My Emily Dickinson

 When I first started reading Emily Dickinson in high school in the 1970s, she seemed to be either a tame poet, good for holiday cards, or a morose poet of the kind satirized by Mark Twain in Huck Finn, Emmiline Grangerford, with her creepy sub-Poe fascination with funerals. She was the farthest thing from the wilder shore of Walt Whitman, I thought.

I read Dickinson as she was edited and domesticated, starting with her first posthumous editors, her brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was only in the 60s that the wilder shore of Dickinson’s poetry started to emerge, beginning with the complete edition of her poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1960. Crucially, Johnson restored the dashes to the poems – which are to the poems what the axe was to Lizzie Borden. The dash, that punctuation interruptus, gave the poems back their sanguinary impulse. We could finally read Dickinson.

It is perhaps appropriate that it took one hundred years. I’ve been reading the Christane Miller edition(the poems “as Dickinson wrote them”) and the great book by Susan Howe – My Emily Dickinson. Howe’s book is in that rare vein of poet’s books – Williams In the American Grain, Zukofsky’s Apollinaire, Olson’s Melville – that shifts your vision. For Howe, Dickinson was the most radical poet of the 19th century. To make a comparison she doesn’t make – just as Georg Buchner seemed to invent the theater of the 1920s in the plays he wrote in the 1830s, so, too, Dickinson seems to have invented the lyric difficulty we associate with the poets of the end of modernism – poets as different as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich - around the time of the American civil war.

Howe adroitly inserts Jonathan Edwards into Dickinson’s intellectual background, and Emily Bronte as her true contemporary. One poet she doesn’t mention is Lord Byron.

Thomas Moore’s edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals was published in the U.S. in the 1840s. The letters were defanged, but the journals retained Byron’s characteristic skipping dash, for instance: “While you are under the influence of passions, you only feel, but cannot describe them, — any more than, when in action, you could turn round and tell the story to your next neighbour! When all is over, — all, all, and irrevocable, — trust to memory — she is then but too faithful.” Byron’s dashes, unlike Dickinson’s, have an aristocratic disdain for the mere plebe assemblies of rote classroom English. Dickinson, though, if she read Moore’s edition, would certainly have seen how they could work.

Of course, Dickinson was a pretty radical DIY type of poet, and may well have done without prompts. But I would love some genealogy of the dashes, on the lines of the way Guy Davenport, in his essay on Cummings in Every Force Evolves a Form, saw how Cummings saw the opportunity in the way Greek verses, as for instance Sapho’s, were published with scholarly apparatus in the Loeb Library editions.

"And when these early poems, none of which has survived entire but exist on torn, rotted, ratgnawn papyrus or parchment, are set in type for the modern student of Greek, such as Edward Estlin Cummings, Greek major at Harvard (1911-1916), the text is a frail scatter of lacunae, conjectures, brackets, and parentheses. They look, in fact, very like an E. E. Cummings poem. His eccentric margins, capricious word divisions, vagrant punctuation, tmeses, and promiscuously embracing parentheses, can be traced to the scholarly trappings which a Greek poem wears on a textbook page. Cummings' playfulness in writing a word like "l(oo)k"-a pair of eyes looking from inside the word – must have been generated by the way scholars restore missing letters in botched texts, a Greek l[oo]k, where the 1 and k are legible on a papyrus, there's space for two letters between them, and an editor has inserted a conjectural

oo."

I think Dickinson unleashed is such a different spirit from Dickinson leashed that to read her poems in the normalized editions is not to see her at all. Compare:

Wild nights – Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –

Ah – the Sea!

Might I but moor – tonight –

In thee!

As compared to this:

Wild nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a heart in port, —

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

Might I but moor

To-night in thee!

This is of course one of the famous poems. The referential strangeness – rowing in Eden? – is subdued, I’d claim, in the second version, just as the Wild Nights, a repetition that is divided by a repelling dash to create a sort of negative identity, is annealed in the double exclamation marks of the more conventional, the more romantic exclamation of the second version. The placement of the exclamation marks in the second version – and the erasure of the exclamation marks in the second stanza - seems, similarly, to take us to the stylistics of romantic poetry, rather than the asperities that Howe sees in the Puritan doctrine underneath the lines, asperities that tossing away the Chart makes more vivid.

I haven’t yet gotten to the point that I could say “my Emily Dickinson” – but Howe is definitely an aid.

On not wanting to be like X

 

There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy, from Twelfth Night to Wodehouse. It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of competition. To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of  Donald Trump, etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison with liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Donald Trump, etc. At least I am not X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as a primary property of the modern subject. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the origin of the enemy is in combat, and there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and the horror that it wishes to avoid most is: being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by anti-war types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, dittoheads. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is where English comic writers come in – where in French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – since the French have a genius for enmity, in English writers, those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens, of course, is the first writer who comes to mind.  In lesser novelists this comes out more directly.  E.F. Benson’s Mapp novels, for instance, all fasten delightfully on the town of Tilling, a sort of suburb for the aspiring, and here meanness, hypocrisy, invidious comparison and snobbery are very foundations of village life and the source of the thousand and one differences between a general mask of amiability and a sudden and brutal dislike lurking just below the surface, and most apt to emerge during a game of bridge. Tilling is a town of retirees, mostly, on limited incomes, but with high social standing. And of course it is picturesque, a tourist spot, and the perfect place to make the most of a limited income.

