Notes on Orwell's apocalypso

 

I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen. They forced 1984 down our throats in my Cold War era highschool – it was the golden age of warning the kiddies against Utopia, so Huxley’s … and Golding’s Lord of the Flies were thrown in for good measure – and I, little rebel, did not read these books. In fact, I’ve never read 1984 and Lord of the Flies. Chinks, no doubt, in the  armor of my reading. I read Zamyatin’s We instead.

But I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen, when I systematically checked out of the library the edition of his essays and letters in three volumes, edited by Sonia Orwell. The volumes were entitled – the last one bore the wonderful title In Front of Your Nose, underlining the touch Orwell, the truth teller, the prophet.

Orwell was an almost preternaturally bad prophet. In contrast to his ability to envision the past and the present – he had the gift for reducing the “mental atmosphere” of an era (or at least of his favored chronological unit, the decade) into ten or more rich pages, the great longform writer’s gift – Orwell’s sense of the future consisted of a rather mechanical extrapolation of the horrors of the interwar and World War II period. Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism was applied, like cheap paint, by Cold War intellectuals to Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, etc. – thus missing the huge changes in the Soviet system.

I think I, as a seventeen year old, turned to the essays because of a remark of Kurt Vonnegut’s, who used one of Orwell’s sentences in his series of Letters from England for the Partisan Review as the very model and exemplar of how to begin an essay. As I remember it, the sentence was: As I write, highly trained men in  technologically sophisticated airplanes are trying to kill me with bombs. Something like that. The perspectival shift – which was, as well, Tolstoy’s great trope, per Skhlovsky – is admirable. One can see how Kurt Vonnegut learned from it. It is was absorbed into American literary culture more, perhaps, than British, where comfortably sliding into your subject is still the preferred intro. The violence of ordinary British life goes more into their popular music, in the Cold War period, than into the novel, with its easy relapse into realism.

I periodically re-read Orwell with the same appetite that I periodically re-read Raymond Chandler. It is not that I agree with Orwell about very much, but I think he is one of the true inheritors of the plain speech style. And, as is proven by such essays as Inside the Whale, he has a rare capacity to appreciate other, radically different prose styles – Henry Miller’s, for instance.

Inside the Whale was written in 1939. While Orwell was reading Miller, war broke out, and the sophisticated airmen started their bombing raids. Although not on the scale expected; that is, during the phoney war. And not gas bombs, finally. The great fear at the beginning of the war was of mustard gas. It is odd that Britain prepared for the mustard gas attack by stocking up on masks while leaving the question of Germany’s development and manufacture of gas warfare entirely off the table in the 30s. But of course, Britain was undecided if Germany was really an ally against the great Bolshevik Satan or an enemy itself. Hence, the treaty that Britain struck with Germany, behind France’s back, which allowed Germany vast leaway to rearm. A treaty that has, somehow, gotten much less of the spotlight than the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. And we know why…

Inside the Whale has a very fine analysis of the “mental atmosphere” of the modernist twenties, of which Henry Miller is definitely a product, even if Tropic of Cancer was published in the thirties. Orwell met Miller, and was astonished and fascinated by Miller’s theory, or rather attitude, that he would just accept what comes. Orwell rightly sees that the didactic leftist writers of the thirties failed to understand the ordinary forms of life under capitalism, fascism and Stalinism, which was to hide your head and eat your breakfast, if you had it. Miller, by contrast, with all his rebellion against the ”air conditioned nightmare”, saw his life and others as fluxes in a stream, the general course of which is far outside the powers of the individual to affect.

This attitude, Orwell implies, is necessary for literature as an object in its own right. Comfort, the protection of ordinary life, the essential liberalism – outside of these parameters, Orwell thought, literature as a modern institution couldn’t exist. The ending paragraphs of Inside the Whale are Orwell at his most apocalyptic, and compare with Adorno’s famous phrase that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.

But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer’s world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. … It [Miller’s attitude] is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into a new shape.”

Two ugly men

 

Two of the great ancient sages were notoriously ugly: Aesop and Socrates.

