"As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing...."

There is no telling how it will all turn out in the end. At the present moment, in this phase of exploration [i.e., after the collapse of the Soviet Union], the picture is confused by the novelty of the situation, the predominance of vicarious entertainment in the life of the masses, what Blake would call spectral enjoyment--everything on TV; the life-styles of the rich and famous offering vicarious participation in spectacles of waste; spectator sports offering vicarious agonistics; democracy restricted to mass voting for media stars. Not only bread but also circuses. It is not clear whether this half-hearted arrangement is an interregnum or the final solution. The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong.

Norman O. Brown, Dionysus in 1990.

It is one thing to bet that the Grand Inquisitor is wrong and quite another to embrace the present dispensation and fall in love with Big Brother. In this late essay, Norman O. Brown was second-guessing himself--as he often did. In so many ways, Brown embodied Van Gogh's definition of an artist: "I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved." Such second-guessing, however, sent chills of horror down his old friend Herbert Marcuse's spine. At the end of the day, Marcuse was a moralist in a fairly old-fashioned sense: that is to say, he was willing to take stands on what he thought was right and wrong. Brown, on the other hand, wished to move with Nietzsche "beyond good and evil." This is where the two men parted company. Put another way, Brown was ultimately optimistic about human beings and their future; Marcuse was hopeful as a matter of principle (see the closing lines of One Dimensional Man) but not what one might call "optimistic."

It is difficult to distinguish Brown's "optimism," however, from a counsel of despair. His embrace of James Joyce's HCE ("Here Comes Everybody") was Whitmanian in temper--he gazed out upon democratic vistas--but one may be forgiven for suspecting that, by 1990, he had thrown in the towel of political and cultural resistance.

The Mazeppist chooses, however, to give Nobby the benefit of the doubt and to believe that he was trying to make the best of a bad situation--particularly at a time in his life when the evening shadows were darkening.

Moreover, the Mazeppist does not accept a binary choice in this matter: either Marcuse or Brown. Instead, he embraces the third way of Van Gogh: he chooses to "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," or "to believe in God and tie his camel." Betting that the Grand Inquisitor is wrong, he still organizes his life around a Marcusian Great Refusal: seeing the inherent value of ascetic practices ("old ways") he chooses thrift, simplicity, delayed (and, frequently, abjured) gratification over the mindless consumption of bread and circuses.

In so doing, he identifies himself with those "arcane disciplines" that emerged from (and are emblematic of) late antique religiosity. He "wastes" valuable time in ritual behavior that offers no earthly reward. In this small way, he resists the flattening of his humanity into the single dimension that characterizes the consumerist personality.

Combining Brown and Marcuse, he chants Van Gogh's favorite line from the New Testament (2 Corinthians 6:10): "As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing..." (KJV).