Comradely Greetings Read Online Free PDF Page B

spiritual conquest; it is known in and through freedom.” “Christianity itself is to me the embodiment of the revolt against the world and its laws and fashions.” “From time to time a terrible thoughtcrossed my mind: what if obsequious orthodoxy is right and I am wrong? In that case I am lost. But I have always been quick to cast this thought from me.” All statements that might have come from Pussy Riot just as easily as from Russia’s great political philosopher. In 1898, Berdyaev was arrested on charges of agitating for the Social Democrats, indicted for “designs on the overthrow of the government and the church,” and exiled from Kiev for three years to the Vologda Gubernia. When the World Spirit touches you, don’t think you can walk away unscathed.

    Intuition—and this is where your blind leading the blind comes in—is of stunning importance. The main thing is to realize that you yourself are as blind as can be. Once you get that, you can, for maybe the first time, doubt the natural place in the world to which your skin and your bones have rooted you, the inherited condition that constantly threatens to spill over into feelings of terror.
    It’s tempting to think that fundamentalism is the only terrifying aspect of our situation, but the problem is bigger than that; fundamentalists are the tip of the iceberg. There’s a powerful antifascist dictum that “the fascists do the killing, the authorities the burying.” I remember something the curator Andrei Erofeev, 3 whom I know to be anything butindifferent to antifascism, used to say while he was on trial at the instigation of the ultra-conservative People’s Council, and facing considerable jail time, for his role in organizing the “Forbidden Art—2006” exhibition: “If the People’s Council had acted without the sanction of state apparatuses, this trial wouldn’t be happening. So the situation, fraught as it is with the crescendoing possibility of violence, is reproduced by those same ‘experts’ who, from where they stand in the halls of power, are supposed to be able to make impartial decisions. ‘Only an expert can deal with the problem.’ ”

    That’s something Laurie Anderson sings: “Only an expert can deal with the problem.” If only Laurie and I could’ve had the chance to take those experts down a peg! And solve our problems without them. Because expert status is no portal to the Kingdom of Absolute Truth.
    Reasonable minds at last are seeing how truth can come from the mouths of innocents. It’s not in vain that the Rus’ 4 so esteems its holy fools, its mad ones. In the beating, political heart of civil Russia’s capital city, at the site of Pussy Riot’s January 2012 performance, at the base of Red Square, stands St. Basil’s Cathedral, named after Russia’s beloved Basil Fool for Christ.
    Cultural competence and sensitivity to the Zeitgeist don’t come with a college diploma or live in an administrator’sbriefcase. You need to know which way to point the map. “Humor, buffoonery, and irreverence” might turn out to be modes of seeking truth. Truth is multifaceted, its seekers many and varied. “Different but equal,” as another good antifascist slogan had it.

    I think Plato was pretty much wrong when he defined human beings as “featherless bipeds.” No, a person does a lot more doubting than a plucked cock does. And these are the people I love—the Dionysians, the unmediated ones, those drawn to what’s different and new, seeking movement and inspiration over dogmas and immutable statutes. The innocents, in other words, the speakers of truth.
    Two years for Pussy Riot—the price we owe fate for the gift of perfect pitch that enables us to sound out an A, even while our old traditions teach us to listen for G-flat.

    How can we resolve the opposition between experts and innocents? I don’t know. But this I can tell you: the party of the innocents, as in Herod’s time, will exemplify resistance.