world into her visions; at thirty-three she stopped eating and drinking entirely, so that she would die in 1380, not long after Good Friday, at the same age as Christ.

In the twentieth century, there’s Simone Weil, a French-born, Catholic mystic of Jewish ancestry. In 1943, aged 34 and unknown as a writer, she died in England after refusing to eat more than the official ration of Nazi-occupied France. It didn’t matter that most of her compatriots could supplement their diet through the black market. As long as a single Frenchman had to endure such hunger, she wanted to share his lot. She didn’t turn away from suffering, but embodied it, didn’t just notice the most wretched, but became one.

To abstain from food is also to purge, clean the inside, rid all the shit from your body. How can you be pure if you’re so full of it? It’s stupid. Everyone carries shit around 24 hours a day. In Ingo Schulze’s 33 Moments of Happiness, there’s a boy, Seryosha, who has found a remedy to this distress. Eat shit, he advises his uncle:

I didn’t want to have to poop anymore! Everybody knows that feeling, don’t they, everybody, but nobody ever says anything about it, no one wants to say it because it’s so horrible, right? But why, I asked myself, am I, why is everybody so scared of it? It comes out of my own body, it’s a piece of me, and so it can’t be any worse than I am! […] I’ve known that for a long time […] but today I tried an old pile, it was my own and it tastes good, Uncle Pasha, doesn’t it? It tastes sweet! Do you know what that means, that it tastes sweet? It means I don’t have to be scared anymore, no one has to be scared anymore, isn’t that wonderful, Uncle Pasha?—translated from the German by John E. Woods

II

Everything which is eaten is the food of power. The hungry man feels empty space within himself. He overcomes the discomfort which this causes him by filling himself with food. The fuller he is the better he feels. The man who can eat more than anyone else lies back satisfied and heavy with food; he is a champion. There are peoples who take such a champion eater for their chief. His full belly seems to them a guarantee that they themselves will never go hungry for long. It is as though he had filled it for all of them.—from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, translated from the German by Carol Stewart

There are also champion nations of consumption. The top five in daily calorie intake: Ireland (3,410); Belgium-Luxembourg (3,380); the United States (3,330); Netherlands (3,320) and Austria (3,310). When it comes to oil and water, however, we’re the crowning pigs. With 4.5% of the world’s population, we burn 24% of its petroleum, twice per capita as the Japanese, six times the Mexicans, 13 times the Chinese and 370 times the Ethiopians. We’re also the biggest debtor nation by far, meaning we haven’t earned what we’ve been eating for 30 years. Talk about dismal economics.

Freakish gluttons and eating contests have always been around but the appearance of professional competitive eaters are emblematic of our time, an era of peak oil, peak water, peak everything, destroy the earth as we lunge forward with irrational exuberance, thank you very much, Alan Greenspan. Twenty-three-year-old Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, hailed as “truly an American hero and a national treasure” by The International Federation of Competitive Eating, is the top eater right now. He's famous for these stomach bursting feats: 45 slices of Famous Famiglia Pizza in 10 minutes, October 12, 2008; 103 Krystal Burgers in 8 minutes, October 28, 2007; 7.5 lbs of buffalo chicken wings in 12 minutes, May 21, 2007; 47 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes, June 10, 2006; and 66 Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs and Buns in 12 minutes, July 4, 2007. The previous record holder was the Japanese Takeru “The Tsunami” Kobayashi, who downed 53.75 hot dogs in 2006.

If you’re not among the starving, then just eat, shit and shop until you’re maxed out, a consumerist ethos to be extolled by poets. Kenneth Goldsmith explains, “the first thing we need to do is to find a poet who is unabashedly pro-consumerist. In our overdrive hyper-capitalist frenzied world, it's hard to find poets that actually celebrate, say, shopping. You might think that during the Bush administration, pro-consumerist poets would be coming out of the woodwork. But no […] ” Goldsmith also advocates the literary equivalence of mindless shopping, “the acquisition of text becomes more valuable than the content of the acquired texts: quantity trumps quality.” And, “the accumulation is more important than word-for-word content […] a concept where all words are weighed by the pound, rather than by their intellectual or literary merit.” But jokemeister Goldsmith must be kidding. He’s not really endorsing this compulsive orgy of First World indulgence, “I haven't voted since my early 20s with the hopes that if enough of us didn't vote, the system would collapse. Wishful thinking, I know. But with the crimes of the current administration and the blood on its hands, I have no choice but to take a Ginsbergian route of engagement.”

