The spectacle?

Human beings easily slip into complacency. They need to be entertained and cajoled. The spectacle must hold their interest; it must enchant, it must inspire, and it is be an escape from the supposedly cruel necessities of everyday life. The spectacle has force when its spectators immerse themselves completely – so much so that it no longer is illusionary, for them. When the spectator seeks meaning from the spectacle, he sinks, with relative ease, into the enchanting wonders of the show. But is necessity even relevant? Necessity is governed by rules, by credos and customs, legislation concocted by those with a genuine calling for such matters. His carefree life, free of politics, fuels his own hubris. He deems himself more moral than those who have to deal with politics. He lives to serve righteousness. He serves self-interest, hence fulfilling his responsibility to his group – his nation-state. He follows laws and legitimates the sovereign who rules for him. But with the triumph of the spectacle, a politics of recurring images and symbols triumphs over a politics of ideas. Thought is not a necessity for the former; whilst the latter cannot be without human thought and engagement.

Feuerbach

From Feuerbach’s Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot trans. (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. xix-xx

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion – and to speculative philosophy and theology also – than to open its eyes, rather than turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, i.e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality.

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, this change, inasmuch as it does away with illusion, is an absolute annihilation, or at least a reckless profanation; for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, and for it has been substituted, even among Protestants, the appearance of religion – the Church – in order at least that “the faith” may be imparted to the ignorant and indiscriminating multitude; that faith being still the Christian, because the Christian churches stand now as they did a thousand years ago, as formerly, the external signs of the faith are in vogue. That which has no longer any existence in faith (the faith of the modern world is only and ostensible faith, a faith which does not believe what it fancies that it believes, and is only an undecided, pusillanimous unbelief) is still to pass current as opinion: that which is no longer sacred in itself and in truth is still at least to seem sacred. Hence the simulated religious indignation of the present age, the age of shows and illusion, concerning my analysis, especially of the Sacraments. But let it not be demanded of an author who proposes to himself as his goal not the favour of his contemporaries, but only the truth, the unveiled, naked truth, that he should have or feign respect towards an empty appearance, especially as the object which underlies this appearance is in itself the culminating point of religion, i.e., the point at which the religious slides into the irreligious.

The Man without Content

The Man without Content

Giorgio Agamben – The Man without Content

The book goes from a modern aesthetic conception of art to an art tied to the very meaning of existence. The disinterested spectator, which Nietzsche’s quote at the very beginning critiques, acts as the point of departure. The spectator, the collector, the romantic, accumulates culture and archives it. He or she leaves art at the level of representation.

Agamben, regarding Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian aesthetic judgment: “the aesthetic dimension – the sensible apprehension of the beautiful object on the part of the spectator – is replaced by the creative experience of the artist who sees his work only un promesse de bonheur, a promise of happiness. Having reached the furthest limit of its destiny in the “hour of the shortest shadow”, art leaves behind the neutral horizon of the aesthetic and recognizes itself in the “golden ball” of the will to power.” (2)

The book attempts to elaborate on this point. On pages 3-4, the discussion regarding Plato and Sophocles – their ban on poetry – introduces the theme of Chapters 6-8: the relationship between praxis and poesis.

Pages 4-5 note the “dangers” of interested art, most notably Plato’s notion of “divine terror”. Here, Agamben contrasts the artist and the spectator.

“To the increasing innocence of the spectator’s experience in front of the beautiful object corresponds the increasing danger inherent in the artist’s experience, for whom art’s promesse de bonheur becomes the poison that contaminates and destroys his existence.” (5)

Note the Rilke quote about the extreme limits of art. This leads to a discussion regarding whether art is dangerous for society, and Agamben concludes that most artists themselves would acquiesce to Plato’s ban on it on p. 6. This leads to a very interesting point:

“If this is true, then the entrance of art into the aesthetic dimension – and the understanding of it starting from…the spectator – is not as innocent and natural a phenomenon as we commonly think. Perhaps nothing is more urgent – if we really want to engage the problem of art in our time – than a destruction of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the science of the work of art.” (6)

This may be at the centre of his study: to recover the origin of art from the hold of modern aesthetics. “And if it is true that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then perhaps we are today in a privileged position to understand the authentic significance of the Western aesthetic project.” (6)

He revisits this analogy at the end: “According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project”. (115)

In the final chapter entitled “The Melancholy Angel”, a reference to Benjamin’s Angel of History, he proposes that art is stuck in a paradoxical position between past and future.

“Thus aesthetics is not simply the privileged dimension that progress in the sensibility of Western man has reserved for the work of art as his most proper place; it is, rather, the very destiny of art in the era in which, with tradition now served, man is no longer able to find, between past and future, the space of the present, and gets lost in the linear time of history. The angel of history, whose wings became caught in the storm of progress, and the angel of aesthetics, who stares in an atemporal dimension at the ruins of the past, are inseparable. And so long as man has not found another way to settle individually and collectively the conflict between old and new, thus appropriating his historicity, a surpassing of aesthetics would not be limited to exaggerating the split that traverses its appears unlikely.” (112)

So what’s the point? He approaches the question of aesthetic space in a way similar to Arendt (or so I think). “Just as all other mythic-traditional systems celebrate rituals and festivals to interrupt the homogeneity of profane time and, reactualizing the original mythic time, to allow man to become again the contemporary of the gods and to reattain the primordial dimension of creation, so in the work of art the continuum of linear time is broken, and man recovers, between past and future, his present space.” (101-02) He speaks of terra aesthetica and how it obscures the original meaning of art – as well as how this relationship between past and future allows man to comprehend presentness. Terra aesthetica - from what I can gather - is leaving the aesthetic object simply at the level of representation, neglecting the original relationship the work of art has with truth.

