The mythical trucker: american psychopathology, lesson one million

 The immediate centrist-right wing response to the limited student loan forgiveness has been diagnostically fascinating. What Governor Rick DeSantis said about truck drivers not liking their "bosses" getting loan forgiveness sort of sums it up. Truck drivers, in this country club view, aren't like country clubbers and trust funders. The latter are so concerned with their families that they put enormous pressure on Congress to lower inheritance taxes, and have succeeded. But truckers - truckers are abstract Ayn Randian beings. Their parents have no college loan debt, their spouses have no college loan debt, their children and grandchildren don't - or maybe they do, but the proud individual, socially blank trucker (who often him or herself has college debt) doesn't care. This individual without any social ties, this immaculate conception of a trucker, cares only, egotistically, about its own self - how much it can eat, how much it can wank, how much it can shit. It is cut off from all social relations.

This actually reflects the dominant way of thinking in patriarchy. The patriarchal subject is, ideally, some trust fund frat boy who says things like "there's no free lunch", even as their very physical existence has depended on at least eighteen years of free lunches. In their delusional, testosterone stoked imaginations, they are "self-made". In a culture with a more realistic view of life, the idea of a self being self-made would be cause for laughter or concern - concern that this claim was evidence of some deep psychopathy. But in the odd tribal culture of American patriarchy, this claim becomes something heroic.

These things all tie into the psychopathology of American politics. Governed by fatally flawed myths, American politics is and has been a real threat to ... Americans. Flesh and blood Americans, Americans who love, have connections, realize throughout their lives that there is such a thing as a free lunch, a lunch they can never pay back.

So I am having a good time reading tweets, especially from the political industry of consultants, pundits and general scoundrels in DC who together form the club of Very Serious People. Their views are reflected everywhere - from the halls of the NYT to the seats of Fox News. And... they are completely unhinged.

The first man (and woman) in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns

 The Ancients, the Moderns, and all that jazz

Adam, the first man – and not my son, who bears the same name – has long been a subject of fascination. The story in Genesis of Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Snake and the Tree of Good and Evil has such a satisfying drive, like a beautiful dream; and like a dream, it seems to come to our waking senses to be somehow in fragments, lacking certain important connective moments.

Hobbes, in the Leviathan, uses a very interesting term to distinguish Adam in the first of a line of charismatic beings:

“From the very Creation, God not only reigned over all men Naturally by his might; but also had Peculiar Subjects, whom he commanded by a Voice, as one man speaketh to another. In which manner he Reigned over Adam, and gave him commandement to abstaine from the tree of cognizance of Good and Evill; which when he obeyed not, but tasting thereof, took upon him to be as God, judging between Good and Evill, not by his Creators commandement, but by his own sense, his punishment was a privation of the estate of Eternall life, wherein God had at first created him…”

The Peculiar Subjects are now called Leaders, Geniuses, or even, in the TED era of accelerated bourgeouis banality, Thought Leaders. Hobbes here is replaying the state of nature that Leviathan speculates about – the state of primal war – with paradise, in orthodox Anglican fashion, at the beginning. Hobbes seems to forget, though, that by the same property, i.e. being commanded by a voice, Eve was also a Peculiar Subject. This forgotten “aside” is typical of patriarchy, where the social logic that gives us masculine x does not give us feminine y because… well, we either forget about y or rationalize y away.

If history turns around Peculiar Subjects, it becomes an ultimately inscrutable affair, in as much as there seems to be no scrutable cause in God’s choice. For instance, he chooses Abraham. And out of Abraham’s descendants, he makes a Peculiar people, Israel, and he chooses certain persons among that Peculiar people, like Moses, or the prophets. For the English empiricists, history, then, can't be a science in any but the most bare bones way: a collection of facts, out of which we can speculate about causes but lack experimental apparatus to prove our hypotheses.

Having a Baconian interest in causes, this larger story causes Hobbes some difficulty. There are those who read Hobbes as an atheist, or at least theistically deist. In fact, there’s no reason to think Hobbes’ difficulty is unorthodox – without this historical difficulty, we subtract grace and faith from the world. We partake in the Peculiar Subject that is Jesus in communion. As Weber would put it, charisma is normalized in tradition.

