Letters to the Editor
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as Glenn is preparing -
for a deeper and more thorough discussion of the Irak war - we also would like to join in - And as long as Salon isn't ruining our agenda with stories like: "Why Al Qaeda should be winning" - my father could speak on behalf of art historians. To make sure that everybody is on the same page (in a matter of speaking) we first propose a trip to Egypt - because Bagdad might be much too dangerous for Americans right now and he knows a dude in Cairo too, who is quite an Artist. You can call him "Lo" (Loai) and as i know, that most of you don't have the time right now to leave the PC and fly to Cairo - pleeze - just walk into your kitchen -
Empty some of your herbs into the sink -
turn of all the lights - if you have windows - cover them and CLOSE YOUR EYES!!
I promise you will smell the Cairo airport and "Lo" will pick you up and he will take you for a very unusual and private tour deep into the big Pyramid - (You might want to eat something before at the cafeteria of the Ramses Hilton because you will spent 5 hours in the burial chamber next to the sarcophagi)
Anyhow - Your eyes are still closed and you feel the weight of the stones above you. They were put in its place approximately 7000 years ago and "Lo" will whisper in your ear:
"Time is the worlds anxiety"…
(have somebody in your family doing the whispering with a foreign accent)…"Time is the worlds anxiety" -
And you will suddenly feel bad about any wishes of "instant gratification" and you will think about John McCain and it will dawn on you- that one hundred years are nothing and that even the 200+ years of your proud "homeland" are nothing - and now what are you going to do?!
You slowly will open your eyes and you will have an article of the NY times about "deconstructionism" of Stanley Fish with you - and you will read loudly to yourself an Lo:
"Both the “I” or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The “I” or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being. The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which “it” (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no
matter how minimalist it goes. In short what we think with thinks us.
It also thinks the world.
And finally you will be prepared for a deep and rational piece of art about the Irak war!