I should say that there is another English tradition that is closer to the French, and it extends from Ben Jonson to Evelyn Waugh. In this tradition, the humor of edging away is treated as a weakness, and the claws are on display. The perfect novel of this type is Waugh’s Handful of Dust, which ends, logically, with the savaging of Dickens. Waugh’s unapologetic snobbery was called “dark humor”, which simply means that it dispenses with the key ingredient of English humor, the comedy of edging away, for the comedy of the brutality of circumstances. One can’t imagine a Wodehouse novel featuring a man prisoner sawing off the head of a prison chaplain, as happens in Decline and Fall. Or Wodehouse giving a funerary send off, all piss Pater,  to one of that novel’s great characers, the teacher/scoundrel/pedophile, Grimes:

“But later, thinking things over as he ate peacefully, one by one, the oysters that had been provided as a 'relish' for his supper, Paul knew that Grimes was not dead. Lord Tangent was dead; Mr Prendergast was dead; the time would even come for Paul Pennyfeather; but Grimes, Paul at last realized, was of the immortals. He was a life force. Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in Wales; drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America; engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire, he would rise again somewhere at some time, shaking from his limbs the musty integuments of the tomb. Surely he had followed in the Bacchic train of distant Arcady, and played on the reeds of myth by forgotten streams, and taught the childish satyrs the art of love? Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods of all the histories—fire, brimstone and yawning earthquakes, plague and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears? Had he not, like some grease-caked Channel-swimmer, breasted the waves of the Deluge? Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters? “

song

 

Love come out, I said, and fight

I’ve got the gloves, I’ve learned the pace

- Honey child, I’ll uncork my right

And land you on your bitchass face.

 

The cutgal in my corner heart

Said, that bitch is for the taking

Follow my plan from the start

And we’ll see who’s faking.

 

Straight up, take her every blow

And bury it in your body.

And by round ten she’ll start to show

She’s grown old and flabby.

 

The bell went off:  I was fifteen

And then it  rang every year or so.

Although at thirty, in between

2 lovers, I almost fell to her strongest blow

 

And  almost lost it to an opened vein.

At last at forty, the strategy

Paid off. Tired, limping with pain

Love fell, leaving me on my mattress free.

 

I turned to bow to the cheering crowd

- but they had long left and the silence was loud.

- Karen Chamisso

Rip John LeCarré

This summer I re-read a lot of John LeCarré novels from his prime years – the 1960s and 1970s – and read a few from his decline – the 2000s. The George Smiley epic, even if you already know how it turns out, does everything right, suspense and clue wise. The ones in the 2000s, though, show the machine is rusty – the suspense is eminently leavable – it is the kind of novel you dogear on page 154 and never return to. The fate of all too many summer novels.

LeCarré is a spy novelist, which means he is a political novelist. The period he achieved his peak in was also a peak and terrible time for Western Intelligence agencies. From Guatemala to Indonesia, from Malaysia to Kenya, Western Intelligence agencies tortured, bribed, trained fascists and generally oversaw misery on an unprecedented scale – Indonesia alone witnessed half a million dead. On the other side, nothing that the Intelligence agencies did , with all their vast holdings of dark money and networks, dented in any way the Soviet empire. They systematically misinterpreted the Soviet empire, feeding that information to politicians. Their real success was helping to establish a sort of franchise colonialism, where National Security States operated as colonial governors to keep erring populations in line.

Yet this focus on what they did outside of their native realms should not be allowed to obscure what they did inside those realms. Inside the realms, they operated to institutionalize a hard, solid limit to left politics in the “democracies’. Socialism and the M6 were inherently incompatible – hence the slapstick attempts at overthrowing Labour governments mounted by Intelligence officers. Similarly, Intelligence agencies in France and Italy were always involved at the edges with far right groups that, at least in Italy, posed a real threat of coup d’etat. In Greece, of course, they succeeded for a time.

The great fright of Capital in the 30s – that militant labor would achieve its goal of evening up the power of decision between Capital and Labor – was quashed for thirty years, until, in the 1980s, the labor movements had “no alternative”.

This is where I’d locate LeCarré. JFK of course preferred James Bond, since JFK was bred to both despise and envy the British dandy. But the cold war liberal, the people who were more inclined to take their cues from “serious” cinema like Seven Days in May, saw in LeCarre’s books the moral struggle they could identify with. The weariness of the white man’s burden, the betrayals and traps that were the price of preserving our freedom – it was all there. But that recognition of moral struggle was not, was never, moral “equivalency”. There could be no such thing when one side – our side – was good, and the other side was evil. Our side was for freedom and free trade, their side was for slave labor camps and central planning. Ah, we know the drill – or those of us old enough to have experienced the Cold War.

