Midlife crisis of the oracle

“To Serapion of Athens, the stoic, who was himself a poet and who criticized the bad literary taste of his times in sustaining the point of view that the verses of the oracles, since they were authored by Apollo, chief of the Muses, could only be excellent, Boethius the Epicurien replied, pertinently and impertinently: have you heard the story of the painter Pauson?

“No”, responded Sarapion.

“You should know this story. Having received a commission to paint a horse rolling on the ground, he painted one that represented a horse running; as the buyer got angry, Pauson began to laugh and turned the canvas upside down: thus, the bottom became the top, and the horse no longer seemed to gallop, but to roll on the ground. This, according to Bion, is the fate of certain trains of reasoning, when they are reversed. Thus some, instead of pretending that the verses of the oracles are beautiful because they are written by God, would say, on the contrary, that God was not their author because they are so bad. The first claim may be uncertain, but what is certain is that the oracles are composed in a manner that is unworthy of divinity.” – The oracle controversy, Robert Flacelière

The oracle is bored, finally, of the future

Ablution in the cold water of the spring  

Autopsy of the victim, the signature

In the disposition of the organs, fate’s writing.

The wisecracks from all the golden codgers on the wall

The epsilon, the laurel wand, moving down the hall

To the chamber where you get your meds and electroshock

So little and so much makes a poet

When the gods have decided to put in their hand

Just as the city’s sack is found where nobody knows it

In the spilled guts of the sacrificed ram

Oh Popeye when you play upon your guitar

Do you play the things that will be or that are?

She sees ambiguity shaped by ambiguity

and that wisdom is hidden in a children’s joke

or in some stray, scrawled obscenity

in a jakes or toted in a poke.

To pose riddles and not ever guess her own

Has turned her voice into a frog’s voice, and her heart into a stone.

A review of Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine

Asclepius was the child of Apollo and Coronis, a mortal princess. Out of jealousy, Apollo struck Coronis with a lightning bolt when she was pregnant, but rescued the child in her womb. Medicine  begins with a femicide. We've always suspected as much.  But as always in the heavily redacted and montaged world of myth (where all that is deep is condensed with all that is shallow, where the cartoon apes the archetype), there is another story too: that Chiron the Centaur, who taught Achilles, also taught Asclepius. He taught music as well, which is how Achilles cured himself of his anger towards Agamemnon. As well, he taught the virtues that calmed the soul. Thus, as is pointed out in Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine, Chiron taught medicine, music and justice as entangled one with the other and, ultimately, one.

There’s a certain kind of medical essay, a book-like essay, that obscurely keeps the faith with that unity. Lewis Thomas in the U.S. is the best known practitioner – Szczeklik was that figure in Poland.

One expects, from these essays, certain doxa: information that has the righteous aura of believe it or not. You will learn, in Catharsis, for instance, that there are 82 distinct terms for different types and properties of the pulse listed in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary. There’s paradoxical pulse, there’s bigeminal pulse, there’s thread pulse, and so on.

The music in Catharsis begins, literally, with the heart beat, and goes through myth and personal experience – the case studies, patient’s whose histories are eccentric, revelatory – and science.

Before the Internet there was Indra’s net. There was as well Ananke’s – Ananke, the Greek goddess of fate. Although Goddess is not quite right – the net of fate was stronger than the Gods. This is the starting point.  The essays in Catharsis are oriented to the modern mythographerk, Roberto Calasso,k taking myth as a soundtrack, lifetrack, culturetrack. In the vocabulary and procedures of medicine,  Szczeklik sees a thousand ties to what lies outside the “science of medicine”. In order to see this, Szczeklik seizes on the terms and practices of the doctor, for instance the “anamnesis” – the name for the patient’s recounting of his history – which Szczeklik associates with Plato’s notion that memory precedes perception in the order of knowledge. In medical terms, the patient’s story precedes the doctor’s observation. The net in which all cause and effect is caught, where memory and observation converge, is what medicine is always going to be about, at least practically. Ethically – which is to say socially and politically – it is about catharsis, purification. 

“Some people have assumed that the text about katharsis in the Poetics has been amputated by an “unknown censor”; others have expressed the view that it was the subject of a separate, irretrievably lost essay. Some have even said in hushed tones that the Stagirite deliberately left the crucial issue of art open ended, because it eludes unambiguous intertpretation. Did he perhaps notatice that in the first syllable of the word he meant to define an ancient, unfathomed mystery lay spellbound? We fist find “Ka” at the beginning of the history of ancient Egypt as “one of the most difficult concepts for the Wewstern mind to grasp”. It was associated with the force that sustains life, the power of creation, and the soul of man. Centuries earlier, at the dawn of Hindu civilization, Kas was the name of the father of the gods, the life-giving element that pervaded the world. The god’s name Ka meant “Who?” – and the first reaction to it was “boundless awe”?”

