On Cannibals and Christians

List the symptoms. We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd, a homosexual genius who spent thirty years as a thief; black humor is its wit, the dances are livid and solitary—they are also orgiastic: orgy or masturbation—the first question posed by the art of the absurd. So the second: is the art rational or absurd? Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste, and we are waiting in the pot for the big roar of waters when the world goes down the pipe? Or are we face to face with a desperate but most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding, that gutted swinish foul old bedding on which two centuries of imperialism, high finance, moral hypocrisy and horror have lain? The skulls of black men and the bowels of the yellow race are in that bed, the death of the Bride of the Sabbath i...