“To look at a work of art, therefore, means to be hurled out into a more original time: it means ecstasy in the epochal opening of rhythm, which gives and holds back. Only by starting from this situation of man’s relationship with the work of art is it possible to comprehend how this relationship – if it is authentic – is also for man the highest engagement, that is, the engagement that keeps him in the truth and grants to his dwelling on earth its original status. In the experience of the work of art, man stands in the truth, that is, in the origin that has revealed itself to him in the poietic act. In this engagement, in this being-hurled our into the…of rhythm, artists and spectators recover their essential solidarity and their common ground.” (102) Hence, Todorov’s characterization of Cortes – appreciating the beauty of objects while neglecting the subjectivity of the creators – applies very well to this. The original tie between spectator and artist also undercuts the disinterested experience of a “man of taste”.

The way Agamben sets up his study is quite insightful.

Chapter 2 and 3 sets up the spectator as the “man of taste”, the one who derives meaning (self-meaning) exclusively from aesthetic objects.

Chapter 4 explores the morbid fascination of the modern aesthete for collecting; the rise of the modern museum.

Chapter 5-6 broaches dichotomies, of a sort: being and non-being, art and the absence of art, in other words, setting up an analogy used in the later chapters, presence and shadow (non-presence). It fields the potential “death of art” in an age of nihilism.

Chapter 7 touches on the topic of products – pop art, consumer art – possibly as an extension of the “cabinets of wonders” of Chapter 4, but differs in its emphasis on production, more specifically the labour involved in production. The point regarding pro-duction serves as the impetus for the recovery of the original meaning of art.

This is an important thread that leads into the longest chapter of the book, Chapter 8, which examines the relationship between praxis and poiesis. It looks at the Greeks (72-76), specifically Aristotle (76-78), Marx on genus or Gattungswesen (79-85), and lastly Nietzsche’s correlation of the work of art to the will to power (85-93).

Chapters 9-10, as the concluding chapters, make very clear the relationship of art to historicism. This “trajectory” (that I have almost arbitrarily imposed on his work) appears to work through the condition of modern aesthetics, one dominated by the man of taste – an extension of the modern knowing subject. The presence of this individual is a manifestation of nihilism, insofar there is a crisis of meaning that stems from an alienation from the original meaning of art. Chapters 7 and 8 aim to recover the original relationship between human action and the work of art, hence the look at praxis and poiesis – one that is inspired by Heidegger and Arendt as the early parts of Chapter 8 implicitly notes. Human action cannot act extemporaneously, hence necessitating the final chapters on man in between past and future, and the possibility of recovering presentness through art. The spatial-temporal questions posed in those chapters most closely resemble Arendt, but are nonetheless interesting questions.

Of the man of taste, Agamben writes the following. “Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends; though condemned to depend on something other than himself, in this other he does not find any sense of what is essential, because every content and every moral determination is abolished.” (23) He intimates, even here, that man of taste is indeed an expression of nihilism. This becomes clearer later on.

“The spectator’s is the most radical split; his principle is what is most alien to him; his essence is in that which, by definition, does not belong to him. Taste, in order fully to be, has to become separate from the principle of creation; but without genius, taste becomes a pure reversal, that is, the very principle of perversion.” (24)

This invites a lengthy citation from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s “pure culture” is related to the self-annulling nihilism manifested by Rameau’s nephew, the man of taste. “In Rameau’s nephew, Hegel saw the summit – and at the same time the beginning of the undoing – of European culture on the brink of the Terror and of the Revolution, when Spirit, having alienated itself in culture, can only find itself again in the consciousness of a split and in absolute perversion of all concepts and all realities. Hegel called this concept “pure culture”…” (24-25)

“In front of Rameau’s nephew, who has become conscious of the split in himself, the honest consciousness (the philosopher, in Diderot’s dialogue) cannot say anything that the cowardly consciousness does not already know and say itself, because the latter is precisely the absolute perversion of everything into its opposite, and its language is the judgment that, while it dissolves every identity, plays this game of self-dissolution with itself as well. The only way it has to reach self-possession is wholly to appropriate its extreme split […] his consciousness (Rameau’s nephew) is radical inconsistency, his fullness is absolute lack.” (25-26)

On p. 34, the comment on medieval man looking at they tympanum of the Vezelay cathedral: “he had the aesthetic impression not that he was observing a work of art but rather that he was measuring, more concretely for him, the borders of his world. The wonderful was no yet an autonomous sentimental tonality and the particular effect of the work of art, but an indistinct presence of the grace that, in the work, put man’s activity in tune with the divine world of creation, and thus kept alive the echo of what art had been in its Greek beginnings: the wonderful and uncanny power of making being and the world appear, of producing them in the work.”

