I should know the end of my American story, and maybe I did, but didn't want to believe myself. I had many advances in life, she was the biggest of all. I was expected to write. Write good books. I didn't. And she is taken away now. I understand it. I wouldn't give me another chance too....
One has to wait and I did. Now I know the story of this book, it's my story with Esther. It's a love story. The usual. We met, we had a family and we lost it.
It's all took place in America, all -- good and bad. Yes, because of America, too. There are many pages on Marxism in this book. Marx won, I lost. Nothing new about it.
No, it's not the childhood, but the old age needs simplicity. I'm tired of my half steps, the pages on postmodernism. The silly name in the first place, it's getting more stupid every another decade. 21sth century, 3rd millennium -- and we still have no name for our history. At 54 I shouldn't be afraid to say it: the Era of Communism!
No, not just Post-AmeriKa, but the centuries ahead of us of total communization...
Go to the communism page (chapter) and explain it!
This is my political contribution to the Y2K elections.
Maybe it's time to write "Anti-American" about the end of democracy in America, about American civilization that replaced American culture. Who said that the United States would escape the fate of the Old World? The socialism and communism that Europe went through. Who said that America is young?
I reread Alexis de Toucquvill's "Democracy in America" again (do it too) and there are plenty of warnings about the dangers that are in strengths of American freedoms. There are places in the books are in need of the modern commentaries. He calls it a new nation, the birth of which we can watch from the moment of conception. Right here is a sign that it must a different, unusual "nation"! Maybe not a nation at all by the traditional standards. How young is this "nation" if it was transplanted from the old Europe?
.... Let me be personal, since this is a "personal non-fiction" and I write about myself -- American Anatoly. Besides, I write my family story, for you, my children. It's a love story, kids, I told you.
Look, after all I needed to look at myself as an American. I was prepare to see what I discovered...
... In order for you not to get confused and understand what I mean by "communism" you should read the chapter on Foucault. I believe it's 25 years ago he published "Discipline and Punish" explaining the new CULTURAL forms of control. The land of my birth try to cut into postmodernity 1917 and used the government as a means of the social manipulation. Foucault argues that we have much more sophisticated mechanism -- the built-in cultural self-control. He doesnt's mention the prehistorical times (before what we know as history began), when the primitives have the same self-limitations implanted through traditions, rituals, behavior (Read Frazer). The contemporary Western society governs not from the outside, but inside of what we used to call "individuals"...
A few years later Deleuze proposed to call us, human beings, "dividuals"...
Why don't you have a closer look at what is going on right now -- your and my ways of communications. Does any agency controls my or your thought process right now? Nevertheless, our "dialogue" is limited. Can we even use the name "dialogue"? Of course I can call my experience of reading "War and Peace" a dialogue with Tolstoy. Alas, me and Leo we separated by space and time and BOOK was the great technology of the history to cut through time and space. It's not the same with our relations, my friend. We could be connected in thje same time... if we are ready to give up on real space in favor of cyper-space (which exists only in time). So, how the lack of real space controls us, Anatoly?
In order for you and me to communicate with the speed of light across the globe, both of us have to leave the 3D world with flesh, bodies, the usual senses... We have to die. Or at least to behave as dead. Like me and Tolstoy. Who is dead, him, me? Both...
But to call it self-censorship? Marx and many after him called it "alienation" (product of the labor process). According to his logic our communication is nothing short of labor; I and you have to departure from our physical unity (mind and body) and act as angels!
This book lived through so many conceptual transformations that I lost track of them. It was pared with the SELF, it was called "Communism in America"....
For a while it has a title "Resurrection: The American Book" and -- "Hell of Paradise"....
The Second Death....
You decide whatever you like and call it however you want. You can even give it your own title.
I am so easy. I left the book to stay open, unfinished. I broke it into three part for technical reasons: Part One -- Social, Part Two -- Cultural, Part Three -- Spiritual. First -- what is in front of me, Second -- what is on me, Last -- inside me. For example, the chapter WAR. You can't live anywhere without being affected by the environment, as we all know, the skin is the place when I and the world meet.
If you follow the "geography" of my books, the African Book was about the old world with man and history; "Father-Russia" is about the transition from the old to the new and super-new. "America" is the New World. But the postmodern doesn't stop here. The generator of time (even pomo time) is the Self (and this is the subject of another manuscript). I didn't want to blame AmeriKa for all the sins of the Western world and I put the Post-American universe in "Theology of Technology" (TECH). Well, there is one more -- POV. Perhaps, the last one explains what I mean by the Resurrection Age. But this is beyond and above anything historical, including the author.
You and me, we, have to live through another big rewrite. You, I have to insert the personal chronology; the years and events of my American life. Some of them I place in "Father-Russia" and in "HIM" (the African Book), but the main story is here. What's the story? Didn't I tell you? How I fought for my family and lost it.
Look, I try. I try to write it, but I have difficult time to hold my head up....
This book lived through so many conceptual transformations that I lost track of them. It was pared with the SELF, it was called "Communism in America"....
