Maoist Kayak

It would appear that most of the beautiful and brilliant young folks in Paris during the last half of the 60s, leading up to May ’68 and its depressive aftermath, were one sort of Maoist or another. Among the radical leftists there was much sectarian bickering and rancour such that many Maoists were official enemies with one another. The poster children for the beautiful and beatific Maoist Parisians are surely Anne Wiazemsky and Juliet Berto in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece La chinoise (1967). Godard said of Maoist China that its greatest accomplishment was creating a nation where they only needed one book, a little if notorious red one. Personally, I’d go for the Analects of Confucius, but that’s hardly here nor there. No nation will ever actually be operating on a single book…no matter who’s the crook or how badly the populace be shook. “Mao thinks in an almost infinite way,” says brilliant but often vexing French philosopher Alain Badiou. Mao certainly didn’t know how to control or direct the widespread chaos and mass murder of the Cultural Revolution, whether or not he thought like I Ching. After the revolution the main purpose of the Communist Party was to make sure shit like that didn’t ever happen again.

The Persian empire was so wide

they did not believe the sun shined

beyond their borders.

“One could claim that the Paris Commune in 1871 was a complete ‘disaster,’” says Badiou. “20,000 workers shot to death in the streets of Paris—nevertheless, it was by reflecting on the Paris Commune that Lenin developed the means for a victorious revolution in 1917. Likewise, it is only by reflecting on the Cultural Revolution that we can prepare for the future of the communist political movement. Why? Because the Cultural Revolution was the sole example of a revolution under the conditions of state socialism. It is no coincidence that the most important creation of the Cultural Revolution took the name the Shanghai Commune.”

Imagine you are travelling 

over a great expanse of terrain

engulfed in flames

and not a single soul

has answer

for your inquiries.

Imagine you need

to pass through town

cloaked.