From Mysticism to Dialogue

Paul Mendes-Flohr. From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989)

“Interpersonal life, Simmel taught, has an ontological grounding.” (14) This follows a description of how Simmel may have influenced the development of Buber’s thought. But it must be noted that Simmel and young Buber’s thought is different from that of later Buber. “Simmel’s – and the young Buber’s – ontology of forms of relationship differ radically from Buber’s dialogical ontology. For Simmel, an infinite number of forms of relationship are, by definition, ontological; for the later Buber, only one form of relationship, the dialogic, is so graced. Simmel’s “formal sociology” would, in any case, seem to have had a seminal influence on Buber’s Ontologie des Zwischenmenschlichen (ontology of the between).” (14) Mendes-Flohr notes that the younger pre-dialogical Buber was only “superficially interested in the relations…between men” from 1899 to 1922 (15). “Indeed, prior to his affirmation of the realm of the interpersonal, Buber’s intellectual and spiritual focus was singularly a-social. In his pre-dialogical period, his central concern was the crisis of Kultur, the decline of spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities wrought by industrial, urban Zivilisation. Such a “romantic discontent” with modernity had been shared by many intellectuals since the rise of capitalist society.” (15) This note is used to introduced the influence of Nietzsche on a young Buber; Buber translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Polish at the age of seventeen. “As a young man, Buber expressly considered himself a disciple of Nietzsche; and even subsequently, a strong trace of Nietzsche’s influence can be discerned in all of Buber’s thought, particularly that of his pre-dialogical period.” (15) Later on in the book, Mendes-Flohr returns to reinforce this point. “Buber apparently held fast to his youthful affirmation of Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Weltbild: the world (qua reality) is in constant flux and should we desire to align ourselves with this process, our “primal” relation to this process must be continually renewed. Renewal – metaphysical, cultural, and social – is at bottom an act of spirit. Indeed, in that he continued to regard acts of the spirit, grounded in the realm of sensibility (Kultur in the broadest sense), as the fulcrum of social change, Buber remained true to his intellectual origins as a Kulturphilosoph.” (126) Mendes-Flohr explains that Buber’s generation approached conventional bourgeois life with great scepticism, seeking a regeneration of Kultur. “Thus, Buber’s early Zionism, which envisioned the redemption of the Jew to lie in a “renaissance” of the Jewish spirit and “primordial” sensibilities, is perhaps best understood as a species of Kulturpolitik.” (16) The discussion of a generational revolt of “spiritually vacuous revolt of bourgeois Zivilisation leads to Buber’s relationship with Wilhelm Dilthey.

“Buber’s generation instinctively protested this conclusion and affirmed the world-in-itself, the presumed reality beyond the phenomenal world refracted through sense data, as the “true reality,” declaring this reality as knowable precisely by virtue of the nonrational categories of intuition and feeling. This “idealistic reaction against science” was represented most prominently in the academy by Buber’s teacher Dilthey, who sought to effect a radical revision of nineteenth century epistemology, particularly with respect to Geistewissenschaften. Dilthey argued that Erlebnis, lived or inner experience (as opposed to Erfahrung, or cognitive experience grounded in sense data), is the primary faculty of knowing the nonlogical, dynamic events of the human spirit. Because it is an “an elementary and immediate reality,” Erlebnis is considered to enjoy an epistemological status (i.e., it possesses an appreciative quality) not obtainable by Erahrung, which medicates the data of sense perception through a priori structures of cognition.” (17) Mendes-Flohr is careful to point out that Dilthey did not “suggest that Erlebnis provided a noumenal, “higher” from of knowledge”; that would be the work of his more enthusiastic votaries. (17) This is done to demonstrate Buber’s brief flirtation with the more romantic elements of German Kultur in his youth, as is shown through his belief that the mystic “achieves unity with the primal experience…of the world spirit”. (18) “Clearly, Buber’s formulation of the mystic’s path to unity is a novel, free combination of Nietzsche’s voluntarism (i.e., unconditional living) and Dilthey’s “Erlebnis” epistemology.” (18)

The final part of the introduction shows the a-social character of Buber’s Kulturphilosophie at its most intense, in the context of the First World War. The enthusiasm Buber displayed for the war was derived from his belief in its metaphysical significance. But, as Mendes-Flohr notes, Gustav Landauer, socialist activist and Buber’s close friend, shook him from his position. The events of the First World War mark the turn in Buber’s thought from, what Mendes-Flohr calls, an a-social phase towards the dialogical Buber of his later life. “For Buber, the axis of Gemeinschaft (community) shifts from pathos to ethos,” writes Mendes-Flohr (19). The shift from the heroic fulfilment of a world narrative to the confrontation of a real world situation occurs in Buber’s thought primarily in response to the unparalleled brutality of the Great War. “At first, Buber had sought to integrate his new sensitivity to the realm of the interpersonal into the categories of his Kulturphilosophie. In time, what emerged was a radical modification of that philosophical system and a novel epistemology and social ontology (bearing, as it does, the imprint of Simmel’s influence) that characterize Buber’s dialogical thought. Mendes-Flohr concludes the introduction by proposing, “I and Thou is also – and perhaps principally – a grammar for the ethical regeneration of Gemeinschaft (community).” This interpretation is one that he brings back in the introduction to The Letters of Martin Buber.

The first chapter “Simmel’s Paradox” is inaugurated with a brief note on Buber’s relation to sociology, primarily through his teacher Georg Simmel, and the various publishing and editing projects he undertook. The primary point to be grasped is that the concept das Zwischenmenschliche (the ontology of the between) emerges in this early period. “He seems to have introduced this neologism to clarify a problem in Simmel’s epistemology of social life…” (25) Mendes-Flohr goes on to explicate Simmel’s approach to social relations on pp. 26 – 29.

