The negative reaction of certain friends – certain others have been supportive or neutral or just silent – to my upcoming performance-recitation Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August (The Best American Poetry, 26 April, 2024), as well as hurting my feelings, has rather surprised me. Crazy, dangerous, pointless, they’ve said. One was so angry, he refused to speak to me for several weeks.
The emoting, worried reasoning and confrontation is all very nice – I reckon it shows I’m loved or at least company good enough not to lose for a whim – but doing my theory of “Real Presence – or “Being With”, as I say for dance – is really important for making the world I live in, and, especially, for making the world I want to live in.
Here’s my apology to friends for doing what I want to do. You can use it as a model next time you need to, as we say, step out for fags.
First off, physical danger. Kyiv isn’t Sarajevo 1992-96.
Even if the Russian Federation has a lot of the crazy-weird Republika Srpska about it and President Vladimir Putin has a lot of Srpska’s psycho-killer Radovan Karadzic in him, the ex-KGB counterintelligence colonel and romantic éminence grise in his own action-hero comic book and would-be Reichs Kanzler sans bottes ni moustache is not Srpska’s Columbia-educated psychiatrist-cum-Prime Minister trying out a half-baked archetype theory on live subjects. He can’t get close enough to knock it down with artillery, which is cheap.
Thanks to the expense of missiles, Kyiv 2024 nightmare scenario has more fever-dream dread than actual rocket bomb in the ambiance. Living it is more like living the inside of Winston Smith’s head after he’s been well worked over than anything else. Kyiv 2024 is awful in its own, special way because so much of it is fear and fear is so personal.
Come to think of it, the people of Kyiv, and of Ukraine, are being forced to cosplay the paranoid goop inside the heads of the likes of Putin, Karadzic, Alex Jones, Q or a 17-year-old whose Dad has bought him an AR-15. It’s the apocalypse: Welcome to the new age. Not so much deadly as scary.
As for pointlessly acting out my Real Presence/Being With theories in a scary place.
Well, off-hand, the idea of the performance seems to cheer up the people on the spot. That’s a lot of what I am wanting to do and most of what I can do.
Cheering up works for the neighbors, works for friends, why not people in Ukraine? As far as the country’s material needs and my competences and resources match up, I’ve got little to give. I’m no sharp-shooter, I can’t give the country an annual budget or guns or bombs, or do political action much beyond voting hard.
Moral support isn’t much, but it is mostly what I am, we are limited to here-below. Why not go for it when I can? And go for it with gusto?
Anyhow, doing little things – the things comfortable and rational middle-aged men and women friends call crazy, dangerous and pointless – does count on the cosmological significance scale; the silly old proverb about wanting a nail is actually up-to-date quantum mechanics. For want of my nutty, risky, senseless action, the world I imagine may or not n/ever be.
The minimal sense of agency in the little-things insight keeps me breathing; it kept Emerson from despairing; Whitman built an ontology on it and Thoreau, a way to live and a politics.
Because I have agency because I’m here is why I am calling my performance-recitation “Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August” Real Presence.
Real Presence will be in three parts – “Song of Self”, “Black Nail” and “Exorcism”. I’ll publish the version of it that comes on the day and post the video on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The three-part organization of the piece reflects my belief that the initial consciousness of somewhere with somebody at sometime empowers the construct “Self”, I, and, thus, “Other”, You, and, in doing that, realizes “Belonging”, We, Ourselves.
Politically, this belief imagines out as a (non “Marxist”) society and culture based on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity” over a society based on Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. That is, a personal, social and culture construct with moral equality of all persons rather than one based on legal, but not moral, equality of morally free citizens.
I think it’s the place of equality in the old slogan-syllogism of enlightenment politics that we’re fighting over today. Winning the war for the people of Ukraine – and it’s a political, not a military question – is the sharp end of the fight for existential, real equality.
In my theory of art, Real Presence translates as striving to generate a state of “Being With”, conjuring the Imagination, the point where narrative begins or, rather, the un-narrative space where other scenarios may come to be.
I’ll be giving a seminar on Being With and, especially, on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity: Experience, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman” following my performance of Real Presence. I’ll also be interviewing a woman fighter and an LGBTQ+ -oriented fighter on their experience of national conflict.
Finally, nodding to a photo of Vladimir Putin warmly squeezing the claw of a murderer on a recent front page of the Badische Zeitung, I invite each reader’s real presence, wherever that may be, between dawn and noon local time this coming Thursday, 15 August.
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