MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE

I bought an enormous playground the other day from a wholesaler. Getting it home was hard enough. It weighed 500 pounds, and I had to get it to my backyard. I tried to drive up the front lawn and my van got stuck. Then I had to unload it piece by piece and drag it to the backyard. getting the wood out of the back of the van freed up the van so I could get it back into my driveway. This was unbelievably unnerving, and I felt sapped of strength.

Since then I've been thinking about building it for days. I had hoped it was like a Lego set where every piece was more or less the same and I just had to put all the pieces together. But there are about fifty different lengths of wood, all kinds of different screws and brackets, and every one is labelled in the diagram with letters, but the wood pieces and screws are not themselves labelled. I have to compare the pieces to the diagram, look at the picture of the thing, and guess. It's baffling. I asked a contractor friend to help me but he said no, it was too difficult. He had tried to build things like that before and he never got anywhere with them.

So a friend of mine from church named Andrea Campbell volunteered her husband. Over he came, and in two hours we got two pieces of it together. But he said, "This thing might be done by Christmas if we work hard. It has more pieces than the World Trade Center. You're going to have to end up asking for a variance from your neighbors."

Nevertheless the two pieces we put together gave me a lot of hope. We set out all the pieces and now more or less have the vocabulary of the thing. We now need syntax, and to keep the overall thesis in mind.

The company that made it is in Texas so the directions at least are in good standard American English. But the problem is that there are holes where you don't expect them in the wood and other places where there are supposed to be holes but there aren't any which means we will end up having to drill and the instructions say we shouldn't have to drill. It's all supposedly pre-drilled.

All over the country there are fathers building these things this summer. Some of them will do it from scratch by themselves, I suppose. I'm just lucky I have Bill Campbell, who also has (to my ear) the best singing voice in the whole Lutheran church of Delhi.

Yesterday I went into New York City to see the Darwin show at the Museum of Natural History. It was a large exhibit. They had Darwin's hammer with which he would crack things open. They had his chair. And they had some other things, too, including four full-sized living Galapagos turtles! Sailors loved them because they could live for several months in the ship's hold and then there would be fresh meat in the midst of a long voyage. I'm investigating animal rights. I do think the oddness of these tortoises grants them some rights. Life, health, and liberty at least. But possessions? I'm not sure if they deserve possessions, or even Jefferson's bizarre addition, the pursuit of happiness. If they do deserve it, they would be pretty slow in the pursuit of it.

After that I took the subway to Bryant Park to meet the poet Mike Topp. Topp is the person I know the best in NYC because I've met him now twice. He looks different from every angle. Straight on he looks like Marlon Brando. From another side he looks like Al Pacino. And from yet another side he looks like James Caan. So that when one talks to him it is a little like watching all three installments of the Godfather at once.

We sat at an Italian restaurant (I had a slight fantasy that Topp would get up like Pacino in Godfather I and suddenly shoot me in the forehead) but he dined happily with me and with the noted critic Jim Feast, who joined us, or rather I joined them. Topp and I ate perch (he told me he didn't mind if I copied his order so I did). I'm trying to lose weight and Topp is thin, so I was trying to copy him. I lost five pounds. Feast had ravioli, I think? It was a place called something like Buttucci's, somewhere perhaps in Soho. I had no idea where I was. NYC is endless when you're in it. The nice thing is that the restaurant has a kind of garden and you are outside, like in Paris, in an inner garden (think of the Roman coliseum inside of Paris!). There was even a tree springing up out of the concrete, and on the tree was a Greek mask of tragedy and another Greek mask of comedy on another tree nearby.

I told them about going to visit Ginsberg's commune farm house over in Cherry Valley, NY and having come across the poet Charles Plymell. Topp said, I'll bet he had a beard, didn't he. Yes, I said. He also was wearing bib overalls, and a Stetson. He is seventy. He is too big to be described as spry, but was energetically digging with his granddaughter in some kind of flower garden. Topp instantly remembered that Plymell had something to do with the publication of Robert Crumb's first comic book. I looked up Plymell using Wikipedia and that turns out to be true. Also true is that Plymell published a funny sounding book -- the Last of the Moccasins (City Lights 1971), which we all agreed was a funny title. There was another funny title in his bibliography -- Bennies from Heaven. We all chortled at that, too.

