Tolstoy Kicks Ass!

Rai had spent that day waging graffiti warfare, so it wasn’t until the next afternoon that she made her way to the softball fields.  As she had hoped, Mike sat in his place, as fixed as the trees that gave shade to the field.

 

He cut straight to the chase.  “How goes the quest, my dear?” he asked as she sprinted up the bleachers.

 

“For meaning?  Looks like guardsman Vronsky has taken up a post in Astrakhan.  No sign of him.  But he’ll show up.”  She vamped in her new outfit.

 

“Yes, of course.”  She was rather disappointed that he didn’t comment on her spiked belt.  “And the other quest?  To refute the philosophy of terror, yes?”

 

“Yeah.  Super-cool.  He’s smart, I gotta give him that, but nothing against me.”

 

“I do not doubt it.”

 

“I told you about the bomb in Soho, right?”

 

“But you have not yet told me how you defeated him.  He quoted Heraclitus, yes?”

 

“Guess what I wrote.”

 

“I do not know.  Anaximander?  Thales of Miletus?”  His eyes twinkled.

 

“I never read that shit.”

 

“You do not always understand my jokes.”  He paused.  “I imagine Tolstoy.  Yes?”

 

“Tolstoy kicks ass.”

 

“You did not once believe that.”

 

“Then I started to read Anna…  Yeah, so I wrote that phrase I used to hate so much.  ‘Resist not evil.’  I mean, yeah, Christian and all, but a whole lot better’n–”

 

“Gandhi said that book influenced him deeply.  And he was no Christian.”

 

“Cool.  Anyway, so I went back yesterday, and you can probably guess what Z put there.”

 

“Something from Lenin.  Or Gorky, perhaps.”

 

“Think about the context.  I mean, I’m sayin’ that all paths to the same end aren’t the same, that a struggle has to be moral, right?  So–”

 

“You give too many hints.  He quoted Machiavelli.”

 

“Of course.  ‘The ends justify the means.’  I mean, how trite.  And stupid, too.”

 

“Stupid?”

 

“Machiavelli’s great if you’ve got lotsa power, armies and shit like that.  All Z’s got is a pack of matches, far as I can see.  Machiavelli’s stupid if all you’ve got on your side is being right.”

 

“’How many divisions has the Pope?’”

 

“Huh?”

 

“A myth, I think.  An advisor tells Stalin that the pope will not be happy if he invades Poland, or the Ukraine.  I do not remember.  So Stalin asks–”

 

“Z doesn’t have the Red Army behind him.  What an idiot.”

 

In the pause that followed, Rai suddenly missed the cries and insults they would generally hear from Z on the other field.  Today they heard only the crack of the bat and the shouts of the game.  It made her sad.

 

“You have not told me how you responded.  I am certain that you did not permit him the last word.”

 

“Actually, I thought about it.  I mean, even a Muggle who knew what was going on could see how stupid he’s being, except… well, I guess not too many Muggles think that much, right?  So I couldn’t trust them to come up with the right conclusion.”

 

“One should never trust a Muggle.”  Mike’s eyes sparkled again.

 

“Exactly.  Yeah, so I had to come up with something to show them what an idiot he was being.  I thought about Kant — you told me he was the best answer to Machiavelli once — but he’s so boring, y’know?”

 

“And you have never read him.”

 

“I tried.  Really.  But I did remember a quote Z told me.  I mean, I’ve never read the guy, but I have a pretty good memory, and… well, I may have messed up a word or two, but it was perfect.”

 

“Please… I cannot survive the suspense.”

 

“It was great.  I bet he just shit his pants when he read it.”  She paused again, hoping to elevate the drama.  “ ‘For the proletarian, the Truth is the weapon that brings victory.’  Not bad, huh?”

 

“Who said that?”

 

“Georg Lukacs.  Who Z loves.  I mean, almost as much as Trotsky or Che.  So I got one of his heroes to go after him.  Truth is the weapon that brings victory.  Not a fucking bomb.  So Z boxed himself in.  Two Marxist quotes to condemn terrorism.”

 

“I cannot imagine that he will abandon the argument so easily.”

 

“He has so far.  No bombs for a while.  He’s stuck.  Struggling in the vicious grip of my logic.  It’s like what I was saying about that babe of yours.  What was her name?  Emma Bovary.  Yeah.  Z needs beautiful words first if he’s gonna do anything.  And I’ve just cut up all his beautiful words at the knees.  Unless he comes up with some new philosophical system, he won’t do anything.”

