London's burning- the great Clash song

(from 'London riots'
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/08/london-riots.html:


"People won't take it forever. At some point they will take it back.")

"Che cos'è la 'società psichiatrica avanzata'?" (Risposta a una domanda di Nanette Miles)

La domanda è sensata; e mostra bene come le cose non siano in genere auto-evidenti.

Mettiamola così: costruiamo un modello della società- un modello che comprende svariati strati orizzontali separati; uno è p.e. lo strato della polizia/controllo del comportamento; comprende persone (poliziotti, giudici, legislatori e così via), istituzioni, regole, ideologie, edifici ecc.

Un altro strato: finanziario/economico: fabbriche, negozi e laboratori artigianali, agenzie di marketing, il settore logistico, pianificatori- e operai, impiegati, manager, banche ecc.

 

Un altro: il livello politico- con proiezioni all’interno (politica interna) e all’esterno (politica estera).

Un altro: il livello militare.

Un altro: scienza e sviluppo.

Un altro: il sistema sanitario.

……

Tutti questi strati sono distinti, e hanno peculiarità che possono esssere analizzate  sia sincronicamente (lo stato presente)  che diacronicamente (mentre cambiano nel tempo); sono distinti, ma embricati, con multiple interazioni e multipli anelli di feedback; insieme essi costituiscono il nostro ambiente vitale, ed il nostro sistema sociale.

Dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale molti studiosi hanno descritto l’emergere di significative trasformazioni rispetto al sistema capitalistico classico (o economia di mercato); un maggior intervento statale, più estesa sicurezza sociale, un insieme diversificato di nuovi oggetti di consumo (dalle automobili ai frigoriferi agli apparecchi TV…) che hanno grandemente mutato lo stile di vita di base; inoltre, vi è stato un processo di concentrazione economica- multinazionali, catene di grandi magazzini, estensione degli apparati di governo; tutto questo ha ricevuto diverse denominazioni: società opulenta, società dei consumi, tardo-capitalismo, società industriale avanzata…

Bene, a quest’ultima espressione corrisponde ‘società psichiatrica avanzata’- che è in effetti un altro degli strati sopra menzionati; non semplicemente manicomi per i folli, come un tempo, ma una varietà diffusa in tutto il territorio di istituzioni private e pubbliche, che offrono una estesa gamma di servizi: dalla psicoterapia classica agli psicofarmaci, dagli ambulatori ai gruppi di autocoscienza a terapie esoteriche di svariati tipi (andando da totale mistificazione a serietà e impatto estremi). Un aspetto rilevante è che in molti di questi sottosettori vi sono fortissimi gradienti di potere (fra chi cura e chi è curato, fra chi insegna e chi apprende ecc.); inoltre, molto spesso il risultato (se non l’obiettivo) è la riduzione del pensiero e del comportamento indipendente, e della creatività. Tutto il sistema in effetti per certi aspetti si sovrappone al sistema di polizia, per esempio,  nella misura in cui contribuisce a che le cose vadano nel modo abituale, senza troppo caos o problemi- la qual cosa è stata chiamata una funzione di controllo sociale, o normalizzazione.

Questo sistema psichiatrico è certamente non totalizzante, e non controlla tutto; non di meno i suoi costituenti fondamentali (la psicologia dell’io, le industrie farmaceutiche, la Associazione Psichiatrica Americana con la sua Bibbia diffusa in tutto il mondo- il DSM ,”Manuale diagnostico e statistico dei disturbi mentali”)  condizionano in modo sostanziale tutto il campo di possibilità, elaborazioni, mutamenti.

Una descrizione notevolmente rozza di questo sistema si può trovare in un saggio di John Zerzan che ho pubblicato sul blog un po’ di tempo fa.  Un’analisi molto più raffinata è contenuta in un'opera di Roland Castel e altri intitolata nell’originale appunto ‘La societè psychiatrique avancè’, e in inglese ‘La società psichiatrica’; è un libro che ha 30 anni- cosicchè molte cose  non vi compaiono, ed è pure un po’ troppo sociologistico e deterministico (il ‘piano del capitale’ tende a dominare e sussumere tutto); ad ogni modo è notevolmente completo e dettagliato.