If we look at Adam in the Early Modern British culture, he operates as a peculiar argument for the moderns as opposed to the ancients. Joseph Glanvill, who was the secretary of the Royal Society and on the side of the new learning, takes Adam’s fall (and Eve’s, though she isn’t mention) as an event in meta-physiology: not only do Adam’s descendants die, but they have to scrape by with their diminished sensorium:

“Adam needed no spectacles. The acuteness of his natural optics (if conjecture may have credit) showed him much of the celestial magnificence and bravery without a Galileo'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. His sight could inform him whether the Loadstone doth attract by Atomical Effluviums. It may be he saw the motion of the blood and spirits through the transparent skin as we do the workings of those little industrious animals (bees) through a hive of glasse Sympathies and Antipathies were to him no occult qualities, &c."

Glanvill’s Scepsis Scientifica, where he made these claims, is prefaced by a defense of this interpretation of Adam. It is a highly wrought passage, the kind of prose that delighted moderns like James Joyce.

“But lest the ingenious rumble at my threshold, and take offence at

the seemingly disproportionate excess, which I ascribe to Adam's senses: I'll subjoin a

word to prevent the scruple. First then, for those that go the way of the allegoric, and

assert pre-existence; I'm secure enough from their dissatisfaction. For, that the

ethereal Adam could easily sense the most tender touches Upon his passive vehicle,

and so had a clear and full perception of objects, which we since plunged into the

grosser hyle are not at all, or but a little aware of; can be no doubt in their hypothesis.

Nor can there as great a difference be supposed between the senses of eighty, and

those of twenty, between the opticks of the blind bat and peripicacious eagle, as there

was between those pure uneclipsed sensations, and aide of our now-embodyed,

muddied sensitive. Now that the pr-existent Adam could so advantageously form his

vehicle, as to receive better information from the distant objects, than we by the most

helpful telescopes; will be no difficult admission to the friends of the allegory. So that

what may seem a mere hyperbolical, and fanciful display to the sons of the letter; to

the allegorists will be but a defective representation of literal realities.”

That time reversal – in which the ancients become young, and the moderns become old, by analogy to the human organism (with its own tender touches upon its passive vehicle – I am going to stifle the obvious dirty joke here, but surely this is referenced somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake), is a pattern that becomes central to the New Learning’s self image. Newton sees farther because he is seated on the shoulders of giants.

Bernard Bouvier de la Fontenelle, the great popularizer of the new learning, recounts the story of Hartsoecker in his Eloge to the Dutch scholar in 1725. This story makes a strong claim that Hartsoecker was the first to examine human sperm with a microscope. It is a story that brings together onanism and science, shame and discovery, in a truly Adamic flourish.

Hartsoecker was 18 when he built his first microscope, on a model he remembered from seeing Leeuwenhoek's. And he shut himself up in his room, for fear his father would find out what he was doing.

“ … [he was} the first for whom was unveiled the most unexpected spectacle in the world for physicians, even the most bold in speculation : these little animals up to now invisible, which were transformed into pleaop, which swam in prodigious qantities in the liquid appointed to carry them, only in those of males, which have the shape of tadpoles, with big heads and long tails, and lively movements. This strange novelty astonished the observer, who did not dare to speak of it. He even thought that what he saw might be some strange sickness, and he did not follow up on his observation. »

The enduring, fundamental narcissism of the human male! I could make the parallels - the hiding from the father, the shame - but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. I am sure that if this story were abroad in the circles where Fontenelle moved, it was, perhaps, available to Jonathan Swift, who would have loved it – and drawn quite another conclusion than Fontenelle. Hartsoecker has a quality of mind that seems quite… Gulliverian.