In both cases, the ugliness was a disguise – the sage as a clown, the clown as omen. Gerard Mace, in his essay on Aesop in Vies anterieurs, begins by recounting his encounter with a streetcorner beggar and storyteller – his Aesop. “ The Aesop that I knew did not at all ressemble the big lipped Moor that La Fontaine evokes in one of his stories, but it is true that Aesop became ugly, because the legend needed it, many centuries after he lived. For posthumous life is as badly assured as the first one ; one continues to change masters and reputation as one changes face as one grows older.”

What was the « besoin » of legends that made Aesop ugly? Perhaps it was the same necessity that gave Socrates an ugly face – the fabulous proximity of the sage and the buffoon.

To my mind, there is something ominous, or omened, in the fact that the French revolution was, as it were, driven by ugly men. Danton, the awkward giant, Marat, the scabrous writer, perpetually in his bath, and Mirabeau. Mirabeau, the pockmarked pornographer, a man of the underground – literally if the legend is true that he hid in the sewers when he was being searched for by the police, caught some skin disease which ruined his youthful beauty, and emerged a different man. “No one knows the omnipotence of my ugliness, » Mirabeau said once. “When I shake my terrible mug, there is no one who would dare to interrupt me.”

Sade was attuned to that close proximity of the buffoon and the sage – and yet, it was, as well, an abyss.

Mirabeau's experience reminds me of the one philosophe who hid, as it were, behind the Revolution, ghostwriting speeches and chansons - Chamfort. The man who puzzled Nietzsche, that reactionary - how could Chamfort, one of the great writers of maxims, have been a revolutionary?

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates challenges Hippias, a vain sophist, over the matter of who is the better man: Achilles or Odysseus. Hippias holds that Achilles was the truest, strongest and best of the Greeks, while Odysseus was the wiliest – polytropos – or the falsest, the most cunning, the most deceptive. But Socrates, surprisingly enough, comes up with an argument to show that either both Achilles and Odysseus are mixtures of the good and the false, or that – if Achilles lies and deceptions come about involuntarily, whereas Odysseus voluntarily takes on the deceivers role, as Hippias maintains – that Odysseus must be the better man. This is the end of the dialogue:

Socrates: Is not justice either a sort of power or knowledge, or both ? Or must not justice inevitably be one or other of these ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Then injustice is a power of the soul, the more powerful soul is the more just, is it not ? For we found, my friend, that such a soul was better.

Hippias : Yes, we did.

Socrates : And what if it be knowledge ? Is not the wiser soul more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : And what if it be both ? Is not the soul which has both, power and knowledge, more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ? Is that not inevitably the case ?

Hippias : It appears to be.

Socrates : This more powerful and wiser soul, then, was found to be better and to have more power to do both good and disgraceful acts in every kind of action was it not ?

[376a] Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Whenever, then, it does disgraceful acts, it does them voluntarily, by reason of power and art ; and these, either one or both of them, are attributes of justice.

Hippias : So it seems.

Socrates : And doing injustice is doing evil acts, and not doing injustice is doing good acts.

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Will not, then, the more powerful and better soul, when it does injustice, do it voluntarily, and the bad soul involuntarily ?

Hippias : Apparently.

Socrates : Is not, then, a good man he who has a good soul, and a bad man he who has a bad one ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : It is, then, in the nature of the good man to do injustice voluntarily, and of the bad man to do it involuntarily, that is, if the good man has a good soul.

Hippias : But surely he has.

Socrates : Then he who voluntarily errs and does disgraceful and unjust acts, Hippias, if there be such a man, would be no other than the good man.”

 Socrates pulls himself up short, here. How could he come to this conclusion? It is as if the Socratic method had revealed a little too distinctly its daemonic side. But out of this little snatch of dialogue, in a dialogue that never receives very much attention, we see the outlines of the philosophe buffoon. Who emerges in Sade, in the French revolution, and in our modernity: Bataille’s monster, the one’s who test the experience-limit heralded by Foucault.