Be’, qui finisce la parte uno della mia risposta; la parte due- quando io o qualcun altro sarà capace di scriverla- dovrebbe trattare di cosa si trova oltre la società psichiatrica avanzata. Il che è quello di cui mi sto occupando in questo blog e nella mia azione.

GC, agosto 2011



[A posteriori, penso vi siano alcuni testi che, almeno per me oggi, illuminano o allargano il discorso- e il problema: che non è solo descrivere e/o criticare, ma uscire dalla paralisi della capacità progettuale, scoprire delle alternative:
-Castel, Castel& Lovell,  “The psychiatric society’, Columbia University Press 1982 (1979).
-Talcott Parsons, ‘Il sistema sociale’, Ed. di Comunità 1996 (1952).
-Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and philosophy, and other essays’, Monthly Review Press 2001 (1970 ca.).
-Jurij Davydov, ‘Il lavoro e la libertà’, Einaudi 1966 (1962).
-G. Lucáks, ‘Goethe e il suo tempo’, Einaudi 1983 (1949).
-Agnes Heller, ‘Sociologia della vita quotidiana’, Editori Riuniti 1975 (1970).

Il discorso diventa evidentemente politico e pratico, e questo tanto più se si deve fare i conti non con un sistema statico o immutabilmente solido, ma con crisi su crisi, disuguaglianze di sviluppo e di potere, superstati in rotta di collisione, e così via. E mi pare che la vecchia contrapposizione: socialismo o barbarie torni ad avere una sua cogenza. Ma questo è argomento ovviamente da dibattere, e il futuro resta da costruire, se ne saremo capaci. – GC, genn. 2012 ]
 

A Homage to Jodi Dean: politics, law, enjoyment, desire- and the Other, and the Real-

(Best ape revolt ever. See it for the tactics)

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/

'Zizek on Law'

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/zizek_on_law_2.doc

'Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory'

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/apsa_05_enjoyment.doc

Language experiments (in back of the Real)/ Expériences avec la langue (derrière le Réel)

Hiéroglyphes de l’hystérie, blasons de la phobie, labyrinthes de la Zwangsneurose, - charmes de l’impuissance, énigmes de l’inhibition, oracles de l’angoisse, - armes parlantes du caractère, sceaux de l’auto-punition, déguisements de la perversion, - tels sont les hermétismes que notre exégèse résout, les équivoques que notre invocation dissout, les artifices que notre dialectique absout, dans une délivrance du sens emprisonné, qui va de la révélation du palimpseste au mot donné du mystère et au pardon de la parole.

A regal soul, inadvertently surrendering to the crab of lust, the octopus of weakmindedness, the shark of individual abjection, the boa of absent morality, and the monstrous snail of idiocy!

Ame royale, livrée, dans un moment d’oubli, au crabe de la débauche, au poulpe de la faiblesse de caractère, au requin de l’abjection individuelle, au boa de la morale absente, et au colimaçon monstrueux de l’idiotisme !

Le langage mange le réel. (Speech eats up the Real).

Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of  solitude, sealed at night. 