This is the theme that links Szczeklik’s humanism to his Catholicism. It is a seductive idea that Szczeklik presents without presenting its opposite – something like Bataille’s notion that filth (can) make us free. Something like the feminist notion that the construction of the virtue of purity has participated in that original, Apollonian femicide. The anti-humanistic theme is not addressed or even very addressable from Szczeklik’s point of vantage. 

The strong tones that contrast pollution and purity slow down Catharsis as it travels from Paracelsus to modern discussions of, say, doctor assisted suicide, which prompts credal negations that are all the more disappointing in as much as we know the vast referential pharmacopiea that Szczeklik deals in earlier is dispensed with abruptly by references to Pope John Paul.

Still: I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for medical essays this plague season. It should be cut, I think, with the harsher diatribes of James Le Fanu’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, which I reviewed in 2001, here. 

Is it like fun

“Is it like fun? Writing

was always hard hard for me, but I think I’d love love

to be a writer.” To be a poppy, though…

The green pod bending

the bristly, slim green stem, or

- “right right right, I bet it must be

like a fucking orgasm if like everybody reads

your book” -

Look

how a stem shoots out from the others

mission creeps the pod forward which stick out horizontal

to the ground

rather than the stem bearing the curling weight of

those downward pods.

They are built for wind,

for distribution, for coverage.

Can one imagine

(“what’s the name of your book?”)

what they imagine if such things  flicker

in the green vegetative soul? A world of poppies.

A utopia of poppies.

Every flower is an aggressor.

- Karen Chamisso

what is herd immunity?

What is herd immunity?

A lot of old fights continue long after they should in science, if science were this instrument that the positivists extol. We are seeing one now, which is all about epidemiology and “herd immunity”.

It is worth noticing that the groups attacking epidemiology are using the same instruments that were honed in the fifties. In 1951, Doll and Hill, in Britain, published a famous epidemiology paper linking cigarette smoking to cancer. This was the first of a flood of studies linking the two. The cigarette companies, under the guidance of certain genius advertisers, found many a compliant scientist to batter against the whole idea of using the statistical models employed by Doll and Hill. These people made one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century: in the interest of ideology and profit, you can legally obfuscate mass murder and get away with it. Thus, as cancers connected to smoking regularly swept away half a million peeps per year all through the late sixties, seventies, eighties, government did nothing but put warnings on cigarette packs. While Cold War scholars regularly brought up Lysenko to show how ideology crazily led to terror in Stalin’s Russia, they simply ignored these figures and this social phenomenon.

Their heirs have made it impossible for the world’s second largest economy, the U.S., to do the least thing towards averting the climate catastrophe we know is coming. And they are the same peeps who are behind the “let’s open the economy” crowd. Having those cancer deaths under their belt, the Corona-virus deaths will be as nothing.

One of the weapons that they bring to this battle is an unexamined notion called “herd immunity.” From the halls of George Mason University to the streets of Stockholm, this “mathematical model” is supposed to show that lockdowns are poopy ways of dealing with a minor problem.

So, what is herd immunity? A simple definition is that it is the resistance of a population to the invasion and spread of an infection. We should contextualize this definition – it arose from considerations of the level of vaccination needed to suppress an infection. Thus, for instance, they vaccinate against the hoof and mouth disease among cattle trying to firewall that disease so it does not have relays to get into the unvaccinated part of the population. There are new cows being born all the time, so there is, de facto, a new unvaccinated population coming into the picture. And the disease itself is evolving in relation to the vaccine, so that if enough of the population is not vaccinated it is possible that the evolution of the microbe will lead to resistance that overwhelms the vaccine.

Notice that all of these situations depend upon a vaccine. They also depend on the situations of the population, which can be determined by many factors. Among humans, sanitation and nutrition are pretty strong factors in the spread or suppression of infection. The percentage of the vaccinated in terms of the suppression of a disease can vary. For polio, for instance, Jonas Salk thought that an 85 percent level was needed. In practice, 70 percent was achieved in most countries, and even then there were occasional outbreaks. Still, by 2016, one of the most common oral poliovirus medicines was withdrawn, because it was no longer considered necessary. Still, other polio vaccines are in place and have been implemented in mass.
Compare this regime to the regime of having no drug to cure the disease. In this case, herd immunity means something like: the herd will be culled so that the resisters will survive. Or as George Scott said in Dr. Strangelove, I’m not saying our hair won’t be mussed, 15 to 20 million casualties tops!

The traditional method of fighting against infection, in the absence of a vaccine, has been quarantine. Quarantines are notoriously hard to enforce, since they require coordinated action by a large group of people, some of whom might find it in their interest to violate the quarantine. This is especially true if the population is composed of groups with different levels of vulnerability. This kind of thing is embodied in, say, infrastructure. In the late nineteenth century, many cities embarked on enormous and ambitious sewage projects, because sewage was a well known vector for disease. Though the wealthy had alternatives, they as a group were still vulnerable in cities, so they cooperated. Contrast this with AIDS, where one group is most affected, and a whole population can get by without too much worry about catching it. In this case, the vulnerabilities of one group can be seized by others as a political ploy, or they can be ignored, etc.