From my perspective, George Smiley and company are successful as cliffhangers, but as inlets of moral struggle, they don’t pass the grade. The planting and rescuing of spies, the moles and their hunters, all seem engaged in trivial pursuits. What is striking is how parallel these secret organizations are to the terrorist organizations, the Red Brigades, the RAF, which emerged in Europe in the 70s. Both were compelled, by the logic of their organization into secret cells, to put their energies increasingly into self maintenance. The Red Army Brigade, for instance, began as an organization that was going to take on the only partially de-Nazified German state, and quickly evolved into an organization concerned with freeing its members from state prisons, or fleeing the state’s gaze. The M6 as a secret service fighting the Soviets was a massive failure, never really disrupting the Soviets at all – but it quickly became, as LeCarré’s novels show, a self-involved organization that basically chased its tail and spends inordinate amounts of time trying to rescue its lost agents – agents that were out ‘in the Cold’. Most unmilitary. It is the rare army that choses to coordinate its battle plan with where the enemy has taken prisoners of its soldiers. That’s simply an absurd way to fight.

This, I think, is the inadvertent lesson of the LeCarré spy novel. The reading of which makes it clear that we have to find another reason, a non-military and political reason, for the phenomenal growth of intelligence services since 1945.

A ticklish situtation: me and clever Hans

 

“A well regarded psychologist once wrote down the proposition: ... for the animals are not capable of smiling and laughing.” – Robert Musil, Can a horse laugh?

When I was a kid, I was subject to a peculiar syndrome. Kids all laugh, of course – or at least this is true in the normal course of events, social and neurological. And I laughed, too. But unlike most of my friends, I was sometimes truly overcome by laughter. A joke, or something that I found funny, if nobody else did, would sometimes set off an almost epileptic series of laughs. I would begin to choke on laughing, and then that I was laughing and choking would itself seem funny. Soon I was panting between laughs, crying, walking around, rolling on the floor. I could not stop myself. Every time I did, every time I was able to make myself pause, something would happen – my parents or my friends would say something, or I would, fatally, think something – and I’d be off again. This didn’t happen all of the time, thank God, but it happened enough that I got a reputation for being an easy laugher. My friends, sometimes to target me, in a teasing way, would tell me a joke at the wrong time – like when I was drinking milk in the school cafeteria – which would have a disastrous effect on me.

Over the years, I stopped having these fits of laughter – for the most part. I have had them a few times since I got married. For instance, last night. We were playing a dice tic tac toe game with Adam. And arguing about rules. Games are fun, but arguing about rules is divine. I’ve always thought, which is why few people volunteer to play games with me. Anyway, one thing led to another and that we were arguing about the O or the X seemed funny to me, and then funnier, and then the funniest thing that ever happened, and I could not stop laughing. Luckily, I was not eating. This went on for five to ten minutes, alarming my wife and delighting Adam.

Perhaps I was laughing at the whole year.

In the Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Robert Musil collected a lot of his ephemera – and Musil’s ephemera is worth the collected works of most authors. One of the essays is about a laughter and the beast – the beast in question being a horse. This was in the days before World War I – “since the war, horses have stopped laughing”.  According to Musil’s biographer, Corino, in August 1913 Robert and his wife, Martha, took their honeymoon in Italy. The countryside was very close to Rome at that date – Italy was where Europeans from France and Germany went to enjoy a vacation from modernity, which of course made all the Italian futurists spit. The horse in question was a workhorse – no pony, and no battle or police horse, but a fine young beast on a fine sunny day. Musil observes that horses, who have four “shoulders” and so four armpits, are approximately twice as susceptible as human beings to being tickled in these vital areas. A boy was petting the horse, “... this horse seemed to have a particularly sensitive spot on the innerside of the shoulder, and everytime when it was touched there, it could not keep from laughing.”

The boy, of course, decided to stroke it just there with the grooming comb, and predictably the horse tried to get out of being tickled: it wiggled away, and it tried to butt the boy away with i “its nose, but it was no use.

I recognize this tickle situation – who doesn’t? “And when he came close to the armpit with the comb, the horse could no longer stand it: he turned on his legs, his whole body shuddered and he drew his lips back from his teeth, as far as he could. He acted, for several seconds, exactly as a person does who one tickles so much that he can no longer laugh.”

The mysterious connection between the tickle and the laugh – the pleasant torture of the whole thing – is a strong element in our natural histories, I think. It extends from sex, with its masochistic properties,  to the whole general humor that makes up “being happy” or “being unhappy.”

p.s. Musil, according to Corino, was a school friend of the psychologist Oskar Pfungst, best known for his work on “clever Hans”, a horse who could supposedly add numbers and distinguish colors. Pfungst showed that Hans were really just responding to unconscious signs made by his owner – which, in my opinion, is much more impressive than adding up 2 plus 2, although it leads only to Houyhnhnm sociability instead of accounting.

A few kind words about pretension

 

Is there anything to be said for pretension?