railroad yard in San Jose I wandered desolate in front of a tank factory and sat on a bench near the switchman's shack. A flower lay on the hay on the asphalt highway --the dread hay flower I thought--It had a brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty spikes like Jesus' inchlong crown, and a soiled dry center cotton tuft like a used shaving brush that's been lying under the garage for a year. Yellow, yellow flower, and flower of industry, tough spiky ugly flower, flower nonetheless, with the form of the great yellow Rose in your brain! This is the flower of the World. Jeroglíficos de la histeria, blasones de la fobia, laberintos de la Zwangsneurose; encantos de la impotencia, enigmas de la inhibición, oráculos de la angustia; armas parlantes del carácter, sellos del autocastigo, disfraces de la perversión; tales son los hermetismos que nuestra exégesis resuelve, los equívocos que nuestra invocación disuelve, los artificios que nuestra dialéctica absuelve, en una liberación del sentido aprisionado que va desde la revelación del palimpsesto hasta la palabra dada del misterio y el perdón de la palabra. [Les perturbations, les anxiétés, les dépravations, la mort, les exceptions dans l’ordre physique ou moral, l’esprit de négation, les abrutissements, les hallucinations servies par la volonté, les tourments, la destruction, les renversements, les larmes, les insatiabilités, les asservissements, les imaginations creusantes, les romans, ce qui est inattendu, ce qu’il ne faut pas faire, les singularités chimiques de vautour mystérieux qui guette la charogne de quelque illusion morte, les expériences précoces et avortées, les obscurités à carapace de punaise, la monomanie terrible de l’orgueil, l’inoculation des stupeurs profondes, les oraisons funèbres, les envies, les trahisons, les tyrannies, les impiétés, les irritations, les acrimonies, les incartades agressives, la démence, le spleen, les épouvantements raisonnés, les inquiétudes étranges, que le lecteur préférerait ne pas éprouver, les grimaces, les névroses, les filières sanglantes par lesquelles on fait passer la logique aux abois, les exagérations, l’absence de sincérité, les scies, les platitudes, le sombre, le lugubre, les enfantements pires que les meurtres, les passions, le clan des romanciers de cours d’assises, les tragédies, les odes, les mélodrames, les extrêmes présentés à perpétuité, la raison impunément sifflée, les odeurs de poule mouillée, les affadissements, les grenouilles, les poulpes, les requins, le simoun des déserts, ce qui est somnambule, louche, nocturne, somnifère, noctambule, visqueux, phoque parlant, équivoque, poitrinaire, spasmodique, aphrodisiaque, anémique, borgne, hermaphrodite, bâtard, albinos, pédéraste, phénomène d’aquarium et femme à barbe, les heures soûles du découragement taciturne, les fantaisies, les Acrotés, les monstres, les syllogismes démoralisateurs, les ordures, ce qui ne réfléchit pas comme l’enfant, la désolation, ce mancenillier intellectuel, les chancres parfumés, les cuisses aux camélias, la culpabilité d’un écrivain qui roule sur la pente du néant et se méprise lui-même avec des cris joyeux, les remords, les hypocrisies, les perspectives vagues qui vous broient dans leurs engrenages imperceptibles, les crachats sérieux sur les axiomes sacrés, la vermine et ses chatouillements insinuants, les préfaces insensées, comme celles de Cromwell, de Mlle de Maupin et de Dumas fils, les caducités, les impuissances, les blasphèmes, les asphyxies, les étouffements, les rages... et beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie!] J. Lacan, "Écrits". J. Joyce, "Finnegans Wake". S. Kristeva, "Pouvoirs de l'horreur". S. Kristeva, "La Révolution du Langage Poétique" Lautréamont, "Chants de Maldoror", "Poésies". J. Lacan, "Seminaire 23- Le sinthome". J. Bishop, "Joyce's book of the dark". Allen Ginsberg, "In back of the real"

'What is the "advanced psychiatric society"?' (This being a question asked me by Nanette Miles)

The question is appropriate; and goes a long way to show how things are not generally self-evident.
Let me put it this way: let's build a model of society- consisting of a quantity of separate horizontal strata; one is p.e. the police/behavior control stratum; it comprises persons (policemen, judges, legislators and so on), institutions, rules, ideologies, buildings and so forth.
Another stratum: financial/economic: factories, shops, marketing agencies, logistics, planners- and workmen, white-collars, managers, banks and so forth.
Another: political level- with projections on the inside (domestic policy) and the outside (foreign policy).
Another: military level.
Another: science and development.
Another: the health system.
..........