If you never have been tempted by a demon or a god

 

“At Pharai in Achaia [a  rite] was practised under the official patronage of Hermes, the market god. In front of the image is a hearth made of stone, with bronze lamps clamped to it with lead. He who would inquire of the god comes at evening and burns incense on the hearth, fills the lamp[s with oil, lights them, lays a coin of the country called a copper on the altar to the right of the image, and whispers his question, whatever it may be, into the ear of the god. Then he stops his ears and leaves the market-place, and when he is gone a little way outside he takes his hands from his ears, and whatever words he hears he regards as an oracle.” - William Halliday Greek Divination (1913)

Overhearing, eavesdropping – I have long thought that these are severely neglected topics in the philosophy of language and literary criticism.  In the Pharai example, the inquirer intentionally overhears. He or she intentionally appropriates the word spoken and applies it to the question asked. But of course that an utterance can be inhabited by a wholly other spirit than that in which it is spoken gives us an eery sense of how the gods operate in the world. There is a great deal of this in the modernist novel. To give just one example that occurs to me right now, this was the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh loved. In Black Mischief,  Basil Seal, making love to Prudence Samson, the daughter of the British envoy to Azania tells her she’s a grand girl and “I’d like to eat you up.” A phrase that the reader is not especially called upon to remember – it is all just lovey-dovey, innit?  Yet, in the final chapter, when Basil attends a dance of the Azanian tribe that has overthrown the Azanian emperor and captured his entourage, including Prudence, he  is treated to a feast at which he asks the headman where the white girl has gone, and the headman responds by rubbing his belly and saying “why here – you and I and the big chiefs have just eaten her.” 

This is the overheard word that is not overheard by the person who speaks it – it is rather commandeered. All of us have surely had those moments when, in the thick of some bad situation, we think back to something we have said without thinking that seems to point to the future mysteriously.

Such is the oracular power of words that are, so to speak, overheard by fate that I often, superstitiously, will knock on wood after making some decisive judgment, like, I am sure I don’t have COVID. What I am certain of has a tendency to vanish in the future. To leave the noise and voices of the market place and go “a little way outside” is the philosopher’s path – from Socrates to Descartes to Nietzsche – and it is only imperfectly imitated by the university. The philosopher, of course, wants to be a scientist, not a superstitious supplicant. Thus, no philosopher that I am aware of has written a tractate on eavesdropping, which is a pity – and a puzzle. Philosophy moved, at some mythical point,  from worshipping at the altar of Athena to worshipping at the altar of Hermes, who overhears and delights in being overheard. A trans deity.

And still a deity. The force of the oracular word has not been slain by the formula or set theory. On the contrary, one of the great evidences of social media is that some phrase, attached to a celebrated name – “said”, most often – is circulated over and over, to the evident satisfaction of the circulators. “God doesn’t play dice, said Einstein.” So, for instance,  we copy this and use it, often with illustrations, and it becomes a kind of evidence, and Einstein becomes a kind of oracle.

But what if the word overheard is not recognized by others as an oracle? What if charisma for me (remember, Weber’s image of charisma is exemplified in Jesus, the man who said: “I say unto you”; the man whose mission was, so to speak, captioned when, as described in Matthew 3:, And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased) is not for thee?  There is a saying for that: “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.".

When we identify with the voice within we call it thinking. But what if we don’t identify, and the voice comes? Is it eavesdropping? Overhearing? An oracle? A daemon? Or schizophrenia? Myself, I think there is always a bit of schizophrenia, of another voice, lurking within, things "said" in the brain that we do not identify with, flashes in the brainpan, words that answer questions we did not know we were asking.

From Poyen to Hitchcock - for a mesmeric history of the new world

Alexis de Tocqueville landed in America in May, 1831 and spent nine months there; out of that experience he wrote Democracy in America and became famous.

Charles Poyen never quite became famous, and is now utterly forgotten. He came to America by a convoluted journey worthy of a Greek hero – his itinerary was littered with omens, pronounced by somnambulists. He consulted a somnambulist, Madame Villetard, in Paris, looking for a cure for a chronic pain he suffered from. Her remarkable knowledge of his disease- which, we are assured in his memoir, The Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, was not altogether beyond Poyen’s own comprehension, since he was a medical student – led him to ask her about his proposed journey to Guadaloup, where part of his family resided, apparently as plantation owners. Madame Villetard gave her approval, so off our hero went, to convalesce and further explore the mysteries of somnambulism. He did so, using some ‘colored servants’ as subjects, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mesmeric trance touched on something universal: …the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties among every nation and under whatever skin, black red or white, it may be concealed.”

