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How to Get Nowhere and Achieve Nothing
On living as a participatory process
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl last weekend, but I heard Kendrick Lamar televised the revolution. It seems that we, as a society, have at last achieved the impossible, the thing Gil Scott-Heron so famously promised us would not be done. The revolution has now been televised.
I’ve been thinking about that poem, the Gil Scott-Heron one I mean. “You will not be able to stay home, brother,” he tells us. Nor can we turn in, cop out, get beer during the commercials, no, none of that, because the revolution will not be televised.
Or, put another way: if it’s televised, then it’s not the revolution.
What’s ironic is that you can now listen to a recording of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” on YouTube. The listening is preferable, I suppose, to just reading the text of the poem on a screen. There’s more of a visceral sense of it, with his tone and the music and the rhythm of it. Even when you just read the words, a wisp of that rhythm remains, a sense of beat and cadence that brings the words to life. Still, it’s more the ghost of a sense than a full sensory experience. Written words are still so much less alive than spoken ones, and recorded ones still lacking in all the other senses that only come from hearing them uttered in your presence.
