RESPONSE FOR ANDREW

Andrew, you asked whether I was against theory or not, and I found I couldn't fit my response into the squawk box.

I am pro-theory but mostly dead-set against Marxist thought. As I read Marxism from a Lutheran viewpoint I see it as legitimating Cain's murder of Abel as a historical necessity. That is to say that Cain is the proletariat and Abel is the bourgeoisie. I cannot agree with class war because in "praxis" it leads to genocide. Thirty million in the Soviet Union, eighty million in Red China, and a third of the population in Cambodia -- these are conservative estimates -- and then leftists get on the Catholics for their killing of several thousand women during the witch trials which took place over a much longer period.

I am against genocide.

I am for neighborliness.

At least in theory! Praxis is always difficult, but we have to at least start with a theory that talks of the Good Samaritan (helps out those who belong to an enemy group) and sees the unfortunate among the wealthy too (a rich man has almost no chance of getting to heaven).

When I think of our current wannabes -- Kerry and Bush -- I cannot understand why they own so many houses, or why those houses have to be so big. Kerry owns six mansions -- a twenty-three room house in Georgetown, and similar mansions in Massachusetts and Idaho. He has a two-story kitchen in one of his mansions in Boston. Bush isn't quite as wealthy, but he owns way more than he needs. Meanwhile there are many citizens -- Vietnam Vets and others -- who only really want "a room somewhere far away from the cold night air." I definitely do not believe that either one should be slaughtered, but I wouldn't want to be friends with either one. They both went to an elite university, and were involved in an elite club. One of the things that I like about the Lutheran church is that everybody is welcome.

So, in theory -- I tend to prefer Christians -- Augustine, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tillich. But I also like surrealist critics -- Codrescu, Breton, Soupault, Annie Le Brun, Octavio Paz, etc.

In terms of the postmoderns I really like JF Lyotard and often find myself in agreement with him, and feel that he has opened up many areas.

I am against any plotting of slaughter. Simone de Beauvoir asks in the preface to the 2nd Sex why can't women dream of massacring men the way that the proletarians dreamed of massacring the bourgeoisie.

I am against genocide, and so I am against any Marxist legitimation through historical necessity of an all-out assault on any race, gender, or class.

I believe in grace.

Christ died for my sins. Although I am an idiot and often forget this, and often get into tangles with people, in theory at least I try to practice and theorize a victimless revolution of the mind. I'm happy to think that I might be having a small impact on other renegades such as yourself. We have to leave behind every avant-garde political thought that is dipped in hate. We have to instead practice love and humor -- there's the real avant-garde (beginning with Christ) -- an almost impossible act to follow. It is mostly impossible for me. I do have moments -- and Lutheran surrealist thought is a theory of impossible moments -- but I can't live in love except momentarily.

Thanks so much for your question and for your generous assessment of Lutheran surrealism's impact on world culture.

Peace, Kirby

NIJINSKY’S LEGACY

Nijinsky’s powerful upper thighs
(Vietnam Vets rolling about w/ leggy memories)
Friends, Americans, countrymen,
Lend Nijinsky a leg
Leisurely with an air of indifference
Lolling about in the pharmaceutical chateaux
Flagrant alarms looming in his ears
Nijinsky knew his hoboes were womanly
The aggravations of the Ballet Russe
Somehow the paranoia passed into breath
Sarah Bernhardt’s missing leg
Vaslav Nijinsky’s missing brain
Belated carnations from the early 20th century
Crickets’ legs erupt into music as they rub
Our legs take us through stores
Across traffic strips
Nijinsky helps us get a leg up on the competition
His Slavic legs akin to the leaping cricket's

Two teenage girls walking out of the Barnes & Nobles in Vestal (near Binghamton NY) this afternoon. One of them giggled and said, "You're like so ADD, girlfriend!"

I didn't turn and look at them as I was involved in a book on Jungian dream analysis having to do with houses in dreams as representations of the soul (shabby houses represent lack of self-esteem, or so the dumb-o interpreter claimed) -- but I had the intuition that the two girlfriends were delighted with the use of the framing device of ADD turned from a medical disorder to a positive assessment. I was rather pleased, too, but not pleased enough to look up at the geniuses in question.

Oology -- noun -- the branch of ornithology dealing with birds' eggs.

I try to use it in a sentence --

"The raptor eggs in Jurassic Park III are slightly too oblong to be oologically significant."

LUTHERAN SURREALISM ON SET THEORY

I'm very tired of poetry. I'm almost never tired of poetics.

A poet who isn't working on poetics is very tiring.

I like Ron Silliman because his poetry is directly related to his poetics.