Simon During’s thumbnail review of Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal used the word pretentious, and then semi-takes it back: “Because it’s not only pretentious, it’s jaunty too which undercuts the abstract flim flam.” (see on Facebook)

There is nothing more damning, in money culture, than pretension. Just as there was nothing more damning, in the culture of the nobility, than the Pretender – claiming an inherited office to which one has no bloodtie. Pretend comes from the Latin world for stretch – to stretch before, to hold something out. “Stretching”, here, is cutely caught up in an Americanism – the stretcher. To tell a stretcher is to exaggerate, or even lie. It is a word I associate with Mark Twain – there’s a sort of unconscious etymological narrative in Huckleberry Finn that makes the stretcher a fundamental part of the tale, which includes a Pretender – a false claimant to the French throne. A flim flam man.

When examining the semantics of the truth in ordinary language, few philosophers pause to consider stretching. As any child knows, though, you can take a realistic representation – a picture, say – and stretch it to make it funnier. When I was a kid, we would get silly putty, which came in a little plastic egg, and stretch it out over a comic book picture. Then we would peel it off and the picture would be imprinted on the putty. And then you’d have some fun stretching it.

Now here’s a toy for you mimesis freaks out there.

Pretension and stretching are bound at the hip. Jesus, in a Wittgensteinian mood, once asked: Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? The answer, in nature, is nobody – but social stature is a different matter all together. We frantically devise measures for that – from who has the longest yacht to who has the most publications. Within these systems, there develops quite a horror of stretching, which messes up ranking. And without ranking in neo-liberal culture, what do we have?

Yet if we are ever to get anywhere as aesthetic beings – and no matter how the money culture tries, it can’t reduce the aesthetic completely to the price system – we have to have some stretch in us. We have to pretend. We have to have pretensions. The critic, who also has to have pretentions, feeds on cutting down the pretensions of others – and in fact the critic represents our general tendency, in our small circles, to whack away at those who get too big for themselves, who stretch – but too much whacking and the field is bare. I immediately grow suspicious when I hear something described as pretentious, since I know of the innumerable things that are not pretentious that clutter our sensoriums day and night (I’m leaving, as a tip to the pretenders, here, the “s” on sensoriums – I’m def not writing sensoria!). And I know that there is an army out there waiting to pounce on poetry and art and leave a big dump on it – their grumus merdae. So I grow wary around that “pretentious” word.

Those who never stretch will shrink in the end, is my feeling.  Crying: I’m melting! I’m melting!

 

santa monica, 2009: for leandra

 

Out of lunch we made a nest

The wine, the salad,  the cigs at the end

And lined it with the bleeding rests

Of our talked down, forked over, knifed over friends

 

You and I, Leandra: behind you the  sea

Huffed and puffed crawled back and forth

On the beach where the pelicans pee

And the kids get their skin’s worth

 

Of sunlight – its so Muscle beach here.

We laughed like witches, immune, apart

From anyone’s poisonous batch of tears

From anyone’s slushy and broken heart.

-Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

 

Letter from Paris

 

This plague winter, I walk out into the streets of Paris under the semi-permanent concrete of clouds, my mask in place, my glasses steaming up from my warm breath, and I distinctly feel, under my feet, something slippery, something creaking. There’s something precarious, something about the sidewalks, the spotty traffic, the masked pedestrians that have a slightly demoralized look. The closed up windows of the restaurants, the yawning awnings of the cafes, all the sidewalk tables gone, the measured influx of customers in the shops that are open, shops sporting, as jauntily as they can, the marks of the Christmas season – reminiscent not so much of the usual commercial bacchanal as of a retirement home stirring up the ashes of nostalgia. Something. Paris reminds me right now of some scarred old dreadnought heading out into cold and enemy infested seas. This is all my illusion, but illusion with a respectable geneology – for one of the staples of modernity is the image of Paris in ruins, another capital city undone: Ninevah, Jerusalem, Rome. There’s a fine line in French literature, going back to the some of the minor writers of the Enlightenment, like Mercier and Volney, who dreamed this dream. Giovanni Macchia, the great Italian scholar, wrote a book about it, Paris en ruines, which, in the French translation, was prefaced by Italo Calvino – a connoisseur of cities, visible and invisible, and an inveterate refugee in Paris. Calvino’s essay is very much part of its time – I believe the late eighties – casting its eye over the changes wrought in Paris by the great commandatore of the seventies, Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, symbolized by the Beaubourg, on the one hand, and the destruction of Les Halles, on the other. Speaking of the radical writers who subjected Paris to their scrutiny, like Zola, Calvino unleashed this fine parenthetical remark: “and it is not by chance, we can add, for even in May 1968 the barricades were given birth like an evocation of the topography of the old districts, the same as for the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which confirms how much the mythological and archaeological  element is inseparable from the idea of revolution.”

The barricades haven’t risen up this year, in response to the Macron government’s massive incompetence. We have, recently, had cars burned, and policemen doing their usual job of beating random innocents. The revolt of the base level of the French population, the gilets jaunes, has been put on hold. Even when it was going at full throttle in 2019, there was not much barricade action, just a little graffiti, broken glass and some bits chiseled off the Arc de Triomphe, truly horrifying the bien-pensants: is this the way we treat the cash cows of tourism?

