Dracula is the Norm

The natural tendency of humanity is for each individual to extend life through sucking the blood of others.

This accounts for communism's failure. Chairman Mao's Maoism ended up with a hand full of party faithful on top. With no term limits, Maoism extended into a reign of several decades, and increasing dotage upon the doddering fool that was its leader. The next generation of imbeciles wanted to consolidate their power even further and this led to the destruction of the student riot on Tianamen Square.

Fascism is the same thing as communism. A group of dotards decides to perpetuate themselves at the expense of all others.

Liberal capitalism amounts to the same thing. Ketchup kings or Texas tycoons.

Lutheran surrealism, too, would like a chance to play Dracula. A vote for Lutheran surrealism is a vote to have your blood sucked by someone new. Vote Lutheran Surrealist and vote for the principle of equality of exploitation!

We will abolish term limits, the secret ballot, and freedom of speech. Everything will be determined by Lutheran surrealism! We will overthrow the constitution and insert instead our poems! We will force everyone to publicly mimic Lutheran surrealism! Freedom of speech will only be for ourselves! Ha ha ha. Kirby Olson, president of Lutheran surrealism, and his handfull of friends, will dominate hystery until the end of our biological lives and will attempt to sustain this domination through the use of encyclopedias, hysteries, and every other means at our disposal.

Ha ha ha.

Give your blood to us! Vote Lutheran surrealist!

WHAT TIME IS IT?

Time is yellow as an old newspaper
Time has fallen like a rider from a horse
Money follows horses around the track
Money is time and falls like manna in our lives
Time is an area of difficulty and has prison stripes
Nobody knows where time has come from or what it means
Time is a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair
Time is an accordion wheezing older melodies
Finally time will die and the stars will blow out
Like somebody's birthday candles
And the clocks will stop & we'll float like Chagall's
lovers

ENDORSEMENT

Oh Lord, I have seen your sparkling rivers!
Your charming peach & your corduroy deer.
I have seen the weather change like tumbling dice,
The Rolls Royce of trees -- the mighty Elm.
As the green pleasant fields have glistened
So I have listened to your owl's hoot
And to the rustling of the breeze in leaves.
The brool of morning coffee,
The cool of the evening mist,
The clouds and the fog,
The pink & orange of autumn.
Hey, what a cheesecake you make!
I recommend Postum and cucumber sandwiches.
Butter melts, tomatoes sing!
Oh Lord, your world is my beloved
Esp. your stars, moon & heavens
But what about your tennis shoes
Also your asphalt roads
& thanks by the way for Lutheran Surrealism!

Oct. 21, 2004

POETRY: FUNGUS OR ULCER?

Poetry of a living author should never be praised or mentioned as it tends to encourage the poet. A poet, as Plato argued in the Republic, does not see the unchanging Logos, but gets all kinds of musical ideas regarding phenomena. The poet in this sense is like someone who wears underwear on their head.

The poet is a calamity, a walking untruth, a cavity in the body politic, an ulcer. Once dead it is permissable to catalogue poets and their efforts, in the same way that we catalogue presidential assassins. We might even admire a presidential assassin long after the crime has been committed. The amazing leap by John Wilkes Booth from Lincoln's booth to the stage, for instance, could be admired. But in no way should we encourage such people. In the same way, the suicidal tendencies of a Sylvia Plath or an Edgar Allan Poe are only exacerbated if we applaud their verse. Look the other way when a poet starts to sing, and do not be moved.

Of course when travelling it is permissable to encourage foreign poets as this will lead to a general spirit of decadence which paves the way for American territorial expansion. More foreign capitals have fallen to internal climates where poetry has gotten the upper hand over theology and philosophy than are due to possibly any other cause.

Let a thousand poets bloom from Reykjavik to Tokyo, from Djarkarta to Khartoum!

