Will the last one turn out the lights

Separating the saints from the sinners is being a much more protracted process than was initially foreseen. Due to an unheralded demand, there will at least be a second sitting for the Last Supper.After all, we’ve been on tenterhooks,a seemingly indefinite anticipation of the last catastrophe. Was F. Scott Fitzgerald mistaken when he said there are no second acts in American lives?

We just had Earth Day and on May 21, it will be the end of the earth day in a less allegorical sense. So long, and thanks for all the fish! If anything it’s been great advertising.  So, it may be time to start living each day as if its the last day of your life. Meanwhile,fringe scholars continue to work, assidiously, with one eye on the clock, pinpointing that moment of final revelation, and perhaps discerning in the cosmos a tiny glint of what Ernst Bloch called the “principle of hope”. An SOS. Until, some mitigating factors are synthesized into the prognostication, and some sudden winds of change arise; that the holy grail is found, that the ark of the covenant mysteriously turns up in a warehouse in Newark;well game changers aside, and the unappeasing sacrifice of one Dominique Strauss-Kahn factored in, a tremendous earthquake will shatter the world on May 21, epicenter unknown.

And who says god doesn’t have a sense of humor. After all, he did make an eighty year old Moses walk up and down the mile and a half Mount Sinai three times on seemingly meaningless errands. On May 31, Jesus will reappear and take to heaven around three per cent of humankind, true Christians chosen long ago by God.So long ago were not sure they can be rounded up. Much speculation, the rumor mills of the aesthetics of armageddon, are centered on what Jesus will be wearing and whether these winners of the lottery will be simply beamed up or whether we will be treated to a visual feast of the latest vehicles from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane -
Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn -
world serves its own needs, regardless of your own needs….
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. ( REM, End of the world…)

The rest of us will endure a mere 153 days of death and horror until we are finally annihilated on Oct. 21, the end of the world, and the final day of baseball’s world series. Typically, the event also exemplifies the cycles of revelation, destruction, remorse and rebirth that characterize patriarchal transcendental idealism. In fact, these doomsday researchers bear some resemblance to composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen and his take on the WTC attack as well as other “minor” disasters which have obviously been used to fine tune and serve as a form of warm up vaudeville act for the main event in the grander cosmic context. All in all its what Hannah Arendt simply termed part and parcel of “the pulse of life”.

After Stockhausen described the WTC bombing as “the greatest work of art ever” a journalist asked him if he equated art and crime. He answered:

“It is a crime because the people were not agreed. They didn’t go to the ‘concert.’ That is clear. And no one gave them notice that they might pass away [draufgehen]. What happened there spiritually, this jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life, that happens sometimes poco a poco in art. Otherwise it is nothing.”

Again we see an artist-prophet’s transcendentalist view that art must be a revelation, a process of spiritual death, remorse and rebirth, or it is valueless. It is interesting in history how often artist-prophets have confused human life itself with the material of their “creations.” I think this form of transcendental idealism that objectifies human life has played a large, but unacknowledged, role in the development of western art music. Perhaps it is most noticeable in the way large numbers of musicians are instrumentalized under the absolute authority of the “inspired” patriarc

conductor in symphony orchestras. (Think of the of the conductors who terrorized their musicians, such as Reiner or Toscannini.) The human, in effect, becomes a fantasy of the conductor’s own mind. This might be seen as one manifestation of patriarchy in music.Read More:http://www.osborne-conant.org/documentation_stockhausen.htm

 

Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign tower. Slash and burn,
return, listen to yourself churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning,
blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle,
light a motive. Step down, step down. Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh,
this means no fear – cavalier. Renegade and steer clear! A tournament,
a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives
and I decline.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. (REM)

But perhaps Harold Camping, finally grabbing some press coverage from those Koran burners, and his retinue of Family Radio Minstrels are actually Freudians at heart; our suffering cannot be overcome, so let’s get fatalistic and give up the ghost. Pack up, a new Babylon beckons. Rather than the detached and clinical rationalism that recalled The Holocaust, Camping is looking for a more passionate version of the Apocalypse that would simply sweep out all previous horrors of evil, and getting rid of the complicated transition in the “peace patch” from Swords to plowshares”. Camping wants to fast-forward to WW4 and Einsteins prediction of fighting with sticks and stones.But, after being saved will the bible be a green book? vegetable-based inks, on recycled, bleach-free paper, not made by slaves, and fair-trade?

Dr. David Bell:“…She was not a psychoanalyst at all but she shared Freud’s basically tragic view of man divided against himself and of suffering that cannot be transcended. I find her writing totally consonant with a psychoanalytic understanding of the world. She reported on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker and she had her finger on the pulse of seeing Eichmann not as evil but as manifesting a particular aspect of culture. She was interrogating him in her mind and asking: What can you tell me about myself and my culture?

So he was not an evil monster for her but a caricature of a mode of existence that has become part of our culture. His motives were not derived from passion. He was a functionary, trying to get the job done well. Understanding what he was doing was not instrumental to his reasoning, the amount of gas needed, the disposal of a certain number of bodies. What Arendt says is that this kind of mass destruction could only happen in our age: the factories, the calm logic with which it was carried out. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said, the peasant farmer is to the lynch mob what the factory is to the concentration camp. The concentration camp carries to an extreme the logic of industrialisation and Arendt resists the wish to project unwanted aspects of herself into Eichmann. Read More:http://www.librarything.com/work/3485 aaa

Camping’s prognostications do seem to expose the vanity of the mythic force when confronting the messianic. His is a pessimistic negative utopianism , a pessimistic concept of the eternal fall from Paradise into a history which promises happiness but can’t deliver on the election promise.

ADDENDUM:

Julia Spinola (2001):Asked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events, Stockhausen answered that the attacks were “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” According to a tape transcript from public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, he went on: “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.”

Asked by a journalist whether he equated art and crime, Stockhausen replied: “It’s a crime because those involved didn’t consent. They didn’t come to the ‘concert.’ That’s obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing.”

Before the press conference was over, Stockhausen had already distanced himself from these comments, a spokeswoman for the Hamburg Music Festival said. On Tuesday, the composer formally apologized for his remarks, explaining that he simply wanted to remind people of the role of destruction in art. Stockhausen asked the forgiveness of anyone who felt hurt by what he said at the press conference.

In a circular letter sent out by e-mail, the Italian playwright and Nobel laureate Dario Fo also stated his opinion on the attacks: “Big speculators joyfully splash about in an economy that lets millions of people die every year in misery. What are 20,000 dead in New York by comparison? … Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”

While Fo’s statement is evidence of a cynical anti-Americanism, Stockhausen’s words appear as the monstrous result of radical artistic egocentrism. To the victims of terrorism, both the composer’s mental descent into hell and the aging left-wing writer’s stale, calculating spite must seem like hideous mockery.Sep. 18, 2001 Read More:http://www.osborne-conant.org/documentation_stockhausen.htm