After dinner we strolled some more to some dessert place that Woody Allen liked and which appears in Manhattan (movie), but Topp said in the film they are drinking alcohol but it's not actually served there. We paid and left. I should have paid this bill but was too cheap suddenly, and didn't know the protocol. So we walked to a Bohemian poetry club but didn't go in, fortunately. There is nothing worse than listening to a poetry reading unless it is listening to a barking dog that has knocked you down and is preparing to go for your throat. We also walked by the Hell's Angels' red door, and then we said goodbye to Mike Topp who said he had to "peel off," and then Jim Feast and I walked and walked and then got on the subway, where we talked about the importance of religious community within capitalism, how it provides a sort of asylum from the pressure of money. Feast used to be a Lutheran, then a Quaker, and is now a Buddhist. Inside of those communities the religious feeling provides a kind of transmutation of souls.

Don't you agree? He asked?

Yes! I said, as he stepped off the subway, and the door closed behind him, and I went back off to my car, to the trip home, and to eventually the odd ride up through the Catskills (so named for the mountain lions which once bothered the inhabitants with their large tails and fierce teeth).

CARL SACHS ASKED ME A QUESTION, CONTINUED

Carl Sachs asked me if Locke and Marx are not compatible to some degree. As I read through Locke's Second Treatise he does argue that anyone who tries to enslave another is committing war against them. One could argue that the bourgeoisie of the 19th century (Carnegie, for example) had more or less enslaved a generation. Locke argues that in such a case war is permissable, and necessary.

That said, the idea is not to destroy the other entirely. But to multiply factions, and create checks and balances against such future tyranny.

Marx's prescription is instead to create a tyranny of the party which will supposedly prevent such tyranny.

In fact, it guarantees that the party will be the new tyranny.

So although both are against tyranny and consider it to be an act of war, they envision different prescriptions. It's Marx's prescription that I most abhor.

Locke envisions on the other hand something quite problematic: he envisions a completely Christian commonwealth. This is probably impractical in this day and age. In his Letter Concerning Toleration he only is able to tolerate other Christians. He argues quite simply that other faiths are completely incompatible with our own.

Marx of course seeks to abolish religion in order to replace it with his secular messianism.

I see Locke as easily the better of the two, and one could easily see the proof in the pudding by contrasting America and its Lockean freedoms with Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and its Marxist tyranny.

Many will say to me, Kirby Olson we have already told you that the Khmer Rouge were not Marxists, or at least were not what Marx meant. Well, what they did is quite easy to foresee when you read Marx. It's all there in the Manifesto.

Had the Khmer Rouge been Lockeans, instead, they would never have been able to do what they did.

Locke good, Marx bad.

Da Vinci Code

Last night I finally caved in and went to see the Da Vinci code. There was another movie I wanted to see more -- Robin Williams' RV -- but I was too late for it, and I thought it would be good to see the Da Vinci Code so I could laugh at all the marketing, all the squabbling, etc. There are lots of informative documentaries on the history channel now about the Templars, about the likelihood of Christ getting it on with Mary Magdalene, etc. And I thought well, this is a moment to follow the squeak of history.

I haven't been to see a movie in a theatre for several years. This is partially because I live in a county where there are few movie theatres. The last one in this town disappeared in the 1950s and is presently an auto parts store. The one I went to was over the county line in a town called Oneonta. I went in, and the ticket taker informed me rather proudly that he had read the book! He was a young man of twenty, and I'm assuming it was one of the few books he's read from the way he said it as if it's some kind of achievement to have read a book. It is hard to believe. The books that everybody had to read when I was a young man were Brautigan and Vonnegut (those were bad enough), but this generation has to read Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. And apparently it is forming their cultural ideas.

I laughed through most of the film. It was so overdrawn. Tom Hanks is some kind of symbologist (at least he's not a Jungian as he argues that symbols are specific, and not part of a general unconscious), and soon enough he's caught up in an international scheme in which the relatives of Jesus are getting whacked by a bunch of albino geeks who think that if it gets out that Mary Magdalene was Christ's wife, that the whole church will crumble, and white male power will disappear and women and multiculturals will achieve peace. I swear that's what it's about.