Poetry softens the enemy better than bunker busters and daisy bombs, better than midnight snacks. Among our own population we should treat outbursts of poetry the way that they were dealt with in Sparta. A good bump on the head with a Lutheran hymnal, I find, discourages outbreaks of poetry in my Sunday school class. Remember -- one good poem could lead to an epidemic of genius. We can stop poetry with a proper mixture of vigilance and zeal.

LUTHERAN SURREALISM IS ABSOLUTIST

Many philosophies have moved toward relativism. As we continue to watch the unfolding of the events in regards to the reception of Jacques Derrida's apparent death (we can never be sure of anything according to Derrida), we read the impressive attempt by Mark C. Taylor of Williams College to put the laurels back on the philosopher that had been denied by the official obituary which had accused Derrida of being part of the 60s crowd that lowered or abolished standards.

Taylor writes, "As the process of globalization draws us ever closer in networks of communication and exchange, there is an understandable longing for simplicity, clarity and certainty. This desire is responsible, in large measure, for the rise of cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism -- in this country and around the world. True believers of every tripe -- Muslim, Jewish and Christian -- cling to beliefs that, Mr. Derrida warns, threaten to tear apart our world." (NY Times Op-Ed, Oct. 14, 2004, A29).

As an antidote to fundamentalism, Taylor says, "In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so we can keep the world open."

My problem with the cultural legacy I've inherited is the utterly totalitarian relativism. That is, there aren't any principles and anyone who posits them is considered to be a fundamentalist.

There is however a de facto set of principles that have developed in the absence of any other principles. "If it feels good, do it," is a principle that many live by. Or we discriminate against Christians, and welcome just about anything else. According to the Teach Yourself Greek Myth Series, there is a simple set of criteria by which one can distinguish between a matriarchy and a patriarchy.

Matriarchy

Feeling
Passive acceptance of nature
Acceptance of humanity
Unconditional love
Happiness
Unity
"The law of nature"

Patriarchy

Man-made laws
Rationality
Efforts to change, control or exploit nature
Judgement
Conditional love
Obedience
Hierarchy

The college that I went to -- Evergreen State college -- tried to inculcate the matriarchal values. I felt sorry for everyone who believed in those ideas. Then, in graduate school, where I studied with a number of French-based intellectuals, those laws were again inculcated, or at least the attempt was made. However, in this case I studied mostly with one brilliant Jewish man, and I could always feel the enormous respect for the true laws of justice written on the heart just underneath his matriarchal surface. I had been raised as a Lutheran, and felt very comfortable with Judaism. Lutherans accept the ten commandments. There is an obedience to the given ruler, and to God. Although rationality is to be used, it cannot take us to the highest place, which is to faith.

I was taught at Evergreen and at the University of Washington the idea of Gaia -- the primitive Greek notion of a primal mother, or that the earth is one thing. We had Earth Day on campus, which was a laughable event where bugs were held up as moral professors. Bretonian surrealism partakes in this, esp. in its later phases -- Arcane 17 (written during WWII) in which an island off the coast of Canada is compared favorably to Notre Dame Cathedral at the heart of Paris.

As Breton floundered in the left of his time, searching mostly through German philosophy for something to hold on to he tried Marxism but found that it was too authoritarian. He later settled into a somewhat comfortable alliance with anarchism, but had to admit in the Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto that he had never discovered a guiding myth.

Lutheran surrealism proposes the mythos of Judeo-Christianity esp. as it has been interpreted by Luther as the new guiding myth for the headless and heedless surrealism that guttered out in the anarchism of the late 1960s shortly after Breton's death in 1966.

Against the symbol of the mother - a matriarchal symbol of fertility and desire without judgement, we believe in the Father Almighty, a symbol of judgement and principled action within time.

Mark C. Taylor writes of Derrida's philosophy, "Whether conceived of as Yahweh, as the father of Jesus Christ, or as Allah, God can never be fully known or adequately represented by imperfect human beings."

