It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Carnival of Anarchy It's almost time for the next carnival, this one on the topic Anarchism in your area.
The carnival will be next weekend, from Friday 23rd through til Sunday 25th, so get cracking on your posts, and when the time comes throw them up here (and on your own blogs, if you wish).
A few questions to consider while posting:
How common are anarchist ideas in your area?
Are there many people who actively identify as some sort of anarchist?
Is there one stream of anarchism that is dominant (eg anarcho-syndicalism, ultra-leftism, anarcho-primitivism, insurrectionary anarchism etc)? If so, why?
What anarchist groups/organisations/institutions exist in your town, if any? Are they old or relatively new?
What is the makeup of anarchists in your area as compared to the general population (ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc)
Does your area have a history of lots of anarchist activity? If so, how does that affect modern anarchist activity and how it is percieved?
What do anarchists do in your area?
Feel free to be as broad or narrow a s you want - discuss your street, suburb, city or country, whatever takes your fancy.
If you want to post on this carnival but aren't currently a member, post your email in the comments and hopefully someone will add you.
In the meantime, use the comments on this thread to suggest and hopefully decide on a topic for the next carnival. For previously suggested topics, check out here and here.
Our next carnival will be held the weekend of May 25-27 the theme with be Anarchy and Spirit, that includes religion, spirituality, (such as liberation theology, anti-religion, paganism, gnosticism etc.) as well as art and music.
For example I would refer you to Scriabin as an example of the breadth of this topic...
Scriabin, previously interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's übermensch theory, also became interested in theosophy, and both would influence his music and musical thought. In 1909-10 he lived in Brussels, becoming interested in Delville's Theosophist movement and continuing his reading of Hélène Blavatsky (Samson 1977). Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician," (Rudhyar 1926b, 899) and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group." (Ibid., 900-901).
On the weekend stretching from April 27-29, the Carnival of Anarchy blog will touch upon the important question of anarchism and violence. It has been a topic of contention among political radicals for ages and I hope there will be a diversity of opinion displayed. The contributors to the carnival are asked to provide posts on anything related to this vital topic they can think of. Some ideas I'd throw out to help those folks out who aren't so sure what to contribute include discussions of whether violence is ethical, wise, desirable, necessary, and so on.
While the Mainstream Media, and the right, have been focusing on Rachel Carson, whose 100th birthday is this year, and her work Silent Spring as the foundation of the modern North American ecological/environmental movement it is important for anarchists to point out that Murray Bookchin was also a founder of the modern ecology/environmental movement.
Beginning today, though as per usual with our little anarchist cooperative someone posted early and someone will likely post late, the Carnival of Anarchy will be hosting a weekend of blogging on the topic of Anarchism and Ecology. Green Anarchy, environmental anarchy, social ecology,etc.
Aftera brief discussion in the comments section of the last posting here is the announcement. Our next Carnival will take place on this site around the weekend of March 23-25th, Friday night to Sunday. The subject for this roundtable will be science and the spirit of anarchism. This includes anything related to the bright light of inquiry, ie. software, electronics, climatology, biology, medicine, or what have you ... viewed from a more or less libertarian standpoint. As usual it would be helpful if members would spread the word about this event on their own blogs and websites. See you then.
A carnival for Anarchists, anarchism, anarcha-feminists, anti-authoritairans, anarchists of colour,libertarians, left libertarians, mutualists, libertarian-socialists, libertarian-communists, individualists, anti-statists, agorists,non-statist socialists, cooperative socialists, Free Market Anti-Capitalists, and Bugs Bunny. And what the heck is a Blog Carnival well....
A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.
Lets see last month we had the the satanic panic about the birth of the anti-christ on 06/06/06 .
He apparently made an appearance at the end of the month at the fashion walkways in Milan. No not the anti-christ but the Great God Pan. Who did not die contrary to the wish of his Christian detractors
The Gods of old are silent on their shore,
Since the great Pan expired, and through the roar
Of the Ionian waters broke a dread
Voice which proclaimed "the Mighty Pan is dead."
How much died with him ! false or true --- the dream
Art reflects and resolves the eternal human dilemma of order versus energy. In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysys in the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal. Every excess breeds its counterreaction. So western culture swings from point to point on its complex cycle, pouring forth its lavish tributes of art, word and deed. We have littered the world with grandiose achievements. Our story is vast, lurid, and unending. (Sexual Personae, pp. 96-7) Apollo, Dionysus and Camille
In ancient times they used to say that those who had lifted the veil of physical phenomena had seen the great god Pan. The upheavals of our time that have revealed a solution of continuity in the evolution of mankind have given rise to a panic literature. Dada is without doubt a pessimistic movement. But its pessimism is based on the danger of human ambitions. It is in de la Rochefoucald and Schopenhauer that we must search for the preliminaries to an international agreement. Dada is the only possible link between men since its fundamental principle consists in being right about nothing. Not to know Dada is not to know our time. In a century when Lenin falls after Wilson, Dada has nothing that can surprise us. Dadas are deliberately out of their depth. But if they are fools they are not stupid. They say nothing for a laugh and take nothing seriously.Art As Anarchy
Picasso never lost his sense of art as "magical," that is, a defense against inner and outer reality, and, more crucially, a way of influencing or controlling, and even changing, them, that is, modifying the reality of one’s internal objects -- the spirits within oneself -- and of external objects, which have their own spirits. This is sheer fantasy -- hence what I call fantastic realism, for it involves both the defense of fantasy and what Freud called "omnipotence of thought," the magical thinking that is characteristic of childhood. It survives in art, as he said -- especially in modern magical/fantastic art, of which Picasso’s is an extreme example, especially his Surrealist-inspired work of the ‘30s. As Charles Brenner writes, the child assumes that "all the objects" in its "environment. . . have thoughts, feelings and wishes just as he himself does. All nature is animate until experience, and his parents, tell him otherwise."(3) When Picasso said that "I use things as my passions tell me"(4) he shows his reluctance -- inability? -- to give up childhood thinking. It seems particularly evident in the still lives that proliferate throughout his art, from Guitar on a Table (1915) through Mandolin and Guitar (1924) to Still Life with Horned God (1937), and beyond. The objects in these pictures, whether natural or man-made, not only seem to be alive, but to have an inner life, that is, to be tense with inner drama.
And the goat-gods like Pan have their origin in the working and lower classes.
Momus. This is really most gratifying. Such encouragement is 4 precisely what I should have expected of a king of your exalted spirit; I will mention the name. I refer, in fact, to Dionysus. Although the mother of this truly estimable demi-god was not only a mortal, but a barbarian, and his maternal grandfather a tradesman in Phoenicia, one Cadmus, it was thought necessary to confer immortality upon him. With his own conduct since that time, I am not concerned; I shall have nothing to say on the subject of his snood, his inebriety, or his manner of walking. You may all see him for yourselves: an effeminate, half-witted creature, reeking of strong liquor from the early hours of the day. But we are indebted to him for the presence of a whole tribe of his followers, whom he has introduced into our midst under the title of Gods. Such are Pan, Silenus, and the Satyrs; coarse persons, of frisky tendencies and eccentric appearance, drawn chiefly from the goat-herd class. The first-mentioned of these, besides being horned, has the hind-quarters of a goat, and his enormous beard is not unlike that of the same animal. Silenus is an old man with a bald head and a snub nose, who is generally to be seen riding on a donkey; he is of Lydian extraction. The Satyrs are Phrygians; they too are bald, and have pointed ears, and sprouting horns, like those of young kids. When I add that every one of these persons is provided with a tail, you will realize the extent of our obligation.Works of Lucian, Vol. IV: The Gods in Council
Pan(Greek, Roman): Io Pan, the shout in the hills, Io Pan, the hooves on the rocks, Io Pan the song in the wild: Io Pan, Io Pan. Io Pan, the scattering of the flocks, Io Pan, the singing of the pipes, Io Pan, the roaring in the fields: Io Pan, Io Pan. Io Pan, the goat, Io Pan, the man, Io Pan, the god: Io Pan, Io Pan.