If we were superstitious, or sensitive readers of signs, like the medievals, we would have been more alarmed by 2019’s omens. Not just the post-modern jacquerie – for didn’t the cathedral itself, Notre Dame, burn? What was this a sign of? It seems, now, so utterly appropriate. You can walk across the Pont Saint Louis and get a hinder glance of the old thing, all its charred flying buttresses and exposed gargoyles – the passer-by’s instinctive gaze upward is greeted by what any sensible person up until 1700 would see as an indictment of the social order.

Ah, there it is again: the creaking.

Sometimes, I wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning. And I swear I hear something.

 

Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues
Le rut des Béhémots et les Maelstroms épais,
Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets !

Kant on boredom and play - a note for the late capitalist peon

  “... men demand activities, even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.” - Immanuel Kant's   The Metaphysics of Morals, my translation

Boredom in the Metaphysics of Morals appears as a theme and a term (Langeweile) in the context of ‘play’ – and notably, playing cards.

In a more extended consideration of the sources of playing in the lectures collected in  the Philosophical Anthropology essays, Kant  elaborates on the hookup of Eden, work, play, and boredom – for it turns out that, in circumstances where our needs are abundantly satisfied, boredom comes into play as the motive pushing us to work or to certain forms of play. It complicates an old equation that posits lack, or need, as the driver of work, or productivity – since boredom is not the same kind of lack as other lacks. What it is, however, is hard to say. “Boredom is the quintessence of unnamable pain.”

The importance of boredom in universal history has never been truly qualifed, since the topic seems to lead, by a neurotic defensive gesture, to moral shamemaking. Kant makes a good effort, though, to cast off the bourgeois shackles and examine the phenomenon coldly, beginning with a cultural universal that reaches all the way into the Canadian wilderness:

“The passion for play [zum Spielem – gambling is implied] is met with in every nation, even the Canadian savages like to play, while Chinese are given over to play to the point of mania, so that they bring their wives and children and even themselves into slavery through play. The interests [stakes] in play serve to enliven it and contain therefore such great charms that it constitutes the pastime for most of our society. The cause is that fear and hope continually change places in play…” [257]

The reasonable man, for Kant, then, plays with that alteration of fortunes in mind. Underneath this reflection, one hears the cracking and downfall of a long humanistic ideal – that of the good life as constructed in the classic tradition. It is not to mediation that the ideal subject, satisfied in all of his needs, turns – but to a flight from boredom. Play, gambling, is a way to make life adventurous again.

“A rational man, who sets down to play, can not have gain as his intent [Absicht], but he must believe, that he at least in the end must be paid for his stakes. Therefore his intention must be something else other than gain. During the play his intention is, of course, only to win, but he did not undertake participation in the game to do so. Here it is a purely a question of hope and fear, that are fundamentally vain; but one is distracted during these circumstances, and has distracted oneself from the one that one calls boredom. Such an evil, which is what boredom is, one commonly doesn’t know how to name, nor what countervailing means to apply to it. This evil of boredom springs out of the lack of activity.” [258]

The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.

 

The boredom motif is oddly untouched by those economists looking at the hyper-financialization of late capitalism, where the incentives are all supposed to be about gain, or, for those on the left, about power. How much of a role does boredom play in the financial markets? Myself, I think boredom is the shadow side of speculation. We are prisoners of the boredom of the rich, we who are playing our games far below theirs.

 

Ressentiment

 

Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.

For the victims, in the afterlife of victimage event, in the narrative trajectory of their life as victims, there is a narrow spectrum of subject positions available, from accusation to forgiveness, from resentment to forgetting. And the same this is true for those who are the great beneficiaries and managers of the social order, who move between demonizing the victim to building programs meant to bring about reconciliation and assimilation, with guilt and fear mingling together. The managers have, of course, more elbow room, and can even afford to spare some understanding for the perpetrators - since the managers are not victims. They even have the luxury, which they abundantly use, of condescending to the victims. Yet, if they are wise, they also must feel a certain fear. The ghosts may conspire, the victims may revolt. The dialectic between the masters and the slaves is, as Nietzsche pointed out, the defining structure of dialectic itself. Without victimage, there would be no dialectic. Victim-measuring is the social project that binds together the accused and the accuser,

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.”

“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.”

This is the codex of the anti-social, the kingdom of Heaven.

You have seen Hanns Chaim Maier, or his brothers and sisters, in the famous photos, “toothless skeletons that were reanimated with Angloamerican corned beef in a can” from April or May, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen. Mayer changed his name in anger to Jean Améry and fled, when he was able, to Brussels. Under a name conceived in anger that renounced his Austrian-German provenance, he waited for revenge. He waited for the people who had sustained and supported the people who tortured him and killed millions of Jews to be reduced, in their circumstances, to living in a vast “potato field.” Not for him the disgusting, “vibrating” hug of the oppressor, in forgiveness, of someone like Martin Buber. He would be Jonah, waiting for Nineveh to be destroyed. Unlike Jonah, though, he recognized, gradually, that neither destruction nor true repentance would come for Nineveh. By the nineteen-sixties, it was clear that destruction, revenge, nor any cosmic equaling of the balance was going to happen.