Woolf as essayist

 

Few novelists have a great gift for the essay. Usually the essays of the professional novelist, the Martin Amis type, have a between-work air. Among the Brits, the great essayist-novelists are Lawrence, Woolf and Pritchett. I have been in love with Jimmy Joyce since highschool, and consider Ulysses the summit – but he was no essayist. Nor is this a gift distributed largely among great poets. Wallace Stevens’ essays are read only in as much as they refer to the real work. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop wrote beaucoup prose, but it, similarly, is parasitic to the work.

 

 But even if you subtracted the fiction from  Lawrence, Woolf and Pritchett, their essays would enroll them among the great writers.

Woolf in her essays retains her novelist’s gift for describing the body – in fact, her description of, say, Hazlitt is of a more concentrated, pictorial strain than she usually devotes to the characters in her novels, who go from the voice to the body. Her Hazlitt (in her essay on Hazlitt in the Common Reader, series 2) comes out of his own works as a posture, a stance,  a character. He is a shoe-gazer, your typical emo, with a genius for his particular division of life, which inserts itself with some difficulty into the usual intellectual divisions of labor. For he is neither philosopher nor literary critic nor pamphleteer, although he has parts of all three.  Plus Woolf catches that something reminiscent of the incel. This is there in Hazlett, but there is something a touch, well, snobbish here,  Woolf passing on that class contempt from which Hazlitt suffered in his life and afterlife:

 

“We see him as Coleridge saw him, ‘brow- hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange’. He comes shuffling into the room, he looks nobody straight in the face, he shakes hands with the fin of a fish; occasionally he darts a malignant glance from his comer. ‘His manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive’, Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with intellectual beauty, and his manner became radiant with sympathy and understanding. Soon, too, as we read on, we become familiar with the whole gamut of his grudges and his grievances. He lived, one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman’s form graced his board.”

 

This is the kind of thing that reminds us that Virginia Woolf was, first and foremost, a Stephen, the daughter of Leslie Stephen of the National Biography,  the heiress of a line that incorporated  the collective memory of the whole tribe of allowable writers – a kind of noblesse de clercs. All of the romantics suffered, from the point of view of the  high bourgeois Victorian vision, from “unfortunate” sex lives – from the incestuous Byron to, what was worse, the declasse Hazlitt. The Hazlett of Liber Amoris, the closest English lit gets to Rousseau’s Confessions, damned him by describing a passion for a servant – the kind of thing no aspiring functionary in the literary world could tolerate. Byron, at least, ran off with women with titles, and Shelley with a wealthy man’s daughter. But a servant in a boarding house – well, it was all very well to do it, but then to write a book about one’s unsuccessful courtship of same – well, that went beyond scandal into tawdriness.

 

Leslie Stephen wrote his own essay on Hazlitt, which shares certain judgments with his daughter. Especially about Hazlitt’s penchant for indelicacy:

 

“Indeed he takes the public into his confidence with a facility which we cannot easily forgive. Biographers of late have been guilty of flagrant violations of the unwritten code which should protect the privacies of social life from the intrusions of public curiosity. But the most unscrupulous of biographers would hardly have dared to tear aside the veil so audaciously as Hazlitt, in one conspicuous instance at least, chose to do for himself. His idol Rousseau had indeed gone further ; but when Rousseau told the story of his youth, it was at least seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book called the "New Pygmalion," or "Liber Amoris," to invite the British public at large to look on at a strange tragi- comedy, of which the last scene was scarcely finished.”

 

That Hazlitt must, indisputably, be included among the romantic generation’s worthies was a problem for those who wanted to merge literature and respectability.

 

Woolf did not – although a part of her was always returning to her father’s voice.  Interestingly, in Woolf’s essay, she mentions that Hazlitt was  the object of malignant persecution--Blackwood's reviewers called him "pimply Hazlitt", though his cheek was pale as alabaster.”

 

The pimple shows up in another of Woolf’s views, although one that was not put down in an essay. Rather, it first appears in her diary entry about reading Joyce’s Ulysses  which she had take up out of a certain duty to the modern novel – and a certain envy of the competition: “I . . . have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” The pimples move from the undergraduate to a serving boy in her letter to Lytton Strachey: “Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.” In fact, all of Woolf’s criticisms about Joyce are swaddled in the kind of snobbishness that anti-Woolfians can’t forgive.