Pan, grant that I may never prove So great a Slave to fall in love, And to an Unknown Deity Resign my happy Liberty: I love to see the Amorous Swains ...Unto my Scorn their Hearts resign; With Pride I see the Meads and Plains ...Throng'd all with Slaves, and they all mine: Whilst I the whining Fools despise, That pay their Homage to my Eyes.
Hymn to Pan
SING his praises that doth keep Our flocks from harm. Pan, the father of our sheep; And arm in arm Tread we softly in a round, Whilst the hollow neighbouring ground Fills the music with her sound.
Pan, O great god Pan, to thee Thus do we sing! Thou who keep'st us chaste and free As the young spring: Ever be thy honour spoke From that place the morn is broke To that place day doth unyoke!
From the forests and highlands We come, we come; From the river-girt islands, Where loud waves are dumb, Listening to my sweet pipings. The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes, The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was, Listening to my sweet pipings.
Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing The light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings. The Sileni and Sylvans and Fauns, And the Nymphs of the woods and waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings.
I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the dædal earth, And of heaven, and the giant wars, And love, and death, and birth. And then I changed my pipings— Singing how down the vale of Mænalus I pursued a maiden, and clasp’d a reed: Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed. All wept—as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood— At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead; His pipe hangs mute beside the river Around it wistful sunbeams quiver, But Music's airy voice is fled. Spring mourns as for untimely frost; The bluebird chants a requiem; The willow-blossom waits for him; The Genius of the wood is lost."
Then from the flute, untouched by hands, There came a low, harmonious breath: "For such as he there is no death; His life the eternal life commands; Above man's aims his nature rose. The wisdom of a just content Made one small spot a continent And tuned to poetry life's prose.
"Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild, Swallow and aster, lake and pine, To him grew human or divine, Fit mates for this large-hearted child. Such homage Nature ne'er forgets, And yearly on the coverlid 'Neath which her darling lieth hid Will write his name in violets.
"To him no vain regrets belong Whose soul, that finer instrument, Gave to the world no poor lament, But wood-notes ever sweet and strong. O lonely friend! he still will be A potent presence, though unseen, Steadfast, sagacious, and serene; Seek not for him -- he is with thee."
(Henry's flute is on display in the Concord Museum. It's made of fruitwood, a warm reddish-brown wood. It has metal stops on it, and Henry's and his father's names carved into it - Amy Belding Brown)
Pan came out of the woods one day,-- His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray, The gray of the moss of walls were they,-- And stood in the sun and looked his fill At wooded valley and wooded hill.
He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand, On a height of naked pasture land; In all the country he did command He saw no smoke and he saw no roof. That was well! and he stamped a hoof.
His heart knew peace, for none came here To this lean feeding save once a year Someone to salt the half-wild steer, Or homespun children with clicking pails Who see so little they tell no tales.
He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach A new-world song, far out of reach, For sylvan sign that the blue jay's screech And the whimper of hawks beside the sun Were music enough for him, for one.
Times were changed from what they were: Such pipes kept less of power to stir The fruited bough of the juniper And the fragile bluets clustered there Than the merest aimless breath of air.
They were pipes of pagan mirth, And the world had found new terms of worth. He laid him down on the sun-burned earth And raveled a flower and looked away-- Play? Play?--What should he play?
490 BCETo punish mainland Greeks for their support of the rebellion in Asia Minor, Darius the Great of Persia sends a fleet across the Aegean Sea and lands soldiers near Marathon, twenty-six miles north of Athens. A runner covers the distance to announce the arrival of the Persians. A coalition of city-states defeats the Persians at Marathon, and the Persians withdraw. In Athens, the god Pan is said to have given the Greeks their victory, to win back from the Athenians their devotion, which he had seen as diminishing.
Soon it was said that the god Pan had given the Athenians their victory by his causing panic among the Persians. It was said that Pan had done so after having seen a slack in devotion to him among the Athenians, Pan wanting to regain their devotion - a tactic different from Yahweh's reaction to the lack of devotion he had found among his Hebrews, and one that apparently worked better.
The Original of Religions by Sir Isaac Newton Mars is sometimes called Mars Silvanus & thence Silvanus or Silenus is the same God with Mars or Bacchus for both were drunkards, & Pausanias tells us the oldest Satyrs were called Sileni, & Diodorus that Silenus was the first king of Nysa where Bacchus was born & that they were contemporary. Whence it follows that they were originally the same person though afterwards the two names became split into two persons, & the one made the Tutor & companion of the other. Another name of this God was Pan or (as the Latines called him) Faunus. For Pan was a sheepherd & painted like a Satyr & by consequence he was an Arabian. The pNote: p Phurnutus de nat. Deor. in Baccho')" Goat was sacred to Bacchus & satyrs were his perpetual companions & the ancients used to paint the Gods in the form of such animals as were sacred to them. Dionysus saith pPhurnutus, was delighted with the sacrifice of Goates δια το ’εαυτον ’ειναι τον τραγονbecause he himselfe was a Goat. He was hNote: h Herod. l. 2') one of the 8 first Egyptian Gods, lived iNote: i Diodor. l. 1. p. 16.a.')" with them in Ægypt in the days of Osyris & in their war with the Giants was among them & was then so terrible to their enemies that he is ever since accounted the author of terror & Panicus terror is still a Proverb: dNote: d Apud Anonymum de incredibilibus Fab. 11.')" Polienus commemorates that Pan first found out military order & constituted the right wing & the left (whence his effigies was formed with horns, & that he was the first that by wisdome & art cast terror. He was kNote: k Epiimenides Aristippus & alij apud Natalem Comitem l. 5. c. 6.') the son of Iupiter & lNote: l Theocritus in Phurnutus de nat. Deor. in Paus Thyrside') addicted to hunting, & carried in his hand a siccle which he used in pruning vines. All which characters can agree to none but Chus the God of wine & war. He was worshipped in Egypt by none but the Mendesij, a people of the lower Egypt where the Arabian Sheepherds sometimes reigned.
Commentary on Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients & Lord Bacon's Interpretation of Myths by Manly P. Hall
Wisdom of its own nature being the principle incorruptible, the relationship of knowledge and learning to wisdom becomes important. Knowledge and learning are expressions of the ascent of human intelligence rising along the steps of what Bacon called his "Pyramid of Pan." Knowledge is like the rungs of a ladder upon which men climb. It is also a road with many paths as in the table of Thebes in which persons of every walk of life, every degree of intelligence, every type of conviction are groping along;always in search of that which is better. They are constantly striving toward wisdom. Their strivings are forever changing.