 

“Perhaps you have based too much on a character from a novel?”

 

“Why?  Z’s just made himself a character in a novel, so why should he be any different?”  Mike looked at her with confusion.  “Well, maybe I’m being tough on him.  He’s not that superficial.  There’s something more there.  But the point’s still the same.  He’s gotta have his words, and now he doesn’t.  Case closed.  Truth is the weapon that brings victory.”  She smiled proudly.  “But y’know what else?  This is way fucked up.  Both of the places are swarming with cops.  Like, after each time I scribble some kinda response, they appear outta nowhere and I gotta run.  I mean, thank God they’re fat and I’m fast, ‘cause they’re never even close to catching me, but it’s kinda stressful.”

 

“I had wondered why your clothes had changed.”

 

“Yeah.  Third time this week.”

 

“You do not think there is much…  I do not know.  Much danger and little benefit in this graffiti battle?”

 

“ ‘Little benefit?’  People’s lives depend on it!”

 

Mike smiled ironically, but decided not to contradict her, instead turning to the slowly progressing game.  Rai had many things she wanted to say, but she couldn’t figure out how to connect them to the conversation.  Finally she decided that she did not need a connection.

 

“Y’know, I’ve got my doubts about Anna sometimes.”

 

“What doubts?” Mike asked hopefully.

 

“Anna’s great.  Like I told you, it’s only page 400, and we’re like best friends.”

 

“Anna might have done better with a friend like you.”

 

“No doubt.  But look, here’s the thing.  Anna reads lotsa books, right?”  She paused, as if unhappy with what she was about to say.  “Nah, that’s not it.  It’s more complicated.”  Pausing again to arrange her thoughts, she noticed that Mike was listening eagerly.  “OK, y’know the myth about love all these novels have?  Like everybody’s looking for love all their lives and life doesn’t make sense if you’re not in love?  Like love’s where we find meaning?  You get it with this fucker Levin,” she pointed to her book, “but even with Myshkin, or somebody as cool as Olga.”

 

“Olga?”  Mike had never quite accustomed himself to Rai’s habit of referring to characters as if they were her intimate friends.

 

“Olga Sergeevna.  From Oblomov, remember?”

 

“You choose the most obscure novels, Helen–”

 

“Kinda cool, huh?  But what was I saying?  Oh, yeah, like this whole fucking love fetish the Russian elite’s got.  It’s like a myth, but way powerful.  So Anna knows she doesn’t love Karenin.  Which makes sense.  I mean, the guy’s a bastard.  So she thinks, there’s no meaning in my life, I’m gotta fall in love.  So she does.  With the first dickwad cavalry guard who shows up.”

 

“Vronsky.”

 

“If she’d realized what an putz he was at about page one hundred, she would have been a lot better off.”

 

“But that is the point, no?  Her story is not really about Vronsky.  It is about Anna.  She is in love with love, not with him.  She wants to be free.  Vronsky is only the opportunity.  Perhaps he had charm, but he is bald, and not a good artist, and not very smart.”

 

“Yeah, that’s it, huh?  She just wants love.  But then it drags her down the wrong path.  Why doesn’t she see it?  I mean, she’s no idiot.  There’s lotsa ways to make life meaningful: books and philosophy and politics–”

 

“And bombs?”

 

“Maybe.  I just wish Anna’d been smarter about planning her life.”

 

“Then no one would read the book.”

 

“Yeah.  That’s the thing, huh?”  Without another word, she ran down the bleachers, leaving Mike to wonder, not for the first time, how sane his young friend was.

 

 

 

Wanting to avoid the Crips who often hung out in the bat cave, Rai walked along the south side of 46th Street on her way to dinner at the Place.  Her worn soles scuffed along the street as she slipped between parked cars; she walked along the front of the high school, then by the construction site for some new ridiculous luxury hotel, looking down at the sidewalk to keep herself from tripping over dropped beams and cinder blocks.  

 

She saw no construction detritus: instead, there was a trail of blood.  Small drops, and not many, but new.  She often saw blood on the sidewalks, especially since the Latin Kings had tried to take this street back from the Crips, so she kept her guard up for a knife or a gun.  But then, against the wall, she saw the telltale signs of a small explosion: shards of glass, blackened brick.  “Z,” she said aloud.  “Shit.”