In an essay entitled “Ressentiment”, he begins by contemplating the “miracle” of postwar Western Europe. The democracy! The prosperity! The liberal society! “I am not at ease in these peaceful, beautiful lands full of clever and modern people. Why, one has probably already guessed. I am one of that (happily) slowly dying species of people who are called, by an agreed upon convention, the victims of Nazism.’

Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill all agree that ressentiment is a poison, a darkness that must be avoided, even when one is beyond Good and Evil. Amery takes the devil’s side. Or, rather, his essay is about the victim’s dealing with being a victim.

As we all know from our everyday political and social experience, the political life of “modern” societies is oriented, to a massive extent, to either disparaging victims or claiming victimhood. There are no non-victims in this discussion – even those establishment figures who are most scornful of “victims” are liable to portray themselves as the victims of victims – or, since this is too reminiscent of the crimes that created the victims, victims of those who “speak for” victims, and who are false friends, not real victims at all. The real victims are, of course, dead and gone, as is right and proper. Survival is a mark that really, one is not a victim at all, but a victimizer of the happy and the prosperous, of Capital and its bosses, of supposed skin “privilege”, etc., etc.

Amery compares his situation in 1945 to that of the giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“I was, as who I was – a surviving resistance fighter, a Jew, one of the persecuted people by a hated regime – in a mutual agreement with the world. Those who wounded me and turned me into a bedbug as dark powers had one operated on the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – they were themselves objects of horror for the winning camp. Not only National Socialism – Germany was the object of a general feeling, that before our eyes turned from hatred to contempt.”

However, just as the bug in the Metamorphosis is kicked out of the house of “normality”, so too was Amery – as an accuser. He quickly became out of synch with the “world-clock”, which had other plans than to make Germany into a potato field. And so the foundation of peace and modernity was laid on the tacit agreement to limit the amount of justice, or revenge, enacted on the perpetrators and their complicit populations.

This moment was not historically unprecedented. After the Civil War, the same thing happened to the victims of slavery. Emancipation turned into compromise, and then into second class citizenship, social death on credit, so to speak. Dubois’s “double soul”, the hyphenated accuser or assimilationist, was born out of a vast broken promise.

This is to spread the question over its largest dimension. Amery’s essay, though, takes the opposite route of asking the question about the bug he had become. How does one survive one’s survival?

2.

Tact – or Takt in German – goes back to the Latin word tangere, touch. The OED traces the “figurative” sense of “discrimination” back to touch as well, a “keen faculty of perception” given by the fingers, which in turn gives us, as well, a sense for what is fitting and proper. The OED leads us to that moment in the eighteenth century where, under the Shaftesbury-ian impulse, aesthetics is conflated with taste. Fingers, the tongue, the skin, with this we release the flavors of the world, we stroke, we feel in the dark. The blind  man in Diderot’s Letters on the Blind could read the world by its wrinkles and cracks. By this we are guided.

 

By these senses, too, the torturer is guided. Our touch, our skin, our sensual discriminations, by these things he gains access to our pain, to that loss of self and self worth that comes with the administration of pangs, of beatings, of cutting, of humiliations. The tortured find that they can’t bear it.

 Améry’s essay warns the reader, from the outset, that the question of tact and the theft of tact is going to operate as a sort of timing device here, giving the essay the rhythm of, say, the swinging of a whip, interrupting the higher flights of analysis and synthesis, with personal references to the torture of having his arms twisted high above his back, or to the Flemish SS officer Wajs beating him with a whip, or a shovel handle, or to the Auschwitz officer Bogen, who was tried in 1958 after controversially being “de-nazified”, for the murders and tortures associated with the Bogen swing: an iron bar on cables across which a person would be bent and beaten with crowbars, the force of the beating cause the bar to swing up and back, until only a human jelly remained.

 In these juxtapositions, what surface is being torn? Perhaps that surface that lies, infinitesimally thin, between the reader and the page.

 Ressentiment is not formally connected with the destruction of tact in the construction of the former in the essay, but by association. It is by association that Améry builds his vindication of the resentful instance, leading us to a conclusion that condemns the happy forgetfulness on which the post-war liberal society has been built.

 “At bottom, the fears of Scheler and Nietzsche were not justified. Our slave morality will not triumph. Ressentiments, the emotional source of every authentic morality, which will always be a morality for the oppressed – they have little or no chance to poison the victors in their evil works.”