Admirable sentiments. However, the somnambulists of Guadaloup predicted that his illness would not resolve itself any time soon, so he set off for New England, where he had relatives. He went to Maine. He went to Lowell. He taught French. And, admiring his new country, he resolved to plunge into its difficulties, writing a book that ‘was calculated to avoid all social commotions and give equal satisfaction to the parties interested.’ This was in the 1830s, and it was to be expected that a plantation owning Frenchman would attack abolitionism – but, of course, not in the meantime defending slavery. Then Poyen turned his hand to translating and lecturing on animal magnetism. Of course, he felt the heat of prejudice – after all, the theory had been exploded by the ‘great Franklin’ fifty years before, alluding to the committee, including Franklin, Bailly, Lavoisier, Thouvet and other notables that investigated Mesmer, under the direction of the royal government in 1784, which concluded that Mesmeric effects were the result of pure suggestion. It was patriotic to disbelieve in animal magnetism. But the enlightenment America of Franklin’s time had disappeared. Paine, coming back to America in 1803, had already written bitter articles about the narrow and bigoted class that had supplanted the enlightened colonial elite. Poyen didn’t find the class particularly bigoted, except, of course, among the establishment medical men.

Poyen was just the kind of enterprising individual that America in the age of the Great Awakening tended to embrace. He had a story of sickness. He had a story of a cure. And the cure was not simply a cure, but a metaphysics, a cosmology, the beginning of a new world. From our diseases we make our discoveries.

Poyen confesses that he himself could not ‘magnetize’, but he quickly found a countryman of his, a Monsieur Bugard, a French teacher, who could. Thus began a practice that was also an exhibit.

It wasn’t that Poyen was the first Mesmerist in America, but he was the first well known Mesmerist missionary. And he had an effect in America that was, in some ways, larger than Tocqueville’s. He attracted a number of New England mechanicals who put down their tools and took up magnetic cures. Among them was a Mr. Phineus Quimby – the very name is like a Jules Verne character! – who heard Poyen lecture in Belfast, Maine, where Quimby worked as a clockmaker. Poyen saw that Quimby was a natural, and Quimby believed him, so like many a disciple, Quimby gave up his former life and embarked on a new one as a healer. Among those Quimby operated upon was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Between Poyen’s stay in America and Quimby’s own practice, certain parts of the mesmeric doctrine melted away – or rather merged with other intellectual currents in New England. It is no accident that Poyen was attracted to the slavery debate – abolitionism and other social causes – woman’s suffrage, temperance, etc. - and spiritualism were joined at the hip in pre-bellum America. As was the intellectual culture that, for Edgar Allan Poe, was the only ‘aristocracy’ in America.

Poe, in the 1840s, took up mesmerism as a convenient device for producing uncanny effects. It worked – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a fan letter to Poe, mentioned that ‘Valdemar’ had produced a sensation in England. Indeed, it produced a sensation in mesmeric circles in general. The story begins with a pitch perfect reproduction of the tone of the animal magnetism pamphleteer, with its mixture of personal experience and scientific ‘fact’:

“My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extend, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.”

Of course, the experiment in magnetic influence is held upon M. Ernest Valdemar – who is, of course, originally a Frenchman now resident in Manhattan. Poe has a lot of his usual fun setting up his joke: Valdemar, skinny and dying, is prevailed upon to allow himself to be subject to the mesmeric influence during his ‘dissolution’. Startlingly, after his death, Valdemar still communicates with the mesmerist:

“… here were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.

I have spoken both of "sound" and of "voice." I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. Now he said:

"Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead."