 

Confused, she looked at the cars parked along the sidewalk.  She ran along the sidewalk and saw what she had feared.  One of the cars was an Infiniti.

 

Behind the car, she found yet another graffito.

 

 

 

“The true is only the expedient.”

-William James

 

 

 

Unusually, she didn’t even consider what the quote meant in their graffiti polemic.  Drops of blood on the sidewalk washed those thoughts from her mind.  She only worried for her friend.  Had the bomb exploded before he could roll it under the car?  He might be seriously hurt, even if he hadn’t lost much blood.  Running, she followed the trail of blood drips down 46th and up Broadway.  Suddenly, at the curb, the trail of blood drops stopped.  It was as if he had stepped into a car or a bus, but the bus stop was a hundred feet away, and Z would never have the money to pay for a cab.  Maybe he had pleaded for a ride to the hospital?  But would Z have gone to a hospital when it was clear that his injuries came from a bomb?  There was no better way to tip off the cops.  Where would he have gone?

 

Confused by the quote and terrified for Z’s health, she stumbled back toward The Place.  Maybe Z was there.  Maybe someone had seen him.  

 

She wanted to run upstairs, to ask anyone if they had seen him, if they knew he was all right.  Maybe the nurse would know.  But before Rai could even get to the steps, Tanya stopped her.  “Rai, hold on.  I got a message for you.”

 

“Not now.  I gotta find Z.”

 

“It’s from Z.”

 

She turned.  Her heart stopped.  She took the three folded sheets of paper from Tanya’s hand, then slipped into the little vestibule where they kept the water cooler.  She sat down on a bench painted an awful shade of blue and unfolded the papers.  Z’s cramped script filled each sheet, leaving no margins at all.

 

 

 

 

 

The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

– William Blake

The bourgeoisie pretends that History can create without Destruction.  As in all of their words and works, they lie.

Freedom descends not from Creation, no more than Man descends from Shit.  Creation imprisons the spirit as defecation imprisons the body.  Man must move beyond the anal retention of defecation and the deification of labor!  Let us destroy, for in destruction lies freedom.  Destruction of the state, destruction of the bourgeoisie, destruction of Lexuses and of Infiniti itself!  Down that Path lies Freedom and Bliss.

Bakunin: Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists.  Piddling anarchists do not understand what the philosopher meant.  Do not just annihilate the WTO!  Annihilate everything.  Rejoice in explosions, in sacrifice, in death!  For that is the nature of the world, and if we cannot rejoice in death and violence, we find joy in nothing.  Or better:  We must learn to find joy in Nothing!  That is our Path.

The Peripatetics and the Stoics and now the Liberals see Freedom in obedience to the Law.  The Law is a fool’s feces.  

No, I say!  Freedom does not lie in shit!  Nor in the Law!  Freedom lies in destruction, in the explosion of all boundaries and walls and taboos.  Here is the quest: to be free, unshackled, unchained, to run naked and unshod across the smoking ruins of civilization.

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”  Ah, but Herr Benjamin, you have forgotten the corollary:  Documents of barbarism are themselves the documents of civilization!  Have you ever seen Truth in the charred shell of an Infiniti?  I have!  Beauty, Truth, Civilization, Barbarism, all joined in a single, fiery bottle rolled under the chassis.  To toss that flame: there you see freedom.  The match and the gun and the spirit defend liberty; not the Court, not the Constitution!

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblance, mon frère, you rebel against my words?  You find them painful, difficult, hateful?  Or perhaps you reject my works, the burned cars that litter Manhattan as a promise of the world to come?  Recall the words of the great eaters of shit: Works do not Save, but Faith.  I have faith.  In freedom.  In truth.  In barbarism.  In the future!

“The first reaction to truth is hatred.”  Tertullian, that great Father-Of-The-Church, (father of shit!) for once speaks true.  That you hate me only affirms the truth of my message and of my future.  The bourgeoisie cannot tolerate Freedom.  They prefer comfort and sloth and a BMW with twin cup holders.

Fortunately for the the rich, they need not suffer their freedom.  They will crumple against the bloody wall of History long before they need fear such horror.  For they fear to be.  Bataille: “the fear of being changes a man into a pubkeeper.”  What joy for us and for the pubkeeper when we sacrifice him against the wall!  There is freedom for all: freedom from the pubkeeper, and the pubkeeper’s freedom from himself.