 

 Joyce’s origins – about which Woolf knew little, except that they were Irish and had never been mentioned in the National Biography series edited by her father – figure overwhelmingly in her response to the book.

 

I think that Yeats’ line about the art that arises from one’s struggle with one’s self applies in particular to Woolf, who struggled with the masculinist ideology of the Stephen type which was definitely in her head, an illness,  and with class feelings that were entangled with the masculinist ideology as well, which she worked out to her satisfaction (and mine – but I think I am in minority in that opinion) in Three Guineas.  It is what made her the most complete literatus of the canonical writers of the English 20th century.

looting and heroic failure: the Liz Truss episode

 

William Hazlitt, unlike Coleridge or Wordsworth, was not only an admirer, initially, of the French Revolution, but believed in its principles to his dying day. He saw the turn to the right of the Romantics – the intellectuals of his generation – as a betrayal. I look back at the first Cold War as the Burkian war – the war of the anicen regime powers against the French revolution – and in those terms Hazlett plays the role of the unreconstructed fellow traveller.

He had company. Byron was scathing about the rightwing British establishment – appealing to an earlier Whig notion of liberty. And of course Shelley was always there on the battlements. But Hazlitt was not a poet, but an essayist. In fact, one of the great English essayists, to the embarrassment of his Victorian posterity. John Stuart Mill could resurrect Coleridge, in search of a liberal consensus, but not Hazlitt. This is one of the reasons that the English universities, usually so meticulous in producing “collected works”, have been so late to take on Hazlitt.

Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon is one of his more obscure works. It is true, too, that he saw Napoleon as perhaps too uninhibitedly the product of the Revolution. The Napoleon who sought to restart slavery in Sainte-Domingue is reactionary in the worst sense. But, at the same time, as Marx thought too, the Napoleon who occupied much of Germany and Italy brought with him an enlightened form of the state that was absolutely necessary for modernization – from regulations concerning abattoirs to modern policing.

In the Life, there’s a marvellous passage where Hazlitt goes after Southey, that tadpole eater, and foresees, in spite of himself, the economic backbone of Cold Wars:

“Mr. Southey somewhere accounts for the distress of the country in 1817 (and probably at present) by the prhase of “the transition from war to peace”, and emphatically observes, that the war was a customer to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Sheffeld alone, to the amount of twenty millions a year. Be it so: but if this were all, and this were really a benefit and source of riches to the country, why not continue to be a customer to these manufacturers of steel and brass in peace as well as war; and having bought and paid for so many cannon and so much gunpowder, fire the off in the air as well as against the French?”

In fact, in the Cold War economy in the twentieth century, the development of nuclear weapons allowed for a twofer – they were highly expensive, highly necessary, and their very presence mean that they were not to be fired off in the air on any account. From the economic point of view, they were almost perfect commodities – luxury and necessity in one.

One of the ways of looking at the Revolution and the wars that followed is to compare the financing of these wars with the wars of the 18^th century. One of the great advantages of Britain, in those world wars, was the state of its finances. Although British GDP was considerably less than France’s, it was France that was always teetering near backruptcy, since the profligency of the monarchy was paid for by recurrent bankruptcies of the state. Thus, the interest on loans to France had to be high – much higher than loans to Britain.

To pursue the Burkian Cold war into real war, Britain had to radically reorganize itself – which it did by taking itself off the gold standard. It helped that the financial world shifted from Amsterdam to London, after the French invaded the Netherlands. Although to an 18^th century mind like Hazlitt’s the English national debt seemed like a nation-crusher, it turned out that this debt was a great advantage to Britain.

From 1688 – the year that James II was deposed – onward, the British instituted a two tier system for paying for war – short term loans that would be repaid by long term loans. In this way, the British were able to get past the limits traditionally imposed by direct payment for war. Instead, the British steadily cultivated a national debt that was composed almost entirely of old loans, consolidated into long term ones, for an endless series of wars. But loans aren’t merely negative things – if they were, nobody would loan, and there would be no bond market. Rather, by producing a lively bond market, the English spread the debt for their wars around. To do this, the state had to perform a one/two step – on the one hand, centralizing organization enough to manage wars, and on the other hand, decentralizing finance to the extent of divvying its debts up among the upper bourgeoisie. Thus, when France, with its autocratic model of government and its dysfunctional parliamentary system, suffered untold misery trying to pay for its part in this series of wars, the British, whose debt to GDP ration was on some accounts worse than France, flourished.