“Interaction does not occur in a haphazard or irregular manner, rather it displays specific patterns. Borrowing the Kantian dichotomy of form and matter, Simmel contends that a priori principles of forms (Formen) structure the given expression of a particular interaction or sociation between individuals. Form is an analytical construct designed to isolate the purely social from the content (intent, purpose) of a social situation, “content being in itself not social”. Justification for this distinction is the observation that the same content may be found with an endless variety of forms; and vice versa, the same form may be realized with an infinite variety of contents. The identification and description of these forms, which proceed inductively and psychologically, Simmel avers, are the principal task of sociology as a science.” (27)

“Further, Simmel emphasizes, “these forms do not make for sociation; they are sociation.” This is to say that social life constitutes “a unique and autonomous form of existence.” (27)” There are traces of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy in what Simmel puts forth. But Buber puts these ideas to greater scrutiny. Simmel, however, realizes the uniquely contradiction this conception of sociation poses. “As a Kantian, Simmel was profoundly perplexed by this observation – and this perplexity recurs throughout his sociological writings. How could society, understood as fundamentally an interpersonal relationship or event, be said to possess objectivity if it is devoid of spatiality? To Kant, only the realm of space and time could possibly qualify as objective.” (28) But Buber, in I and Thou, reveals the I-Thou relationship is neither objective or subjective in substance (personal note). Simmel concludes that “sociation as consciousness of the other is a form of knowledge, akin to apperceptive self-consciousness is a form of knowledge, akin to apperceptive self-consciousness.” (28) “Society is a fact of cognition”, exclaims Simmel. (28) As Mendes-Flohr explains, Simmel, however, rejects the psychological-functional model of interaction as inadequate. “This model of social interaction would imply that the response of one individual to another is merely a modification, conscious or unconscious, of one’s psychic interests. To Simmel, this could hardly explain the objective forms to which individuals seem to adhere in their relations between one another.” (28) By applying a Kantian concept of synthesis, Simmel tried to respond to functionalist arguments. “In synthesis, primally disparate and incoherent elements are “connected” to form a unity of perception. This unification endows the constituents with a quality they do not possess in and of themselves. Kant of course confines this act of cognition to spatial objects.” (28-29) This is the paradox mentioned in the title of the chapter. Buber proposes das Zwischenmenschliche as a “descriptive designation of the ‘region’ of interaction” (29). Mendes-Flohr reiterates, for the sake of the reader, that this is the central preoccupation of the study; to uncover the relationship of the ontology of the between or interhuman to Simmel’s sociology. In other words, Mendes-Flohr embarks on a genetic account of the concept interhuman in Buber’s thought.

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), French sociologist, perhaps the first in Europe to propound the idea of a social psychology opposed to a Volkerpyschologie, taught that social facts arise through imitation, an “inter-mental” activity in which the action or value of one individual is duplicated by that of another. “The mechanism of imitation is affective. Individuals influence each other much in the manner that a wave motion is distributed: an innovative motion (act, value) is distributed (socialized) through a series of assimilative, monadic (human) relations. In a less mechanistic version, Tarde contends that a social process is initiated by an innovative act that is an adaptation to a given situation; other “intuitively” acknowledge the genius of this act and imitate it.” (33) Although this discussion between sociology and social psychology is interesting it leads to a divergence between Dilthey and Simmel, two primary influences on Buber. According to Mendes-Flohr, Buber cites Dilthey as a his “principal teacher in philosophical studies” (34). The quote from Dilthey regarding man as a “historical and social being” is reflective of his influence on Buber’s later work on philosophical anthropology in “What is Man?” (personal note). Dilthey’s objections to the discipline of sociology lies in its attempts to provide grand formulas…a science “which aims at comprehending everything with happens de facto in human society in a single study…” (35) “Dilthey,” according to Mendes-Flohr, “argues that political science (Staatswissenschaft) is the only discipline methodologically capable of treating such phenomena. Furthermore, the “state” assures the functioning of “lower” organizations and often has incorporated these into its own juridical organization.” (36). Mendes-Flohr notes that Buber’s affinity to Dilthey is largely “terminological”, but the conceptual substance of his idea of social science remains dependent on Simmel (36). He relates Dilthey to “political principles” or institutional conventions and Simmel’s forms to a priori principles, “whose dynamic transcends both history and individual action system” (36). The point of the chapter is clear enough. Mendes-Flohr attempts to demonstrate the Simmel has a philosophical influence on Buber, as much as Dilthey. “Buber’s social psychology is non-psychologistic; therefore, Dilthey’s psychologistic position is not a contributing factor in its formation.” (42) Mendes-Flohr clarifies this later on. “Contrary to Dilthey, Buber presents the descriptive and analytical aspects of social psychology as procedurally separate. Furthermore, he suggests that these aspects are each of a fundamentally different order: analytical social psychology is confined to the labour of one individual, descriptive social psychology is a cooperative effort of many; the former is pedestrian, the latter a new and fruitful departure.” (42) It goes on to be a deep analysis of Buber’s preface to Simmel’s work. The point is that the terminology for interhuman is posed in the preface and reflects a convergence of the influences Dilthey and Simmel had on a young Buber. “For Simmel the fleeting moment of interaction is an elemental sociation; for Buber the evanescent “meeting” of an I and Thou is an “elemental dialogue” – and as such, it discloses an oft-hidden “reality.” In the fleeting moment of meeting, one gains a glimpse of the life of “genuine community” (echte Gemeinschaft), or matrix of warm and trusting relations that had been eclipsed by the competitive, calculating relations of bourgeois urban life. The I-Thou meeting is an elemental Gemeinschaft, and hence, as we shall subsequently see, Buber held that Gemeinschaft is not, as many pessimistically presumed, irretrievably lost; and if indeed it is locked in the past, at least, Gemeinschaft-like relations are an elemental, and thus preduring, transhistorical reality.” (45)