The story was published as a true account, originally, in England, although Poe didn’t intend it as a hoax. Poe’s own obsession/compulsion was with erotic resurrection. Always a great griever, Poe found a woman who reminded him of his dead wife – one Sarah Helen Whitman. She knew of him from common friends, one of whom had written to her about his ‘uncanny’ ways – ‘the strangest stories are told, and what is more believed, about his mesmeric experiences.’ He had talked to her a total of one time when, in 1848, he received a Valentine from her. That prompted one of his spookiest love letters, an outpouring that even ‘Helen’, as he decided to call her, must have found daunting. This includes this passage:

“Immediately after reading the Valentine, I wished to contrive some mode of acknowledging – without wounding you by seeming directly to acknowledge – my sense – oh, my keen – my exulting – my ecstatic sense of the honour you had conferred on me. To accomplish as I wished it, precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however; and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems; and then the lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first purely idea love of my soul – to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you – flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all – all that I would have said to you – so fully – so accurately and so exclusively, that a thrill of intense superstition ran at once through my frame.”

A voice at a distance, so gelatinous as to be congealed into dead print. Naturally, Poe's one meeting with Sarah/Helen had led to a walk in the cemetery. The actor being captured by the act - such things always seem to happen to America's outlaw writers.

I do not know how thoroughly Hitchcock knew Poe, but Poe's theme, and the theme of the mesmeric influence of the dead, pervades Vertigo. While another fifties classic - Lolita - toys of course with Poe's fascination with girls. Oh, that male desire for the resurrected femme fatale!

the geography of lost

 

There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream.

There is a vital connection between this dreaminess and adventure. Simmel wrote that adventure cuts itself off from normal life and is recalled as a kind of dream – but what kind? Lostness, I think, is the condition of adventure.
In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. There are people we know who fall in love, say, with a certain type. From outside, you recognize it. But from inside that lover’s illusion, as you might think it, there is all the difference in the world between x and y. How does this person’s radar pick out these loves? Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our libidos. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again.
Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction:
“Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.”
Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life:
“When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that this difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other. And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.”
That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course:
“While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, within this movemen it becomes a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which is somehow bound up with the center.
The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb].”
As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear.
Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on.
“The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.”
These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future.
Simmel’s adventure concept, as one can see, is akin to lostness. I’d suggest that the most characteristic lostness there is is being lost in a wood. The beginning of the Inferno casts its shadow precisely because the forest represents a certain alienness to human settlement. It is a tree settlement, a bushes settlement, something that arises without human thought or intention, but that is visibly a settlement, a matter of mutual interdependence, something that is, perhaps, beyond us. To be lost in the world is, partly, in my way of conceptualizing it, about giving ourselves up to the strange – and the stranger. The ultimate strangers are non-human coordinating communities – the community of the sea, the community of the mountains, the forests. These strangers are echoed in the strangers, the human ones, where adventure takes its course.
And the moral of all this is Miranda’s:
“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!”

revery on transcendence

 

Borachio, thou art read
In nature and her large philosophy.
Observ'st thou not the very self-same course
Of revolution, both in man and beast?

-         The Atheist’s Tragedy

 

What is the state of transcendence today?

-         One of Derrida’s favorite gambits was to open an article with a totally queer or off kilter sentence: Que vais-je pouvoir inventer encore? For instance. This seems a phrase broken off from a first draft, or an interior monologue, or something eavesdropped upon. Some event to which one was not privy. It sets us, if we are not so irritated that we do not read further, on the path of estrangement, which means hopping, skipping and jumping to an unfamiliar rhythm.

-         “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.”

-         So: what is the state of transcendence today – as opposed to, say, one hundred or two hundred years ago. The thought came to me as I was lying in bed here on vacation. But what does it mean to approach the state of transcendence now, if transcendence is an intemporal relationship of, say, experience to, say, the world, and plunk it immediately in history? Or more specifically, its state. Because one could say transcendence for the Cro-Magnon man, or for that matter the passenger pigeon, and transcendence for me, lying in bed and feeling the air of the fan on my bare feet, is the same matter.

-         “Transcendence.” It does seem to have migrated from a central concern of philosophy to a central concern of new age self-help books. A keen philosophy student wanting to write about “transcendence” is almost surely going to start with old texts, transcendence in Kant say, and do a little hermeneutic massage to figure out what that was about, perhaps relating it to the latest in the analytic theory of consciousness. His own experience of transcendence is not going to be part of this story, most usually.