And the goofballs who are trying to save the earth from the white male Catholic church (especially the albino wing) practice a sort of ritual sex! You only see that in one glimpse, but it's just retarded. I'm sorry, but there's no other word for this: mentally handicapped or mentally challenged won't do.

The odd thing is that Hanks and the French woman never even kiss. The whole movie is supposed to be about men and women, and the power of love, as over against the ritualistic Sado-masochism of the Catholic church, and then the two of them just walk away from each other at the end, even though the movie was also predicated on their care for one another, on the fact of their love as a man and a woman.

People today.

The weirdest thing is that there are all these discrepancies. For instance in the next to last scene our two heroes are in a crypt-archive where Mary Magdalene's remains have been kept. Hanks says to the French girl you are the last living relative of Jesus. And then they come up out of the crypt and a woman says to her, Hi Sophie, I'm your grandmother. So what's her grandmother, chopped liver? And then it turns out that half this town is related to her. It's practically the French version of Appalachia. But they've been unable to find her until just this moment. Geez, just Google her.

I guess you have to read the book.

And then you have to watch the documentaries, and then read other books, until the thing starts to get straightened out. Is this the strategy? Make the movie as twisted as possible, and the leads and strands as tantalizingly wrong as possible, so that we have to write letters to the editor, take young people by the shirt collar and say, listen, all this stuff is just the wildest innuendo, ok? But it's not even that. It appears that the film-maker Ron Howard (Opie) and the writer Dan Brown and the actor Tom Hanks (Gump), got involved in some bizarre currents, and did their best to make sense of it. And now an entire generation is walking around wondering if they are the last living relative of Jesus. Jesus.

To Rethink Nature

In his notes on Marxism in the book La Nature, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the central problem with Marxism is that it lacks a theory of nature.

Proceeding as if earth should be heaven, Marx sought to rectify the earth's ill by conflating Luther's two kingdoms into one, and proclaiming the next kingdom a fraud that we should be living in this one.

But entreprenurial ability is not evenly spread throughout the population. Few have it. Rarer than poetic genius (which it resembles) entreprenurial ability can't be taken for granted. The shoddy factories and crummy products of the Soviet Union demonstrate this. Right down to the sandpaper that they called toilet paper, the situation was anything but Charmin.

It is doubtful if anything can rectify the lack of a green perspective in Marx. His philosophy was written prior to the notion of ecology. A functioning and stable economy cannot be built from a blueprint. It has to grow out of people's natural abilities. Weeded here and there. To do the weeding himself (to weed out the bourgeoisie) was precisely what Christ warned against when he argued that we must leaving the weeding to Him, and meanwhile let the wheat and the chaff grow together for fear of killing them both. In Marxist economics, the ecology is too simple.

Much of Christian economics is too simple, too.

Luther's economics was right on. It's what he was primarily thinking about when he got rid of the Pope. Remove that obese monstrosity, and there is more than enough to go around. And so northern Europe has prospered while southern Europe continues to strain under its fattened clergy.

It's something of a miracle that Luther got this just right. It's quite difficult to understand. He had a wary mind, and one that matched hesitancy with boldness.

While the Lutheran democracies of Scandinavia remain as green as ever, and their products are almost universally prized for their ecological qualities, the ruined remains of the Ukrainian nuclear industry, the burnt out smelly forests of the East Bloc, and the horrible hulk of the proletarian revolution bespeak a terrible lack of an ecological thinking within Marxism itself. Nothing was sacred except profit.

It is hard to understand the role of a conscience in political thought. But we can see that there was no reverence toward the earth in Soviet thought. The disappearance of the world's fourth largest sea, the Aral, is but one of their blunders. I can't help but trace this blunder to what Merleau-Ponty calls the absolute absence of any ecological thought within Marx's oeuvre, its capital blunder.

I dreamed that I could change anything that I wanted to change. However, the change only lasted for twenty minutes.

Celebrity Sighting

Spent the last several days doing very time-consuming things. Wednesday my wife contested a traffic ticket in Albany's city court. She was doing 40 in a 30. She had to pay 125 and got two points. Her first offense.