Frankly, I don’t see any parallel between Goldsmith and Ginsberg, but I don’t know the former’s output well enough. Does anyone? We’ve reached a point where a poet can become famous without generating memorable poetry. It’s so passé to expect poems from a poet, leadership from a leader, or words to mean anything, that’s why we’re in decadence. Recently, the poetry ghetto was abuzz over Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter’s Volume 1, a 3,785-page anthology featuring 3,164 poets, each coupled with a computer-scrambled poem. Goldsmith announced this prank, “Either you're in or you're not.” In what? And why should anyone care? But in a statistic mad, compulsively counting culture, quantity is all that matters. Sixty-six hot dogs, 3,785 pages, billions served.

III

Writers and artists don’t have to parrot Party lines or purchase the reigning paradigm. Consider Tehching Hsieh, whose every act has been calibrated to convey the most symbolic meanings. Born in Taiwan, Hsieh was a 23-year-old administrator on an Iranian oil tanker when it docked in Philadelphia in 1974. He jumped ship, paid $150 for a taxi ride to New York, where he’s lived ever since, working the first four years as a busboy in Chinatown. Immigrants of all stripes have been drawn to this country because it has been, for over a century, the plantation mansion of the world. Call it the house slave conundrum. Hsieh wanted to be in NYC because it was the center of the art universe. Until a 1988 government amnesty, he was an illegal alien. Hsieh’s famous for these performances:

1) Cage Piece, 1978–79, where he spent an entire year in a 11 1/2 x 9 x 8 cell without talking, reading, writing, watching television or listening to music. An assistant provided his food, removed his wastes. As an illegal, he stayed out of sight, thus “safe,” yet he had announced his whereabouts through public posters. He had also arrested himself. Like other prisoners, he marked each day with a scratch on the wall. He had escaped all the way to America only to remove himself from it. Leaving his cage, he felt as though he were surrounded by wolves, he said, “I could feel the sense of survival, an aggression in everyone."

2) Time Piece, 1980–81, where he wore a uniform and punched a time clock on the hour, every hour, for an entire year. Out of 8,760 appointments, he missed only 134, mostly due to sleep. Punishing himself and on call 24 hours a day, Hsieh over mimicked an employment ritual without actually working. He also parodied the stereotype of the super hungry and insanely industrious first generation immigrant.

3) Outdoor Piece, 1981–82, where he entered no building or any kind of shelter for an entire year, the lone exception the 15 hours he spent in a police precinct after a fight with another homeless man. As an illegal alien, Hsieh was already “homeless,” a squatter on another’s property. Wandering the streets 24/7, he became a permanent part of the landscape, assimilated himself in the most literal way, yet he still didn’t count on any civic or social level. Like the native-born homeless, he was visible only as a nuisance.

4) Art/Life, 1983–84, a collaboration with Linda Montano, tied to Hsieh by an eight-foot rope for an entire year, on the condition that they had no physical contact. Linda in Italian is 1) clean and orderly 2) elegant and well-groomed; In American Spanish, “pretty and lovely.” Hsieh’s pairing with Montano was literal, realer than real, yet ultimately pointless. They started out as strangers, didn’t get along all that well during it, then squabbled about whose idea it was. Together, they endured all the annoyances of a relationship without any of the benefits. More awkward than a fake wedding, it didn’t even yield a green card. Fittingly and perversely, all of their conversations were recorded on the condition that these tapes would never be listened to.

5) A year without art, 1985-86, where he didn’t make, talk about or look at art for an entire year. Previous to this, he was willing to erase huge chunks of his life to make art. With this piece, he got rid of art.

With an uncanny knack for paradoxes, Hsieh repeatedly gravitated towards the fringe, hung out at the bottom, suspended himself between impossibilities. A true hunger artist, he knew how to invest refusal with meaning.