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Praxis Praxis, how I loved you. You appear seven times, at least, per page in the volumes of Western Marxism and Socialist Humanism I’m selling twenty, no, thirty years late, so that even the vast Book Graveyard in Rockville won’t take them, if in fact it survives. My wife’s Uncle Mike, the shrink, who also has to retrench, must have the same problem with his shelves full of moldy visionary prepsychopharmaceutical attempts to *analyze schizophrenia. There’s no market for the Talking Cure or for you, praxis, now. Ideas like rusting factories producing mice, like apartment buildings terminally urined by banks and tenants, like untraceable pensions and mortgages, like wasted educations, like space shuttles. So that Mike at a party might quote Laing’s Three Rules for the Creation of Schizophrenics (Rule One: You absolutely must not; Rule Two: Rule One does not exist; Rule Three: There shall be no discussion whatever of the existence or nonexistence of Rules One, Two, or Three) and diffidently mumble, They may not create schizophrenics but they produce *something; and be looked at with the horror and wish to be elsewhere religious types claim they encounter (as indeed they should). But you, dear praxis, don’t even receive that degree of recognition, i.e., contempt. And even I must admit I’ve found you wanting. Under Nixon, for an hour a week I planned to abandon my bourgeois self and the vanity of art, move to Oakland, organize workers and welfare recipients, learn to sweat and talk football and cars while subtly injecting class-consciousness. Under Reagan, an hour a month. Under Bush Two I signed e-petitions, donated money, and never left the house. By then people once on welfare were working four jobs and had eaten their young, while workers in distant jungles awaited some heavenly imam ... Oh praxis, it’s snowing. On Fox, they’ll joke about global warming and sixty million viewers will laugh. I could no more explain to them that the deepening white outside is a pledge of the desert to come than I could clear it; but on the sand in my mind, I croak with thirst and triumph as we burn. Praxis, the self is a hovel, but that doesn’t mean we want to move. It’s a musty gruel that becomes the sweetest persimmon when someone, ourselves included, asks us to share. Near Shelley’s grave, the ashes of Gramsci sift from his tomb beneath a corrupt and epicene moon. Victor Serge, dying in a taxi, couldn’t afford the fare and must tour Mexico City until the traffic stops. Rexroth wrote his friend Jacobson that, despite Stalin, despite McCarthy, they had been *the happiest men alive in our day*; and perhaps they were, but his book won’t fetch fifty cents at the Book Graveyard. And don’t talk to me, praxis, about art as praxis; I know what that amounts to. Marcel Marceau’s old film about a park: the little girl, the rude little boy, the bashful somewhat larger girl and youth, the wistful or preoccupied feeders of pigeons; and he – do you see – must be all of them, until the gates close and the last, the old man, hobbles off with his terrible stare.