Friday we went to NYC to get a passport for Sofia, the two-month old-baby. We waited for hours in a room on the tenth floor of some Federal building at 376 Hudson St. The children and I looked down the street from the window. Bicycle messengers, taxis, cars of many kinds, busses, all speeding on their way to somewhere, all deliriously unaware of Lutheran surrealism.

Finally we got the business done and went down on the elevator, and as it opened we saw the 60 Minutes Reporter Mike Wallace getting into the elevator. Actually, my back was turned.

Riikka said, "Kirby, look behind you."

I turned and saw his famous face, bigger than life. He is 88 years old, but still full of powerful intellectual energy, slim, and somehow quite strong. I smiled, feeling like a jerk. But to my surprise he shot an enormous smile back. And one at Riikka. No one else seemed aware that this was Mike Wallace!

And for a few seconds we were in a bubble of time together, until the elevator closed behind us and shot him up the building.

We walked out for a stroll through Soho on a sunny afternoon in early May.

In the car home over the Pulaski Skyway Riikka and I said we should exaggerate the story and say that Mike Wallace went UP the elevator with just us, and talked to us, and patted the baby's head. This would prolong the story, and give us something to turn into a story. But in the tradition of 60 Minutes, we then decided to stick with just the facts. And the facts are simple: we encountered Mike Wallace for barely ten seconds, and he did in fact shoot a very charismatic smile at us, perhaps because of the four small children, perhaps because Riikka is so beautiful, or maybe just because he's such a good man.

Now, if I could only get him to do a segment on Lutheran Surrealism. We are a movement waiting to happen, needing only the news to report on us in order to garner massive public support. But in order to get the news interested we would have to be stockpiling nerve gas, or threatening to blow up a trade center.

Lutheran Surrealism, however, is good citizenry at work. We hold open the doors for the elderly, we pay our taxes on time, we do not believe in any kind of terrorism. We support the government, and we mow our lawn every week. We are in short, the kind of good news that no news program would ever comment upon. This is both our strength and our downfall. Good news, like good poetry, catches on only very slowly. It might take several generations. It might take 400 years. But what is time?

CARL SACHS ASKS LUTHERAN SURREALISM A QUESTION

Carl Sachs asks whether Marx and Madison are necessarily incompatible.

The answer is that they are opposites. Exact opposites? As exactly opposite as two political positions can be. And here is where we will attempt to prove this, converting youthful philosophy professor to our side at last. Here is the summary of Madison:

The Federalist Papers. Madison contributes twenty-six of the eighty-five essays that comprise this famous attempt to rally support for the Constitution. His important Number 10 argues that the framework of the new government will not allow any single faction in America to overpower another. Madison's essays, Numbers 37 through 58, clearly define the separation of powers within the several branches of government.

Against this Marxism posits a SINGLE PARTY, with no separation of powers.

Madison in his famous Number 10 argues in fact for a multiplication of faction. The more factions that are represented the safer the Republic will be.

Marx argues for precisely the opposite that THE party must take over the entire country until its totalitarian aims have been accomplished, and then absurdly, it will "wither away" as passive a phrase as has never been deconstructed.

Democracy is a robust and jostling mechanism in which many factions compete.

Marxism is a totalitarian system in which one party seizes all power and holds it until the end of time. Even when it "withers away" it is still in control. It's just that now everyone is a zombie who believes in the party, and its ideas. Until then, it will not wither away, but further tighten the thumbscrews of Cyclopsean power.

We here at Lutheran Surrealism firmly back Madison and the proliferation of factions.

Few read the Federalist Papers any longer among the radical fringes. But we here at Lutheran Surrealism can often be found inching through the pages, astonished by Madison's reach, and how he cut off Marxism's long ugly totalitarian beard before America could get further entangled in it.

We thank Carl Sachs for his question.

Any others?

ONE PARTY SYSTEMS BAD, MULTI-PARTY SYSTEMS GOOD

I hate one-party systems. Once they attain absolute power they immediately begin to fester with corruption.

Absolute power yields absolute corruption.