Mendes-Flohr describes the transition of das Zwischenmenschliche from a “sociological designation denoting the zone of interaction” to “a term of ontological ethics describing the realm of “authentic” interhuman relations” (46). “Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft are no longer simply a matter of organic structures, of historical, diametrical oppositions, but of transhistorical forms of relation: in Between Man and Man (1947), Buber attributes the crisis of modern man, his “social and cosmic homelessness” to two factors…” (46) Having read BMM, I can tell you those two are the increasing decay of the old organic forms of direct life of man with man; and the second is that man can no longer master what he has brought about, i.e., technology. The presumption that a choice must be made between an individualistic anthropology and a collectivist sociology is erroneous. “The influence of Simmel’s “formal sociology” is palpable. His teaching that society is essentially structured by a priori forms of relations would thus seem to have furnished Buber with a seminal insight leading to a strategy for the renewal of Gemeinschaft.” (47) The pre-dialogical Buber, as Mendes-Flohr notes, “subsumed his interest in sociology to his overriding quest for heightened inner experience (Erlebnis) and mystical unity beyond the phenomenal and therefore social world” (47). This cannot be presented as a mere aberration, as Mendes-Flohr does, of Buber’s generation. This quest was mystical unity was of course steeped in neo-Romantic yearnings for lost roots. Although the connection to a Volkish ideology is made elsewhere – Bloch and Mosse – it cannot be made in the case of Buber. It was an intellectual movement against urban bourgeois values, but also intent on reviving Kultur.

“Buber’s pre-dialogical thought is dominated by an interest in mysticism, particularly, in the unitive Erlebnis. This interest was…a correlate of his concern with the putative decline of man’s spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities attendant to the rise of bourgeois Zivilisation.” (49) This chapter appears to clearly draw out the influence of Nietzsche on Buber’s pre-dialogical, but also his dialogical thought. But to examine Nietzsche’s influence on Buber, we must examine Schopenhauer’s framing of the problem of individuation.

“For Schopenhauer the empirical world is principally a fact of individuation: a plurality of discrete and autonomous units, all of which are eternally separate from one another. An irremovable barrier separates all empirical facts of existence, between man and man, between object and object, and, of course, between man and object. Such an individuated world is a function of the perceiving mind, however. The a priori structure of human cognition prescribes that the world be apprehended by the formal principles of time and space, principles that, because they seek to specify or measure relatedness, “succession of moments” and “position of parts,” necessarily imply a cognitive finiteness or individuation of that which is perceived…Time and space are the sole and defining principles of the phenomenal world, the world of individuation.” (51) We return once again to Nietzsche.

It's a small world after all...

I recall feeling inexplicably unhappy on a visit to Disneyland as a child. My childhood was not an unhappy one - my parents loved and cared for me, provided most things a child would need or should want, and they took me to places that they thought were integral to youth, such as Disneyland. They loved me and always wanted the best for me. Yet, as a child walking around in 'the happiest place on earth', I felt quite despondent.

One of my most vivid memories of that day was of walking out of the "It's a small world..." attraction in an unhappy mood. My mother could not understand the behaviour of her eldest son, and scolded me, "You're in Disneyland, what else could you want? Now don't be throwing a tantrum". She chalked it up to the periodic bratiness of a child and did what any mother would do, put her foot down to snuff out any misbehaviour. But it wasn't my bratty nature coming out. Sometimes I wish it was that simple. In fact, it was a "revelation" that was to blame for my melancholy. As the boat-cart carried my family through the attraction, I realized that the majority of children around the world were not singing and dancing to a silly ear-worm inducing song - most were starving, unclothed, without a roof over their heads, or without parents at all. And most were lucky to live beyond their twelfth year, much less be visiting Disneyland. I knew then that I couldn't be happy with sugar-coated illusion so stilted and parochial that it made a young boy utterly depressed while in the "happiest place on earth". It was then, at that instant, did the world start to come into bold clarity for this relatively sheltered child.

Alot of mistakes made in my childhood, my adolescence, and even my early adult life can be attributed to an inclination towards bratiness. But that moment of depression at Disneyland was not. It was an awakening that I would embrace and push away - one that stayed regardless of the ebb and flow of its intensity. Years later, that clarity has been lost, regained, and hopefully strengthened. Any worthwhile truth is elusive, because any worthy truth cannot be possessed or grasped absolutely. We can only live truthfully with ourselves, with friends and family, and with those whom we have yet to encounter. We must face the world with honesty and conviction and never afraid to be unhappy, because life is at times a tragic affair.

He was a Crook

HUNTER S. THOMPSON
'He was a crook'
Jun 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know Iwill go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all theway to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by thehead with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancée's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

The empty wanderer

He ran away from his problems and ended up on an island. But soon he discovered that even an island could not detach him from his troubles. The disturbance within would ebb and flow. He often sat on the shore enthralled by waves crashing onto the sandy beach but ineluctably disappointed by the receding tide. Soon he grew bored with the beach and its fickle waves. He would find new distractions, always ending up worse than before. He searched for peace in the seclusion of wilderness and sat for years in pure stillness. Alas, he could not stand repressive serenity. Three years passed and he was ill-equipped to cope with himself. He abandoned nature and returned to sensuality.