Most poets don't think about poetics.

I'm also interested in art that is about art theory.

Duchamp, for instance.

I like mathematics that is about mathematical theory.

I even like to read political writers when they are pushing the envelopes of political theory.

I almost can't stand literature, but I like literary theory.

The only literature I like is when the writer is rethinking all basic assumptions from the word go.

I really like geometry. I like circles and so on. I like Ellsworth Kelly's simple outlines of flowers.

I hate messy paintings from the 19th century that are so complicated that you can't see anything in them. I like Uccello -- his geometric arrangements.

One of the areas that amuses me is set theory. I like to apply mathematics to politics.

"The sum of all members of any set is a set."

If we take that as an axiom, then it's funny to think about who is a woman. In the early 90s there were still feminists who didn't accept transgendered women (originally men). Then the argument became more dominant that one becomes a woman by performing as one. And so at Holly Near's concerts men could perform as women, and get in. And so men did, in order to check out the women! There is an excellent story on this topic by Stewart Home in his book NO PITY. The story is called "Grrrl Power." This book is now out of print, but my British anarchist friends could probably find a used copy in some bin.

It's a grrrls only concert and many men wish to get in. Men will be grrrls.

"Sets with the same members are identical."

Can a member of a set change itself so that it no longer belongs to the set? With the help of a surgeon, or with the help of a little imagination, the answer is yes in some circles, no in others.

Right now we have red states and blue states. And yet some of those states could change their colors.

People have intuitions regarding what and whom belongs to a given set. When examined logically, these intuitions almost always begin to appear to be illogical or demonstrably false.

Ron Silliman has two sets: The School of Quietude which is determined by a set of poets whose crucial feature is aversion to risk, and the Post-Avants who are determined by their enthusiasm to risk.

Obviously, the key term is risk. When is a risk not a risk? It is perhaps riskier for a poet to be conservative than to be an anarchist, for instance. It is perhaps riskier to back Augustine and Christmas than to back abortion and Allen Ginsberg.

Choice of sets such as races, classes, genders seem to determine much of our politics these days. And yet examined closely these very sets are less and less real. The more we study them the more real their categories appear to be, and also the more that they appear as fraudulent fictions which moreover are complicated by one another. If a man is both rich and Hispanic, which of the three categories is determinative of his political correctness? Can we even tell what choices such an individual will make in terms of voting based on those criteria?

And there are sudden shifts as when Leroi Jones (friend and publisher to many many white male writers in the early 60s) became Amiri Baraka (who wanted nothing further to do with these writers from the late 60s until more recently). The same happened to David Horowitz who was in bed with the Black Panthers -- a very tough leftist writer who has become one of the staunchest of the neo-conservatives.

Sets among human beings are constantly shifting. We talk about Americans, and now try to hyphenate for greater clarity. And yet all of these identifications are shifting and uncertain, and don't take into account the ability of the member of any given set to suddenly change colors.

We believe that everyone should become a Lutheran surrealist, even though we have been unable to define the parameters regarding membership. Attendance at a Lutheran church, and strong interest in matters surrealist, are the only prerequisites at present. At present there are two of us. Won't you join?

No matter what side of the war Americans are on most of us are jubilant to see the Iraqi soccer team beat Australia and Portugal to arrive at a chance for at least a bronze medal.

It is equally fun to see the American basketball team get beat by Puerto Rico and Lithuania.

I'm upset with the coverage of badminton. I've only managed to see one match. To my mind there is way too much swimming. Swimming isn't fun to watch because you can't see the faces of the competitors. Has rhythmic gymnastics been dropped from the Olympics? This was perhaps the only contest in which aesthetics rather than strength, imagination rather than efficacy, was the primary criterion of victory. Also, it did have its ancient Greek antecedent in the vase depictions of young women with rope, ball, and ribbon. It was in the Olympics for some time, but now I have seen no mention of it.

Whatever. Once again, hurray for the Iraqi soccer team. They may play on Tuesday for the bronze -- it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on. At least Saddam and his sons won't be able to torture them if they lose!

And if they win -- 25 grand a piece, which I imagine goes quite a ways in Baghdad?

Let's continue to hope for upsets by the tiny and underrated countries. It's fun to see their flags and to hear unusual anthems. I hope the Finns win SOMETHING. So far I haven't even seen a single Finn in any contest.

