320
FRANCIS GOLFFIN6
limited, so is the significance of our actions. Of course von
Mise!
is not, as many liberals assume, a conscious advocate of the
status
quo: the status quo can have no meaning for him, since it
is
a
temporal category, a mere
flatus vocis.
Material improvement,
though real enough, happens in an evolutionary void; its locus
is
the perennial stage of human action, which has remained substan–
tially the same ever since man outgrew his bestial phase. Since
this
crucial transition (or since that second one, from barter to a money
economy) time has stood still. That this stillness is the stillness
of
death--or the frightening stillness one senses before a disaster–
never seems to have entered the mind of our proud philosopher.
Bismarck has called politics the "doctrine of the possible."
While Utopian Socialism may be viewed by its detractors as the
"doctrine of the impossible," von Mises' praxeology offers us, quite
simply, an impossible doctrine.
Francis Golffina
CORRECTION
In Kenneth Koch's
Poe.try Chronicle,
which appeared in the
January-February, 1961 issue, several lines were inadvertently
dropped from the opening paragraph. Following is the corrected
text:
Frank O'Hara's
Second Avenue
is a poem in eleven
parts-about the length of
The Witch of Atlas.
Its chief persona
is
a sort of Whitmanian I, though other voices appear and disappear
as they do for example in the
Can tos
and
Paterson.
The I is wanner
and more urgently involved in the details of his surroundings than
Whitman's I, the surroundings in this case being New York, but a
New York that no one has described, a 1953 springtime New York
of abstract expressionist 'painters, luncheonettes, movies, and dry
cleaners. This New York is not viewed tragically or sociologically,
but lyrically. Mr. O'Hara writes about it as though he knew it so
well he didn't even have to look at it any more; its details are so
naturally associated with his strongest feelings that they are con–
stantly turning into symbols and back into surface again:
Shall I ever be able to avail myself of the service called
«Same Day Cleaning", and in what face have I fought the Host?
THE EDITORS