All these strata are distinct, and have peculiarities which can be analyzed both synchronically (present state) and diachronically (as they change in time); they are distinct, but embricated, with multiple interactions and feedback loops. Together they constitute our living environment and our social system.
After World War Two many scholars described the emergence ot significant transformations away from the classical capitalistical system (or free-market economy); a greater state intervention, greater social security, a whole array of new consumption objects (from cars to refrigerators to TV sets ...) which greatly changed the basic lifestyle; also, there was a process of economic concentration- multinationals, chainstores, big government; all of this was variously named: affluent society, consumeristic society, late capitalism, advanced industrial society...
Ok, to this term corresponds 'advanced psychiatric society'- which is in fact another of the strata I mentioned before: not just asylums for the insane, as once upon a time, but a diffused throughout variety of public and private institutions, offering a wide range of services: from classical psychotherapy to psychopharmaca, from walk-in clinics to self awareness groups to esoteric therapies of various kinds (going from total quakery to extreme seriousness and import). One relevant thing is that in many of these sub-sectors there are very strong power gradients (between who cures and who is cured, beween who teaches and who learns, etc); and, secondly, that very often the result (if not always the aim) is reduction of independent thought and behavior and of creativity. The whole system in fact somewhat overlaps with the police system, for example, in so far as it helps things just keep moving the ordinary way, without too many tumults and improperties- which has been called a function of social control, or normalization.
This psychiatric system is certainly not totalizing and all-controlling; nonetheless its basic constituents (ego psychology, drug industries, the American Psychiatric Association with its world-wide diffused Bible- the DSM, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders") highly determine the whole field of possibilities and imaginings.


A very crude description of this system can be found in an essay by John Zerzan I have published on the blog some time ago. A much more refined analysis is in a book by Roland Castel and others titled in the original just 'La societè psychiatrique avancè', and in English 'The psychiatric society'; it is now 30 years old- so that much is not comprised, and it is also a bit too sociologistic and determistic (the 'plans of social capital' go a long way to dominating and subsuming everything); anyway it is fairly complete and detailed.


Well, here stops part one of my reply; the next part- when I or someone else will be able to write it- should deal with what lies beyond the advanced psychiatric society. Which is what I am working on in this blog and in my praxis.  GC

                (from Cronenberg's 'ExistenZ')

What lies beyond the advanced psychiatric society? (Reading Lacan on jouissance) [Ancient poem]

What indeed?   : abjection, disgregation, solitude, filth and finally death, amid horrible acts of violence and terrible physical and moral pain...- but wait now: isn't all of this what we have this side of the border? and what does the parting line dispose and order, what and whose law is enacted; who is the winner; where is the joy? GC

whatever you want
whatever you say
you know me
I know you


I tracked you down the alley
hard rain pouring down
I tracked you down the alley
I know you




[qualunque cosa tu voglia/ 
qualunque cosa tu dica/ 
mi conosci/ 
ti conosco


ti ho seguita per il vicolo/
pioggia che cadeva/
ti ho seguita per il vicolo/
ti conosco]

IMPERIAL 2 (Vollmann): 'Body-snatchers'

The state of exception seems to be the normality; there's no need for anger, no need for blame- or is there?  And is truth- the real-  better than deceit, forgetfulness, Verwerfung? At this point, I really plainly don't know. GC

BODY-SNATCHERS

The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border's eyes stained it with yellow tears.—These lights have been up for about two years, Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.

He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he'd played his part in the work first begun by Eden's angel with the flaming sword, the methodical patrols and prowls to keep the have-not millions out of paradise—which in this case was Imperial County, California, whose fields of blondeness, of endless pallid asparagus, onion plants like great lollipops and honey-colored hay bales produced the lowest median tax income of any county in the state. Zone El Centro, named after the county seat, comprised Sectors 210 to 226, of which Sectors 217 to 223 happened to be Murray's responsibility. He kept the key to the armory, whose rows of M4 shotguns awaited a mass assault from Southside which never came. He knew how to deploy the stinger spikes, the rows of accordion-like grids like a row of caltrops: Pull a string and they opened up to puncture a tire. One car actually drove twelve desperate miles on four fl at tires until it was wrecked beyond any conceivable utility to its confiscators.

They'll pop their heads up in a minute, he was always saying. He was always right.

An hour ago we might have been able to see through the bamboo and across the wrinkled brown water into Southside where Mexicans sat on the levee waiting to seize their chance, but at that time Murray and I had been over by the Port of Entry East bridge where two Mexicans waited, not aliens yet; while on our side, Northside, another agent sat calmly watching them in his car.