When we hear the comforting words, mathematically modeled, we have to remember that the modeling is only as good as the empirical data, and that is not very good. So far, mortality rates have differed considerably. Testing rates which are supposed to give us samples of the larger disease picture often end up giving us pictures of how much testing is going on – especially when we have wildly different samples.

What is brought into focus in these times of crisis is the expendability of a population in terms of the larger socio-economic system. In the 50s, when the AEC became aware that fallout was spreading a potentially lethal radiation load on a population located hundreds of miles from the bomb sites, they came up with a phrase that beautifully condensed the way established power thinks: the low use population. Indeed, is only a matter of time before some rightwing economist dances on the heads of all our dead parents and crows about the silver lining in terms of entitlement for all these old folks dying. Not to speak of the white settler offspring who have absorbed the idea that the virus has much more severe consequences in African American communities – communities that have seen their asset growth basically frozen or in decline from 2000 – and starts celebrating.
And this is the lesson of herd immunity in the C-Virus era: the herders don’t care.

The game of dress up: male novelists/female characters

Angela Carter once wrote that she read novels when growing up for, among other things, insights into being a woman. She read the English writers of the period – a period when Leavis’s “Great Tradition” – and naturally she read D.H. Lawrence – the Leavisite candidate for the truly great English writer (Virginia Woolf being bashed for snobbishness and Joyce for being not sound). As Carter writes, “I smelled a rat in D.H. Lawrence pretty damn quick.”

This does not mean she dismissed Lawrence as an artist. But he was the kind of novelist she wanted to pit herself against, moving aside that stone on the English novel – up to and including my quasi Christian metaphor of the stone being moved aside, the kind of resurrectionary theme Lawrence was all about.

One of her insights into Lawrence involves, well, the same problems that I think about when writing fiction with female characters. 

It has to do with dress-up.

If you read Raymond Chandler, you will notice that, for all of Marlowe’s tough guy gestures, he has the heart of a clothier, a Hollywood costumer. Take this from The High Window:

‘She was wearing a brownish linen  coat and skirt, a broadbrimmed straw hat with a brown velvet band that exactly matched the color of her shoes and the leather trimming on the edges of her linen envelope bag.”

Her linen envelope bag! The fetishizing aura overflows – as auras tend to – when we reach that fashion accoutred bag. Freud isn’t in it, brother.  How many of us know what an envelope bag even is? On the other hand, Marlowe is a product of Hollywood, no bones about it, so that we read these heroic descriptions without wondering too much about this information, as why does Marlowe even know about an envelope bag?

Lawrence, as Carter notices, is also indefatigably fussy about women’s clothing. For all that he was after an encounter with the dark gods buried in Etruscan vases, he was always going on about what his women were wearing. Carter has some great remarks about Women in Love, his “most exuberantly clothed novel” which  “furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex,

trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women

through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con

tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically

fetishistic, obsession with female apparel. Woman in Love is as full of clothes as Brown's, and

clothes of the same kind. D. H. Lawrence catalogues his heroine's wardrobes with the loving care

of a ladies' maid. It is not a simple case of needing to convince the reader the book has been

written by a woman; that is far from his intention. It is a device by which D. H. Lawrence

attempts to convince the reader that he D.H.L., has a hot line to a woman's heart by the

extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and

submission.

Yet Lawrence clearly enjoys being a girl. If we do not trust the teller but the tale, then the

tale positively revels in lace and feathers, bags, beads, blouses and hats. It is always touching to

see a man quite as seduced by the cultural apparatus of femininity as Lawrence was, the whole

gamut, from feathers to self-abnegation. Even if, as Kate Millett suggests, he only wanted to be a

woman so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself, since

nobody else was good enough for him. (The fantasy-achievement of this ambition is probably

what lends Lady Chatterley's Lover such an air of repletion.)”

I’m sure that my own games of dress up, as much as I research them and try to think of the clothing in terms of the choice of the wearer rather than the judgement of the observer, as much as I agonize over the style of the clothing and the styling it evidences, are cons as well.  On the other hand (he said, defensively)  the way my male characters dress is, as well, a bit of a con, in as much as these are fictions. Clothing is so helpful because it is, as well, a an attempt to fictionalize – wearing clothes might warm us, but it also shields us, helps us stagemanage our bodies, gives us a feeling of being ourselves as characters.  It is true, often, that there are breakdowns in the clothing game in fiction. To give a movie instance – I just rewatched  Terminator (yes, this lockdown is dragging) and the Schwarzenegger character successfully clothes himself in pants and shirt that come from a person maybe four sizes smaller than him, without ripping, while the human from the future – I forget his name – steals trousers from a drunk tramp without noticing once that these trousers are well pissed in. They even fit him, the human from the future, I mean.

This is supremely not having an eye for clothes, and it is unusual in a Hollywood film.

