Value

The beauty of an unexpectedly long series of migraines - and I do not snark here - follows from the slow, painful reemergence into a world that has changed, however slightly.

I know this happens every day, from moment to moment; that it perhaps provides the single defining feature of our existence. But after passing through an ocean of nausea (new, for me) and vertigo which threatened to permanently reconfigure my sense of up and down, I managed to turn on the computer, and discover that all of the (now unsubtle and mechanical) blandishments of the Obama administration, on Egypt, have come to naught, even for many who connect to the revolutionary feast days only as spectators.

A real, live actual revolution has swept away the calculations of those who inhabit the pits of power. I know they still calculate, still plot some "redress" for this revolutionary grievance against them, against what they must now perceive not only as an affront to their idealization of human interaction, but to their authority.

I just doesn't matter. Come even the violent destruction of those who have turned uprising into revolution and festival, the people - the persons - who survive will remember.

No totalizing program - not even the Spectacular episodes of late capitalist coruscation, those flashes of performance and simulation which beg a conformity to a manufactured culture - has the penetration and depth of application to erase every single memory, in every single web of recollection, in each and every person in Tahrir Square.

Even at our Western distance from those events, at our remove from their more intimate memories of their own proud rebellion, where we who have too much distract too easily, there exists a not insubstantial number of us who can now believe in the possibility of our own revolutionary elan.

And that, friends, comrades and strangers, is worth more than we yet know...

UPDATE: Ken MacLeod yesterday wrote something very similar, with greater brevity, and more insight. I defer to his wisdom, and apologize for the unforeseen similarities:

"...In Tahrir Square last week thousands of people stood up to a counter-revolutionary mob and fought it back, yard by yard over a long day and night, with sticks and stones. In those few hours they proved in practice that the human being's conscious will can change history. They brought the human subject and human emancipation back into politics. Whatever the immediate outcome in Egypt, this consciousness will not go away. We can all go back to being human. That doesn't mean we will all love each other. It means we can fight each other for good reasons."