The Mark Inside: Joseph Beuys And Coyote meet “Humanitarian” Bombing Campaigns
By Phil Rockstroh
 Nazi propaganda: "Millions Trust Adolf Hitler!"
IN BERLIN, Germany, in early 1939, at Friedrichstrasse railway station, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, my grandmother placed my mother and her older sister, with a few family valuables sown into their clothing, on a Kindertransport bound for Great Britain. Soon thereafter, she went about the business of bribing my grandfather’s way out of a concentration camp. And then, by means of more brides, charm, cunning, and sheer force of character, she and my grandfather secured exile from Hitler’s Germany. My grandmother, being a shrewd judge of character, was able to accomplish this because she knew Nazis were human beings, desirous of gold and social position; most did not swoon over Nazi ideology. The majority of Nazis were careerist, simply yuppies on the make (“just looking for a better life for their children”) — and Nazi officials were giving out the jobs, so they joined the party. Even in the aftermath of the war, after much of their country had been reduced to ruins, the people of Germany refused to face their complicity in the crimes of The Third Reich.
In post-war Germany, memory itself seemed to have been firebombed to ash and rubble. For ordinary Germans, the extent of Nazi evil was too great and their own contribution too quotidian to accept personal responsibility for crimes committed by the state. How could the flickering of such tiny desires set the vast world aflame?
Although I was nowhere in the vicinity, I am an accessory to the crime. In the late 1940s, my grandmother ran guns to the Irgun. She embraced the desperate, nationalist delusion of Zionism. I understand why she did this. But, now, everyday, Palestinians are forced to their knees in order to make amends for the sins of Europe. Although its origins and workings seem to us mysterious and evanescent, evil remains proliferate because our traumatized psyches see it as a force of good. Evil is a deranged angel of self-preservation, convinced his wicked machinations and destructive fury are bulwarks against outside forces aligned to bear his doom. Yet, even as I make the pronouncement, I must maintain a stubborn skepticism regarding my own claims of innocence in the matter.
The serpent is the hero/anti-hero of the tale. He is the co-creator of the human psyche. He should be given his due, in regard to providing us with the knowledge necessary to leave the pointless inertia of paradise and blunder into the possibility that we may know ourselves to a greater degree and thus be able to see the world before us with a bit more depth, nuance, and clarity.
In contrast, nice liberals, because they are cut off from their dark, angry side and their hidden, selfish motives, all too often, are boggled by, seemingly frozen in polite mortification, before rightist rage. Why is rage such anathema to liberal sensibilities? As a consequence, liberals, oblivious of their own buried, selfish motivations, have difficulty understanding laboring class anger and resentment and how it is channeled and displaced by conservatives.
In the theatre of this faux republic, Republicans are effective at selling their imperialist wars of choice and their class-stratifying economic policies because they have become convinced the roles they are playing are real. Regarding this situation, Konstantin Stanislavski, considered to be the father of modern theatrical conventions, is reported to have instructed, when an actor becomes so deeply merged with the role he is portraying that he begins to believe he is that character, it is time to escort him from the theatre.
Other times, he would simply lie upon a bed of straw, watching the coyote as the coyote watched him…man and beast appraising each other. During the performance piece, Beuys would engage in ritual acts, such as playing percussion on a large triangle and playfully tossing a leather glove to the coyote. Project completed, Beuys returned to Kennedy Airport, transported, once again, by ambulance, making good on his promise of exiting the US without having set foot upon it. Thus Beuys identified with and symbolically merged with the psyche of his coyote co-art conspirator and opened himself to the cunning, death-devouring spirit of the much-scorned animal (The coyote is an animal that lives on carrion) to gain the creative wherewithal to renounce the death-drunk spirit of US Empire. “A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche.” –James Hillman Once at an amusement park, when I was three years of age, I released a cherry flavored lollipop from the apex perch of the carriage of a Ferris Wheel. Entranced, I watched its speed accelerate, as it fell in a plummeting spiral, then shatter to crimson shards on the pavement below. Even a singular conversation, like a popular uprising or an encounter with a work of art, can be similar to this. One cannot realize the presence of another nor open oneself to real change (in contrast to, hackneyed commercial come-ons and political campaign legerdemain versions of such) without giving oneself over to a small death. Yet there have been moments when I let myself fall…have been shattered to shards…a broken soul among vast constellations of broken souls…and have forgotten, momentarily, my own aloneness…wandering in a unifying wilderness of glinting shards.
Such situations bring both opportunity and peril. Power becomes brutal and ruthless when presented with a credible challenge. This is why Bradley Manning is imprisoned and Julian Assange is under house arrest awaiting extradition, and both will be made to suffer greatly for their actions.
But, man, oh man, those shattering moments, delivered by art, music, beauty and love, this life reveals. It just might be worth the risk of sticking around for a while longer to see what shakes out. |