The clothing option doesn’t necessarily make the character. I can know and feel many of Dostoevsky’s characters without remembering his descriptions of their clothing, because they are perfunctory – unlike Tolstoy’s, or Lawrence’s. That is the deal with characters, male or female, and what they wear – wearing is meaningmaking. I think that we go from the clothing in when we make characters. I don’t think of my female characters, oddly enough, as naked. And that is perhaps a fault. God, as he made abundantly clear in Genesis, definitely meant us to be naked.

“Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

And thus the Lord God learned that his characters do have their own lives.    

Why the Labour party should split up

The leaks about the Labour party that came out last week have been, I think, largely overlooked, partly because the same media that sympathized with overturning Corbyn and collaborated on the project doesn’t really want to revisit the story. But it is definitely an exemplary story.

The leak shows that the rightwing of the party – the third way people, the Blairites – spent much of their time in the election against Theresa May, which Corbyn just missed winning, doing things like dissing black members of the party, knowingly diverting and wasting party funding, and goldbricking in order to bring about a Tory victory. The thinking was, the Tory victory would then overthrow Corbyn.

Now, every leftist is, by nature, paranoid, for good reason: if you attack powerful forces, it is common sense to think they will attack you back and operate in the sneaky ways they have operated to get, say, tax breaks and shit. But the whole Corbyn moment was premised on the idea that Labour is still a viable party for the left.

In America, this is often viewed in terms of… America. American provincialism, right? So that Labour is the Democratic party, the Conservatives the Republicans, etc. However, this seems to absurdly de-contextualize Britain, which, in spite of its Brexit, still has more similarities, as far as its political system goes, to a European country than to the U.S. In Europe, over the past twenty years, we’ve seen an enormous breakup of the Left. In France, the Socialists have simply disappeared. In Germany, the SPD is now on par with the Greens. In Italy, the Communists metamorphosed into many combinations, all of which packed a smaller and smaller political punch, until the ultimate Third Way politician, Matteo Renzi, a historic failure.

In Britain, the context is rather similar.  Colin Kidd in the LRB in 2012 has argued that Labour without Scotland would be a permanent minority party, and that divorce from Scotland has come to pass. Ross McKibben at the same mag pointed out that Labour dropped from 54 seats in Scotland to 1 in 2015.  Just last week, a Guardian columnist, Andy Beckett, pointed to the ten year run of Tory rule and asked, justly, whether Britain had turned into a one party “democracy”, like the Christian Democrats in postwar Italy.

All of this poses a question: if the center right is so ardent about keeping its Blairite claws into Labour,  and if Labour has no map to victory for the foreseeable future, why continue to contest possession of a moribund property? Why not start a separate party, a Corbynist party, using Momentum’s infrastructure to begin with?  Parties do die. Or evolve into something totally different. Corbyn’s moment in the Labour party looks more like the last hurrah for a once vital Labour left than the future.

One can easily imagine the realigments that would take place while the Tories rule for the next decade, as looks most probable. A green-red coalition with a British Left party – a Center coalition between a Blairite Labour party and the Lib-Dems – and the dominant Conservatives, sometimes allied with various ephemeral fascist parties.

Of course, I am discounting one of the major realignments that could well happen: the further split up of the UK, as Scotland becomes independent and Northern Ireland votes to reunite with Ireland. One thing seems probable to me, though: Labour is dead as a vehicle for the “left”. It will never happen.

Sometimes,like today, I fail to feel

Sometimes, like today, I fail to feel
Sensibility, like my lost shadow's sister
follows me around all blank and peel
and I'm all what's up mister

from room to room, from closet to closet
a numbskull under the skin
which I display in the bathroom in close-up
-selfy with a death's head grin.
-Karen Chamisso

an anthropology of the 1 percent

Ethnographic field studies of peasants, hunter gatherers, farmers, powerful village men, etc. are common. Field studies of rich American families are less so.   Off hand, I can only think of George Marcus’s studies of  rich Texas families in Houston and Galveston, which was nevertheless full of insights.  Marcus uses a term that the muckrakers used – dynastic wealth. His view of wealth is still wedded, however, to the notion of the family, especially in terms of male heirs.

Myself, I think that we should look at modern wealth from the perspective of the “house”. This is akin to the dynastic perspective – we think of the “house” of Windsor, meaning, vaguely, parts of the extended family of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A house his, on the one hand, a concrete building, and, on the other hand, a synecdoche for the entirety of the property. “Members” of the house can include servants, as well as the less endowed cousins, aunts, uncles and others who have some claim on the property.

