Crackpots 15: Book Recommendations (Patreon)

ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS---We announced a while ago that we do a newsletter now, and we've had some great ones...we do them once a week, rotating between the three of us, plus a guest every month, it's available on the "CRACKPOT" Patreon tier. In the past month Liz wrote a great one about Gisele Pelicot, YC wrote about the breakdown of society, Kate Wagner wrote about being evicted, it's all so wonderful I can hardly believe it... Anyways we're gonna occasionally make one free or available to the regular subscribers, and this is my turn.

By BRACE BELDEN

-----------------------

 I spent the other night reading and got some ideas, some of which I sort of wrote down here but I got impatient so if something doesn't make sense, chock it up to that---impatience is a trait God imbued me with and so any criticism of it is a criticism of God, who unfortunately I do not particularly believe in--but that doesn't mean he isn't real and won't strike your funky ass down like Uzzah for getting mad at me! I could try flesh all this out more but I'd run the risk of making a golem, and besides we have a schedule to keep and I started this after it was already supposed to be out, I've had a busy week...so anyways here are some book recommendations:

The best book I read last year was The Sibyl by Pär Lagerkvist...it is short, I think very highly of it (and it's one of two books by Lagerkvist I read in the last year that are related to Jesus Christ, the other being Barabbas, which I also got a kick out of). The book is essentially a long conversation between a man, who is in fact the Wandering Jew, and a decrepit old oracle from Delphi. This part I'm gonna put down here isn't about Jesus Christ, or the Wandering Jew who denied him comfort, it's from the prophetic Sibyl, who once upon a time when she was holy made ecstatic love to God in a grotto but who was forsaken by him and left to live a hermitudinal existence alongside her idiot son (put into her either by God, her dead one-armed lover, or both). She says of God:

What would my life have been without him? If I had never been filled with his spirit? If I had never felt the bliss that poured from him, the anguish and pain that is his also, and the wonder of being annihilated in his blazing arms, of being altogether his? For me he has been a wild chasm which engulfed me and all that I held dear. A glowing breath and an embrace without safety, without peace, but for which I longed nevertheless.

For her there was truth in the myth, truth so real it gestated for months in her belly and came out a grinning, silent thing, keeping her company as she sits in solitude on the side of a mountain. Her life stinks---but aren't we jealous of her! We're so far away from anything to do with defeats and victories...oh, those still happen, these things still occur, but they occur around us, to us, the ecstasy of triumph is something not just denied us but is inconceivable. At least the Sibyl experienced having sex with God in a cave! We, unfortunately, much more resemble her interlocutor, the tormented Wandering Jew...

It seems to me, now that I think of it, that the Wandering Jew should be a Saint. . He's been cursed after all, surely proof of some special relationship to God! Surely he hasn't been canonized owing only to some old prejudices, his name might be too Jewish, perhaps he should change it...

And that got me to thinking about who are our American saints---I mean saints in every sense of the word, old and new...my understanding (which I'll gladly admit is pretty crude) is that saintliness originally equated to a plain fealty to God, any old asshole in the flock was a saint, and it was only gradually that it become a bit more snooty. I guess once the flock got big enough, the bigwigs had to get judicious. After a while, you had to be flayed alive in order to achieve sainthood. What a ripoff: One minute you can be a holy saint just by living and praying in Ephesus, and practically the next second you had to get put into the brazen bull just to get the same honorific! I guess it's more Christlike to die in a fucked-up way (I feel like carpentry, then, should be a holy profession...but what do I know?). From what I understand, once Christianity really got established the rules relaxed, and aspiring saints no longer had to get torn to shreds by dogs or lions, they just had to give off the air of being tight with God, although the occasional miracle or other proof of this was sometimes required.

Who are our saints in America? I mean this in the old sense---our holy believers. The MAGA people? I think it's probably fair to say. They constitute a flock, and there is real faith there, there is the desire to be annihilated in his blazing arms. In my lifetime no American political figure, liberal or conservative, has come close. The obvious retort is Obama, but he's distant, cold; if he can get his followers erect, it's a bloodless, stubby tumescence. This why the jokes about a liberal January 6th are absurd--- not because liberals are smarter than Republicans, but because they possess a weak fidelity (the "Leftist" January 6th was, unfortunately, CHAZ). And then, yes, you get to a tired old point about MAGA types holding up Trump being their god. I think that's probably straightforwardly true. If there is one person, outside of I guess K-Pop idols, who can make his followers feel his glowing breath and an embrace without safety, it is him.

 What other collections of political saints are there? The liberals? They seem to imitate saintliness but more often ended up with Saints, in the latter-day sense of the word, meaning martyrs or particularly upright confessors, who ministered a flock unsure of what to worship: God or their own neurosis. But anyways, who on earth could feel the bliss pour out of old Joe Biden? Who would want to? Obama, as I said, was the closest they came, and he's more interested in executive producing nature documentaries and growing distant from his wife. But if they do have a God, it's him, and his pantheon of bureaucrats...how pathetic!

Anyways, I consider this because of the particular durability of the MAGA movement, especially in the face of the various left-wing flurries like Occupy and portions of the BLM stuff. I often think about what percentage of MAGA types would die---be martyred---for Trump; it's impossible to know. But one suspects it's considerably higher than those who'd be willing to die for Kamala Harris. What kind of moron would be Kamala Harris' Ashli Babbit?

