Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.
My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. Attack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me something very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.
Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.