In Marcus’s work on the rich, the invisibility of wealth is one of the great structuring themes. It is mostly the case with the non-wealthy that their visible environment, from car to apartment to house, is their real wealth. The asset of most Americans is a house – although many have a few stocks, the vast majority of stocks and other financial instruments is owned by the wealthy. These things are wealth, too, but they can’t be seen the way chattels can. Marcus proposes a parallel with the Kauli, a people in New Guinea:

“In talking about the people of the other world, the Kaluli use the term mama, which means shadow or reflection. When asked what the people of the unseen look like, Kaluli will point to a reflection in a pool or a mirror and say, "They are not like you or me. They are like that." In the same way, our human appearance stands as a reflection to them. This is not a "supernatural" world, for to the Kaluli, it is perfectly natural. Neither is it a "sacred world," for it is virtually coextensive with and exactly like the world the Kaluli inhabit, subject to the same forces of mortality .... In the unseen world, every man has a reflection in the form of a wild pig . . . that roams invisibly on the slopes of Mt. Bosavi. The man and his wild pig reflection live separate existences, but if something should happen to the wild pig, the man is also affected. If it is caught in a trap, he is disabled; if it is killed by hunters of the unseen, he dies.”

The Kaluli reference is not a mere affectation, but a way of making something intelligible that is beyond “inherited” wealth.  I have to quote Marcus at length, here:

  The dynastic fortunes that I have studied in Texas over the past few years are complex creations of various kinds of experts and of lineages of descendants two to four generations away from founding entrepreneurial ancestors. A dynasty is commonsensically a family, but after much experience with this form of social organization, I find that it is primarily a fortune instead. Concentrations of old wealth, however, have no one particular locus or materialization; in short, they have no presence. Rather, a fortune has multiple, simultaneous manifestations within a variety of interconnected but isolated social contexts that encompass the long-term fates and daily lives of literally hundreds of people. In initiating my research, I followed common sense and took the family-literal flesh-and-blood descendants, and particularly those who seemed to be leaders or in positions of authority-for the dynasty. I soon discovered in their here and now lives the profound influence of the equivalent of the unseen world among the Kaluli-the complex world of highly spec- ialized expertise that through an elaborate division of labor, not only structured the wealth but, also, created doppelganger facsimiles of the descendants-roughly similar to the Mt. Bosavi wild pig reflections of Kaluli persons-variously constituted as clients, beneficiaries of trusts, wealth shares in computerized strategies of investment, and accountants' files. While the unseen world is richly registered through sound and imagery in the here and now of the Kaluli, it distinctly is not among the descendants within dynastic families.”

These houses, I propose, are what is at play, anthropologically, in the ownership of corporations. The idea of the stock market as a way of transferring ownership to more efficient managers is not born out by anything in our real economic experience. But these complex transfers of ownership as the politics of various houses – this makes much more sense. The great houses in medieval and early modern Europe were founded, above all, on a warrior ethos – they were seized in wars, they warred with each other, and they warred outside of Europe in crusades and, eventually, in the massive war against the indigenous peoples and culture of Africa, the Americas, and Asia.  

a great debut novel

The list of great debut novels is short – although some of them are the greatest of novels. Don Quixote might be considered a debut in two ways – it is the debut of the modern novel, and a debut novel. There’s Dead Souls, the Pickwick Papers, Madam Bovary, Decline and Fall, The Sun Also Rises, V.

There’s also Chiendent, Queneau’s first novel, which has been translated as Barking Tree or Witchgrass. Americans are more familiar with crabgrass, which holds the same place in our lawn mythology as chiendent in France. The principle of the weed – of the invasion of an alien thing that is much like the real thing – in this case grass – but somehow not is a beautiful structural metaphor for what Queneau was doing. My own novel, Made a Few Mistakes, boosted one of Queneau’s brilliancies – the idea that falsehoods can take life and motive power, moving people to do absurd things under false premises. An idea that is put into a literally Cartesian framework in Chiendent, as a plain clerk, traveling in his usual routine in a metro from work to his half built suburban home, has an actual thought. That is, he notices something in a store window that he has walked past hundreds of times. In that moment, he begins to take on substance – which is noticed by a sort of flaneur, an authorial stand-in, who sees him literally becoming “rounder” . And as our clerk, named, sadly enough, Etienne Marcel – which happens to be the name of our own street, once it gets past Beaubourg, an existential coincidence I never dreamed would happen the first time I read this novel – continues to think, he continues to substantify, rather like an a Cartesian eucharist. A silhouette becomes a person.

The silhouette to person transformation would be a high concept gimmick save for the fact that the novel is also about an entire slice of Parisian life, from flaneurs to petty crooks, from anonymous letters and stalkers to Marcel’s odious step-son, Théo, a sort of Rimbaud gone to seed early. Queneau’s novel was published in 1935, under the impulse of his break with the surrealists and his reading of Ulysses. Ulysses was that rare novel that seeded others, much as punk bands formed from members of the audiences that watched the Sex Pistols. There’s Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Queneau – and this list is just off the top of my head.

