2. To dwell or reside in.
3. To hold or fill (an office or position).
4. To seize possession of and maintain control over by or as if by conquest.
5. To engage or employ the attention or concentration of
Occupy entered the language ca. the14th century. By the 16th-17th century it became “a euphemism for ‘have sexual intercourse with,’ which caused it to fall from polite usage” (Online Etymology Dictionary).
Isn’t it strange how words can be clothed with special garments depending on contemporary context. “Occupy” would seem to have such easy specificity. But even before the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” jettisoned its “Wall Street”, the word had layered significance, as in its 5 lexicographic usages above. That said, in its current abbreviated form, the phrase, reduced to the word, gathers heaps of even more significance. It conjures imagery, scenes from the past of lunch counters and university offices, military discussions, and so on. So much so that this specific exteroception has grown to become a multifaceted interoception, to use one of Antonio Damasio’s concepts of self coming to mind.
On the other hand, or, perhaps, consistent with that metastasizing cognition, the more it means and does, the more the word loses some of the clarity of its force and utility. And this leads to a possible answer to the questions that bother so many people about Occupy. If it’s a movement, what is its destination? If it’s a symbolic gesture, urging some sort of (political, social, cultural, fill-in-the-blank) change, a call for action, perhaps, then who are the targets of its mustering?
I don’t think it’s any of that. I think the phrase and then just the word grew from a combination of frustration and rage, first targeting a specific impersonal institutional behemoth, seen to be crushing the life out of our society—Wall Street—but as it continued to grow, to metastasize, it associated with all the impersonal institutional behemoths that fail to respond to the humans whose visions and goals the institutions are constituted to facilitate. But these monsters function in opposition to those visions and goals. They, in fact, serve certain other, anonymous masters.
So Occupy has become more while it has become less. Its persistent epidemial growth has mostly infected larger and larger groups and individuals who have a very distinct sense of betrayal. The vagueness of Occupy’s purposeful meaning arises from the gnawing malaise endemic in each participant and his and her associates. What all agree on is this sense of betrayal. And nowhere is this sense more focused than in all our governmental institutions, local, state and, especially, federal. When people in a presumed representative government have become convinced that their representatives have betrayed them, they will do something to let everyone know.
We might just be re-experiencing the early 1950s. This Occupy word just might be a re-imagining of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”
Perhaps among the tent dwellers and drumbeaters and within all those betrayed, Occupy’s voice is getting ready to sing its epic.
BTW—"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." -- Mark Twain
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