They told him not to fritter his time away, not to idolize the pondering wanderer. But he did. He loved to wander - not to know where he was going, or when he would get there. He loved the distractions of the island, its slow deliberate pace. He loved the cabana boys who slaved for his enjoyment. But they did not love him. They loathed how his meaningless decadence. They loathed his lecherous gaze and despised his overt predation. One day, he was found strangled, with a half-full pina colada in his right hand.

The Coming War

The Coming War is between forces on each side of a vast emptiness. Once markets collapse, illusions lose their strength. When money and contracts no longer can constrain antagonism, the first salvo will be launched. First, it will be a battle of vitriol, then sabre-rattling. And ultimately, each will be raised as THE Great Evil. The Great Evil is no longer one that threatens the soul. The Great Evil threatens hegemony. The Great Evil threatens to dominate, threatens to repress…threathening to displace the current machine of repression and domination. Where shall you stand in the Great War? I am at the margins. I have no home. On one side, I face patronization. I am still immature in their eyes, and always will be. On the other, I am corrupted; impure, I am infected by foreign values. I was born at the margins, and raised to aspire for the norm. What norm can exist in a time of war? But when the war comes, where can I stand? Will I be tore to shreds being pulled in infinitesimal directions? Or will I stand alone as passive observer, chronicler of the End? Here I stand …at the margin between worlds lost to each other…at the edge of a universe on the verge of annihilation.

Armageddon of Banality

Frank was born and raised in line. After his parents passed on, he talked to the girl before him in line. They traded significantly irrelevant information: name, age, number in line. He then asked the question he desperately wanted an answer to. He unzipped his pants and asked her what the fleshy appendage was. She answered with her lips and the line moved. Having received an answer he asked another.

“Why are we in line, girl?” She confessed that her father might have once knew but he was now gone, neglecting to leave her with that knowledge. The line extended to the ends of the earth - origin and end as if one in the same. East and West, left and right were untenable categories.

“Let’s go this way, girl”, he said pointed in one direction.

“No, let’s go this way”, she pointed in the other. The question of direction consumed them, for neither knew where the End was. Others in line started to debate as well; the End is there, here, up over where? Unquestionably puzzled by the futility of the chatter, they stepped out of line, walked in a random direction, and in search of futile answers to a question already forgotten.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

“A line to Armageddon?”

“Yes, you have stepped out of line and Armageddon will elude you.” They looked out over at the window past the drab curtains and saw the meadow.

“But if Armageddon is the End, who processes these applications?”

“The Fire.”

The Officer continued, “The Fire purifies; vessel to Eternity.”

Dennis and the Reverend

“God is Dead. The flames of hell have gone out!” blared from a public announce system. Dennis walked into the church, ignoring the noise. However, his fellow parishioners reacted adversely to the chant, shouting and shaking their fists in a futile pantomime. He suspected that neither side listened to the other and proceeded quietly to his pew. After the reverend cursed his agitators to hell, he composed himself and led the congregation inside. The reverend began his sermon and Dennis settled into a peaceful slumber. Rather than ignore his napping parishioner, the already agitated good reverend lashed out.

“How dare you! How dare you sleep through God’s word?!?” Dennis was shaken from his slumber by sanctimonious bellowing, looked at the reverend, and shifted back into a more comfortable sleeping position. The reverend was now inconsolably outraged and rocketed out of his pulpit to confront the sleeping parishioner. Dennis slept through more admonishments until the reverend led him forcefully to the front of the congregation; it was his intention to give him a dressing down.

“Dennis, God loves you as he does all his children. But why? Why do you persist in disrespecting the House of God on the Sabbath?” Dennis was unhappy that the reverend thoughtlessly wrecked his day of rest.

“Reverend, you say this is the Sabbath. What did God do on the Sabbath? Yes reverend, God rested on the seventh day. I sleep to honour...”

“God is Dead. The flames of hell have gone out!” The pronouncement drowned out Dennis' last words. As the reverend once again shouted futilely at the agitator. Dennis yawned at the whole affair, only to face the wrath of the congregation. “Blasphemer!” they bellowed and converged on him, tearing him limb from limb.

The reverend stepped over the remains and continued his sermon.

I walked while they talked

I walked while they talked.

I hopped in and was off.
They could keep all of it.
I had no need for those things.

Where would I end up?

I had no clue. I just wanted to go.

I saw the stop sign. I went through.
Not in rebellion,
or indifference;
I didn’t want to stop so soon.

I rolled and rolled and rolled,
grey blurred into green.

Soon it stalled.
I dumped it and walked.

I was nowhere, but it seemed like somewhere.

I took in a breath. A long whiff; inhale exhale.
I hadn’t breathed in sometime. It was fresh and almost free.

The light grew fainter…

dimmed…

faded…

and…

was gone.

I walked and wandered, followed the sky.
The Dipper, the Cowboy, the North Star,
soon gave way to morning.

I took a breath of the morning air and hacked.

It claimed to be somewhere, but was nowhere.

The monsters were there,
grunting like the ones I had abandoned.
Waste all around.
Joy nowhere to be found.