Of them all, I think it was Queneau who thought hardest about how to construct a novel – and among this crew, he is the only one who saw how funny Joyce is. The French have a great sense of farce – unappreciated I think in the Anglo world, save for the Anglo appreciation of Molière – and Queneau is an expert farceur, without the sometimes heavy breathing, the Playboy jokiness, of Labiche. His coincidences hit because you don’t really see how these events are going to collide. Especially in as much as he views events like a mathematician – Queneau, like Musil, was a trained mathematician, a rarity among novelists or among fucking anything – I mean, how many math postgraduates do you know? So for Queneau, the distribution of coincidences is held to a rigorous schemata, the base of which is a sort of Cartesian algebra.

Descartes is known for having reduced geometry to algebra – or at least made that a program. His calcul géométrique would have made Descartes a famous figure in intellectual history outside of his Meditations and Discourse on Method. Similarly, the algebra of character positions, within the framework of the Parisian world of things in motion, produces a number of collisions which are prefigured by the “channels” or vectors involved – the circulation of traffic, of letters, of vacationers, of clients in bistros, etc. - but not totally determined from the point of view of any one character. This is the limit of thought, so to speak, which Etienne, as he substativizes, bumps into. Of that which one cannot calculate, one cannot think clearly. Hence, the opposition between the thought and the bump.

Farce is characteristically about sex and money. They are inherently farcical because they are the object of our most ardent calculations – and farce is nothing if not calculated – and yet in the world of farce, as in the real world, we often miscalculate. In fact, miscalculation is heir to farce’s premise, since sex and money are also wildcards, jokers in the pack.
Farce, it turns out, is an excellent way to approach the city. Queneau’s work – Chiendent, Pierrot mon ami, Loin de Rueil, le Dimanche de la vie, and Zazie dans le metro – is an extended study of Paris, from Parisian pronunciation to Parisian working class quarters to popular amusements – which is one of the great novelistic undertakings of the twentieth century to my mind. It has not been as influential as Celine, but it is as funny – when Celine is funny – and without the meanness that creeps into Celine as he became more of a monster.

So, for a good time - go out and read Queneau!

Two poems by Karen Chamisso

I. Unnamed

Found-and-pound her little mut me

Found-and-pound we all become

Found-and-pound was she

Tubed up so that the broken drum

Of her lung could still functi

Myself the one whacked out without conjunction

I woke with her bad breath in my mouth

After her death everything went South

For a long while.

II. Pastoral, maybe

My poem fell into the wrong crowd

as I was visiting the  Garden Center

in my SUV with  and Jake, our gardener, driving.

Huh huh huh

To buy me a magnolia stellata sapling or a loud

Japanese plum  - huh huh huh

It peered instead at the bottles of Ortho Orthene on the shelf

“kills the queen and destroys the mound” it read to itself

And suddenly it knew that it had taken a side

Huh huh huh

When Troy was destroyed with every kind of  -cide

Hum hum hum

So don’t think a flower, carefully etched, can save you

From returning to the mound with some kind of bait

And thus I pushed my cart through the Garden Center gate.

The Breaks

 

Breaks on a bus, brakes on a car 

Breaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s.

 I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain. 

 One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

2. 

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. 

The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” 

Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see... “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.”

Hume’s Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

3.

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

4.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system.

Which is why we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live

Do we lie to ourselves? The argument against

 It is a commonplace that we “lie” to ourselves. In 2012, the psychologist Dan Ariely published a book on dishonesty with the title “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: how we lie to everyone (especially ourselves)”. The reviews and responses to the book never questioned the parenthetical – the notion that we lie to ourselves seems to lie in our stock of accepted truisms.

I want to tussle with that truism. I think it is wrong, for interesting reasons.

What is a lie? It would seem to require two parts. One part is that it is the communication of a falsehood. The second part is that the person communicating the falsehood both, a., knows it is false, and b., what to induce the recipient of the message to believe it is true.

Lying is one of the classic social phenomena of childhood, at least in the bourgeois West. A child, for instance, is warned that some fascinating piece of their parents’ bric-a-brac is fragile and not to be handled. A vase, a commemorative plate handed down from the great grandparents. The child, nevertheless, does in secret handle the object, and breaks it. 

When the parents discover the breakage, the child denies having handled the object. The words “lie” and “lying” get bandied about.

This is a form of deception that seems to correspond well to our notion of the double requirement of the lie.

However, there is another scenario from childhood in which the word lie comes up. In this scenario, a parent promises x, say ice cream cake on Sunday. And then doesn’t deliver on the promise – the parent tells the child that he or she forgot to get the cake. And the child, who let us say has been extra good in anticipation of the cake, feels cheated, hits out, and says that the parents “lied”.

The lie here seems to fit not so well with our paradigm. There is no evidence that the parents, at the time of the promise, were thinking that they were not going to get ice cream cake. In other words, the intent to deceive was not part of the original scenario. This scenario is quite common and recognizable. For instance, the same child grown old promises himself that he will resist sweets. He’s been told that he is not supposed to eat sweets by the doctor. So he makes a resolution – which has promise-like features, since it is, a., sincere, and b, about future activity – not to eat sweets. And he succeeds so well the first day that he decides that it wouldn’t break the spirit of the resolution to reward himself with one sweet. And then another sweet. And so on until he realizes that he has broken his resolution. Between the resolve and the breaking of the resolve he has “deceived” himself. He might even be tempted to say: I lied to myself.