TODAY

Threes eat tyrants
It's a cinch the bicycles go
Down cobbled streets
Gabled roofs
Curlicues in old neighborhoods
The blue hair of grandmothers
Waters green carnations
With eco-fanaticism
As the cougar crouches in the petunias

LUKACS & Solzhenitsyn

Georg Lukacs writes in the book Solzhenitsyn (in 1969): "Great literature of all ages, from Homer to the present day has, in the final analysis, 'contented itself' with showing how a given social condition, a stage of development, a developmental tendency, has intrinsically influenced the course of human existence, human development, the dehumanization and alienation of man from himself" (Cambridge: MIT, 1971, trans. from German by William David Graf).

Marxists claim that alienation is a historical phenomenon rather than a permanent feature of human life.

Using Hegel, they argue that there is a progression in history from the earliest times until our own. Oddly, history moves by itself, and yet it needs the Marxist to analyze and budge history whenever necessary. History is God coming to know Himself in time (Hegel, Lutheran). And yet Hegel himself said that "The owl of Minerva flies only in the evening" (in the Phenomenology).

Lukacs' idea therefore is that the job of the writer is to reveal alienation. He praises Solzhenitsyn for doing just that using the Stalinist era through which he had had the misfortune to live. Lukacs mocks the "illustrating literature" of the Zhdanov-Stalinist era in which it was forbidden to give the working class hero any faults. The working class hero was a romantic concept, Lukacs claims, whereas what we now require is a realism so grounded in reality that the real objects of the Siberian labor camps (as Solzhenitsyn describes brooms, gruel, filth, cold, sadism of the guards, etc.) become symbolic of the larger situation historically.

"The central problem of socialist realism today is to come to terms critically with the Stalin era. Naturally this is the major task of all socialist ideology" (Lukacs 10).

Solzhenitsyn rarely surfaces in American academic debate. Perhaps one feels that it's better not to rake up the troubled past in a situation in which an increasingly feeble-minded left is confronted with an increasingly feeble-minded right without anything except Lutheran Surrealism waiting in the wings to give a broader perspective.

Lukacs, the great critic of Marxism (perhaps no one else within that group has his intellectual status, and he is indeed a joy to read), says that coming to terms with socialist realism during the Stalin era is the great project for anyone who wishes to move forward. Many of the problems of Socialist Realism remain intact having jumped out of their Bolshevik path only to haunt us for instance in the work of Toni Morrison.

The idea that some other social group is responsible for our alienation is a peculiarity of Marxist thought. In Hegel (a Lutheran) the process was historical, and seemingly out of our hands, with God moving the pieces about, and finally compelling Napoleon to push the kings off their thrones in order to institute democracy. When we come to Marxists, however, they think that pointing out alienation is tantamount to resolving it -- ushering in a new sense of community. This is a staggeringly stupid idea, and yet held by some of the most brilliant contemporary minds.

In the Augustinian legacy, alienation is a permanent effect of the fall. Reading Solzhenitsyn for a Christian is a remarkably different project than it is for a Marxist. We read him and laugh at the unbearable means by which Pelagian materialism takes on the aspects of the great Conniver...

Lukacs never once mentions that Solzhenitsyn is a Christian, as were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (whom he also praises very highly), and that their perspective comes from a totally different tradition than that of Stalin and Zhdanov or Lukacs himself. As Solzhenitsyn writes,

"...if I were asked today to formulate as precisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat, 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"

There's an amazing article in the most recent New Yorker by the art critic whose name I can't spell -- Peter Schjedahl? He argues that the older Olympic games were so much greater than our own and lists some of the reasons being that they sometimes killed one another by treachery in order to win, and also would have had no problems taking performance enhancing drugs. I kind of did the Exorcist double-take reading it.

Where did the idea of good sportsmanship come from?

Why is it that we (most of us) no longer reverence an athlete who would do anything to win? Even in Homer when Achilles dishonors Hector by dragging him around Troy's gates in order to humiliate his parents it angers the gods.

I'm not so sure that all-out war has ever pleased the soul. A sportsman who refuses to shake the hand of the victor at the Olympics is somehow disgraceful and dishonors us.

And again I have to place Athens next to Jerusalem.

It is fun to place one city next to one another. I am informed by my friend Mark Lester that Oswald Spengler placed Baghdad next to Washington and found them equivalents.

One could place Paris next to Wittenberg, and ask into their relative virtues.

While criticizing ancient Greece for its Olympic institution based on the efficacity of the performer, I wanted to note too that I am in favor of democracy with all its checks and balances and am against any one-party system -- whether it be fascism, communism (they amount to the same thing) or sadism, its corollary in personal relationship. Norman O. Brown notes in his volume Hermes the Thief that

"Hermes was the patron of lottery -- of which the mantic dice are one species -- and lottery was one of the characteristic institutions of Greek democracy; the extensive use of lottery in the selection of Athenian public officials was the supreme expression of the democratic principle of the absolute equality of all citizens" (105).