Bacon, being somewhat of a scientist, liked to point out that the strivings of science are forever changing. One day w have one belief, the next day another. One scientist supports another, a third contradicts them both. Yet each one ina way is dedicated to truth, but to each truth is only what he is capable of experiencing. Therefore, Bacon points out that the greatest handicap to the advancement of learning is the human mind. Here he comes very close to the concepts of Buddha. He points out that as long as the individual is in captivity to the tryranny of mind, mind will hold him to the conditions with which it is familiar. The biologist will continue to grope along the lines of biology, the physicist along the lines of physics, the astronomer will continue to build larger lenses with which to view the heavens; but all these are not going to end directly in wisdom.
Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts (painting, literature, architecture, gardening), and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele’s Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume presents a new edition of the text together with an introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading.
It was an age of reason based on faith, not an age of faith based on reason. The enlightenment spiritualized the principle of religious authority, humanized theological systems, and emancipated individuals from physical coercion. It was the Enlightenment, not the Reformation or the Renaissance that dislodged the ecclesiastical establishment from central control of cultural and intellectual life. by emancipating science from the trammels of theological tradition the Enlightenment rendered possible the autonomous evolution of modern culture. Diderot said, if you forbid me to speak on religion and government, I have nothing to say. Hence natural science occupied the front of the stage.
Most of the philosophes wrote on natural science. To Diderot, d'Holbach and the encyclopedists all religious dogma was absurd and obscure. LeMettrie and d'Holbach were consistent determinists. Voltaire disagreed with them and said they had a dogmatism of their own. Diderot too insisted on the free play of reason. But he was an unashamed pagan and believed in a kind of pantheism or pan-psychism, not pure atheism or materialism. He was humanistic, secular, modern and scientific. He expected from his method a regeneration of mankind.
English deism, however, was more pervasive in the Enlightenment. It emphasized an impersonal deity, natural religion and the common morality of all human beings. Deism was a logical outgrowth of scientific inquiry, rational faith in humanity, and the study of comparative religion. All religions could be reduced to worship God and a commonsense moral code. There was a universal natural religion.
Yet, it was David Hume, the Englishman, who cut the ground from under his deist friends (Natural History of Religion). Natural religion rested on the basic assumption that man is guided by the dictates of reason. Mind is the scene of the uniform play of motive. The motives of man are quantitatively and qualitatively the same at all times and in all places. An empirical study of the nature of man, said Hume, reveals not an identical set of motives but a confusion of impulses, not an orderly cosmos but chaos. The elemental passion, hopes and fears is the root of religious experience. Religions may be socially convenient but being rooted in sentiment they lack the validity of scientific generalization. A rational religion is a contradiction in terms. Hume here comes close to demolishing the entire rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment--its natural rights, its self-evident truths and its universal and immutable laws of morality.
Voltaire is in the middle between the materialism of the Encyclopedists and the skepticism of Hume. His ruthless and comic deflation of theological sophism prevented him from recognizing the deepest drives of Catholicism. He conveyed the power of intellect to his generation, but also saw the limitations of reason. Reason was, after all, a poor instrument, but it was the only weapon that raised man above the animals. He believed in the argument from design or "first cause." But this no longer sufficed Diderot and Hume. Voltaire accepted the classical ideal of the brotherhood of man and the universal morality of man. He was essentially a humanist--the greatest humanist of the Enlightenment. He had not the depth of David Hume or Immanuel Kant, but they could not have done his work. Voltaire had only one absolute value: the human race.
The central theme of the Enlightenment is the effort to humanize religion. All philosophes rejected original sin. Here Pascal became a problem for them. For Pascal used their method of analytic logic to prove the existence of original sin and the utter inability of the unaided human reason o solve the problem without accepting the authority of faith. How do you explain the "double nature" of mankind? It becomes intelligible only through the doctrine of the fall of man. Pascal haunted Voltaire all his life. The cruel laughter of the Candide could not suppress the problem of evil. In the upshot he accepted Pascal's analysis of human nature. By becoming an agnostic he became prisoner of Pascal's argument--reason without faith ends in skepticism.
Rousseau had a more original solution to Pascal's problem. In his two discourses he painted a picture of depravity of society that would have delighted Pascal. If he accepted degeneration how was he to explain radical evil? He discovered a new agent of degeneration--the "fall of man"--not god or individual man but society. Thus salvation comes through the social contract. Man must save himself. In social justice is the meaning of life. It was neither a theological or metaphysical solution but a modern solution.
GK CHESTERTON: THE EVERLASTING MAN The idea was concealed, was avoided was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved. There are not a few indications of this change in other places. It is implied for instance in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination of several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount Olympus, when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he lived in his own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god of the wood when he had been a god of the world. The very name of Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words 'Our Father which art in heaven.' As with the Great Father symbolized by the sky, so with the Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and Cybele often seem to be almost incapable of taking over the whole business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one of these, worshipped as the author of all.
H.P. LOVECRAFT FIRST published “Supernatural Horror in Literature” in 1927, when the 37-year-old writer had recently returned to his birthplace in Providence, RI and was entering the most prolific period of his luckless, beleaguered career, a six year span in which he would write “The Call of Cthulu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and the novellas The Shadow over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness. For someone who died young, at 47, Lovecraft arguably managed to invent an entire literary genre—weird fiction. He left it with an oeuvre of fabulously original and mythopoeic texts, without which the fledgling young cousin to Gothic fiction and secular, nihilistic descendant of supernatural folklore would never have survived its infancy. In the essay, revised several times in his final years, Lovecraft sets forth a lucid and direct doctrine of his driving force and ethos, his fiction’s raison d’être. There is, of course, the opening sentence, quoted and referenced ad nauseam as if it were a tidy summation of not just Lovecraft’s fiction but of the entire history and canon of fear-inducing literature: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” But lost in the pithiness and easy eloquence of that opener is the cogent anthropological polemic that follows, a genealogy of fear, superstition, and metaphysical curiosity.
To appreciate the cosmic mystery that Lovecraft so obsessively tried to convey and conjure to hideous life in his stories, we are invited to consider human knowledge as a flat plane in the middle of black depths of outer space. The plane is thin, fragile, and ever-tilting, like a huge pane of glass. Everything within that plane has been explained and understood: terrestrial biology, classical physics, physiology, large swaths of human history. But as soon as you step near the edges, you face the abysmal immensity of all that is unknown: numberless galaxies, planets, and stars that have existed for billions of years; white dwarfs-cum-black holes dense enough to bend time; an infinite kaleidoscopic expanse, potentially just one of many infinite expanses in a hydra-headed multiverse that perpetually begs the question of its own sentience.
A great deal of Lovecraft’s legacy rests on the Cthulu Mythos, a sprawling mythology centered around the short story “The Call of Cthulu” but also enfolding numerous other works by both Lovecraft and other authors who expanded upon his universe and cosmogony. The story, framed as a manuscript discovered among the effects of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, concerns Thurston’s investigation into the far-flung cults, afflicted dreamers, and synchronous states of psychosis that all seem catalyzed by the telepathic powers of the bat-winged, tentacle-faced anthropoid Cthulu. As Thurston digs deeper, both through the notes of his late great-uncle (thereby creating a frame-epistolary narrative) and his own inquiry into the mysterious circumstances of a derelict ship in the Pacific, he surmises an underground network of hostile, primitive cults around the world that pray to the “great priest Cthulu,” who they believe sleeps in a mausoleum-city under the sea and will someday rise again to enslave the earth.