And yet, the difference between the symbol of the earh mother, and the symbol of the sky father, leads us in different directions. J.J. Bachofen, friend of Nietzsche, and first to posit early matriarchal societies that had been replaced by the patriarchal, argued that the early matriarchal societies had male tyrants as their leaders. Those male tyrants held all the women under them in common. If desire is the only principle, then power decides whose desire will be lived out and whose will be suppressed. Nietzsche argued that this is all there is, and all there should be, and that might is right.

We see something beautiful in the dawn of the patriarchal religion of the Jews. Because it stands on a different set of principles, the principles of fairness, and justice, it will last. Charles Reznikoff writes,

You have a bush beside the road
whose leaves the passing beasts pluck at
and whose twigs are sometimes broken
by a wheel, and yet it flourishes,
because the roots are sound --
such a heavy wheel is Rome;
these Romans,
all the legions of the East
from Egypt and Syria,
the islands of the sea and the rivers of Parthia,
gathered here to trample down Jerusalem,
when they have become a legend
and Rome a fable,
that old men will tell of in the city's gate,
the tellers will be Jews and their speech Hebrew.

[By the Waters of Manhattan 34]

Reznikoff's Judaic belief's sound root is a belief in the father. The matriarchal father believes only in desire (think of the new Jason and the Argonauts in which Dennis Hopper plays the bad dad), versus the lawgivers -- Solomon, or Jesus himself, who raise humanity to an awareness of neighborliness, out of the realm of the merely aesthetic and into the realm of the ethical and the religious.

Humanity has struggled for millenia to understand this legacy. And it has been paid for with a thousand generations of blood. When Luther stood up to the Pope and his minions in 1519 it was on the basis of principle. It nearly cost him his life, and did set off hundreds of years of war. All for a principle. The principle of the good father.

By this I don't mean to imply that women are outsiders or chattel. By no means. In fact, an intelligent woman such as Hannah Arendt could be considered patriarchal in that she believed in a higher justice and in the possibility of ethical and religious faith. Or there is Marianne Moore whose poem "Marriage" defends the institution while admitting its detractors have had much to say against it, "Liberty AND union/ now and forever" the poem ends, and makes a final reference to the Holy Bible.

The noumenal dimension is symbolized by the father, according to Bachofen, because it is separate from the child, and helps the child separate from the mother, and join the public realm where justice must prevail if the society itself is to prevail, and where we see one another not as means to the end of our own desire, but as autotelic. When you enter a bank as a faceless entity, the result is alienation. That we each have a face, and that this face is divine, as it was made in the image of our common father, is the minimum basis for a society. This is why there are greeters in many stores. The idea is to pay tribute to the idea of your face. Neighborliness.

Lutheran surrealism begins there, but doesn't end there. It also asks whether or not whales have a face and can understand neighborliness. Cetologists disagree. Lutheran surrealism offers whales the benefit of the doubt.

We take from Breton the search for a myth, and a belief in convulsive beauty. We put this search for beauty partially into nature (we do love whales! but we are suspicious of microbes!), but we place it more firmly in the noumenal dimension of the sky, and peer earnestly into the heavens to see the face of our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be his name. And we welcome the coming of His Kingdom, for to Him is all the Power and the Glory, for ever and ever. Amen!

THE CULTURAL SITUATION

The cultural situation I'd found myself in when I emerged as an adult in the mid-70s was one in which poetry in particular was Jungian. The so-called Deep Image school was on top. James Bertolino, Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, William Everson, and perhaps a dozen other figures (mostly now taken down a peg or vanquished or a laughing stock) were principle actors. About to break from the pack were the LANGUAGE poets (Silliman, Bernstein, of course, but a good twenty or thirty others).

The problem with the Jungians is that their language was self-enclosed in a tightly fitting dream realm.

The Marxists and postmodernists -- who came in the thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands -- made short work of the Jungians and drove them from academia. Today it would be an odd thing to come across a Jungian in academia -- although there are probably a few pockets of them remaining quietly closing out their tenure.