 In this conclusion, we spot an untruth. That untruth takes the “strong”, the victors, to be immune from their own sense of grievance. How could the man at the handle end of the whip be resentful? This, I think, is a casualty of the radical inequality that Améry establishes between the perpetrator and the victim. When Améry remarks that the German people who he encountered in his transits from camp to camp in 1945 were stony faced about the cadavers they saw and more than willing to gleefully appropriate the “Jew coats” that were stripped off the prisoners, these were the ‘strong’ in a very limited sense.  The whole consciousness of these complacent supporters of murder and torture on an industrial scale was moved by ressentiment, as well. The emotional source of every authentic morality may, as well, be the emotional source of every authentic crime. By projecting backwards into ressentiment the desire to re-establish tact – a common, a communistic touch – its power and extent are, I think, illogically limited.  

My objection stems, in fact, from Améry’s insight into the heart of ressentiment – its struggle against “natural time”.  For Améry, the struggle is about reversing time and its effects, not in order to produce some alternative past in which one assassinates Hitler or prevents the disaster of 1933, but, rather, to produce a permanent state of revulsion against the horror of the Camps, one that perfectly reproduces the first effect of the horror: permanently wounding time.  This seems to me consistent, as well, with the ideology, the emotional style, of the “victors”. They do not cynically evoke wounds that they do not feel – they, instead, feel them, according to all historical evidence.  The idea that ressentiment does not have to be the only emotional source of authentic morality – that instead revolution itself, the slave’s revolt, can be that source – is put to one side by Améry as an ultimately non-serious dream, even an insult to the tortured.

 

“But what an extravagant daydream I have let myself fall into! I Didn’t I see passengers at the train station in 1945 turn pale in anger in the face of the piled up corpses of my comrades and turn threateningly on our and their  torturers?  Didn’t I see, thanks to my ressentiment and, through the effect of its traces, thanks to the German cleansing, time turn backwards?  Wasn’t it a German man who seized the shovel, that instrument of beating, from the SS man Wajs? Didn’t a German woman come forward and and car for the wounds of those who were tortured, broken and crazed? What didn’t I see in the unrestrained past, in the past turned backwards into the future, the forever overcome past!   

Nothing of the sort happened, I know, in spite of all the honorable efforts of the German intellectuals, who really wanted in the end to be what the others held them to be: rootless. All intelligible signs indicate, that natural time will refuse the demands of our ressentiment and  will finally extinguish it. The great revolution? Germany will not make up for it, and our resentment will come up empty.“

This is a powerful indictment. And yet, it doesn’t lead to any act of further solidarity. If ressentiment were really the emotional source of the slave revolt, shouldn’t that morality recognize other victims? It is here where I would like to lack tact as a reader. For it seems that  out of the moral uniqueness of victimhood, its hell, Améry wants to preserve the uniqueness of the concentration camps, of the perpetrators. He does not want to share with colonial peoples, or the Armenians, or anybody,  the status of the ultimate victim – for this would take away the moral uniqueness of his victimhood, would force him to share the pain he has shored for himself and his comrades alone.  This would lead him out of the unique opposition between German culture and German barbarism that is one of the motifs of the new liberal order, the way in which the slogan “never again” reduced to - never the Germans again.

“But the particularity of a highly civilized people with reliable organizations and almost scientific precision achieving the murder of millions will become regrettable, and even come to be found in no ways unique, proximate to the murdering expulsion of the Armenians by the Turks or the horrifying violence of the French colonial forces. Everything will be buried in a summary “century of Barbarism”. As we, incorrigibly refusing to learn, unreconcilable, historically hostile reactionaries in the literal sense, stand there, the victims, as survivors we will all finally seem to represent merely the cost of doing business.”

This is brilliant. Yet in the end, I, a reader who can only bow to those who were tortured at Auschwitz, or in Turkey, or Algeria, must reply in an untactful way from out of a life in which none of the pains I have ever experienced have come close to those I have read about. For the hoarding of victim status, the ressentiment that excludes the Armenian and Algerian victims, leads not to the authentic moral values of the slave morality, as Amery says, but to the use of ressentiment for all the wrong purposes. The victim comes not to prevent future victims, but to classify who and who is not the most victimized. A bureaucracy that can only lead to disaster.

I don't like where Amery's essay ends up. It reminded me of the onion chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In this chapter, Alyosha goes to visit Grushenka, Dmitri's mistress. She tells him a story:

'Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he, ‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’ And God answered: ‘You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’ The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,’ said he, ‘catch hold and I'll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day."

 

On Jean Améry's Resentment 1

 Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.

For the victims, in the afterlife of victimage event, in the narrative trajectory of their life as victims, there is a narrow spectrum of subject positions, from accusation to forgiveness, from resentment to forgetting. And the same this is true for those who are the great beneficiaries and managers of the social order, who move between demonizing the victim to programs urging reconciliation and assimilation, with guilt and fear mingling together. The managers have, of course, more elbow room, and can even afford to spare some understanding for the perpetrators - since the managers are not victims. They even have the luxury, which they abundantly use, of condescending to the victims. Yet, if they are wise, they also must feel a certain fear. The ghosts may conspire, the victims may revolt. The dialectic between the masters and the slaves is, as Nietzsche pointed out, the defining structure of dialectic itself. Without victimage, there would be no dialectic. Victim-measuring is the social project that binds together the accused and the accuser,

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.”

“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.”

This is the codex of the anti-social, the kingdom of Heaven.

