The Gospel of Anarchy, the Polaroid Kidd and Internet Disappearance

Justin Taylor's novel The Gospel of Anarchy is set mainly in a punk house in Gainesville, Florida called Fishgut, founded by a mysterious figure called Parker, whose particular brand of "anarcho-mysticism" got him evicted from his previous squat.

This is Taylor's description of Parker:

"Parker was raised in religion. Thomas knows that much. He ran away from home as a teenager, from some fucked sect of -- what were they? Snake-handlers, Adventists, Baptists, speakers-in-tongues, Witnesses, maybe renegade Mormons; no way to be sure. He was long unchurched by the time Thomas met him, but the language, the forms of thought were stuck fast. They were who he was. Parker was a big-b Believer, he had a God-entranced vision of all things, but because of how Thomas grew up - secular atheist Jew, same as David - the very idea of belief was foreign to him, and he did not for a long time comprehend what it was he was dealing with."

Taylor is interested in merging the languages of anarchism and religious (or mystical) belief. Part of the underlying intellectual atmosphere of my PhD is the perhaps unexpected interactions and overlaps between left-wing politics and religion in the United States. Though the academic reasoning behind this is found in the rich language of David Foster Wallace, there is a personal rationale too: these two apparent opposite belief-systems were the poles of my childhood. Like Parker, "the language, the forms of thought" are "stuck fast" in my intellectual make up.

Reading Taylor's novel I was reminded of the photos of Mike Brodie, better known as the Polaroid Kidd, who a few years back surfaced with the photos of young punks riding trains around the States which punctuate this piece. In 2007, the Needles and Pens gallery in San Francisco held an exhibition of his photographs and the Kidd was interviewed on Fecal Face's SF page (which can't be found there any longer, as far as I could tell, but is pasted here). 

The Kidd's work depicts a life not alien so much as alienly familiar. I have seen Walker Evans' photos for the book on the US south's sharecroppers he did in the 30s with James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (another religious reference), and I've read Woody Guthrie's (semi-fictional or not) autobiography Bound for Glory (another?) with its tales of train-hopping hobos. Guthrie, along with Whitman, made way for the both the Beats and Dylan's championing of this lifestyle. Allen Ginsberg, a tireless left-wing campaigner, claims his poetry career began with visions of William Blake, and Dylan himself discovered Christianity in the 1980s. The Kidd's photos reinvigorate that accumulated mythology with a twenty-first century sensibility that retains the conviction that different types of lives are possible. 

Reading Taylor's novel, I wanted to see the Kidd's photos again, to confirm the similarities between novel and image. But searching for either "Polaroid Kidd" or "Ridin' Dirty Face" (his old website) on Google returns nothing but references to him. Clicking on Needles and Pens' link to his website returns a 404 Error - Page Not Found message and typing in PLRDS.com (which Brodie used to manage) takes you to an anonymous place-holder. Apart from the gallery's page, mixing the Kidd's photos and those of people looking at them, we are left with blogs written by others like me who discovered him one way or another and were moved to write something about them. 

But maybe the Kidd's disappearance is peculiarly apt. If train-hopping entails moving from place to place, vanishing in the dead of night, then his dematerialization from the internet is just another movement. His status in this strange parallel world is now one of a ghost; glimpses, flashes and traces remain in embedded photos (themselves copied from digital versions of physical, chemical reactions) and fond remembrances in comments sections including from apparent family members of the Kidd's.

Gianni Vattimo

Last week the University of Glasgow held its annual (I think) Gifford Lectures and Italian Communist, MEP and professor of philosophy Gianni Vattimo came to talk about "The End of Reality". I could only make it to one of the series, but a thing in it caught my attention. I'll try to follow it through, and it'll probably be more what I think he said than what he actually said, but I don't think that matters.

So, we have seen, especially since postmodernity, a gradual dissolution of reality, with the idea of being as event (did he mention Badiou at all?), an event "in which we participate actively as interpreters" (that was one of the introducers speaking) rather than as an objective given. If it is an event, then, it is ongoing, continual, and in that sense it is a dialogue, between at least two and probably between far more than two. Being is not reducible to an individual. It is therefore collective, and Vattimo talked about "solidarity instead of objectivity". This either led to or was itself an "increased spirituality to everyday life" because of the idea of God as the Holy Trinity is a dialogue too - God in this image is not an individual being but a (manifestation of a) dialogue. THIS is the End of Reality - it is the increased spirituality of everyday life. If reality ends - reality here being that objective event - then that end is an increase in spirituality because reality ending creates a dialogue, which is Godlike.

If this is true, then human life is always incomplete, never-ending. This is why, said Vattimo, a devout Catholic who believes not in God but in the "death of God", "I don't think we can find salvation on planet earth".

I liked him immensely. He was very well turned out in blue suit and pink tie, chuckled a lot, got lost, skipped bits of his paper, ran off tangentially into little anecdotes and jokes that were sort of half-lost in translation, given his thick Italian accent. It's pretty amazing Glasgow can get people like that to come over and speak - he was here for a week, he gave a seminar on Saturday and then a series of lectures from Monday to Thursday. David Jasper, from the Theology department, gave an emotional little speech afterwards about how these lectures remind us what the university is for - sharing ideas, talking, meeting - and how we said goodbye to Gianni as friends.

Funny

Reason, Faith, and Revolution

Terry Eagleton has a new book out, called Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

From this review, it sounds very interesting:

"Eagleton’s devastating critique focuses on Hitchens and Dawkins’ theological illiteracy, ignorance of how science works, and naive faith in rational progress. The crisis of Enlightenment reason, which was apparent to secular philosophers long before it became part of the popular Christian response to modernity, is little noted in Ditchkins."

(Ditchkins is his name for Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins).

"From Ditchkins, one would never know that there are forms of Christianity reducible neither to fundamentalism nor to effete Unitarianism. There has been a sustained Christian tradition of scriptural commentary that acknowledges the autonomy of science and is quite self-conscious about its own hermeneutics. Ditchkins reduces God to a sort of Loch Ness Monster for whose existence there is no convincing evidence. As Eagleton clarifies with help from Thomas Aquinas and contemporary interpreters such as Herb McCabe, God is not the big, bad daddy in the sky, “the largest and most powerful creature.” Neither is theology intended to explain the operations of nature. But it does respond to questions concerning “why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us.”"