I am nowhere, yearning to be somewhere;
dying with every breath.
Withering beauty,
my beloved is lost.

We learn too well to think

Depression, alienation, and isolation; these meld to form the norm. I despise. I loathe. I hate. And I disdain. I am quick to judgment, incapable of thought or attentiveness. I am modern man – the most bungled of perfect creatures. Crudely sophisticated distractions numb the pain, repress my destructive fury, and allow me to put on that glorious smile dripping saccharine; the image makes it all okay. We learn too well, are too easy to train, and malleable for all sorts of tasks. We learn well and forget to think.

Man loathes his mortality and envious of the eternal cosmos. He desires a grand reduction, to bring eternity into individual mortality. Those who pursue greatness unto death brings the world into the self and refuses humanity. He wants to walk among gods by annihilating the imperfection known as man. The universe is no larger than his enclosure. He grins as he stares through the screen door, watching the bugs slam into each other and plummet to earth. All is well. All is mine, as lord of minutia. But, the bars of the cage are still there in spite of particular delusions of grandeur. The universe brought into the self is no larger than two bugs colliding into each other. The world will go on without him, as it will go on without the bugs. As individual, man is no god, simply a deluded bug. In togetherness, he stands in fellowship with life and the universe.

Rainmaker man

As he stood on the edge of the bridge, the voice on the megaphone read cue cards and the voice in his head told him to do it. He contemplated the fate that laid below, above, and in between; all the while with voices talking at him. It was a rather calm scene for him, in spite of the surrounding commotion. Vertigo. Blissful vertigo. The megaphone echoed incomphrensibly; the voice told him to jump.

Paying no attention to the voices, he gazed below at the afternoon sun glistening off the distant water. He found it unbearable and tilted his head upwards towards the cloudless sky. Sunshine had always depressed him and it was no different on this particular day. He wanted it to rain, in the worst of ways. But he didn't control the heavens, regardless of what the voice told him.

Jump and you'll make rain! the voice said, now changing its tact. Rainmaker man, that's what you are - plunge in and make it fucking rain! He looked despondently at the helicopters. Why do they have helicopters for this, he thought. Somewhere there must be murder, rape, robbery, and of all sorts of stuff going down. Why were they so concerned about him standing on the edge of a bridge?

They can't let you die, the voice returned. Why? Jump. Jump and you'll make a mockery of them. Jump, take the plunge and erase everything they have over you. Their power, their repression, their authority vanishes like that. Free! Released! You'll be free, don't you see? Free! Why don't you just do it, you rebel! Make your mark!

Vertigo. Blissful vertigo; baring weakness for all to see. Help me! Jump! Please get off the bridge! Help me! Jump! Plunge! Over the edge, you go. Vertiginous sounds, each emptier than the next. Hollow noise, constant clamour. Jump! Don't do it, there are other ways, poison; noose; bathtub gore; sliced piece by piece; bullets; immolation; electric, fried body; and JUMP! Spin. Spin. Take the Leap. Vertigo. Blissful vertigo stretching to the depths.

He looked towards the bridge; the negotiator was approaching, a heavy-set guy with a bald dome and a couple whiskers sprouting above his upper lip. A contemptibly cardboard cop, he thought. Instant deja vu.

"Now, son, you've got the rest of your life ahead of you. Whatever is troubling you now, we can work through it together. We promise you..." the negotiator paused momentarily, as if trying to muster a little more. But it was too late. The boy was on his way.

He ended up in the water. Spining the whole way down. The bliss of vertigo was there to the bitter end. On the way down, he saw the officer's face; the face of a vanished father, tears raining down for a forgotten son.

"...I promise you."

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What will you most regret? Never having teenage love between the sheets.

Really? Yeah, prom night happened in the back alley of a Denny's.

Oh. Okay.

What will you miss the most? The rain.

Figures.

Who will you miss the most? My dog Skip.

Alrighty.

Last question: Do you believe in God? Hell no.

Alright, we are done here. It will take about 6-8 weeks for processing. At that time you will enter our re-training program and we'll get you started on your new assignment ASAP. Just sign here and here - and please feel free to visit the sites while here.

What is there to see? It kind of looks like a void.

Well, there is where you are wrong. A void is anything you'd like. So please explore.

What if I wanted to be in a brothel?

Think it and it will be.

Um, how about a brothel full of chicks without dicks?

It is the product of your thoughts. We can do nothing to change it.

What are you insinuating?

Nothing at all. It is what you imagine it to be, only you can control it.

I wasn't thinking about trannies!

It is what it is.

Um, okay. And what is 6-8 weeks in a void anyway?

About 2-3 days earth time.

Why didn't you just say that?

Can't. Company policy.

The fucking voice lied to me.

Shall we become intimate?

Another cloud mushrooms somewhere in the distant sky.

"Is that it?"

"Let's hope so"

Another cloud rises.

"Is that it?"

"Probably not."

Several clouds erupt, growing less and less distant.

"They're closing in."

"It doesn't matter anymore. All is lost."

They sit down; eyes fixed on the horizon.

"Shall we become intimate?"

A hand reaches out to no response.

"Intimacy is of no use."

And as the clouds choke the sky above, they accept their fate.

"Ashes to ashes..."

"...dust to dust."

They nod and vanish.

Damien?