Hello, said Murray. Have those folks been there all day?

Yessir, the agent said.

Suddenly it was dusk, and the two men were already crossing. Now they were illegals.

Get out! an officer yelled at them. They turned and slowly, slowly walked back into Mexico across the humming throbbing bridge.

Then we drove west down the long horizon of border wall. Two Mexicans walked along the fence down in Southside, screaming obscenities at Murray.

Now, you see, this has got concrete, Murray explained. But it only goes down about four feet. They have their little spider holes. They pop up, throw a rock through the windshield, then go down again.

We drove west, down into the lights of Calexico and out again, passing the sandy waste whose incarnation as a golf course was memorialized by carcasses of palm trees.—See, another hole in the fence back there, Murray said. Usually you just hold back and wait. They'll pop up.—The golf course had gotten robbed once too often, and then somebody burned down the clubhouse after a fence-jumper from Southside was shot. So some townspeople told me. Their stories were weary and muddled, but in them as in this former golf course the border wall remained ever in the background, its long, rust-colored fence dwindling into lights. Then the dim red fence abruptly ended, and we met the All-American Canal, which comprises so much of this sector's border westward of the wall. Follow the All-American upstream on a map, and you'll see that it abruptly turns north, wraps around Calexico International Airport near that abandoned golf course (the hollow in this spot is a good place for pollos and solos to hide, and sometimes for bandits, too, who murdered somebody here half a year ago), and then it bends due east again just before Comacho Road, ducking under the railway and Imperial Avenue, streaming on eastward toward its source, until the last we see of it, it's overlined the streets named after southwestern riches: Turquoise Street, Sapphire Street, Garnet Street, Ruby Court, Emerald Way, Topaz Court—after which it runs off the map and out of Calexico. In the first four months of 1999 alone, eight people whom the authorities knew of had already drowned in the All-American's cool quick current, all of them presumably seekers of illegal self-improvement; and I imagine that other bodies were never found, being carried into jurisdictions where perhaps the nonhuman coyotes got them. In April 1999 the United States Navy began to wire the canal with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar noise-detection apparatus.—The goal is to create a system that can alert authorities when someone is in trouble in the canal, my home newspaper informed me blandly. Who am I to doubt the Navy's altruism?

You should see these guys pickin' watermelon, bent over all day, said Officer Murray. They do work most Americans wouldn't do.

We were close by the Wistaria Check, which lay opposite the place on the Mexican side where the taxi driver and Juan the cokehead had taken me the day before.

The taxi driver had said: If you want, I'll jump into the canal and swim across, if you pay me.

Juan, whose scrawny back and shoulders most proudly bore a tattoo of the Virgin for which he'd paid two U.S. dollars back when he was twenty (he was now Christ's age), stopped the taxi to buy fi ve hundred pesos' worth of powder in a twist of plastic. He was a true addict. Every day I had to advance him his wages. By late afternoon he needed a bonus. I had found him amidst the slow round of beggars and drunks on a street two blocks south of the United States where a poster announcing a MILLION DOLLAR FINANCIAL SERVICE depicted a giant identification card which among all its elysian proclamations faintly whispered NOT A GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT, then rushed on to proclaim ORDER YOUR PERSONAL U.S. I.D. CARD HERE TODAY. On that hot afternoon when we departed Mexicali's red and yellow storefronts and drove westward into the dirt, the houses shrinking into shacks, Juan and the taxi driver kept glancing at me and muttering together; but I told them that I would have even more cash when I came back tomorrow. Far away, deeper into Mexico, I could see the pale bluish-white mountains like concretions of dust. Now we came into Juan's hometown where several of the Mexicali street-whores lived, and although Juan wanted to stop to buy more coke, business, personified by me, demanded that we leave behind those long blocks of tiny houses of cracked dry mud whose yards were dirt instead of grass. So we turned onto a long dirt road in parallel to the All-American Canal, which we could not yet see. Here each of the many tiny cement or adobe houses was fenced away from the world. One fence derived from boxspring bedframes. Other fencepoles had been fashioned of twigs or columns of tires, and there were many hedges of thorns on that nameless road of prickly pears, bamboo, dust, beautiful palm trees, and turtles sleepily lurking in the stagnant ditchwater.