But in the short story’s assiduous following, the specifics of plot and character have been stripped away over time in favor of the mythological framework Lovecraft built underneath them. Indeed, “The Call of Cthulu” is one of the major archetypes for weird fiction and horror stories that unfurl their own visions of alien histories and clandestine realities oozing into mankind’s painted veil. What would eventually become the major genre paraphernalia of cosmic horror are all present in “Cthulu”: bizarre, atavistic cults, with members crude and grotesque in appearance, suggesting indifference or outright contempt for anthropocentric concerns; sinister prehistories involving god-like species that existed before mankind, and are often all-powerful and eternal; and most importantly, a protagonist or central character who is traumatized, driven insane, or otherwise blown open by his brush with the cold impiety of outer realms not meant for human purview.
Lovecraft would expand on this aesthetic with At the Mountains of Madness, his 1931 novella recounting an expedition into the furthest reaches of the Antarctic and the discovery of a colossal ancient city of skyscraping towers, monolithic architecture, and intricate labyrinths, all carved out of the glacial wastes with the easy majesty of a Roman metropolis. At the Mountains of Madness differs from some of Lovecraft’s earlier works in its continuity and steady narrative gaze. In “Cthulu,” Lovecraft relied on fragmentation, fixating first on the hypnotic creations of a young sculptor, then a Louisiana bayou pagan cult, and finally a derelict ship drifting in the Pacific Ocean. The story’s geographical sprawl underscores the exotic otherness of this elusive idol Cthulu, a sinister omniscient entity who pulls in its worshippers not by religious doctrine, proselytization, or even physical force, but through the invasive insistence of its veracity, communicated through dreams and hysterias. Thurston is sucked in by a horrifying global synchronicity that remaps the world in accordance with this insidious supernatural force. In Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft chose the perfect location to plumb the depths of the unknown without ever risking encroachment by the familiar. By conceiving a primeval, baroque metropolis rising out of the forbidding ice-mountains of Antarctica, obliterating man’s grasp on earth’s history and his own anthropocentric sense of it, Lovecraft did not need to deal with the deformed, depraved cult members that had heretofore been his middle men between human society and the horrors that lurched and swelled in the surrounding void.
Through his fiction and famously flinty atheism, it’s clear that Lovecraft is a writer primarily focused on the horror inherent in philosophical materialism: matter is the only form of existence, and human beings’ minds shrivel in craven idiocy to grasp the sheer scale of that matter as it appears through space and time. Allegorically, Antarctica could easily be a stand-in for a planet in another galaxy, with a history and organic kingdom stretching backs tens of millions of years. The important point is that it shatters what Lovecraft called the “humanocentric pose” to tiny pieces, with protagonists never again able to reenter a society propelled by the underlying assumption of its own importance.
But well before Lovecraft, there was The King in Yellow. The 1895 short story collection by Robert W. Chambers was recently dredged up from literary obscurity by Niz Pizzolatto for his HBO series True Detective. Unlike much Lovecraftian fiction, The King in Yellow is completely terrestrial, a series of ten stories vaguely connected by the play of the book’s title, a work of such beguiling power and artistic perfection that it drives insane whoever reads it. “The Repairer of Reputations,” the first and by far the best of the stories, begins with a concise summary of the U.S. 25 years in the future (1920): an immaculate, hermetically sealed state, ethnically cleansed by segregationist laws and strict isolationism, with edges sandpapered into smooth docility. The pristine veneer of a society flourishing with complete impunity brings to mind the fin-de-siècle movement that was gaining steam in the 1890’s; Chambers seems to hint at the inevitable decadence and spiritual rot unimpeded civilization brings. That very decadence is embodied in the play, which “could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.” The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, is slowly going mad as the play’s rapturous poetry percolates inside him, and harbors bizarre delusions of grandeur, fancying himself prince of an alternate American empire descended from the exquisite lost cities described in the play. The story ends with an Editor’s Note explaining that the narrator recently died in an insane asylum.
The horror that creeps out of Chambers’ King in Yellow is inverse to yet also philosophically aligned with Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic fear. Chambers is portraying the madness and psychotic narcissism that comes from a society too indulgent, too aesthetically opulent, and fueling delusions of its own grandiose history. But both authors evoke the mesmerizing, irresistible terror that is the natural response to the undermining of human history. Real or imagined by their respective narrators, the vast, sprawling, rococo cities, sublime in their existence outside of linear time, destroys those characters’ sanity and sense of historical proportions. The “purest poison” of The King in Yellow play is not unlike Lovecraft’s arctic city of stone: the briefest glimpse of the beautiful logic of another world serving as a drawbridge to madness. Whether or not these worlds actually exist in their authors’ fictional universe is not the most important factor; what matters is the horrific impression they leave on a character’s ontological assumptions and consciousness. In this way, the spectrum of sanity and insanity is circular: veer too far in either direction, and you’ve undermined the boundaries you were not supposed to know existed, thereby losing your blissful ignorance and suspension of disbelief forever.
What’s most intriguing about The King in Yellow is how it seems to be a sort of arcane passageway between weird fiction and postmodern literature. “The Repairer of Reputations” is told from the perspective of an unreliable, neurotic narrator teetering on schizophrenia who is infatuated with an underground history of America. Works like Jorges Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius,” and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 similarly feature fanatical, faux-detective narrators obsessed with shrouded histories that either completely reconfigure the known world or open doors to fantastical alternate spaces. The similarities between The King in Yellow and The Crying of Lot 49, in particular, are striking and indisputable: both feature a mysterious play of shady authorship with bizarre, spellbinding contents; symbols — the Yellow Sign and muted post horn — representing cults and secret societies; and deranged psychotics who seem to hold the only keys to whatever secret kingdom the protagonists desperately seek.
But is there any deeper connection to these works beyond their fetishization of esoterica? Well, I would argue that The King in Yellow, that inconsistent mishmash of stories that in some cases read like weird tarot incantations or sorcerer’s babble, introduces us to the flip side of cosmic horror. Instead of recoiling in abject fear at the materializing possibility of “hidden and fathomless worlds” completely autonomous from the mundane one we take for granted, characters in these works obsessively pursue the breadcrumbs to these phantom frontiers as if they were the truest form of salvation. Instead of wishing them away, as so many Lovecraftian narrators do so that they may regain their sanity, these characters actually participate in the perpetuation of these chimeras. Francis Thurston’s hell is Hildred Castaigne’s heaven. And so cosmic horror is also cosmic ecstasy.
The forking paths introduced by The King in Yellow become paradoxical reflections of each other: on one hand, you have Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, which declares the insignificance of humanity and its diminutive powers of comprehension; and on the other, a lineage of fiction (seemingly spurred by the fin de siècle sentiment) so jaded by the smug success of civilization that it invented new realities for its self-absorbed protagonists to pursue simply to cure or alleviate the pervasive ennui they suffered from. What makes this literary bloodline such a sacrilege to Lovecraft, though, is how these alternate worlds—the lost city of Carcosa, the underground mail service W.A.S.T.E., the imagined world Tlön—do not negate or diminish mankind’s intellectual faculties or position in a cosmic scheme, but reinforce them. In fact, they reinforce them to such a point as to suggest that the ceaseless, unchecked power of human consciousness inevitably leads to solipsism, the most extreme permutation of the anthropocentric pose.
