{"id":9,"date":"2011-03-07T21:28:24","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T21:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/test\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2011-10-12T15:06:49","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T15:06:49","slug":"editorial","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/editorial\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Face Me; I Book You!<\/strong><\/strong>:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>The Arts and Asocial Media<\/strong><\/strong><\/h1>\n
Amatoritsero Ede<\/h6>\n
\u201cIf the poet can no longer speak for society,
\nbut only for himself, then we are at the last ditch\u201d
\n\u2013 Henry Miller<\/em><\/h5>\n

I remember setting up a Facebook profile with great reluctance a few years ago. I did not put up a single picture there for two years and I screened myself off with a pseudonym. Otherwise, any evil eye could peep into my soul or sitting room at will through the window of social media \u2013 never mind the much-vaunted self-protection modules on the site. All it would take is a hacker-style breach of all privacy protocols. Still, \u201cresistance is futile\u201d in the age of social media \u2013 particularly if you need it as a tool or do not want to risk ending up as a twenty-first century Luddite.<\/p>\n

My creative activities eventually unmasked me and I am now a regular denizen of that cyber world even though I inhabit that space strictly for its utility. But a recent strange encounter from the most unexpectedly irritating of sources \u2013 another creative writer \u2013 confirms my suspicions in ways far in excess of my original worries and leads me to question the artist\u2019s sense of social commitment in an age of the \u201cglobal babble\u201d that social media is.<\/p>\n

Before going into the details of the macabre encounter I want to elaborate on the reasons for my initial aversion to social media because it has import for the event itself. Apart from possible unbidden intrusions there is the tendency for great miscommunication due to \u2018interference,\u2019 where messages, instant or not, get twisted en route, especially without the mediation of a face-to-face. Another irritant is the twin staple of vanity and narcissism deriving from the manic self-importance reflected off the mirror of social media. This sickening almost perverse self-love is further exaggerated by that insidious illusion of instant familiarity called the \u2018friends list.\u2019 While all these can reduce the full grown adult to a blubbering, self-worshipping infant and egomaniac, it also leaves room for unwarranted abuse, harassment, intimidation, and bullying or cowardly attacks from behind an impersonal computer monitor.\u00a0 The last is precisely what I suffered in a surreal encounter this past week in the hands of a pretend friend and Internet Tiger \u2013 apologies to Pius Adesanmi \u2013 on Facebook.<\/p>\n

I must say I had completely buried my social media phobia and was oblivious till the devil himself violently tapped me on the shoulder with his spiked trident: \u201cYou’re an asshole, Amatoritsero, a total, fucking and complete asshole. Fuck you and everything you stand for. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.\u201d Those were the devil\u2019s deranged words in a private Facebook message to a \u2018virtual\u2019 stranger. Let us keep in mind that I have never met him in real life, never had any conversation beyond a few hellos across the ether in several years. I did not know how to react to this bolt from the daemonic blue and wondered if it is not an example of that miscommunication of which I was wary. Otherwise, I seriously suspect that this apparently high-strung writer might be on drugs. \u2018Give the devil the benefit of the doubt,\u2019 I thought. \u2018He may be coming down from a hard dose of cocaine or has had a bad day in hell.\u2019 So I ask him calmly:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy this unwarranted attack; I am mystified?\u201d<\/p>\n

And he responds sharply:<\/p>\n

\u201cI only say to you here in a private message what I could not say to you in public. The so-called \u2018attack\u2019 is due to your insularity. How can you not know Keziah Jones!\u201d<\/p>\n

This is when I remembered that several hours earlier and for the first time ever I wrote on the devil\u2019s Facebook wall, asking him who the artist in a video still he posted a short while earlier was. His irritated response had been: \u201cKeziah Jones, of course! Google him. Don\u2019t tell me you don\u2019t know Keziah Jones!\u201d\u00a0 Now in light of the vicious verbal assault in a private message, I wondered why, if at all, I needed to know Keziah Jones, who seems to be the devil\u2019s alter ego.<\/p>\n