I was riding the bus the other day, listening to Modest Mouse on my IPod shuffle and reading my copy of Kafka On The Shore, when a small child, about six years old, walked up to me to say hi. I waved politely - acknowledging his presence and reassuring his mother, sitting a few rolls back, that her wandering boy was okay. But the little boy anxiously tried to tell me something, motioning for me to take out my ear plugs. I played along and took out the earphones and motioned for him to sit down in the seat beside me. I asked him how his day was going. And like any precoious young boy, he recounted his day in detail. He informed me that his mom had taken him to Gyro Beach for most of the afternoon. He went on the swing, the slide, and the monkey bars - he was quite adept at the monkey bars, a fact that he was proud to share. I smiled and commended his proficiency on the bars; confessing that I was no good at them when I was his age. Then I asked him whether he got good at the monkey bars while playing with his friends. But he responded by shaking his head.

"I have no friends," he said, erupting into a laughing fit. I smiled and pressed that surely he had shared time on the playground with other kids and they could be considered friends - even in the broadest of terms.

"No friends," he said again, as his face took on a bleaker pallor. I tried to reassure him that his superb ability on the monkey bars would surely impress in the future and win him friends.

"I won't ever have any friends," he said, but this time with a wry smile that seemed out of place on the face of a six-year old. "Damien tells me that friendship is not for me."

"Who's Damien?" I asked him, now slightly perturbed by his responses.

"Damien's in my head...he tells me things."

"Oh, I guess Damien could be an invisible friend." I said, unsure of whether I wanted to know what Damien was telling this boy.

"He tells me you are a...kind red spirit..." he paused, as if waiting to relay the last of Damien's message, "...and that you will not burn...when the time comes."

Once again, I smiled. I couldn't help but smile. And of course, I didn't know how quite to respond, apart from posing the obvious question.

"When what time comes?"

"When it is time for all to sleep," he replied with a slightly less innocuous giggle and ran off to join his mother, as the bus pulled up to their stop. I waved bye to them and put my earphones back into place. As I watched the boy and his mom walk away from the bus stop, I noticed a couple preoccupied with a gaggle of shopping bags walk past a man sleeping on a bus bench and wondered if we weren't already all asleep.

Kitsch

Kitsch, invariably, makes life bearable. Kitsch turns shit into gold. Kitsch is rapid obsolescence; a fad fades away before it launches. Without kitsch, all we would see would be shit. Without the possibility of irony, all would be serious and without play. We all end up kitsch; epiphets on would-be headstones attest to that (Kundera). The world free of kitsch would be unlivable, because we would see the shit. Everything is shit without kitsch. Kitsch is a placeholder, a necessary illusion, until we can find meaning in silence, find comfort in nothing, and discover reality apart from image.

Clam up boy

Clam up boy,
there's much to fear,
abandon hope,
cry to mommy,
cry to daddy,
soak them,
with your snivelling tears;
failure is man's everyday destiny,
without mommy-daddy.

Freshman

Once upon a time,
in an office space,
a freshman left breathless,
by mundane complexity;
life in a textbook,
stuck on repeat -
a disc projects,
images as images,
and nothing more.

Images of a fight,
a desperate flight,
from a broken home,
and the image of a lonely road -
returning,
to start again;
all images return,
stuck on repeat.

Alas,
monotony reigns supreme,
dulled sensations,
turning circles,
craving for response,
and only getting dictates;
there is no silence or rest,
for the programme in full effect.

Then there is touch,
most immediate of sensations,
reduced to mere mechanics,
enslaved by proximity;
discordant intimacy -
ah, there's the rush,
the endless meander, trifling saunter,
towards catharsis.

G-A or A-G

G: This photographic memory, what a curse! What a pain! I wish I could forget and live today.

A: But you can't live without recollection. Man cannot be without recollection.

G: How so?

A: Without recollection, there's no ground for our being here now.

G: On the shoulders of giants?

A: No, no...more like, uh, the origin we don't know.

G: Who cares about an unknown and incomprehensible origin?

A: You're here, right?

G: Yeah.

A: I'm here, right?

G: Sure.

A: We're here, right?

G: Yes, so?

A: That's all there is to origins. Besides, it beats obssessing about the end.

G: What about numerology and Nostradamus? He knew the end...

A: But could do nothing to escape his own demise. Plus, Nostradamus couldn't prophesize his erection while masturbating. You can't know the end. Nobody can.

G: What if I hung myself? Would I not be able to will the end?

A: No, you could will your own end, but not the end. The world will go on without you or without me.

G: What if I were to take a whole lot of you with me?

A: The world would still go on.

G: What if I were to wipe out everything, every living thing?

A: Man's destruction cannot be total, even if he likes to think he has that power. The world would recover and go on.

G: But in what sense would there be a world without man to confirm that it exists?

A: On the other hand, what is man without his being in the world?

G: Nothing, I guess.

Hamstrung

Hamstrung, testing, testing,
one, two, three,
thunderbolt,
doubled in succession;
why, why, why,
isn't thunder just flatulence?

Hamstrung, whimper and cry,
where, where, where,
is all the time?
Blue and green,
dribbling, dripping,
and expiring;
never to be seen.

Hamstrung, tender snore;
tardy, tardy, forevermore,
what, what, what,
will come of the day,
not yet imagined,
in an image-Way.

Hamstrung, tried and true;
heads roll and stain the streets,
red, white, and blue,
the king's head on a pike,
the emperor's in the nude,
so who, who, who,
is next in line;
for throne and gallows,
is mere difference in kind.