Yet: it is hard to see the second case as a matter of lying. The reason is pretty simple: the lie depends on the liar knowingly communicating a falsehood. This requires that the liar have an idea of what is true and what is false, leading into the lie. Now, if I lie to myself, am I saying: there’s one self that knows what is true and what is false, and one self that is being deceived and accepts as true what is false?

Psychologically, this seems to promise the infinite growth of selves, each one hiding the truth in order to lie to the other one down the chain. This leads to a picture of selfhood that is, to say the least, different from the Western norm. The self in this picture is inherently neurotic. In which case one wonders whether the condition of knowing the truth from falsehood could ever be fulfilled.

You will have noticed that the lying scenarios I laid out to explain lying are taken from childhood. I do think Freud is on the right path in looking for the models of the self in the development of the child. And of course neurosis makes no sense if the self is identical with one consciousness - we have every reason to believe that most of our perceptions and "thoughts" are unconscious. But that doesn't mean that the unconcsious is a self, a different self. Perhaps it is preliminary to or the accompaniment of the self without itself being self-like.

The above argument leads me, at least, to think that when we speak of “lying” to ourselves, we are thinking more of the promise breaking form of deceit than the standard lying form of deceit. This has important consequences for thinking about self-deception and the communicative regime in which the self is defined.

The Trick Book

“D’you know the difference between a big cat and a little one?”

A big cat’ll claw your eyes out

But a little pussy never hurt no one.”

We  hold these truths against our sometimes doubt

And write them in our trick book as lore:

L'effronterie, la complaisance et la metamorphose,

Said poor Anne-Joseph Théroigne de Méricourt,

Describing both whore’s art and what we expose

In making poems as the big cats do.

Aren’t we prophetic strumpets every one.

Rowdy girls who will cut you  

And little pussies having little pussy fun

writing our trick book in the margins of the Norton Anthology:

sisters, let’s take back our gynecology.

Karen Chamisso

The Kaleidoscope and Schopenhauer: an entertainment

In the chapter on the "metaphysics of the beautiful and aesthetics" in the second volume of the Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer discusses history. In 1851, when the essays came out, Schopenhauer's stance against the philosophical importance of history made him seem, pleasingly, like some archaic remnant of the eighteenth century. He was willing to suffer this reputation, and even enlarge on it. History at this time is, of course, associated with Hegel, and even if Hegel did not recognize, in Schopenhauer, his unmasker and foe, Schopenhauer definitely took Hegel as the touchstone of what Leon Daudet later labelled "the stupid 19th century" - the stupidity being, at its very beastly heart, the idea that there was a dynamic axis to history.

In the essay on history, Schopenhauer casts himself as a moralist, an intemporal observer, a user of classical exempla. And he comes up with this image:

He who, like myself, cannot help seeing in all history the same thing over and over again, just as every turn of a kaleidoscope continually reveals the same things, but in different combinations, will not be able to share all this passionate interest; nor, however, will he censure it.

According to the toy historian Paul Hidebrandt, the kaleidoscope, which was invented by the Scottish scientist David Brewster in 1817, aroused “such enthusiasm among all social circles that the victory of the kaleidoscope over the Chinese puzzle or tangram game was even celebrated in Paris with an engraving: the goddess Kaleidoskopia, with her emblems, a tube and a pattern sheet, stands on a Chinese person crawling on the earth, before whom lies his board game on the ground.” However, supposedly the Chinese became enamored of the ‘tube of ten thousand flowers” themselves, and began to manufacture them en masse.

Borges notes Schopenhauer’s kaleidoscope comparison in "the Wall and the Books" in Other Inquisitions, and writes of it: “For if the world is the dream of Someone, if there is Someone who is dreaming us now and who dreams the history of the universe (that is the doctrine of the idealists), then the annihilation of religions and the arts, the general burning of libraries, does not matter much more than does the destruction of the trappings of a dream. The Mind that dreamed them once will dream them again; as long as the Mind continues to dream, nothing will be lost…”

A quick search through a couple of Schopenhauer biographies has not brought me any information on when the great man collided with the kaleidoscope. But it would be easy to believe that he saw one early on, perhaps in 1817, because it was at that time that Schopenhauer was most closely involved with Goethe's optical work. Goethe was a friend of Schopenhauer’s always fearsome mother, Johanna, and Johanna wanted her son to get into Goethe’s good graces. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer deviated from the anti-Newtonian program on color laid down by Goethe – he rationalized it into a system having to do with the sensitivity of the retina. Goethe was particularly infuriated that Schopenhauer betrayed him on the issue of “white” – which, as Newton said, contained all colors, and which, according to Goethe, did no such thing.