You have seen Hanns Chaim Mayer, or his brothers and sisters, in the famous photos, “toothless skeletons that were reanimated with Angloamerican corned beef in a can” from April or May, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen. Mayer changed his name in anger to Jean Amery and fled, when he was able, to Brussels. Under the angry name, he waited for revenge. He waited for the people who had sustained and supported the people who tortured him and killed millions of Jews to be reduced, in their circumstances, to living in a vast “potato field.” Not for him the disgusting, “vibrating” hug of the oppressor, in forgiveness, of someone like Martin Buber. By the nineteen-sixties, though, it was clear that destruction, revenge, any cosmic equalling of the balance, was not going to happen.

In an essay entitled “Ressentiment”, he begins by contemplating the “miracle” of postwar Western Europe. The democracy! The prosperity! The liberal society! “I am not at ease in these peaceful, beautiful lands full of clever and modern people. Why, one has probably already guessed. I am one of that (happily) slowly dying species of people who are called, by an agreed upon convention, the victims of Nazism.’

Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill all agree that ressentiment is a poison, a darkness that must be avoided, even when one is beyond Good and Evil. Amery takes the devil’s side. Or, rather, his essay is about the victim’s dealing with being a victim.

As we all know from our everyday political and social experience, the political life of “modern” societies is oriented, to a massive extent, to either disparaging victims or claiming victimhood. There are no non-victims in this discussion – even those establishment figures who are most scornful of “victims” are liable to portray themselves as the victims of victims – or, since this is too reminiscent of the crimes that created the victims, victims of those who “speak for” victims, and who are false friends, not real victims at all. The real victims are, of course, dead and gone, as is right and proper. Survival is a mark that really, one is not a victim at all, but a victimizer of the happy and the prosperous, of Capital and its bosses, of supposed skin “privilege”, etc., etc.

Amery compares his situation in 1945 to that of the giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“I was, as who I was – a surviving resistance fighter, a Jew, one of the persecuted people by a hated regime – in a mutual agreement with the world. Those who wounded me and turned me into a bedbug as dark powers had one operated on the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – they were themselves the horror of the winning camp. Not only National Socialism – Germany was the object of a general feeling, that before our eyes turned from hatred to contempt.”

However, just as the bug in the Metamorphosis is kicked out of the house of “normality”, so too was Amery – as an accuser. He quickly became out of synch with the “world-clock”, which had other plans than to make Germany into a potato field. And so the foundation of peace and modernity was laid on the tacit agreement to limit the amount of justice, or revenge, enacted on the perpetrators and their complicit populations.

This moment was not historically unprecedented. After the Civil War, the same thing happened to the victims of slavery. Emancipation turned into compromise, and then into second class citizenship, social death on credit, so to speak. Dubois’s “double soul”, the hyphenated accuser or assimilationist, was born out of a vast broken promise.

This is to spread the question over its largest dimension. Amery’s essay, though, takes the opposite route of asking the question about the bug he had become. How does one survive one’s survival?

Second Wind: a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

First wind came out of the womb

Guzzling atmosphere like champagne

Bawling the certainty of self.

Second wind came out of recess

- a whistle, the line of girls

-the pecking order had my heart in its hands.

At midcourse I saw behind me

My blundering enemy Jane, flushed

With her evil weight and ways.

‘Where the foxe is earthed blow for the terriers

After the maner.” Birth of second wind

Out of the death of the fox

The wolf, and the deer.

I was by the tenth grade mistress

Of the breathing art, took my enemies three two one.

I was Coach's girl, until I discovered pot and cigs.

My second wind, my second wind

Another ghost howls in my wrack and wreck.

controversial opinions: if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, they are heroes

 

John Quiggins at Crooked Timber published a post last week about controversial opinions. He describes tweeting two of his controversial opinions, to see what response he would get. The two opinions are: there should have been more nuclear power plants built over the last 50 years, and less coal used; and two, world war 1 was a useless waste of life. 

Although I disagree with one, as Quiggins presents it, and agree with two, both of these opinions do not seem that far off the track. 

I have an opinion that is further off the track, I think. I think that if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really did steal the "secret" of the atom bomb for the Soviets, then the world should name a holiday for them. That was one of the most humanitarian acts of the twentieth century.

I'd backup my argument by saying: the U.S. showed an incredible moral blindness, or perhaps immorality, with its turn from the thirties - when the official American position decried bombing civilians as a war crime - to the forties - when it made bombing civilians a pillar of its military strategy, up to and including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Further, as the Korean war shows, unlimited targeting of civilians through airpower was the standard operating procedure for the American military. 

Given that mindset, if the U.S. had the monopoly of the atom bomb for another decade, it is probable they would have used it, perhaps extensively, against the Soviets, China, and perhaps in Korea. We would be living in a pretty awful world right now. 

So, god bless Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Or Julius - even the crank right that has howled about how Julius was guilty throws in a crumb that yeah, frying Ethel was a little overthetop, seeing as she was innocent. But you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette. And now, onto condeming moral relativism!