The 80s and 90s saw an explosion of what was then called critical theory. Extremely complex and dense books by Lacan, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and others swept through. One good thing that took place in the poetry realm was that one could be a poet and think. This was refreshing, as the image of the poet as shaman took second place to the poet as public intellectual.

Also, poets -- along with all the other members of the humanities -- began to participate in the social and political, and were no longer solitary solipsist Jungians.

And now we find ourselves at an impasse.

Marxism has fallen out of favor throughout the world and there are only a few troglodyte governments left, and even those are swiftly changing over to a capitalist model. Perhaps the only truly communist government left is North Korea. And littered over the landscape are Cambodia, Vietnam, the gulags of the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution that took place in China, and the Shining Path in Peru. The legacy of revolutionary Marxism in places like Romania and Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia is one of genocide where anybody who could got out.

Why did it go so bad? It's because the collectivity became a lynch mob looking for anyone who possessed even a slight trace of individuality, or even a small interest in thinking for themselves. Hence, all readers of any kind were extinguished under Pol Pot in Cambodia, and it was the poets and thinkers who mostly populated the jails and who hung upside down in the prison systems of Ceausescu & co.

How this insane philosophy emerged out of Hegel, and how Soren Kierkegaard patiently and sensibly built the antidote, deserves further study.

Kierkegaard comments in regards to Hegel,

"Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large, whereby he becomes something infinitely great -- and at the same time nothing at all."

Today is a period in which an almost inconceivable tragedy has taken place. Hegelian thought is spread through the American universities and churches. Collectivism has triumphed.

It began perhaps with Andre Gorz's article in Sartre's journal in the 1950s "The Long March Through the Institutions." And they set off, and have now taken over the universities. The idea was to seize the means of cultural production. Who could say what (otherwise known as political correctness) and whose images could circulate (the canon wars), are the principle legacy of this barbarian horde -- as it was these key means of control that would allow the pious intellectuals of the 60s to change the culture through a strict control of the symbolic realm. And so images of women, minorities, and the poor would be turned upside down by cultural fiat, and society would change in order to engineer what Andrei Zhdanav in the 30s had called the new man.

So, here we are at the beginning of a new millenium and the state is in charge of the arts. The collectivity is now in charge, but its cultural authority has vanished (everywhere except in America Marxism has become as laughable as bloodletting -- because that is what it most resembles). And yet, Marxists and their ilk have tenure throughout our university system.

In the Soviet Union it was a Christian (Solzhenitsyn) whose opening salvo created the first crack in the East Bloc. In East Germany the Lutherans operating out of Bach's church led the resistance in 1989. In China it is today various religions who continue to posit a different scale of values.

In France it has been Kantians who largely dismantled the Marxist problem.

America, strangely, has been perhaps the most vulnerable of all countries to communist thought because it doesn't teach philosophy in the high schools or colleges and so is vulnerable to it. But to the extent that it is going to be overthrown -- the overthrow will come from within religious quarters. The art world is filled with narcissistic nobodies who will spout anything that allows them circulation. Those few Americans who remain to know what a principle is, and so can thus stand upon it, are the Christians. One can hear them coming. They sound to me like the footsteps of the Hussites as they sang coming over the mountain at night to confront the Pope's minions. A hundred thousand, with torches, at night, united in song, and the anti-Christ's minions scattered in terror before this united throng.

As the Christians come -- and one can hear them coming, and there will be no stopping them -- one wonders what will happen to art. There are a few sensible books coming out -- Fritz Oelschlaeger's, and a few others that are circulating, and are certainly the first in what looks like it is going to be a complete Christian destruction of the postmodern paradigm. Thanks to tenure, the conversation will not be one-sided, but within twenty years postmodernism will be a layer of intellectual history. What will survive? I hope that it will be Kant and Kierkegaard -- Hegel's rivals -- and that their Lutheran sanity will prevail, and we will not have the horrific Calvinist puritans for another three hundred years.