Perhaps you say that I am evil.  “Where are his morals?” I hear whispered in the crowd.  “Has he no love for his fellow man?”  I do love!  So much that I would give you your freedom.  But do you desire Freedom?  Knowing the pain of that choice?  The pain of skipping and laughing over the coals of what you once treasured?  If you say that destruction is evil, then yea, behold evil in these words and in these acts.  But also behold Evil in God, who destroys.  In the wind and the sun and the worms who fertilize the soil.  Life demands destruction.  I shall provide it.  Let the weak and the stupid use their morality to preserve that of no value.  I destroy, and History marches on.

For what is morality?  I have made a study.  Rimbaud: Morality is the weakness of the mind.  Even better, the sodomite Wilde: There is no sin except stupidity.  This is the sin I have come to avenge.  The foolish and the stupid and the weak can find freedom only in death.  I will grant them this grace.  This is the greater ethic: to drive forward the creaky cart of History, for so long mired in a debate over how to build a better cup holder for the cappuccino of false consciousness!  Let us push forward through the shit, leaving behind the debaters.  For Freedom lies forward, and its price is dear.

I quote for you another of the “fathers” of the West.  Ambrose, teacher of the bastard Augustine.  “There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.”  Indeed!  So what is evil?  I, who break the shackles of a conscience imprisoned by Dunkin’ Donuts?  I, who free the mind of the perversions of consumption and emptiness?  Or those who force the worship of gasoline and steel and bad SoHo Art?  Who serves a false God?  Not I.  Not I!

For here is the Truth, though in the mouth of a fool: “Live dangerously and you live right.”  Faust sold his soul, but he lived!  Lived fully.  He drove History forward, broke new ground, showed Truth to the people.  Perhaps he sacrificed his soul, but for whom?  For his own glory; this we hear from the craven, callow bards of the past.  No!  Faust sold his soul for the Glory of Man!  He sacrificed himself on the altar of History to give us the Future!  I see the same altar before me, and it calls my name.  That I may have the courage.

If the Fathers of the Church can sometimes speak Truth, so, too, can a fascist.  Recall Borges on the crucifixion.  Jesus dies, but within three days he reigns in glory over heaven and Earth.  Judas, essential to salvation, loses his soul, his life, is condemned to eternity in hell, and suffers the slings and arrows of every outraged Christian!  Both died for the Salvation of the World, but whose sacrifice was greater?  Judas!  Judas, who sacrificed his soul, not merely his body.  We celebrate of the passion of Judas, not that of Christ.  Who is the Lamb of God?  Who the savior?

In these words, then, behold!  Ecce Judas!  For I have sold my soul for the salvation of the world, for the freedom of the people.  Historians may condemn me, but History Will Absolve Me.

Let this be the judgment of history: not by morality, but by genius.

 

I care not whether Man is Good or Evil; all that I care

Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool.  Go, put off Holiness

And put on Intellect…

 

 

Perhaps Blake was mad, but we may not judge there his value for history.  I have put off Holiness, the Sanctimoniousness of the Impotent, and affirmed the Strength of the Universal Intellect.  Thus Spake History!

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “One must have chaos in himself to give birth to a dancing star.”  I feel the chaos flowing in every vein and artery, in the bitterness of betrayal and the joy of sin and the longing for freedom.  But what is the dancing star?  A star burns bright, and its rays dance like the sparks that fly from exploding Infiniti, or the bacchanalian reel around the Lexus of Emptiness.  Now that place is no more, now the Infinite cannot imprison us!  Feel the chaos that gives birth to the dancing star, the genesis of Freedom.

Should you condemn me for infamy, declare that sin is not freedom, I say to you, “He who hates vice, hates mankind.”  Lest Pliny seem too archaic, or lest you miss the reference, again to the Irish Sodomite: “Disobedience is man’s original virtue.”  I do not embody the morality of the bourgeoisie.  I represent the Virtue of Mankind.  None will thank me, no generation will call me Blessed, but my hands bring forth the future with fire and ice, with fury and joy.

 

“All armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.”  I am armed with the truth, but also with kerosene.  I am armed with a thousand quotes, the annihilating, fecund distaff of the West.  But most: Behold, I am Free, and I make Freedom!

For I do not desire Truth.  Nor Good, nor God.  Nor Salvation.  I desire Freedom.  And it is mine.