While Lutherans do preserve a distinction between those who have been ordained and those who have not -- and thus those who have the authority to preach a sermon and those who are not thus ordained, and while Anabaptists and others have claimed the riot of everyman to be his own priest, and while the surrealists did have a leader who determined who was and who was not a surrealist (and the pile of ousted far outnumbered those who remained -- in talent if not in quantity), Lutheran surrealism is fairly uncertain of the legacy of standards and choice both in terms of who we consider to be worthy of giving a sermon (Christ was not ordained), and in terms of those whose art we consider to be successful and not (artists we once considered dopes are now in our pantheon, and some have been kicked out -- i.e. ee cummings).

But we reserve our greatest skepticism regarding those who are fit for political office. At present a de facto oligarchy is in place in American elections with the necessity of the candidate having a war chest of at least one hundred million to even be on the political radar. Even Ralph Nadar is worth 200 million. Kerry is worth at least a billion. Bush is the "runt" worth only 150 million. In this instance, a Hermean lottery might be necessary to put the people back into the term democracy. What if Joe Blow the dog-catcher was suddenly elevated to the presidency? Or Jane Doe? With our current system of checks and balances, the country would proceed to its destruction just as surely as with any of our other more highly endowed contenders.

THE LUTHERAN SURREALIST OLYMPICS

Upon coming to political power we would institute the Lutheran surrealist Olympics. Instead of the vain striving for earthly excellence instituted by the ancient Greeks, the Lutheran surrealist movement would focus on unearthly athletics that combine humor with mischief and an eerie sense of the demons within us and around us.

For instance, we would have a marathon in which athletes would walk backwards as slowly as possible while thinking of the Slow Loris. The event would take place at three in the morning in a forest and would not be televised.

In the event known as Leaping Sideways Through a Window participants would do just that, and just before exiting through the window would flash a weird and unsettling emotion to the spectators that would be the last glimpse of sanity just before a human becomes permanently mad. (Ok, we borrowed this from the Polish dancer Nijinsky whose biography -- by Peter Ostwald -- we are currently enjoying.)

The Greek version of the Olympics focused on efficacity. Who can throw a ball or discus the furthest? Who can leap the highest, or swim the fastest, or punch another in the head harder.

The Lutheran surrealist Olympics would focus on other aspects of humanity -- who can demonstrate their link to marvelous and remarkable forces presently outside our ken and expand human consciousness in terms of breakthroughs and reveal us to ourselves not in terms of efficacity but in terms of our capacity to dream?

I picked up Eric Clapton's Best about a year ago, and can't really bear to play it. The singing doesn't hold up. Usually he sings the first line or two well, and then he collapses. Singing is difficult because one has so many things to remember -- and also forget. You can't think about the audience, and yet you must. You can't think about the music, and yet you must. Clapton's inspiration holds for only a line, and then for some reason his singing becomes rather prosaic, as if he's mouthing the lines rather than singing them. One of the most beautiful "negro spirituals" if that term is still to be used, is on the CD. "Swing Low," is one of the better songs on the CD, because Clapton's tired, and uninspired voice is contrasted with a black woman's voice who also only manages to sing one or two lines at a time, and then collapses into mouthing the words. They take turns lifting one another into inspiration.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan and what did I see?
Coming for to carry me home.
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

If you get there before I do,
Coming for to carry me home.
Tell all my friends that I'm a comin too,
Coming for to carry me home.

The song is listed as a traditional spiritual. Clapton's guitar holds up throughout the CD but his ability to sing is conspicuously absent. Perhaps because of the calamities he's faced, and yet often it is calamity that can bring a singer to a new peak. Not exactly a surrealist song (Breton feared music, or hated it, and so there is no such thing as surrealist music). One can imagine the people of the Virgin Islands singing this song in church and lighting up the evening sky with it. A beautiful song like this isn't exactly political, but the force and beauty in such music can bring people together like no mere political speech by any earthly titan.

THE TOOTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

On a park bench at 72nd and Amsterdam
An elderly woman accosts me
"I've eaten yogurt with the lid, too"
I don't want to know
I vant to be alone- !
Her one tooth in her mouth like a narwhal whale

When she gets up to go she appears to be human
And I am sorry I failed to recognize it
"Have a good evening," I say
"You too," she says, but she means it

Away she goes in the clutter of souls
A shabby woman in black pant suit
Not a bum but unkempt
She will die within two years
Who did she know while on earth?
Did her parents relate to her?
Why didn't she get the tooth fixed?

June 28, 2004