10,601. RUDIMENTS, pt. 244

RUDIMENTS, pt. 244

Making Cars

I've always tried to be on a 

learning curve, onto something 

new, and never without a study. 

That's always led me into 

sometimes conflicting and 

sometimes confounding and

contradictory points, which 

I've then had to study, in turn 

and find a conclusion for with 

which to back out of the 

apparent dead-end I was on 

the way into. Sometimes that

is the most amazing part of the

learning. It's been my experience

to see that that is the very thing

which people first lose. The

'quest' ongoing, by which to

pull together and build up their

lives. Journalists, certainly, have

loss of this immediately; the

very profession (supposedly)

demands it and now it is even

worse, as journalism has simply

degenerated into advocacy. I

don't think there really is a pure

'journalism' today, any longer.

All of that purity and neutrality

reporting stuff has fallen away, and

for sure Ochs, Sulzberger, and

Graham too, are laughing, 

somewhere, their shorts and 

panties off, respectively.

-

The contradictions are what most

baffled me. In NY City, say, if I

had asked a coal dealer or such,

about 1969, what he thought of

the politics of the day, Lindsay,

police, whatever, he'd not have

minced words, and would have 

clearly, and without any overlap

or contradiction, stated, 'That

son-of-a-bitch is ruinin' my life

with his east-side ways. Taxing 

my horse, and now each bushel 

I haul, and then demanding a

permit fee for inspecting my

shovels. And then wanting my

horse off the street as 'outmoded

conveyance.' Who the Hell do they

think they are.....' There's certainly

no hedging or gray area in those 

words, nor any back-tracking 

then to put forth an agenda-ized

reference to current political 

attitudes of correctness. It was

all critically straight, and blunt.

In other things, the inherent

contradictions are what

drove me crazy.

-

As I studied Martin Luther, 

for instance (Elmira College, 

Christina Rosner, '1974 / 1975), 

I found this baffling contradiction, 

referring to his religious breakaway, 

the peasant's revolt, and (the 

contradiction) to whom one's 

allegiance is owed, even after

he's destroyed the chains and the

shackles. "Luther's condemnation

of the Peasants' Revolt is what his

strongest critics today most remember

about him. In the early 1520's 

Protestant Pamphleteers promised

both burghers in the cities and

peasants on the land a new spiritual

egalitarianism (the 'freedom' of the

Christian, the priesthood of all

believers), in place of the Church's

hierarchical cures of souls. Like the

Jews in 1523, the common man, too,

heard in the Reformation a timely

political message of autonomy and

social cohesion. Backing up those

overtures were Luther's denunciations

of the tyranny of princes and lords and

the sheepishness of their subjects: 'Our

rulers are mad; they actually think they

can do whatever they please and order

their subjects to follow them in it, while

their subjects, in turn, make the mistake

of believing that they must obey

whatever their rulers command.' Now

that certainly seems pretty clear; cut and

dry. Yes. A time for revolt, true to the

form of the Reformation values of the

Lutheran breakaway. YET. Yet, here

was the contradiction: Even as he 

speaks of the sympathy for the plight 

of the peasants, he undercuts it by

stating that the disputed plight of the

peasants' rights of issues of body and

soul were matters for the secular

courts and not to be freelanced by

'gospelers' and 'revolutionaries.' His

bracing counsel baffled me : "Peasants

should fight as a people who will not

and ought not endure wrong or evil 

according to the teaching of nature.

Your grievances regarding game,

birds, fish, wood, and forests, and the

unfair levying of services, tithes, taxes,

imposts and excises, and death taxes

are matters for lawyers, and do not 

concern a Christian. You must let

the name of Christian go and act as

men and women who want their

human and natural rights." This was

a crossroads I always had trouble

passing over. Proper instruction

for a society based on the rule of

law, maybe, but bitter counsel for

the peasants. Luther eventually

denounced the peasants, and 

their revolt, for tying together 

the religious teaching of the 

Reformation with socio-political 

revolution. They'd lost it all, 

and (in my mind) Luther actually

had shown his real hand. I
would call that baiting them
right up to the line.

-

Oh but did I have trouble with 

that! No one ever seemed right
enough to cleanly cut and parse
what was going on between worlds.
There seemed always a compromise 
or a wink with a nudge to the
prevailing powers. In Luther's
day, remember, those prevailing
powers (as we know them now)
were not yet even fully formed  -  
much was still wide open, liquid,
and without shape; but the 'world'
as people had known it, was falling
away. It haunted me enough to 

make me conclude that the 

entire mess of them, reformers 

and the rest, were nothing more 

than the same hounds of hell 

in a different dress. Always

falling back onto layers and 

rank  and protocols. Everywhere, 

everywhere, another mini-church 

a'borning, one of levels and ranks 

and strictures. It all ran on money, 

and everyone wanted their nickel. 

I often then wondered  -  is that 

how extremists are made? And 

that, my friends and ladies, is

what led me to William Blake;

of whom and which you

will read next.