You can call me Cassandra, but I say the Puritans are coming, and that all that can stop it is the concept of the individual. It was an individual who held the tanks at bay during the revolutions on Tianamen Square. A single man in white. The tanks ceased to roll forward for a few seconds. The whole globe cheered.

The great antidote to Calvinist and Marxist collectivization is the individual.

Artists at their best have an individual vision. They do not represent a society. They ironize and form blocks against the collective. Against science, against the collective, against the official church, against academia, against the Trojan horse of the notion of society, each individual artist must stand against all the tanks and flattening devices of the state and find their own values on which to stand. This is why I prize Kierkegaard, because although he devalues the aesthetic, he prizes the individual:

"In the constant sociability of our age people shudder at solitude to such a degree that they know no other use to put it to but... as a punishment for criminals. But after all it is a fact that in our age it is a crime to have spirit, so it is natural that such people, the lovers of solitude, are included in the same class with criminals" (Sickness Unto Death 363).

It is precisely on this point that artists can stand and hold off the mindless hordes of the Marxist and Puritan collectivists. All we need are individuals unwilling to be flattened. A knowledge of Lutheranism will help this, esp. the struggle between Kierkegaard and Hegel. A knowledge of surrealism will help, too. A knowledge of Lutheran surrealism will be what separates those who survive from those who flounder in the collectivisms of today and to come.

WHAT I'M EATING

In The Importance of Being Earnest the sandwich of the day is cucumber. I have been trying a slightly derivative alternative -- using light oatmeal bread (35 calories per slice) I apply a thin layer of Benecol margarine (40 calories, plus it is said to fight cholesterol on the side of the tub) on one slice. Then, I lay diagonally across one slice a Mt. Olive Kosher dill strip (0 calories), and cap it with an unbuttered slice of bread. It is delicious, esp. with a large mug of hot Postum (20 calories). I can eat five such sandwiches and drink all the Postum (super-sized mug) and come out at just under the 600 calories that I count off every day for lunch. I'm not sure if Jesus would like this sandwich, but I'm certain that Luther or Breton would. It's Wilde!

THE DEBATE

How to recover the institutions that have been tarnished. Today the youth of America have adopted the notion that family, police, army, education, government, and especially business are totally corrupt and that there is no remedy. In Aristotle and in Aquinas and certainly in Luther there was a notion that the universe had a purpose, and was meaningful, and was tending toward the good. With Nietzsche and the Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume all this was Scotched. We are now in a muddle. Getting rid of the superstitious element in order to turn primarily toward reason has destroyed any form of transcendence. Without it, however, we have also gotten rid of the notion of universals, especially the universal good.

The business realm cannot be allowed to think that the bottom line is all there is. It's not. The discouragement that many feel in the aftermath of the 60s -- the decline of all institutions since the Vietnam War -- has to be reversed, but it has to be done on the basis of a sense of quality, and an ethic of care. I feel that the Democrats have somehow lost this sense, and the Republicans have only a vicious version of it.

This is the reason for our Third Party -- Lutheran Surrealism. We have tried to reopen the transcendental realm in order to reopen the possibility of the universal good.

In this country with its winner take all voting we do not expect to win any seats in this round or in any other, but we do wish to influence events by making our exception felt by the major parties. Lutheran Surrealism -- like Ralph Nader's campaign -- is run primarily on principles, and is not focused at all on the bottom line.

Those who would focus primarily on the bottom line would turn this country into one run by thugs along the lines of Haiti after the forced ouster of President Aristide. We do not believe in the bottom line. We are interested in the aesthetic intuition that leads us to the possibility of transcendence within immanence. We care more about a drawing by Albrecht Durer of a mouse than we care about the debates.

A drawing by Durer can possibly revive the sense of quality, and a sense that each must be seen as an end in him or herself. We cannot expect this from either of the major party candidates. Lutheran surrealism would turn all Americans into artists.

We wish we had somewhere to look for inspiration. As it is, we look only to ourselves, and are betrayed by a pessimism without limits lit only by our lunacy.