See all those cars in there? Stolen, my guide triumphantly explained. From

America.

Well, I said, I'm glad they have a new home, Juan. How do you know they're stolen?

I don't think these people have enough money to buy a new car—or ten new cars.

He said that in Mexicali it cost two or three hundred dollars for a brand-new stolen American automobile, which I considered not a bad price. He said that another industry of the householders along this road was to hide emigrants on consignment until nightfall, then help them try to swim the canal. And just as he finished explaining these matters, we came upon a man in sunglasses who was driving a brand-new van with tinted windows. We had seen no other vehicles before, and we saw none afterward except for one water truck whose corroded white cylinder tank slowly bled water as it went. The man in sunglasses rolled down his night-dark window to study us, which was the only reason that we could see him at all. He was gripping a pair of binoculars against his face. When he had digested us, he drove slowly past, the window still down. He was watching the canal now through his binoculars.

Think he's a coyote? I asked.

What else?

Now we arrived at a little shrine to the Virgin and a cross. Someone had died, perhaps a solo. Juan read the inscription. Yes, he said, the man had drowned trying to cross into America, where everything was wider, cleaner, safer, more expensive, more controlled and more homogeneous. And by this shrine we parked the car and ascended the levee of crumbing mud-dust to gaze at the United States, where of the three of us only I could legally go. It was hot and thorny and dry on the Mexican side with all those American fields appearing so cruelly green like Paradise, because the water belongs to America, as Juan put it. Beside us, a skinny horse browsed in garbage.

Some chocolate-brown boys were swimming in the coffee-colored canal, and on Northside, very close to Wistaria Check as I said, a white truck was parked and two middle-aged white men were trying their luck at catfishing, ignoring the boys who ignored them. Juan pointed to the boys and said: See those poor people over there? They're gonna try for the night time, then they'll walk through all the fields . . .

Ask them where they're going.

They're gonna go to Canada, they say, unless Border Patrol catch them.

Ask them if they know where Canada is.

They say, they don't know, but somebody told them it's a real nice country where you don't get hassled like you do in America.

On our side, the dusty desert side, an obelisk marked American dominion, and later I learned from the Border Patrol that the canal actually lay slightly north of the true border, but those guardians found it needlessly troublesome to assert their authority over the few slender feet of United States sovereignty between the marker and the water. Officer Murray said to me: If I saw people on the Southside of the canal, I'd just wave to 'em. You see a raft, now, you just back off. Don't wanna spook anybody.

A day or two later the local papers carried a story about how Border Patrol agents had shot one of those rafts with a pellet gun. The raft capsized, and one or two aliens drowned. (There are Border Patrol officers in boats, and they're like fishing, a solo in Algodones told me. They cut open or shoot at the rafts and let 'em drift downriver.—Last night there were about seven shots, his comrade said, shrugging.) But the drownings, I hope, were an aberration. I never at any time met a solo or pollo who expressed physical fear of the Border Patrol. Murray insisted that some agents bought fast food with their own money for the frightened Southside kids they'd captured.

But the Mexican consulate never hears that, Murray said bitterly.

They'll probably start rafting pretty soon, he muttered.

He stood listening to the canal, which was long, low, black with bamboo. His job was not to shape the destiny of those who sought America, but merely to postpone it. For what could he do to them, but lock them in a holding cell, then deport them back to Southside so that they could try again? And for a moment, as we stood there, each of us letting his private thoughts fall into the pit of the night, I almost pitied the futility of his occupation, as I suspect he did mine (the main purpose of my essays being to line birdcages), but then I fortunately persuaded myself that all vocations and callings are equally futile. He talked about how beautiful it was when he patrolled the shoulder of an onion field at dusk with the bees returning to their hives, and I started to like him. He told me about the fine catfishing he'd had in the canal, and we gazed at the sparse weak lights which shone from Mexico, until suddenly the radio said: There's already a rope across. Looks like it'll be near Martin Ranch.

Okay, said Murray, I'm up on the canal bank.

Okay, copy, replied the radio.