-         For instance, re the later, the kiss.

-         Why the kiss? Why kiss? What is the state of transcendence vis-à-vis a passionate kiss?

-         In the stream of analytic philosophy, not only has transcendence been booted out – an intolerably pre-scientific relic – but experience itself is treated almost wholly as an epistemological question. Experience is consciousness, or fills up that space. And this generates questions like: is consciousness a product of the brain, denoting a cerebral mechanism like “fish” denotes certain creatures that swim in the sea? Or does it have a different ontological status?

-         In this way, the kiss dissolves into a business having to do with intentions.

-         The starting point for the pragmatists, however, has to be experience, not consciousness, or knowing. This is their debt to Emerson, which has been underlined by James, Dewey, Cavell, West, Rorty, etc. Experience, say of a kiss, or of time and space in general, is “nagged” by transcendence – by the contained having something in it that is more than the container.

-         Wittgenstein, the story goes, was discussing his sense of the propositional structure of the world with the Italian economist Sraffa. He “insisted that a proposition had the same internal structure as the state of affairs it describes. Sraffa responded with a certain Neapolitan hand gesture… and said: “what is the logical form of that?”

-         Another version of the story is that Sraffa responded by kissing Wittgenstein passionately on the mouth.

-         No. I made that up.

-         In the tv series, Locke and Key, the uncle looks at his childhood home, the House of Keys, and gives it the finger. Bodie, his nephew, sees him, and the uncle smiles sheepishly and explains that the finger means many things. Like aloha, says Bodie, and the uncle agrees. So Bodie goes around, giving the finger and saying aloha. Has Bodie misunderstood the finger, or aloha?

-         There’s the handshake. There’s the embrace. There’s the kiss. Our transcendent gestures? Or is it all… projection?

 

variations on the pathetic fallacy

 

Although we were going upriver to Blois, that day, we had a couple of hours to kill, so we decided to take the train downriver to Saumur and poke around. We got out at the station and headed up the hill to the bridge, which is mighty long. Its left flank crosses one branch of the Loire river, then it runs through an island, then it crosses the right bank of the river.

Saumur is a physically capacious town, with an infrastructure, as a newspaper article in the Petit Temps, December 9, 1893, noted, that could easily support 100,000 people – but like the clothes of  a person who has some wasting disease, the infrastructure is much too large for its current size. What happened to Saumur was that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had the effect of outlawj g or severely restricting Protestantism. Since half of Saumur at that time was Protestant,  most of the population left. It was the worst thing ever to happen to Saumur. Even the owners of the story-book castle above the town were affected. Since then, the most celebrated fact about Saumur is that the model for Balzac’s Pere Grandet might have lived there. It is slim pickings when a town’s reputation is basically an outtake from the Comedie humaine, but that’s Saumur.

As you cross the left flank bridge, you will notice – you will be forced to notice – that the vast bridge, which is supposed to span one of France’s largest rivers, now spans a mere river bed, overgrown with scrawny vegetation and hosting a few mosquito breeding pools of water. As you cross the right flank bridge, the Loire, which flows beneath it, is visibly shallow, and the banks of the river have most significantly encroached upon the trickle that still claims the name of a river.

France is hot this summer. And France is dry this summer, with a dryness that emerges, in the papers, under various bureaucratic formula as a “crisis”.

« The Loire is perhaps a long tranquil river… but for the moment, it is drying out. The préfecture of Maine-et-Loire has been taking, each week since the commencement of July, new measure ordering water restrictions. Each one is more drastic than the last. »

The Loire is suffering.

2.

When I write “the Loire is suffering”, I am conscious that, according to English literature classes, I am committing the “pathetic fallacy.” That term was coined by John Ruskin in his book, Modern Painters (1856). Ruskin goes about coining his phrase by attacking, firstly, the use of the terms “subjective” and “objective”, suspicious immigrants from German philosophy, and then returning to good plain English:

“… we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question,—namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy;[54] false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us.

