“MYSTICISM AND POLITICS” — SOUNDS LIKE A MISQUOTE?

One evening over thirty years ago I was sitting at my kitchen table, probably tearing my hair out over bills I couldn’t pay, when the phone rang. An unfamiliar woman’s voice asked, “Is this Dr. Story?”

My caller was a Professor of Russian Philosophy at a small Southern college. I knew the name.

She continued, “Is this the Dr. Story who writes about Berdiaev?”

I said yes, but wondered how she knew this. “From where I sit,” I told her, “I can see on my shelves a three-volume collection of Russian philosophy which bears your name. But how do you know mine?”

“From someone who recently returned from the Soviet Union,” she replied.

At the time I had published no scholarly articles, only a handful of poems, and – if memory serves – one book review. There was as yet no internet. So I was a bit startled. But one of the things you were aware of in those days, as a Soviet scholar, was samizdat’, the underground press. The Soviet Union was a large country, but a relative handful of people were a part of this clandestine information system, sustained through typewriters and carbons, mainly. I had visited the USSR one spring and, while in Moscow, consulted, very hush-hush, with people there who were interested in Berdiaev. Obviously, my caller’s informant had talked to the same people.

So who was Nicolai Berdiaev? A Russian philosopher of the early twentieth century (1874-1948), on whom I had written a two-volume dissertation. And the purpose of that late-night phone call was to invite me to deliver a paper at the annual gathering of people in my field. The conference was to take place in Atlanta and would be attended by scholars from all over the country, and the world.

I was flattered. But as I explained to my caller, I was no longer associated with a university, was currently neither teacher nor scholar, and in fact was just scraping by doing low-paying jobs, which were all I could find. She replied that maybe I could get back into the teaching profession on the strength of this paper! This is your chance, she said! Everyone will be there; you never know!

To make a long story short, she kept calling and, eventually, I weakened. I called in sick to my temp job one day, stayed up for 24 hours, producing a twenty-minute paper in one giant exhalation. I took an inexpensive night flight to Atlanta, flopped at a cheap hotel, and the next day managed to evade security in the convention center so I wouldn’t have to pay the registration fee. I delivered my paper with gusto to a packed room. Since I had only one slippery foot in academe and the other foot already sliding toward literature, it didn’t sound much like any other paper at that conference, but I received warm and admiring congratulations from my peers.

As I had expected, however, no job offer emerged. So my paper turned out to be a kind of last hurrah in the groves of academe.

The subject of my talk was “Mysticism and Politics,” a marriage of two ideas that seems, on the face of it, headed for a certain divorce. But that was Berdiaev for you. A brilliant thinker – Christian existentialist, philosophical anarchist and eternal gadfly – whose criticisms were telling, whether or not his solutions held up under scrutiny. And since my paper was never published anywhere else (I never sought that), I’ve now decided to put it up on my website for those who might be curious. About mysticism and politics. Or Berdiaev. Or Russian history. Or anarchism. Or power. Or me. (Click to read Mysticism & Politics: Nicholas Berdiaev and the Revolution of 1905.)

The mysticism of the title is Berdiaev’s, of course, not mine. But what we clearly shared, at that time, was the philosophical anarchism alluded to in the epigram I chose to begin the paper. And there may still be a trace of that feeling in me today, in the form of a deep-breathing skepticism towards all those who voluntarily occupy positions of power, including – on those rare occasions when it’s an issue – myself.

Share this post:
Facebooktwittermail
This entry was posted in More About Jim, On Writing, Publications, Readings & Events, Whatever. Bookmark the permalink.