So does the discovery of these exotic underpasses of human and alien history induce terror or rapture? The best way to answer that question is to conclude with one of the finest contemporary cosmic horror writers, Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti’s work, which includes anthologies and short story collections like Teatro Grottesco, The Nighmare Factory, and Grimscribe, has been described as philosophical, Kafkaesque, and nihilistic. And certainly one of his most famous stories, “A Case for Retributive Action,” which centers on a man who starts working for an insidious corporation in a ghastly border town, has the uncanny dream logic, dread, and allegorical overtones reminiscent of Kafka. But other works, like “The Last Feast of Harlequin” (which Ligotti dedicated to Lovecraft), and “In the Shadow of Another World” suggest not malevolent bureaucracies exerting totalitarian control but the narrator’s themselves as complicit agents in their exploration of surreal worlds.
In “In the Shadow of Another World,” the narrator visits a house imbued with phantasmagoric powers. When the caretaker, a sort of ringmaster to the house’s lurid theatrics, opens the shutters, the windows reveal grotesque dreamscapes brimming with alien fauna, misshapen beasts, and human appendages. The house is a portal to the bubbling anarchy of shadows and nightmares, but unlike a Lovecraft story, there is no logical explanation or historical context for it. It is the stuff of dreams and imagination, alluring to the narrator because of its grisly disorder. Ligotti’s world is one of sensation and impression, like going to a carnival tripping on mushrooms.
One thing so many of his stories have in common is the implied consent, the tacit willingness the protagonists have to enter these back alleys and decrepit schoolhouses and backwoods Mardi Gras ceremonies that are each gateways to the outer limits of human experience. They are junkies for the sensations that a hidden reality induces. And that seems to appropriately sum up just how far weird fiction and cosmic horror have strayed from the days of Lovecraft’s stuffy, Victorian professors and scholars gasping in never-ending horror as the boundaries of their world melt away. Ligotti’s narrators — part-time students, drifters, and curious nobodies — want to escape the banality and neuroses of the square world and become ravished by the annihilation of material existence. They don’t fear the subversion of human knowledge and existence; they long for it. And that implied consent extends to the reader, who wants her imagination to be spirited away from the manacles of what is known to a more grandiose vision that consummates dreams, intuitions, and memories.
The truth is that complicity has been there all along. Even Lovecraft’s heroes are drawn to dangerous territories and rabbit-hole texts because they know, deep down, that what scholar Douglas Cowen calls the “sacred order” of everything we assume to be true is a farce, a myth masquerading as fact. Despite the inevitable outcome that Lovecraft illustrated time and again — when we go digging around we’re likely to have our anthropocentric fables crumbled to dust — these characters always do it, and we as readers always want them to do it. For them and us, the cosmic ecstasy was always hidden in the horror. The imagination, weaned on a materialistic civilization and thoroughly disillusioned with it, yearns for that sublime unknown.
This is the labour day long weekend in North America and for that reason the August Carnival of Anarchy will begin and carry on through the week. The theme is:
The legendary founder of Bread and Puppet Theater is 90 years old and rising. In December I went to interview Peter Schumann in his home in Glover Vermont, together with his carpenter and comrade Henry Harris. We asked him about the wars of our times, about education, about ideology, and about the past and future of Bread and Puppet. Then in January, we decided to go back, and ask the same questions again. We talked for hours – trying to keep up with Peter who, in conversation just as in cirque, dances gracefully on visionary stilts through centuries and subjects. I made a transcript of all this, which billowed out like one of his painted bedsheets, with voluminous vistas of joy and woe… but it was easy to get lost in all the wrinkles and ruffles. So, I chopped it up, and slowly pieced it together again. This is an edited composite of both interviews, cut and pasted and kneaded and baked… hopefully the result will be, at least a little bit, like the world-famous bread and puppets. Heinrich von Kleist wrote that “where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet.” And so if what follows is more like a puppet of Peter than the man himself, so much the better. Without further ado, the papier-mâché revolutionary.
What’s happening in Gaza and what does it mean for this whole civilization?
That’s it – it’s finished, this civilization. It’s a pretend civilization that prides itself on a humanity that it doesn’t have. It has the opposite: it has inhumanity – thoroughly. Very thorough inhumanity – and nothing left over other than in little bits and pieces in individuals and in little clubs, that’s it… I mean how can they survive? … The last circus this last summer we called The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus. And that’s pretty much what it is. This is no more humanity. This pretense of a humanity with certain moral codes and etiquette of how to behave… that’s violated day in and day out. Right at the announcement of their peace deal they killed at least 100 people – in a school, just a hundred people, you know, mostly women and children, so what, just another hundred. And there’s no protest against that, are you kidding me? The bourgeoisie doesn’t see what it does? Phew. This is the bourgeoisie… And we are dealing with the kids of the bourgeoisie, you know. They come in flocks to us, because they want to learn otherwise. And when the puppeteers travel with their shows, people come even when academia cancels them – cancels their contracts for a few thousand bucks, on the eve of the performance… and there is immediate community support for another place. On tour, during the tour, on the same day, they can find another place. People are hungry for it. People know this is all shit…
There’s a mass media… we call them the truth industry. Yeah, what’s the truth industry? Upside down truths, half truths, quarter truths, all the versions of the truth that are not applicable to the truth. Unbelievable…. I’m trying to find news… Right now the big jargon of the various people who observe it, say OK, so the Axis of Resistance is now kaput, it’s finished, because of what happened in Syria. And others contradict that and say no, take the real latest news: Hamas is fighting as heavy as ever, and the same thing is true with Hezbollah. They are very successfully actually defeating the Israeli army in all kinds of details… the Israelis make no publications of their casualties; they are enormous, and they lose a lot of people and a lot of very valuable billion dollar equipment that the Americans gave them…
[Did you see the] Palestinian journalist [Sam Husseini] in a press conference with this Blinken guy? … As he was talking, the cops came and manhandled him, and he said ‘no it hurts’ – and he’s an older man in his 70s – and they manhandled him and took him out… and the rest of these hundreds of journalists they all sat there! They didn’t jump up and fight the cops? What kind of journalism is that? Why didn’t they jump up? All of them, staying seated?! Their own colleague, simply for asking a question, gets carried out of the room brutally… unbelievable! And the rest of them take that as if it’s part of the game. Yeah it’s a good job probably. Good little New York Times or Washington Post jobs, and they can’t risk them, no… These bastards. Bunch of fascists. That’s all they are. The press in America is disgusting. Just as academia is totally disgusting. What do they do? I mean, imagine: they call it education and they call the cops to beat up their own kids. Isn’t that the end of the definition of your academia, if you call in the cops to beat people up? By definition that should be the end … that’s not academia… that’s not research of the mind or investigation of the mind… it’s unbelievable, this farce of democracy, this total farce … And all of the world looks on and sees it… they can’t help but being dependent on this empire here, economically or otherwise, but the empire is also going downhill very fast, just like Israel… people are leaving them, running away from them… you see the Hasidim in Washington Square, and they all support Palestine, they don’t agree with the state of Israel. They say ‘that’s a wrong state, that’s not in our religion at all.’ They are the courageous people. The others are all cowards, idiots, stupid, uneducated…
I mean, imagine, that these fighters for freedom of press, they are immediately made criminals, and this is called the free press… it’s the opposite of what they pretend, all the time. It’s unbelievably false, what they say. They lie from morning to night. For what? For profit, for securities, for good salaries at the New York Times or Washington Post or whatever, or the stupid NPR shit…
I mean when Hamas broke out to do these hostage takings, you know, the big thing they make about that as if it was a war, did they ever look into how many Nazis were killed in the Warsaw uprising? Did they ever research that? It’s the same thing… But the biggest part was done by Israelis anyway; it’s pretty well researched. They had already, what’s it called, the Hannibal Directive – it was already in place at that time, and they decided no, no more deals, just kill our own citizens, why not, that’s better. Just as it is with the exchange of these hostages, again and again, there were so many chances to do it and they didn’t do it… Whatever they say turns out to be just lies. Convenient for making a speech in the New York Times or some bullshit like that…
I mean they gave Netanyahu standing ovations, for the mass murder of the day – the biggest mass murder in a long time, unbelievable…. so in other words, they steal the people’s money, hard earned money, usually, and give it to the mass murderer, and then he gets cheered for that? Are they so stupid, didn’t they go to school? I mean there’s an amendment to the constitution, the Leahy amendments, which forbid them to transport things without investigation of what it’s used for and how it’s misused… and they totally disregard what they themselves swear for. When they take their seat in congress they have to first swear with a hand on the bible to the constitution. Bullshit. They are totally liars. And cowards, cowards to the bone!