 

155

For instance—

 

"The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould

Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold." [55]

This is very beautiful and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?”

Ruskin’s other example of this false perception – what he does not call projection, but which I, having read Freud, will- has to do with water. The example is from Tennyson’s Alton Locke:

“It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind admits, when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke,—

 

"They rowed her in across the rolling foam—

The cruel, crawling foam."

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic fallacy."”

Ruskin is a sage, which means that his thought, stretched through some forty volumes of the collected works, is a matter of a sort of gestalt rather than a set of logically derived conclusions. Like other Victorian sages, such as Huxley, one feels that underneath the common sense that dismisses German philosophy and gets right down to true and false appearances, there is a distinct strain of Protestant iconoclasm. In Ruskin’s case, this co-exists uneasily with his ideological elevation of the medieval period as the touchstone for the best social order: an organic order, far different from industrial capitalism. In his autobiography, Ruskin calls himself a “red Tory” – the red part being the aforesaid disgust with capitalism, and the Tory part being his indissoluble Walter Scott-ism. His rejection of an art and language of false appearance, summed up as the pathetic fallacy, is all about the common sense tradition of English philosophy. But his problem comes from annexing common sense to his theory of the heightened and heightening  truths of art. Ruskin solves his conundrum by another division, between first rate art in which the passion that drives the projection is genuine, and second rate art, in which the projection is driven mechanically, by a lower need – the need to be, in this or that instance, artsy.

3.

My belief that the Loire is suffering, I’d contend, is not an instance of either good or bad pathetic fallacy – but a contention against the century in which passion and feeling have been reduced to events – phenomena or epiphenomena – which require a neural substrate.

The discourse on emotion, in the West, is characterized by the strong break, at the end of the early modern period, between a theory of temperament based on “spirits” of some kind in the human body – and in the bodies of certain animals – and the theory of emotion based, eventually, on motions in the neural network. “Emotion” itself, as a word to cover the gamut of the passions, is a nineteenth century invention. Like the temperament theory, it encodes the idea that the internal life is defined by motion itself.

This, however, drives us up to a gap in our explanations. How does neural motion make an emotion? Is the Loire unable to suffer because its motions are not of a certain arrangement and material type? Or is this all a user illusion?

 

a perfect novel: Queneau's A Hard Winter

 

In Obitor, Mircea Cartarescu’s Proust-like novel of growing up in Bucharest, the narrator describes watching a small bug cross the expanse of two pages of Doestoevsky’s The Double.  The bug is, of course, unaware of the characters in The Double, its living space:

It patiently makes its way over the hillocks and ravines of the bad quality paper, tunnels into the pages, then reappears in the yellow light without according the least attention to the complicated psychological processes of Goliadkin, to the black print, larger than it, which codifies them.”

There is a kind of novel I love that does something like this with its characters. In Joyce’s Ulysses, the characters traverse the Odyssey without having any idea that this is how their motions on that June day in 1904 are being accorded – at the most, some of them think they are role-playing Hamlet. In Under the Volcano, a whole astrological, alchemical and numerological world is expressed in the drunken journey towards death of the Consul. One could name, here, Bely’s Petersburg and the novels of  Raymond Queneau.

The difference between  Cartarescu’s bug and the characters of these novels is that the characters have some consciousness of walking through a textified world. It is a flickering consciousness, granted. To give an example from Queneau’s almost perfect novel, Un rude hiver: the wife of the main character, Bernard Lehameau, dies in a fire in a cinema house in Havre on 21 février 1903. That is the date of Raymond Queneau’s birth, but Lehameau has no consciousness of this. The reader who looks up the fire will find it never took place. Yet the Havre Lehameau encounters, the Havre of the Gaumont, the Omnia-Pathe, and the Kursal movie houses, the Havre in which the Belgian government in exile had its seat, the Havre in which a Chinese troupe gave an exposition of dance on Place Thiers in October 1916 did “take place”. Queneau scholars have long noted that in the Queneau’s journal for 1916, the Chinese troupe is described as putting itself in a row to begin its dance; in Un rude Hiver, the Chinese troupe forms a circle. This small upset of a fact is guided by the place of circles in the entire structure of the book, which presents a Havre that exists, as well, in the symbolic form that Queneau wants to give it.

