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Clotaire Rapaille, a fine American name, and a Jungian too, huh? Perfectly clean American thoughts I am sure, despite the cheezy smell of burning crotches.
But then I like my coffee dark and thick, my wine red and tart, my cheese smelly and soft, and my car, well, driving my car in traffic is like playing ruby in the nude. And women? At eighteen I was in love with Melina Mercouri and I haven't changed.
But it is the mythos of psyche that I am more interested in. Leo S must have suffered from agoraphobia in its deepest philosophical and spiritual sense, because if Weimar was anything, it was out of control---wild, unhooked, relative in every sense of that idea. The shifting registers of feeling, form, logic, and expression were all over the dial.
I imagine the short, fat, introverted, and bookish Leo in his fay German tourist outfit, much like Ashenbach in Mann's Death in Venice---Leo plagued by squawking vendors in the streets of Cairo. Pure chaos, tormented by The Flies in Sartre's play.
Gods? You are looking for gods, Saheb? We've got gods. What are you looking for? You like the little green one, maybe? Very special, very pretty. It's Egyptian alabaster, but looks like jade. Or how about this, a nice heavy stone one, simple, plain, easy to live with. Just between you and me, Sir, it was probably stolen from Persepolis. Or how about this one from Africa, wild colors, with feathers and teeth? No? Maybe this one, a fine bronze of Shiva and Parvati dancing. You like these sexy figures, maybe? Look at the butts, nice, huh? Ah, too bad. You don't like them? They are very popular and we have many copies...
It was the vast diversity of thoughts, gods, ways of life, in their concatenated cacophony that appalled Strauss in Weimar. Just within the minority of German Zionists, he went nuts trying to find some inner coherence and continuity, and there was none.
His first philosophical-theological focus was on Spinoza as an anathema. But I got to thinking about Spinoza and Amsterdam, especially through the drawings and prints of Rembrandt. Amsterdam 17thC must have been a zoo of people from all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa, maybe even a few Chinese. It was the idea that Spinoza was a Morrano, a Jew of Moorish and Portuguese decent that both fascinated Strauss and appalled him. Little wonder Spinoza was a pantheist. Of course he was a pantheist in Amsterdam, the virtual bazaar of world ideas in 17thC Europe.
Strauss was from a small town (Marburg, Hessen) and his father had owned(?) and ran a farm equipment store---small town petite bourgeoisie. How much different could that have been from small towns in this country, a hundred years ago? Well, older and prettier but still...
My father (b. Hobart, OK, 1908) came to visit me once, back in the 60s in Berkeley. I lived about two blocks up from Telegraph and he had trouble finding a parking place. He came to my student apartment which was a mess with three weirdo roommates (smelled of cheap wine, marijuana, and turpentine--long nights with Nietzsche and Malraux, La Voix du Silence), quite shaken from the experience. There was obviously no solace at my place, so we left. I directed him to north Oakland and some recognizable middle class restaurant for lunch. It was an old fashioned white BBQ place with waitresses. I used to eat there with my aunt. He was very relieved to be in a `normal' place, despite the fact he had lived in Los Angeles since the Depression, and Telegraph was hardly less weird than Hollywood. Both would have appeared to my father as something like the rainy street sets of Blade Runner---the endgame for stem cell research?
Thinking back on it, I can see that my father (despite his taste for sweet German wines) suffered from the kind of agoraphobia I am thinking about. It is a kind of mindless, gut rejection of everything, except the quiet, smooth, homogeneous America of the comfortable suburban mind. Sure, there are lots of people and places, but the over arching sweep, is of a homogenous, smooth, fluidity with very little to disturb the at-home sensibility. In effect a Huddling Place, much as Simak's story, and many of his novels depict. That is what is threatened, that is the source of the fear and loathing. The Repugnant delegations in NYC this summer must have gone nuts with anxiety at the idea that the `real' NYC would come crashing into their hotels, their huddling places, like the roving gangs in Clockwork Orange, kicking heads in, and breaking into song, with choruses of Singing in the Rain.
I am going into these lurid details because I think they illustrate how to combat our foe. It more or less comes down to pushing an anarchistic diversity in their faces, and re-taking the USofA with a circus, a cornucopia of ideas and people, spilling out into the street in a dance of our own multicolored feathers, teeth, and horns, as in Orfeo negro, Orfeu do Carnaval, l'Orphee noir.
CG