File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9707, message 17


Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 20:29:45 +0200 (MET DST)
From: rolf.martens-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Rolf Martens)
Subject: Re: M-G: Farewell, heavenly windbag!


Vladimir,

*That's* real poetry! (Below.) Mainly true, IMO. But
don't forget Bob's got some good points too. At least
I think so.

Rolf M.

>Dear Bob,
>
>You have won another great victory.  It will go in the long "anals of
>history" of victories
>of folly over reason.  But since even folly today must dress in the
>language of Marx I
>find you a mocking confirmation of its strength.  Marxism has sunk into
>the
>thickness of humanity so deep that it has not only its geniuses and
>martyrs, great
>villains and heroes, but its own street nuts as well.  So now it's a
>complete life world on
>its own.  And this is good.  If we imagine Marxism as a city, your place
>in
>its topography would be a street corner.  Every morning, when marxist
>crowd busily
>moves to work, a tribe of crazies waits for them on street corners,
>one's own for
>each nut: a trotskyist, a maoist, a marxist-leninist, etc.  They talk
>passionately, with
>conviction and force.  But if an occasional passerby , new to the city,
>stops for a
>couple of minutes to listen to this feverish flow of words he soon
>realizes that the
>they are connected only grammatically and, perhaps, also by some secret
>logic
>of madness that he cannot penetrate. At first, the passerby is mildly
>scared by the
>nut's wild gesticulation. He shouldn't.  The nut's fists never cross
>some imaginary line
>between himself and the onlooker, as if there is a  magic circle around
>him that separates
>him from the world and makes him invulnerable to it.  And so the
>passerby moves on.
>He will never again return to the spot.  As the rest of the city crowd,
>from now on he
>will see the street nuts as nothing else but a natural part of the city
>landscape.  Perhaps,
>he is wrong. Perhaps, they cut some instructive allegory for us all
>which we have yet to
>decipher. Could it be that Bob is here to remind us that thought,
>separated from deed,
>takes revenge on itself and becomes its opposite, returns to myth, and
>even
>further back into the past, to the magic function of words? Or perhaps
>Bob is
>a divine jester telling us cryptically that communism is not of this
>world and that
>no amount of marxist normalcy takes us an inch closer to it?  Whatever
>it is I'm
>leaving Bob's street corner never to come back.  Go on, waving your
>fists,
>Bob. Go on, chanting your magic words, divine windbag.  Farewell,
>dear fellow, till I stop one day at your street corner in the City Of
>Heaven.
>
>Vladimir Bilenkin
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>



     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005