A stronger metaphor using another children’s toy is employed by Lorenz Oken. I image Schopenhauer knew of it. Oken is writing in 1805, before the kaleidoscope. This is from his Physiophilosophy:

“All things are created in time; for time is the totality of Singulars. Time is no stationary quantity, which is always changing itself into something new during its progressive flux. It is not a continous stream, but a repetition of one and the same act, namely, the primary act, like as it were to a rolling ball, which constantly returns upon itself. There is no endless, still less an eternal thing; for things are only positions of time. Time itself is, however, only repetition…”

Two children’s toys, two similar points about time - except that Oken’s is a more radical stance. Schopenhauer was stuck, due to his system, with defending some version of Kant’s notion of the aprioris of experience. Myself, what I find interesting here is the connection between seriality and eternal repetition. The notion of a repetition that creates a difference connects Schopenhauer and Oken to a passage in De Quincey that you would not normally put in this association. It comes in the section of the Opium Eater entitled The Pains of Opium. The text wavers between a description of the hallucinatory pains of opium and a lingering repetition of them, arousing the suspicion that pain and pleasure melt into each other in ways that are going to elude classification.

“Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s, Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further and you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.”

Bad Years

I’ve been thinking about other bad years; for instance, those between 1845-1849 in Ireland.

Ireland, it is estimated, had a population in 1845 of around 8 million – a figure that would not be achived again in more than a century. The mass of the population consisted of poor laborers and smallholders. They survived, to an astonishing extent, on the potato. It was the staple – the potato was to the Irish household what steak, potato, veggies and desert are to the  the contemporary American household. The economy was largely agricultural, and the cash crops – grains, for instance – were exported to England.

The potato blight was brought to Europe from the U.S. It started in Belgium – which in all during this period suffered perhaps as many as 40,000 deaths – and spread to Ireland.

Ireland, at that point, was “joined” to the UK, but was in reality ruled as a colony. In the 1840s, in England, the new theories of free trade and non-state interference – old style liberalism – had come to dominate all right-thinking thought. Before, in Ireland, there had been food shortages, but they were met with state intervention, the hiring by the state of a labor force, the stocking of supplies and their distribution, etc. But by the 1840s, this kind of thing, the long noses of the Oxford intellectual and ministerial assistant looked down at these relics of barbarism.  

Ciara Boylen, in her chapter on the famine in Princeton History of Modern Ireland, has a good summary of the British response to the starving to death – or, really, famine fever, typhus, and other of the horrible messengers of  death.

”Despite some very notable examples of intervention, in general the response of the state to Famine relief was characterized by a reluctance to interfere in the Irish economy. The circumscribed level of state intervention has been explained by reference to a complex nexus of opinions, tenets, and doctrines, the most im-portant of which were an adherence to the assumed dictates of classical political economy, in particular the doctrine of laissez- faire; a providentialist belief that the Famine represented an act of Divine will; prejudicial views on the moral failings of Irish landlords and tenants alike; and a perception that the Famine represented an opportunity to accelerate economic and social regeneration in Ireland. Repeatedly aired concerns over the sanctity of the operations of the free market were voiced alongside warnings that a country already suffering from a severe want of industry and self- reliance might be corrupted and debased even further by the provision of gratuitous and profligate relief. As such, it was not merely the objective laws of the market that had to be obeyed, but the particulars of Irish conditions.”  

These reactions, in the aftermath of the Irish famine, did not fill the pundits, thinkers, and state actors who had them with shame and remorse. Rather, they congratulated each other on a dirty job well done. Coinciding with the famine, the large landholders started a campaign of evicting their tenants, and expanding the business of exporting grain and cattle. After the famine, there was a twenty year stretch where famine in the British empire was mostly uncommon, until the first of the great Indian famines struck in the 1870s. 

As Mike Davis shows in his invaluable book, The Victorian Genocide,  the British rulers of India acted according to the same rules, valuing the economy first and blaming the enormous losses of life – the one in the 1870s took an estimated 13 million lives. Lord Lytton, the half mad  Viceroy of India,decided in 1877 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s crowning as the Empress of India by staging a weeklong banquet in Delhi that entailed 68,000  meals for British officials, maharajahs and satraps, the most expensive meal in the world, according to the newspapers. In the meantime, in labor camps where the British grudgingly herded starving Indian peasants, the food allowance for adults was one pound of rice per diem, without anything else – no proteins, no veggies, etc. It provided less calories than were enjoyed by the inmates of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp.  Interestingly, the officials sent out into the “field” all believed the famine reports were exaggerated. No need to panic, and probably an excuse by lazy Indians not to work.

Bad years, bad policies. Yet I – at least -see every connection between this variety of Anglo liberalism – the liberal terror famine mindset – and the response of the Anglophone countries to the corona virus. The same notion that this was all exaggerated. The social Darwinism. The placement of a free enterprise system above everything else. The maximum incompetence, which is generated not by incapacity, but by the refusal to build capacity. 

As it was, so it shall be – is this the law to which we must bow down? Or is there, perhaps, a better way?