Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

For some reason the Russians keep statues of Vladmir Lenin on display in their cities. Promenade down a prospekt in Moscow or Petersburg and you're bound to come across these granite impositions. It's hard not to recoil while gazing at the statues - the man was, after all, a nun killer, a liquidator of Orthodox clergy, the sponsor of a famine (1921-22) that left some 5 million dead. One wonders, "why keep the asshole around?" The idolatrous function of the statues is surely no more, with faith in Leninism little more than an embarassing relic.

The statues are heavier with historical gravitas then they are with stone, though, and I imagine that it's for this reason that they're preserved.

But statues of Iosif Stalin, on the other hand, are nowhere to be found. The travel guides say that there's still one standing in Petersburg, but I didn't see it while I was there. I did see a bust of him alongside the Kremlin wall, denoting his final resting place (he lied in state next to Lenin for years after his death). It was the only time I saw a sculpture of him, and considering the Russian proclivity for carving their (in)famous citizens from rock, this singular appearance says a lot about how they wish to (dis)remember him.

The absence of these statues is a silence of sorts; their vanishing act denotes a willful striking of the record, a muting (or at least a reducing to murmurs) of portions of historical and cultural recollection. Their absence is blessed lacunae - we all want to forget some things, and it's easy not to remember when there's nothing to jog the memory.

Iosif wanted to be like the idols he planted all over Russia. These mustachioed Baals conveyed a sense of invincibility and religious solemnity becoming of the former seminarian who fancied himself (by way of adopted surname) a "man of steel." The truth couldn't be more opposite, however: Iosif was a man of tiny stature, a yellow-eyed Napoleon with a withered left arm and a defective foot that kept him from fighting in the Great War.

I guess that at the end of his life, Iosif did become like these statues, though certainly not in the way he intended. It's reasonably surmised that many of these statues were forcibly collapsed and turned into rubble before they were hauled away, leaving behind that gaping silence. We can see a similarity in the toppling of the statues with the way in which Iosif departed this world. It was a blood clot in the brain that finally forcibly toppled Stalin, and Martin Amis describes it thusly:

"On March 1 Stalin stirred at midday, as usual. In the pantry, the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 P.M. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. Koba (Iosif) was lying in soiled pajamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce "a buzzing sound" - the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), 'in irons.'"

Paralyzed on his right side, Iosif was statuesque, his skin a grey-blue pallor, his lips blackened from lack of oxygen. He died four days later.

*

By most accounts, Iosif wasn't that diligent of a student when he was in Seminary. If he had been, he might have later remembered the eighth verse of the 115th Psalm, which is a riposte against the makers of idols:

"Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them."

This is practical advice for those who spiritually invest in the temporal and the worldly - one's fate is the same as that which one idolizes.

Idolize money, and one will be easily lost and squandered.

Idolize materialism of the consumerist sort, and one will become obese, overlarded with posessions and insatiable.

Idolize materialism of the philosophical sort, which is the denial of the supernatural and the transcendent, and one is reminded of Bertrand Russell's words: "all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of human achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." There's not hope here, but there is a certain existential nausea.

Idolize the self, the ego, and one eventually succumbs to the perils of megalomania: the insecurity, the paranoia, the delusions of grandeur, the shock that comes from realizing such weighty faith in one's own flesh and will only leads to ruin and eventual decay.

We are frail and fragile creatures, which makes our desire for self-exaltation strange (though perhaps predictable, from the perspective of denial).

*

The most basic element of Christianity is this: God became flesh and lived among us.

*

The thing I can't get my mind around is this: I'm doing my damndest not to put my ultimate faith in things of this world, especially in myself, yet God became just like me, he became a thing of this world. And it's through God's self-imposed frailty and fragility that I will become indelible and perfected.

This is scandalous, counterintuitive. The product of a wild and divine genius.