Strike the Colors of Lutheran Surrealism!

We can say that the sky "blackened" after the Industrial Revolution.

We can say that the sky "whitened" with the approach of dawn.

Newspapers yellow, and the greening of America's cities were helped along by Olmsted &Vaux, those intrepid developers of urbane parks.

Similarly, we can discuss the pinkening of the electorate. As America turns toward John Kerry with the enthusiasm of a newlywed, so we can say that America is going pinko, in the hopes of a Soviet style invasion of Big Hair.

Under what does Lutheran Surrealism fly its colors?

Under the color white, indicating surrender. But does this mean that we give up? Or that we surrender our will to God's?

We wish.

Our dawn is coming but we still do not know what it brings either in terms of politics or aesthetics. We soldier on.

In the two kingdom's theory there is a separation between what we can intuit of the noumenal (spiritual) dimension and this material dimension. All institutions must be built with a keen ear to the noumenal, although we can only inhabit this material dimension. We sense a purposiveness in the beautiful algebra of our wobbling bicycle as it circulates among the institutions of church, university, and home.

Lutheran Surrealism presents Eirikur Orn Noradahl -- the Frank O'Hara of Reykjavik.

http://www.muse-apprentice-guild.com/spring_2003/eirikur-poetry-iceland-SPECIAL-FEATURE/home.html

One wonders if the Viking spirit is hiding just beneath! But he is against war. The Althing -- the world's oldest parliament -- in continuous session since the 900's, made a convenience marriage with Christianity (and then somehow with Lutheranism some time after 1520) and it seems the willingness to hammer the enemy has vaporized. This is part of the general trend in the Nordic countries -- extremely good English -- telecommunications -- but few write in English as well as Eirikur.

Are these Lutheran surrealist poems? We don't think so. There's rather a certain paganism bubbling in these pages. They take place at the cusp between Thor's Day and Frey's Day, and were published in our old friend August Highland's journal.

IMPRESSIONS IN ICE

I got the impression that the Icelandic correspondant Eirikur's poems betrayed a certain anti-American feeling which is perhaps the lingua franca of western European disgruntlement but they were witty poems and I recommend them.

I was supposed to say something about Kierkegaard vs. Hegel as the blueprint for Lutheran surrealism. K and H were both Lutherans, but H felt for some reason that he had the whole blueprint. K's work consisted largely of ridiculing Hegel. Hegel believed in the universal. Kierkegaard thought there were only particulars.

The link between these two is more complex than either one allows. The particular can only be seen as a type. A type can only be seen in its particulars.

Hegel felt that we are types in history, which is universal.

Kierkegaard said we are individuals, and able to stand outside of our times, and pose antithetical values.

Of the two Kierkegaard is certainly more fun to read. Only two jokes in Hegel's Phenomenology, and one of them is giggling in a footnote.

The monstrous symbiosis between the avant-garde and Hegel in early 20th century thought especially among the surrealists.

Lutheran Surrealists believe in the face of Christ. It's an individual's face, and must be loved for all its infinite splendor as we love the faces of our own particular children. Certainly children are types, but most importantly they are individuals, as was God when he became man.

His face during the death throes is not a symbol, and should not be abstracted thus. It does have a meaning, but the meaning is in the reality of that face that so loved us.

Hegel saw all of history as a means to an end.

The poem, like the face, confronts you with its particularity.

The poem opens like the face of a person and cannot be abstracted into a means toward an end.

This difference between Hegelian-Marxist readings of poetry and Kierkegaardian readings of poetry is like the difference between a whore and a bride.

Lutheran surrealism -- unlike social realism -- sees art as autotelic, as a particular rather than as a universal, and is perhaps even against the universal. We believe in the bride, the particular bride, and are against the exchange value of the whore. We believe in the unique.

This is why we are increasingly interested in the work of Charles' Olson and Reznikoff as exemplars of the particular against the globalizing tendency.

We welcome clarifications of our edifying treatise in ice.