I’ve just finished this novel, taking the train from Paris to where I am writing this now, in Bourgeuil, where we are spending an Airbnb week – Loire country, good for wine and biking. I finished it with the feeling I always get when I’ve read a novel that works, for me, on all levels: the feeling of emerging from something, well, portentous – full of portents. There are novels you go to like a suppliant going to a temple to ask a question. As is well known, the answers the prophetess gives are always enigmas, which require a lifetime of study. Koans, the Kabbalah. Queneau, as his journal shows, was fascinated with “esoteric” knowledge; even as he gave up the path prescribed by Guenon, he retained a fascination with the sage, a fascination fed by Kojeve’s reading of Hegel, in which the sage has a distinct, historically important role. Kojeve’s lectures, given between 1933-1939, were written down by Queneau, and published in 1947 as the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, which had an enormous impact on the French intellectual scene. I as well have ambitions to be a sage, but I looked out the window, watched the Loire countryside go by, and thought as a suppliant.

Why, though, is it almost perfect? Why do I think, in terms of traditional  novel business, it is better than Witchgrass –Le Chiendent – my favorite Queneau novel?

Well, the character of the protagonist, Bertrand Lehameau is one of the answers. It is hard to write about a protagonist who is so opposed, ideologically, to the author. Moreover, this is a love story with a theme that is every bit as sappy as a Lifetime movie (spoilers ahead): Lehameau falls in love with a British nurse, who fills a void in his life created thirteen years before, when his wife and his mother died in a great fire in a movie theatre. They nearly sleep together – they don’t – the nurse leaves, called back to England – her boat is sunk by a German U-boat. Yet there are other features Lifetime avoids. Lehameau is also attracted to a teen, Annette – and take her and her brother Polo on outings to the movies. The siblings have a sister, Madeleine, who runs a brothel. Lehameau sleeps with Madeleine and proposes marriage at the end of the book. Moreover, his leg, injured in battle, heals, and he heads cheerfully back to the front.

Queneau was a great admirer of Joyce – Joyce rocked his world, one could say, and started him on his career as a novelist – a not uncommon effect. In a sense, Lehameau (literal translation: the hamlet)  is an anti-Bloom. He’s a  thirty-three year old ultra-rightist of Schopenhauerian views and anti-semitic tendencies. Apparently, Queneau took some of Lehameau’s speeches and attitudes from his own father. In an unpublished text meant to begin a memoir, Queneau wrote: “ I am from a petit-bourgeois family: my father was an anti-semitic and my mother epileptic, my aunt practiced an underhanded euthanasia on my grandmother, one of my uncles died of delirium tremens, another managed to avoid the same by way of smoker’s cancer, the third was blind in one eye.” There is a particular form of forgiveness parents reserve for children and children for parents – perhaps this explains the state of grace that surrounds the otherwise dark and unpromising Lehameau. His thirteen years of chastity as well as his war wound are healed at the end of the novel, which ends with a certain insight. Lehameau is discussing life with his friend, the bookstore owner Madame Dutertre:

“Mrs. Dutertre looked at him, making a great effort to decipher the new being that was presenting himself to her.

-Okay, she said, finally, you no longer hate the poor and the miserable, Mr. Lehameau?

- Nor the Germans even, Mrs. Dutertre, he responded, smiling. Not even them. Not even the Havre-ians, he added, laughing.

-Well, it seems you must have become a great sage, said Mrs. Dutertre, trying to kid him.

Bernard got up.

“Well, Mrs. Dutertre, goodbye. I’m going off to the war like everybody else.”

In this novel, “deciphering” plays a great role. At one emotional high point Lehameau and his love, Helena, look at the sea – but Queneau describes them as “deciphering” the sea. Here the bug runs into the letters that it has simply crawled over – and discovers, with contra-bug surprise, that it is indeed a letter. As with bugs transcending their bugness, so to with humans – in Queneau’s world.