… All these Americans including Obama, they’re all war mongers – by education. They were all brought up to be war mongers, and that’s the only venue they have. The weapons manufacturers are so happy that it is like that; it’s the biggest production in America, it’s way bigger than any Coca Cola or anything… You can’t be an innocent bystander, there’s no such thing. This is our fate, to be artificially made into innocent bystanders, which we are not. We are guilty bystanders. The inability, the impotence of not knowing what is available to us, the great liberties that we have… The languages that are available to you are tremendous – they are huge, they are available; some of them are not available and have to be invented, or translated from older languages, all of that, but they are. But this is our lifetime, what do you do with our lifetime? That’s what we have to do! We have to do! No other way.
But you don’t support the war in Ukraine?
(Uproarious laughter) They don’t even take a look, they don’t even remember how Biden smiled on the TV screen when he said, oh I’ll take care of that gas line that goes from Russia to Germany… And he killed it, bombed it, and he told it to the American public with a smile; he said yeah we’re going to take care of that, and that’s what they did. And then they even gave aggressive weaponry to penetrate Russia, inside Russia. Are you kidding me? Russia is huge, fantastic, even way bigger than America. Siberia is bigger than America. Russia has no comparison to America. It’s a way bigger thing, and economically probably better off than America I would think. After they told them not an inch further with NATO: that was during the time when there was still the Warsaw Pact, when the Communists had their own thing, and Gorbachev canceled it, he said, no we will stop, in return for not an inch further of NATO, we will stop the Warsaw pact… Classic American trick… trick people into believing them… It’s not real, the reporting on it…. what the old Ukraine was, how the Nazis divided it, how it survived the empire afterwards… the American empire, and the Russian empire, and how it lived through this and still was the main agricultural background for wheat, and super precious goodies… It’s unbelievable, the stupidity of the reporting of what’s happening there…. it’s pretty horrendously the opposite of what is being told to the population.
The most common reasonable assumption from this moment is that we are going to die in nuclear holocaust. This is the logical conclusion of this type of warfare, because… Americans have a concept of ‘winnable nuclear war’… this is so typical for capital, there’s no conscience in it, no heart in it, no mind in it, it’s all just calculation, and the shameless, ridiculousness of this moneymaking… how many more objects does it take to make a person happy, it doesn’t make any sense, it’s ridiculous… All colonies live that way, whether it was Spanish or French or German, all these bastards establish these little aristocracies of superiority, little clubs of people… the beneficiaries of this, the exceptional ones… who wants to be part of that club. Disgusting.
Another theme in almost all the Bread and Puppet shows is migration. Alongside world war, mass deportation is in the news again. How can we understand migration and deportation?
After all, these wars necessitate migrations. Whatever you do there in those South American countries, with drug wars and other horrible inflictions on them, necessitates migration. There’s no other way; you can’t live. And to pretend otherwise, it’s ridiculous, for this continent of America which consists almost entirely of migrants, in the first second or third generation… How is that understandable, that a nation of migrants is against migrants?! What a ridiculous thing to do! Doesn’t make any sense. And these borders, as if they’re all evil over there – they eat dogs or cats, naturally, that’s what they do…
I’m Silesian. We were bombed out at the end of the war, just a few minutes later when the war was finished, the big bosses signed papers, they made Silesia into Poland and Czech Republic and phew, it was gone, so 95% of Silesians were deported…
Academia is in free-fall. What’s the beginning after the end of education? How should we work with young people? Can you recommend some good books?
There are so many good guidelines. Me, I’m at an advantage because we grew up as kids learning poetry by heart. So we are full of incredibly wonderful things that are just coming by themselves. We don’t have to research it, it’s in our vocabulary, you know. And these kids never learn poetry by heart. Their schools abandoned that habit a long time ago, and they don’t have that vocabulary. They have a shallow vocabulary educated by mediocre terms that are fashionable… it’s ridiculous to me… What happens to them when they are deprived of their computers and how much time they spend with this stupid information business all over the place instead of weeding the garden and planting the potatoes?
… And they go to schools… what used to be called radical schooling, and they come running here totally disappointed… it’s all over the place, we used to have sort of the semblance of opposition… That’s how it was in postwar Germany, all these radical schools – Rilke ran a school. There were beautiful radical schools; schools where kids had to learn carpentry in addition to academia – languages and skills, plumbing and poetry – the real stuff. Great ideas. My father, he was deep into that… The best advice we can give to kids who come here is to make as little money as possible. Try to live with as little money as possible. Don’t waste for that shit, it’s only good for beer-buying otherwise. Even beer you can make yourself. Don’t bother about that shit thing with money… I’m a proletarian and I realize that…. We work with the bourgeoisie; with their kids. In the kids’ education, art is a privileged enterprise of entertainment, of surplus, it has nothing to do with life, it’s bullshit. And we are teaching them no, it’s not bullshit, it’s the real thing. It’s the address, it’s the language. And that’s what you do when you do art, you do the language. What is your language going to be, how are you going to address the masses, how do you get it out? … Instead of shopping for beautiful paints and all that, no, you pick them up from the garbage, you take old sheets and cardboards and cut them out, and make big figures of them – it’s all available in the garbage of this civilization, this civilization is so rich in that…
…Use real good books. For example Kropotkin… So amazing, the biggest anarchist sensation in European literature, and Americans don’t even know about Kropotkin.… you know, the prince who at a teenage age told his parents ‘no more prince for me, I’m just Pyotr’… and then they sent him to a military academy and he traveled thousands of miles through Siberia, and he collected information that was the opposite of what Darwin said, which capitalism uses as its philosophy of competition. And Kropotkin found… in meadows, in birds, in deer, in coyotes – it’s the total opposite of that. It was the exact example of the opposite of the competitive philosophy that used to be the inspiration for capitalist enterprises, and he points it out so clearly. It’s called Mutual Aid… It’s a huge book, fantastic, American students don’t even read it in the university, it’s ridiculous, how can they avoid it? And so he’s put down in the category of an “anarchist,” an anarchist philosopher, and he is, yeah. Another [by him] is The Conquest of Bread – a few very good readable books, excellent examples… and there’s another companion book written by a German forester, The Hidden Life of Trees … fantastic, pointing out the secret languages of a much huger life … what’s underneath the tree – every form of life from mushrooms to insects – it’s unbelievably bigger… and how communication travels in there, how diseases get fought, how trees talk to each other in families, how they communicate between the fungi and the leaves; unbelievable, so beautiful. But it’s huge…. Same with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope: people don’t even know about it… he started writing it during Nazi Germany and then continued it after he went back to Europe, an American emigre like all the others… Instead of going to Frankfurt – Adorno and Horkheimer and all the people went there – and Bloch no. Bloch and Brecht went to East Germany, to the communists. Yeah. Very big difference… you know, corrupt system, difficult communism and all that, you know. But so what, way better than capitalism. Rents are cheap, health care is cheap, school is free. You know, a totally different system. People in America don’t even know that. In China people don’t pay for school. Why, what? How come Americans don’t even get informed on that? … Or Cuba… they could learn it from anybody. And they think of that as not relevant? Are you kidding me? Relevant to people’s life? How you make your money; naturally it’s the most relevant thing – how much rent, how much food costs… Americans grow up so incredibly stupid, uninformed on the world, uninformed… people have no idea how much bigger the world is. How there is more puppetry in Siberia than the whole of the United States. There is more versatility and ancient information from old theater forms… in old communication forms of theater. Definitely in Tehran; unbelievable, the richness of Iranian society, it’s so rich, so huge, much bigger than Europe… and when Khomeini was elected he threw out the Hollywood movies and all of a sudden puppetry was a major faculty in the Tehran university… I went to India, to Kerala, to one of the communist states of south India. Same thing; what they have to offer in way of ancient cultures, it’s vastly bigger than what Europe has, and definitely America. It’s so much bigger, in quantity and variety. And people here when they talk about Iran, they say oh but women get stoned for adultery. Really? Take a look at America. Who has the biggest prison system? Who tortures people with solitary confinement? And then to point fingers…
What’s your ideology? One time after a pageant, you stood next to a door frame in the middle of the pasture, and everybody walked through it, and you said “Now you’re a socialist!” But do you have to subscribe to the little red book?