For the left, there was Bernie Sanders. He flirted with greatness (I'm not talking of his political positions, which were oftentimes weak, but his character and mythos) but he showed himself totally unable to fight in the manner that would secure him a victory.  You can see this in the practical absence he's taken from his own legacy. A leader needs either the reality or the myth of heroism, bravery, strength, vitality, determination. Sanders has a certain poverty in these traits. Compare his lack of ruthlessness to his idol, FDR!

 And (allow me a moment of self-pity!) consider the Communist: Who would die for that, here, now? More likely you'd be written off as a nutcase, torn to pieces by the press, and forgotten...and we still wouldn't have Communism, you'd just be dead. The horse must come before the cart, but the horse seems to have run off, we can't find it anywhere, and one gets the sense that nobody else is really looking...

There's a great book that collects Jean Genet's political writings, I love it, it's called The Declared Enemy, he talks about how every man who kills makes himself an accomplice of God (Genet is, of course, called Saint Genet  in Sartres book on him, which I've never read). I hope Genet's wrong---killing is a nasty thing. But I hope he's right about this: Genet also says that God is in hiding (and this is my elaboration) perhaps he's hiding out of shame...let's hope "The God That Failed", is simply hiding alongside him, waiting for a messiah! But I'm only kidding around.

("The God That Failed" is the name of a famous anti-communist book from the late 1940s, a collection of essays by Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, etc---I've never read it and am not recommending it but I have to admit they got our asses with that title...)

(But writing this out the Genet God stuff made me think about Alexander Blok's famous poem The Twelve---who cares, I can mention it, the rest of this doesn't make sense either, but it relates to the above because after all Jesus Christ, who I understand the Christians take to be both God and His own son {and they say we Jews have sexual hang-ups} is marching at the head of the Red Guards, is present among the prostitutes and soldiers and cold old ladies, trundling through the snow like a polar bear. I like the poem and you might too--it's possibly the only poem in history to consistently repeat the phrase ALL POWER TO THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY...here is a translation...here is another)

I've been reading the Penguin Dictionary of Saints...I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, I also read the Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 earlier this year...It's just a little something to read whenever, the entries are short, you sort of learn a thing or two, and besides everybody should read a dictionary or two...

But hey, people really go crazy over these saints. They love these guys, I think Catholics even pray to or at least beseech them, so I may as well learn a little about them. Some of these characters are pretty interesting...I like the three different ladies named Pelagia the best, and Isidore the Farm-Servant (Who seems to be Catholic Spain's version of Stakhanov). I also like the Roman Susan, who, like one of the martyred Pelagias, was put to death for refusing to fuck one of Diocletian's buddies.

That some of these saints didn't exist at all doesn't seem to matter. In the introduction to Dictionary of Saints it's made clear that the authors know a lot of the entries aren't exactly what one might call factual, and they quote Arthur Quiller-Couch (whose pen name was Q) in the introduction: A legend, however exaggerated upon fact, is it's own fact, witnessing belief. Surely the Wandering Jew can bolster his case for canonization by using that quote...

(As an aside, I love this book: The Fifth Business, which is the first in the brilliant Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies. They are wonderful books, and captivated me as a teenager; they still hold a very secure place in my heart. There are some interesting things on saints and hagiology in the Fifth Business. The trilogy also introduced me to Jung, who is someone I thought Davies made up until I read the name somewhere else. Plus whenever I ate at the Brazen Head in San Francisco I was reminded of the book)

There’s this great book called My First Life  which is just a really long interview with Hugo Chavez, and in it Chavez is asked about the "Chavez myth"...he doesn't deny that one exists, as such, but he says this: I'm not a myth. I'm a reality. And I'm more and more a concrete reality every day.

He later goes on to quote Aristotle, saying that myths contain truths (which of course we know, it's common knowledge, it even says just this in the introduction of the Dictionary of Saints), and that the purpose of the Chavez myth was to nourish that kernel of truth until it grew such that it could invert the relationship with the myth, become "more and more a concrete reality every day", such that the myth would now exist as a kernel in the truth…

(Certainly the original saints, the mass of believers huddled in Jerusalem and Philipi, nourished their myth such that it became concretely real... "A legend, however exaggerated upon fact, is it's own fact, witnessing belief." In other words, God gave them an inch and they took a mile)

Reading the interview with Chavez, you get the sense that he has what it takes to be a leader, to create both truths and myths, to enjoin them: Vitality, bravery, intelligence, strength, heroism. He doesn't nurture his own weaknesses; he attacks them...but the unfortunate truth is you can also get a similar result by deception, vitriol, greed, cunning, and money---things our enemies overflow with.

Most of the collective myths holding the American people now don't even have promises of beautiful futures, tangible or otherwise, just variations on an ugly present. The right-wing should be glad of the technologists joining their side, with talk of settling Mars and a world made up of infinite computers that will work for us like magic slaves. They have their myths and truths---they are wedding them, we see the two fucking like crazy on TV, they can't get enough of each other---we're left in the corner, limp and mopey. At present, the left is much more like the Wandering Jew, who tells the Sibyl he is

Doomed to live on this world, which He left long ago, and to posses no other. And to look about me day after day, year after year, for centuries and tens of centuries, with these old eyes that see through everything and perceive the vanity of all things. In a world covered in ashes. It is for this and that he has chosen me, condemned me.

Fatalism, self-pitying, a martyrdom without God, smug and self-righteous. In a word: Cursed. How dismal. But it's not all bad---the Wandering Jew at least gets to wander, and he gets to be a Jew. But he's no Hugo Chavez. So those my books recommendations. Happy January!

Brace