I turn to my horned pretend friend himself for answers. I examine his life and work. He is Nigerian, like his alter ego, the musician. Both of them are expatriated \u2013 my wicked antagonist to London, and the other to London as well and then Paris. Another common bond between both is that they are vicarious entertainers. Apart from writing fiction, the devil struts his stuff on the stage like the musician does. Both are theatrical. And what this kind of absurd theatre does is to merely entertain in a world going through paroxysms \u2013 a tumultuous Middle East, racism, the Israel\/Palestine debacle, a wayward global economy, environmental pollution and the threat of extinction from nuclear proliferation. Not in any of the devil\u2019s novels or plays do I find a tissue of social conscience. A huge moral hole plunges through his writings. As for his alter ego\u2019s music, surely it is neither \u00a0fringed by the firebrand activism of a Fela, nor does it have the philosophical depth of a Bob Marley. These kinds of art are Sunday distractions for somnambulist petit bourgeoisie; transient art, which like bubble gum, is chewed, enjoyed, and spat out.<\/p>\n

It became clear to me that my interlocutor is that kind of writer with a split personality, who cultivates the public persona of the carefully groomed romantic artist, dreadlocks and all – plus a practiced self-indulgent smirk – while in secret he is nothing but a sadistic sociopath. Yes, he made sure to throw his egomaniacal tantrum in secret behind the wall of a private Facebook message and not in public. This dreadlocked nightmare reminded me of Arthur Rimbaud whose schizophrenia was captured in the incongruence of his sublime poetry and his dealing in slaves and gunrunning in Harar, Ethiopia, in the late1800s. The only difference being that Rimbaud\u2019s dissolution was public, not private.<\/p>\n

It might seem strange to compare gunrunning and slave-raids \u2013 both depraved and criminal in Rimbaud (slavery had been abolished in Europe at the time) \u2013 with the devil\u2019s bi-polar behaviour. Nevertheless, the fact is that his meltdown is only the first signs of a more serious pathology and could lead in any direction of future depravity. Rimbaud\u2019s dissolution took time. And the dissimulation (hiding behind a private message) involved in the devil\u2019s behaviour is particularly typical of psychopaths, who are highly intelligent, but usually very cunning, appearing quite harmless and are apparently well-integrated members of society. It is the Dr. Jerkyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome.<\/p>\n

Rimbaud\u2019s schizophrenia is the occasion for Henry Miller\u2019s critique in The Time of the Assassins<\/em>. In the epigraph above from Miller\u2019s critique, the \u2018poet\u2019 refers to Rimbaud in the latter\u2019s abdication of his social responsibility as artist when he became degenerate but, more importantly, it recalls a sense of the societal betrayal and a dark, Jekyll-and-Hyde personality in Rimbaud. <\/em>It is instructive that the devil was first and foremost a poet. But poetry deserted him as it deserted Rimbaud the slaver and gunrunner in the end. Although in reality the devil deals in words, not in slaves or guns, the aggregate lack of social cohesion in those words (those plays and novels) of which his secret Facebook attack is symptom, all point to the same brooding, sociopathic personality Rimbaud needed to deal in slaves or arms. Beyond Miller\u2019s particular reference to Rimbaud, I deploy \u2018poet\u2019 here to collectively refer to those \u2013 writers, musicians, painters, or artists generally \u2013 whose calling requires sensitivity and compassion as a unit of social engagement in their work and in their personal comportment.<\/p>\n

For a writer to secretly attack with words on Facebook is to turn it into asocial media; it is to abdicate the social roles of the artist as conscience of society, as example of elevated humanity for the politician, the soldier and the plebeian. The devil\u2019s work, with its “white noise” and empty entertainment value (novel after novel, play after play, story after story) merely adds to the global babble in the world. It leaves the world deaf from that noise, deprives it of the ability to reflect, and makes it incapable of meditating or socially mediating for solutions. While it entertains, a work must remember to elevate, or if it does elevate the writer\u2019s life must not cancel out his work as Rimbaud\u2019 life did his poetry. The devil\u2019s bi-polar personality profoundly complicates any future hope of that empathy which is at the heart of the socially committed writer\u2019s trade. We are indeed \u201cat the last ditch,\u201d as Miller says of Rimbaud, \u201cwhen the poet no longer speaks for society\u201d but for his own selfish goals \u2013 in the devil\u2019s case, that of mere economic survival every theatre season, cheque by royalty cheque and grant for grant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Face Me; I Book You!:\u00a0The Arts and Asocial Media Amatoritsero Ede \u201cIf the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch\u201d \u2013 Henry Miller I remember setting up a Facebook profile with great reluctance a few years ago. I did not put up a single […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":786,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions\/786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}