No you don’t have to. Naturally I’m a communist, why wouldn’t I be… The overriding, call it the ideology of the day – it’s not the necessary outcome of this kind of thinking. Still you understand the ultimate simplistic difference of free education and healthcare, that’s a huge difference… What’s art good for? What do you do with a bunch of youngsters who don’t know what to do with themselves? What do you do with a beautiful landscape that’s not utilized agriculturally, but you could use for walking and revolutionizing and learning how to march together? …These are the realities; these little details of it, way more than the overriding ideology title, whether communism or socialism – it’s secondary to the reality of it. The reality of it is this big thing – they call it life I think. It’s a big thing: itches and twitches and grandma dying and auntie dilapidating and kid growing up – all of them together, same time. Yeah, my god, look at family life, look at what happens around here… it’s all over us, all around us…
Possibilitarians are proletarians… they are the masses, they are the 99 percent and they are available to everybody. We call them possibilitarians, because that’s it – but the possibilities are not opened up. Possibilities are just asleep, you know, and both Bloch and Kropotkin talk about that: the asleep-ness, the Not-Yet of things. The Not-Yet is so much bigger than the thing that’s here! And that’s the real expectancy of life… the Not-Yet in the sense of our living is the most important part of what Bloch calls Hope: it’s this vague thing that doesn’t have to be as vague as all that. It can be analyzed, it can be gotten, especially if you think of the difference of the 99 percent life and the 1 percent life and the controversy and the little politically pre-arranged battle between them… What could be clearer at this moment in American history, with three billionaires sitting right next to this new president – isn’t that as clear as it can be for the rest of the world? … Other people realize it in the rest of the world; this is a declining empire, it won’t be as Trump thinks at all. It’s an empire in decline…
…The Not-Yet is in the landscape also. You walk into our pine forest which is full of memorials, and people’s ashes, all of that, even grave sites, and what’s coming out of it… for example, the fact that people do have the hunger for memorializations, that people want that in their life. They don’t realize it, it doesn’t exist in this culture. When you go to Asian cultures it’s all over the place – meaningful memorializations – and here it doesn’t exist. And when you do it and the youngsters come and they sit there and talk about their aunts and their suiciding brother and all this stuff, it’s amazing what comes out. It’s a whole life in itself, just as part of realizing that life is so much bigger than the cliches about what life is… every week we do it. Once a week we go there and people let loose and do their talks. Part of life! Joel [Kovel] is in there, with his big book…..
Bread and Puppet Theater has been called political art, medieval art and religious art. You have been compared to Brecht, Genet, O’Neill… but what gets left out of all the analysis? Break it down for us; what are puppets? What is bread? What’s happening on this land? Who are you?
You think a puppet is a thing, a factual thing, a thing that you pick up and you can learn how to manipulate it, or somewhat. It’s not. It’s an opposite to your body and it emphasizes elements in your body that you didn’t even realize were there; that can do things that the body can’t do. For example a puppet has a little neck – no dancer can ever do what that neck can do; that neck can go all the way back, can go over here, there; can pick up the rest of the body and drape it around itself… It’s a divinity, it’s something that isn’t even comprehensible to people… no learning of effectiveness and what you want to say; that would be commandeering it — no way. It’s so secretly something, a whole thing, you can’t even imagine it. Only people who work with it – they realize it, slowly… and they start kneeling down in front of them before picking them up, carefully. Yeah…
The normal American diet is not only wonder bread but noodles, which go straight through the body to the shithouse…. Chewing is severe and real. And it massages your brain. So whoever eats pumpernickel becomes a revolutionary and whoever eats noodles becomes a capitalist. It’s a real thing, the simple recognition that food is something that you have to gain. Not just by tooth and saliva mixing, but also how you gather it, how do you get it… gleaning… a lot of tedium of all these little things coming together and nourishing families… When Elka’s parents bought his farm do you know why they bought it? Elkas’ mom was a peasant woman – poor family with nine kids – they took it because of this hillside here which is the watershed. This is the best water you can get anywhere in a landscape, to be so close to a watershed… it’s incredibly good, I keep telling the kids who come here, please drink the water, you won’t get it anywhere… And if you continue the stupid noodle eating, ok you’ll stay stupid, and if you chew pumpernickel you’ll be intelligent.
…Naturally in order to get land you have to team up with other people and make communities. Even Bread and Puppet, it couldn’t have worked with just a family; it needs more people, kids, gardens… there isn’t any other way of doing it. And then you have inherited an anarchy that is in total chaos, very hard to live with, but it’s worth it, because it produces something that the system can’t produce… outside the ambitions… nothing to do with the entertainment issues, and the desire to tickle people’s beautiful muscles for desire… that’s it, and the confusion makes it very attractive… It just does itself, and it will do it in conjunction with the latest news and horrors, and also the imbecility of not being told about it; having to live with the realization that it’s not in people’s conversation…
…Well I’m a papier-mâché revolutionary. I build giant papier-mâché swords to defeat the empires. Or divinities that are way more superior than capitalism; therefore come down on them when they don’t expect it and crush them with papier-mâché! Hahaha.
There are a lot of books and movies about Bread and Puppet. And there’s a big archive next door… but give it to us straight; how did this get started and what’s it all about?