People scream that they are Marxists at me all day long. I say, absolute power brings absolute corruption. They think they will be immune because communists are such goody two-shoes. In fact any person is corrupt almost from the instant they attain absolute power.

Ha!

Same as everybody else. The problem with Mexico is that for too long it was a one-party state.

This is the problem of most of the Spanish-speaking world. Ironically, the only powers fighting against this monopoly of power in Spanish-speaking countries are other one-party states in the offing, such as the Shining Path in Peru, or the icky Stalinism of Castro.

If you want to get rid of corruption you have to have a multi-party system. Two is the minimum, and they must genuinely be at one another's throats all day and night, and yet play by the rules, the rules meaning that they accept the sharing of power. This is the beginning of health. It's why our economy is Relatively free of corruption.

Even more so in countries like Finland where there are some thirty parties that get a slice of representation. there is almost no corruption in Finland, which is why it is even better off economically per capita than America.

Many legitimate factions reduce corruption. If any one party gets absolute power, then the result is always already absolute corruption.

In a country in which absolute corruption exists, it is impossible to do business. And so businesses fold, and those that remain are hampered by the party in power.

Lutheran surrealism is not exclusivist. If elected, we promise to leave Madison's brilliant system of checks and balances untouched. Our whole idea is to multiply existing parties, and to cause new power bases to proliferate.

Corruption is what those of the third world are fleeing. Not only in Mexico, but in the former Soviet countries, Africa, etc. The only people who don't want out are people from multi-party systems with checks and balances against corruption.

That's what the first world and second world countries share. What the third world countries share is dictatorship by one party or another (all one-party systems are fundamentally the same).

I work in the tallest building in Delaware County. It is seven stories. From the lunch room one can see the Delaware River. At this point it is only about twenty feet across, although it goes on to become the 34th largest river in the US. Across the river one can a tiny hut, or observational post. It is green, hectagonal, and approximately 6 feet in diameter. For about a week I've been trying to figure out what it is, or was, used for.

I talked to the mayor Dave Truscott. He said, "It was built in the 1930s by the WPA. It is a water gauge, or it housed a water gauge. It was originally meant to study the Cannonsville Reservoir which was built just after WWII. This water gauge worked by having a tube go down through its concrete base into the river. A rubber ball floated on the water on the top of the tube, registering highs and lows in water flow. A machine registered the variations with a needle on a graph. Every month the paper was taken out, and studied."

I nodded.

Truscott has been in town most of his life and he knows just about everything. He is a retired mathematician who once worked at SUNY-Delhi. A slim, silver-haired gentleman, who walks tirelessly around the village, arranging flowers, talking with people, keeping the town in shape.

"There are nails in the water gauge house's door, but you can get to it through Smith Pond Park, and look inside if you want. It would be a good project to go there with your kids and have a look inside. The Americorp group refurbished it recently. It's got a new roof and windows."

Truscott had still more information, but I had to get to my 9:30 Mythology class and I had only fifteen more minutes to walk across town to the classroom. I hurried through town, and arrived at the class at 9:29, and began talking about Antigone, and the notion of Sophocles that our fate is determined not by ourselves, but by the gods, and therefore there are things beyond us that remain mysteries, and will always remain mysteries.

However, the water gauge is no longer one of those mysteries. It is a tiny hut, or observational post, that belonged to the DEC, for purposes of river observation. It was closed down in the 1980s. A newer one with a digital recorder is now over by Fitch's bridge. The newer one has a solar panel on the roof, which provides it with electricity.

Truscott waved goodbye after giving me the information. I said goodbye. He said, "Hey, you can put all that into one of your poems!" I thought about this, but prefer prose for this project. Poetry is about mysteries. Prose is an exploration of fact.

The great Icelandic poet Eirikur Orn Norddahl wrote a review of my chapbook Waiting for the Rapture in Icelandic. It can be read here. Don't be intimidated by Icelandic. It's possible to read it without any study whatsoever. It's the world's only perfectly transparent language -- one that just anybody at all can read. In the near future Lutheran Surrealism will have Icelandic as its official language:


http://10000tw.blogspot.com/2006/05/um-waiting-for-rapture-e-kirby-olson.html