They could be running across the fields right now, he said to me. Okay, he's got sign.

We were in the car now, speeding toward the place. We stopped by a wall of hay, which we smelled more than saw in the dark humid night. Border Patrolmen were searching with their lights.

Right here you got the traffic, Murray said.

And he shone his flashlight on fresh footprints in the sand.

These kids should be easy to catch, he went on, half talking to himself. But I feel naked; I don't have a spotlight. I don't have any alleylights . . .

The long field appeared green through an agent's nightscope. The Border Patrolmen hunted and searched, as the crumbly earth devoured their feet up to the ankles. It was silt from the days of the ancient sea. They came through the field, stalking it with headlights which rendered the furrows cruelly bright.

Maybe we'll find the bodies, Murray said. Maybe not. It's just pure luck. But these kids tripped a sensor.

I can't see 'em anymore, another officer said, resting his hands on his Sam Browne belt.

I got an eye on your bodies, said the nightscope man, whose monitor made the word bodies seem chillingly appropriate, for in the green night the aliens glowed white like evil extraterrestial beings or zombies out of a science-fiction movie. The nightscope man could also reverse the contrast if he chose, so that the bodies became green silhouettes in a glowing white field of night-ness.—They're layin' up in the middle of the field, he went on, directing the hunters through a darkness which neither they nor the aliens, who surely thought themselves safe, could penetrate. How eerie it was! Only the nightscope man could see! The aliens lurked on faith that the darkness was their invincible friend. The Border Patrolmen could scarcely perceive where they set their own feet; they could have been approaching a precipice; but they approached the unseen bodies with equal and, as it proved, more justified faith.—Lookin' dead smack in the middle, said the nightscope man. Yeah, I got a fix on your bodies. Turn left. Three steps more. Another coupla steps. They should be right in front of you, right down there in those . . . Yeah, you got 'em.

Now came the wide circle of the spotlight. The hunters' cars circled the field. And the bodies, hopelessly silhouetted, resurrected themselves from the fresh earth, giving in to capture and deportation. They rose, becoming black on black. And the shadow of a man whose hands were on his head was replicated manifold. Two of them with their hands on their heads stood gazing down at the half-empty jugs of water they'd carried. Sad and submissive faces gazed into the darkness, half-blinded by the brightness as the Border Patrolmen frisked them. Yes, the bodies stood wide-eyed in the light, all in the line, with their hands obediently behind them. Coughing, shuffling, they began to cross the fields.

You know what? a Border Patrolman said to one of the bodies. You really need to brush your teeth. You've got wicked bad breath, guy.

The body was silent. In the nightscope it had been as white as one of the freshly dead fishes in the cool green poison (or should I say "reputed poison"?) of the Salton Sea. Now it began to reveal itself to be brown—Hispanic, sunburned and field-stained.

Let's go, amigos. Come on. Let's go; let's go.

None of the captives looked terrified. It was as Officer Murray had said: People realize they're not going to jail for the rest of their lives, so they calm down.

Now, that irrigator's car over there just happens to be in a convenient place, an agent was saying. We'll have to check him out . . .

The Mexicans walked more quickly now, carefully cradling their water jugs, attended by the bright, bright lights. Now they sat in a line on the roadside, a long line of them, with their jugs and bottles of water between their legs. Most of them wore baseball caps. They were young, wiry, strong to work. Their eyes shone alertly in the night. Already resigned, they quickly became philosophical, and in some cases even cheerful, slapping their knees and poking one another smilingly in the ribs. Soon they'd join the people staring out the panes of the holding cells. After eight hours or so, if they had no criminal history, they'd be sent back to Mexico.

(As I reread this chapter almost a decade later, in these days of "extraordinary rendition" and the Patriot Act, I suppose that a body fears capture more nowadays. But how can I be sure? Our Department of Homeland Security seems disinclined to let me watch any more hunts and chases.)

We got some that made the river, but we bagged the rest of 'em, an officer was saying, but already the Border Patrol had found other game.—Two made it up into the housing development, a woman's excited voice cried on the radio, but we're tryin' to inch up on 'em . . .

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