Well, when you go into, you know, the details… it’s starting in the early years when we did Vietnam in the street… And we did things that we needed hundreds of people for, in the street: bombardments of prisoners, resurrections, pulling them up, cops, all that, death masques, all that – it was totally easy to get the couple hundred people that we needed to do it… People were sick and tired of the slogans… they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to be a shark in an airplane, they wanted to be a Vietnamese woman being bombarded – it was easy to get people to realize that, the big spectacle of it. It was a carnival you know. Like throwing shit at the cardinal. And you can do that during the carnival: a limited revolution, a very time-limited revolution, which is not quite a revolution because of its limitation, just a jubilee for the sake of relief. That’s what carnival was… it was time-limited and then it went back to normal… Wonderfully liberating for populations, but not meaningful until you take a look at what happened in the 14th century, which is when peasant revolutions – Engels wrote about them – became serious. And peasants – rye bread eating peasants – crowded together, and beat the shit out of the latest state of the art weaponry: knights on their horsebacks. And the peasants came… people with hayforks – ripping the brightest beautiful knights with their fancy attack methods of killing – they ripped them off their horses and beat the shit out of them. You know, there are big records of this. It happened again and again, starting in the 14th, century, into the 15th century, and into the 16th century… peasant revolution would have been the likely thing if Luther and Zwingli and the other reformers would have coordinated their moves with the peasantry. And they didn’t. They sided with the aristocracy… Thomas Müntzer, one of the biggest successes of peasant revolution – way more successful than Luther as a speaker – he was the big thing, not Luther. And then Luther has him hanged, publicly tortured to death, by the aristocracy… the 14th and 15th century would have been the ideal time to create real political revolutions. It didn’t happen. It totally could have happened… the bourgeoisie took over, and from the beginning, they imitated the aristocracy… and that became the goal, to become as nice as the aristocracy…
It has a hell of a lot to do with history…. [For example] what happened with Matthias Grünewald. He was Germany’s major late-medieval, early-renaissance northern artist… he was on horseback in 1502 going over the Alps… and during that travel was the 1502 total solar eclipse, which was the most serious thing… this one was really like the end of the world. Everybody thought this was the apocalypse; this was it, in the middle of the day – and he experienced that riding on horseback through the Alps… and whatever he painted after that is obviously influenced by the blackness. No question about it, everything comes out of the deepest possible darkness, even the most polychrome events that he invented like nobody else, come out of a darkness that is so severe; all his things, his crucifix and nativity and all of it. And that happened at a time when one of the major diseases in the middle ages was ergot, caused by rye, a fungus in rye. Rye was the food of the peasants, it’s much easier to grow than wheat; it grows in the Alps, in the deserts, even in Mongolia it grows fine. When I bought rye I went to the highway department in New York because they keep rye – it’s the toughest of grasses – when they need to fix highway entrances they grow rye… and that’s what the peasants ate, and the effect of ergot is craziness, total craziness, and skin diseases and so on; weird, serious stuff. So there was a whole sect of healers called the St. Anthonites, who dealt with the ergot effect, mostly in the peasantry. And they hired Grünewald to paint… and then people flocked to it, like to a healing altar. And people threw their crutches – they have records of all that, unbelievable! And that was the reality of painting. He painted all the healing arts available to him, underneath crucifixes, and painted all the most graphic horror of ergot… no comparison to any other picture in the renaissance… nothing compares to Grünewald… The peasant struggles are so important. The situation will come up again. For example with migrants being deported. This will happen again. People have to realize – what we eat is food. Food has to be made by people. Saying it comes out of tin cans is not good enough. So there could be a shift of attention when people realize what a serious thing food is. It’s huge…
In 1968 you lit a fire in hearts and minds; first it burned in New York City, then it moved to Vermont… and at some point you’re going to graduate; shuffle off the mortal coil; join the extraterrestrials… and we’re going to be left here running around wondering what to do. Any advice for the future of Bread and Puppet, post-Peter Schumann?
Oh yeah, totally ready for it… Death is little, death is big, or death, don’t believe it. Haha…. You’re right, it’s a good point, because puppeteers talk all the time about my funeral, and what kind of whiskey we’ll have served, and I agree a lot of good whiskey is needed for that funeral. But it’s so apparent what has to happen. The organization of Bread and Puppet is so changing according to etiquette, according to bourgeois habits, according to the latest result of the job market, which you know is so unfair to people’s talents… people are forced into these straitjackets of being slaves, just as Marx called them, slaves to the system… of – what? What is it? It’s slavery, whatever you call it – a form of slavery that you have to pay rent and all this. It’s ridiculous! Why? Totally unnecessary, stupid! Why? The 99 percent, let’s take a little close up look at what they are. OK, Bernie [Sanders] tried to do a little bit of awareness for the working class and so on. Not enough. Needs more. Yeah, mama mia…. our bourgeois little company needs it all the time, they need to be re-radicalized all the time.
Ernst Bloch says that “the true Genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.” What comes after the end of humanity? What do we do next?
My best examples come from Gaza and Lebanon, where people from under the rubble are declaring that: ‘no we are not giving up.’ No, my family is dead, my grandpa died, my cousins are no more – we are not giving up. They built a horse from trash, from ambulances destroyed by Israel; a German sculptor with teenagers built a big horse, a big statue, and then the Israelis destroyed it, immediately, and the message was yeah, out of this crap, we’re going to make a horse, galloping. It’s amazing what’s happening there…
…We will never totally explore a summary of what we need to do, but we should keep doing it. And you know that, I mean you have to do it, it’s never a solo enterprise, anyway. It won’t be done by a solo singer… it can only be done where not even conversation happens, something less than that… it’s trying something, doing something, pronouncing something – into the public, unexpectedly, you know – and see what happens to it, what’s the response to it, how do you get it? Yeah!
Immediacy. Do it immediately. To not do planning revolutions, to not do lengthy developments of a new type of engineering of this and that. But to step right into the street, step right into whatever is available, to speak right out in front of whatever you have out here… whatever size the group is doesn’t matter. You know the tour just went all across the country… the universities canceled them, quite a few of them, where they had contracts, and on the same night they found a community center, on the same night… In other worlds there’s a real hunger in this truth-deprived nation for other versions of truth, for looking at what the real thing is…
(December 16, 2024) Any thoughts you want to share with us before Christmas?
Santa and Walmart and whatever. Santa… at least in southern French culture, is a witch! Santa is a child molester and is a demon – nothing to do with goody goody. The house that he hits is seriously hit; he’s equipped with torturing equipment, and he is sincere. And so that fake little man is the sugary version of reality, which is a very bitter horror thing in culture. How was it transformed, it would be interesting to find out, how did they manage to turn it so upside-down? …The excuses for the great god of love religion don’t exist anymore. Because now people can read this world enough to realize that the god of love was a gigantic murderer, of genocidal proportions, all over the place … they discovered all the kids’ grave sites in Catholic schools here in America, remember that, shit like that? Yeah, is that the god of love or not? Yeah, it is.
(January 21, 2025) Do you have any New Years’ resolutions?
Good idea. I had a dream last night, about revitalizing the Domestic Resurrection Circus, and meeting crowds and crowds of people like we used to have, in the thousands, and walking with them… and as we walked, we called it, Revolution… Just walking around these circus fields, in my dream… doesn’t matter where do we go right? … I mean you have a job to do, with your teammates, it’s obvious, whether the town gives you permits or not is secondary. It will happen – you will get whatever you need, and otherwise you find other ways of doing it. But this is the important thing: you get those kids going.
Note: p Phurnutus de nat. Deor. in Baccho')" Goat was sacred to Bacchus & satyrs were his perpetual companions & the ancients used to paint the Gods in the form of such animals as were sacred to them. Dionysus saith pPhurnutus, was delighted with the sacrifice of Goates 
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