“Fuck you, man,” he laughs. We both sip. “I'm curious about this A-R-E business. What the hell is an eidolon?”
“It's difficult to explain. I guess it's the ideal form of an individual, something along the lines of the soul. I mean, I initially thought it was just another word for soul or ghost, but Faxo clearly believed there to be some type of nuance there. All he did was make the whole thing more convoluted.”
“So it's not synonymous with the soul?”
“I mean, a thesaurus may tell you differently, but there are a number of distinctions between a soul and an eidolon — not that I really know what any of them are. There's more than just the spiritual connotation. There's another side, but I can't seem to figure that part out. Faxo couldn't explain it all that well. He was kind of a pedantic guy.”
“A pedantic artist?” he laughs. “That's unheard of.”
“Seriously, though, it just doesn't make any sense to me. I understand the drive to be without the restraints of convention, which is what he kept talking about; but he also mentioned some other context in which the word applies without really explaining it. I don't see how the two interact. A part of me was thinking that it had Scholastic implications, but I don't see Faxo as being that type of person. Then again, he did bring up Plato once or twice. And Aristotle.”
“What about thetans?”
“What?”
“It just sounds like a cult to me.”
“That's what I said.”
“My guess is that it doesn't explain anything because it's not supposed to,” he continues. “It's just some bullshit ideology that lumps all of the problems of the world together so that it can then proffer some vague solution. This is how all cults and conspiracy theories operate. The schizophrenics aren't all that different.”
“But Faxo was an intelligent guy…”
“What?”
“What's the name of this song? It's so fucking catchy. I've had it in my head for like a week.”
“I think it's called 'Young Folks'. I don't know who does it. This is one of Melissa's mixes. I'll burn you a copy.”
“Thanks.” I take the last drag from my cigarette. “What was I saying?”
“About Faxo.”
“Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't seem like he'd get caught up in that type of bullshit.”
“You do know that Heidegger embraced Nazism.” My skepticism is discernible. “At least in nineteen thirty-three.” I dig at the cigarette, which, again, has refused to go out. “It just goes to show that even intelligent people will embrace some completely insane elements of a system, provided they agree with some of its underlying tenets. Heidegger felt that democracy was not capable of coexisting with the technological advances of the twentieth century. Furthermore, he wanted a society that promoted the epic, the magnanimous. Democracy, he felt, only promoted mediocrity.”
“I think that analogy is a bit exaggerated.”
“I won't deny that it is; I'm just saying that this Faxo character probably gave you the hagiographer's Keens, not the real Keens.” I tilt my head. “He probably came close to deifying the man.”
“But they, the A-R-E, aren't political. The organization isn't really religious, either. In fact, they didn't even seem to have an agenda or anything. They just wanted to pursue a, an — I don't know — halcyon lifestyle. They wanted to be like this nexus of peace and joy amidst a world that seems to have lost its soul — kind of like an artistic Kibbutz.”
“A what?”
“It's like a Jewish commune. It's not really supposed to be politic—”
“So they don't want to be political? Is it because they see politics as futile?”
“I won't put words into mouths.”
“But it's implied, right? That's what the art world has been doing for years. You've heard of Dadaism.”
“But it's different than anti-art and all of the other garbage that people espouse when they're too lazy and self-absorbed to do anything worthwhile. It's spiritual, too. Dadaism was not only nihilistic; it was atheistic, too, wasn't it?”
“I always considered nihilism inherently atheistic.”
“A lot of people would say no, but that's another conversation. It's not just that the A-R-E reject everything; there's a reverence for life, which is something completely anathema to nihilism. There's this earnest desire to…I guess revel in life, to relish it, to make it…I know this sounds stupid, but human. Modern art seems to be drowning in vulgar materialism and the basest of human emotions, the idea that the Unconscious is a bog of fury and lust. Even high art, when it strives to convey something complex or poignant, seems to be necessarily pessimistic.”
“You do read the newspapers, don't you? It's a veritable shit-storm out there. Besides the energy crisis that's about to erupt in this country, you have terrorism, civil wars on just about every continent, enduring strife in most of Africa, a culture of waste in just about every country that would call itself industrialized, waning civil participation, famine…I could go on. The point is that cloistering yourself from the harsh realities of the world either by denouncing them from the ivory tower or by ignoring them is nothing more than Modernist escapism. And we don't need escapism or its equally useless counterpart: bleak, apocalyptic millennialism. We need to recognize the problems confronting us as a species. We need people who not only see these problems, but artists and politicians who can shift the discourse of this society in order to actually address them realistically. I mean, free-market capitalism is no longer a sustainable system. We need a figure on the left who can drive this point home.”
“So vote Gore in oh-eight,” I laugh.
“You know what I'm saying, though,” he smirks.
“I agree with you; I just also believe that people need to enjoy life to a certain degree — that they shouldn't get so bogged down by the plight of the world that they lose heart, and end up just going with the flow. I think that's one of the primary objectives of the A-R-E — a celebration of humanity for just a night every so often. That's what I got out of Daphne and Patrick more than Willis. They seemed to imply that the A-R-E congregates on a fairly infrequent basis in order to have these parties.”
“What else do they do?”
“What do you mean?”
“When they're not having these raging parties with furries—”
“—I think they're called plushies when they wear full costumes like that.”
“Is that capitalized?”
“I don't fucking know.”
“Whatever. So you have plushies and Elvis impersonators and models from Seurat paintings and men in diapers and pointy, German helmets…what are those things called again?”
“Pickelhaubes.”
He laughs. “What do they do on the other days of the week or month…maybe even year?”
“I never thought to ask. It just seems like a loose federation of artists.”
“And the acronym could really be anything. It could be Argonauts Reclaiming Eden, for all you know.”
“That sounds pretty cool. Did you just come up with that?”
“No, I've been saving that one up for a while now.”
“Well, regardless, I know it could mean anything, but you shouldn't think of it as a group that has the potential to change the world. What I saw was just a party. I mean, every culture has their festivals, their Bacchanalias.”
“I guess. It just seems like a waste to me. If there are all of these famous artists floating around the place, I don't see why they don't put their heads together to come up with something of substance.”
“Maybe they do.”
15.1
Tomas is a drunken mess. His voice mail, which I receive as the nearly empty train speeds past sleepy brown facades, is a desultory harangue that conveys only one important piece of information: The Sheeps are going to be going on about quarter to one. The name sounds familiar, but I can't associate them with any person or place.