Waiting for Barby
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey WAITING FOR BARBY BE SPONTANEOUS-OR ELSE I hope you can stay with this column to the end. I know that I would find a part of myself yearning to get on to some new...
...Duties which were once part of being alive are now seen as virtues...
...To remain with a traditional religion, or abandon it, to continue a marriage or leave one, or live with someone, or come out of the closet— everything gets chosen, anything important feels too godawful deliberate...
...I was happy about that...
...The most obvious alternative to Western democracy is, sad to say, nothing so interesting as barbarianism...
...Because the barbarians are coming today...
...They have sincere lines in their faces the way other people have frown lines...
...I know that I would find a part of myself yearning to get on to some new distraction within minutes...
...In an important, occasionally infuriating work, The Betrayal of the West (Sea-bury), Jacques Ellul raises the question: Are we willing to will the West...
...Lawrence worried about too much consciousness brought into lovemaking, and called it "sex in the head...
...We don't have barbarians...
...No grail myth is out there waiting...
...It is certain that something will come to us from cultures we haven't yet appreciated—but before we assume that all of our future is to be found there, we have to ask whether the West is really as played out as it seems to be...
...Drugs, alcohol, marital breakdown, sexual promiscuity, and television are all symptoms, not the problem...
...Why isn't anything going on in the senate...
...Roman society was played out, but there was something fresh about the barbarians...
...Our barbarians learned their ideals from Parisian academics...
...The problem is that we must always be interested, distracted, diverted, and we aren't willing to pause long enough to learn what it is we are avoiding so frantically...
...Those people were a kind of solution...
...Whom can we look to...
...he went on, determined, I guess, to justify his affection for his offspring...
...Because my children are people...
...The vague knowledge that something is wrong with the way we feel most of the time has led us to a dreadful self-consciousness...
...Doomed from the start...
...He didn't know the half of it...
...their eyes sparkle too much, maybe overdosed with Murine...
...D.H...
...There isn't any fresh blood left on earth...
...Invasion was a hopeful thing...
...I also know I am not at all unique...
...I'm beginning to feel empty again...
...They've held their faces that way so long they stuck, just as mothers always warned they would...
...Maybe this is one reason for the popularity of movies like Stars Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...You know why...
...What's the point of senators making laws now...
...During the Vietnam war a woman asked me if a group I was working with needed an extra draft counselor...
...Years of this take their toll: look at the older psychologists on the human potential circuit...
...How serious the people's faces have become...
...We are faced at the borders with 19th century scien-tism, a crude form of Marxism...
...Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating...
...Although his definition of the West is never completely clear, Ellul insists convincingly that the West today lacks an honest sense of its past, and he accuses intellectuals of abandoning a commitment to the values which have mattered most in Western history—a belief in freedom, and the absolute value of the individual...
...Our future may lie buried in the Third World, in ways which have yet to be made clear...
...The barbarians are due today...
...Everything serves as therapy, politics more than anything else...
...but he saves his fire for those writers and thinkers who believe the West to be the repository of all evil, while other societies—no matter how oppressive— are viewed as blessed places, progressive and peace-loving...
...We talk about spontaneity and naturalness precisely because of our distance from those things:' 'Come on, let's try to be spontaneous...
...Marx was certainly not so sure of himself as the Paris-educated Cambodians are...
...Boredom is our biggest moral problem...
...But at the end, Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion...
...What do we have to hope for...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come...
...The meeting of Greco-Roman hope and barbarian myth gave to the West things as wonderful as the fairy tales we still know, the grail myth, and a sense of magic which informs us to this day...
...And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer...
...The Celtic cross, the round-eyed impersonal figures of barbarians' art, were infusions of new blood...
...In 1904 C. P. Cavafy wrote a poem, a cutting picture of bored Romans waiting anxiously for their city to fall: What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum...
...Ellul is far from easy on the West, which he sees as wounded and self-contradictory from the start of its history...
...Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought...
...The most powerful ideology in the non-Western world is our own cast-off, one of our last big ideas...
...We have given to the poorest nations of the world our most hopeful ideology, and it looks stale a few decades later...
...24 November 1978: 743 Now what's going to happen to us without the barbarians...
...And it goes on: the barbarians will be received by the emperor, the people are all dressed to dazzle the barbarians, the orators are silent because elegant speech bores the barbarians...
...A doctor at a party tells me, "I like my children...
...I want to get involved in something," she said...
...The only barbarians we can hope for, the only ones who could be any sort of solution, will have to come from somewhere else, some place really distant, star-like, marvelous...
...Why are the senators sitting there without legislating...
...So we look to the one place left where something new might be happening—the stars...
...Our real barbarians aren't even as interesting as we are—and we know how dead we are...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