Within that one-two step, Britain, where the financial center of the world was now located, made its debt a mainstay of the rentier lifestyle.

Here’s what  the Cambridge Economic History of Europe says: “Already in the eighteenth, more strongly in the nineteenth century, there existed among the British population a wealthy section capable and willing to invest part of its income in state bonds. Between 1761 and 1820, about 305 per cent of British public expenditure was financed from this source; between 1689 and 1820 the proportion did not fall as low as 29.5 per cent. This section of the population derived from these loans an income in the form of annual interest which grew to a substantial independent source of incomes within the total economy. Interest due to the wealthier section of the population was defrayed via the budget mainly from revenues derived from indirect taxes, paid overwhelmingly by sections of the population in receipt of lower incomes.”

Now, the proper name for this is looting. War, in Hazlitt’s imagination, was simply loss. This is the moral image of war. But another image of war is about gain. Gain, it should be said, or loot, is still something the established poohbahs are ashamed of. Thus, war is always about principle. When the anti-war peeps said that the war with Iraq was about blood, this was perceived by all the great poohbahs as laughably naïve. Of course, in the business press, there was a great excitement about the chance for profit, but this existed in another discursive universe. When that universe did obtrude itself on the vision of the poohbahs, it was dubbed something like free enterprise, to give it that secret ingredient “freedom” – Freedom, like the phrase No Women and Children Admitted, which the duke and the dauphin put on their playbills for the Royal Nonesuch, is a lure. “If that don’t draw em, I don’t know Arkansaw” – said the Duke. Freedom is in that same category.

The UK version of looting, with both its internal and external aspects, created a mighty power. But that power has vanished. As Finton O’Toole observed in his book on Brexit, Britain without an imperial project is slowly becoming prey to the nationalism – and in particular, English nationalism – that had been repressed under the British ideal. Also repressed, I would say, is the idea that the wars are looting expeditions. In that repression, the compromise image – which O’Toole captures well – is that of heroic failure. To which the Liz Truss fiasco aligns itself all too well.

“The grand balls-up is not new, and in English historical memory it is not shameful. Most of the modern English heroes, after all, are complete screw-ups. The exploits that have loomed largest in English consciousness since the nineteenth century are retreats or disasters: Sir John Moore’s evacuation of Corunna in the Peninsular War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, the ‘last stand’ against the Zulus at Isandlwana, Gordon of Khartoum, the Somme, the flight from Dunkirk. This culture of heroic failure Barczewski defines as ‘a conscious sense of celebration of the striving for an object that was not attained’. She points, for example, to the ten memorial statues in Waterloo Place, a key site flanking the great processional route up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace: five relate to the disastrous Crimean War, one is of Franklin and one is of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died with four of his men having failed to get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen’s pragmatically planned and unromantic Norwegian expedition.  

Oddly, the leaders of the Leave movement often seem to relish the prospect of just such a failure. It is as if the entire enterprise was undertaken under the sign of a phrase of John Major’s, the former Tory PM, who when asked about some Thatcherite policy he was implementing replied: ‘if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.’”

Heroic failures past, heroic failures future – such seems to be the impulse under the surface of Brexit Britain. Combined with Truss’s open economics of looting by the very wealthy, things are going to plan – that is, going to hell in a handbasket. All hands stand by as we salute the coffins!

The Elon Musk raree show

 

The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a young woman, and the way of Elon Musk with Twitter are high and low mysteries - the last of them falls under the mystery of the confidence man in American history and lore. I have changed my mind about the Musk and twitter thing. I thought it would be a disaster, and I still think so, but it will also be a free comic spectacle as well. Musk's 44 billion dollar purchase can be justified, financially, in two ways - either Twitter stock goes up tremendously, or he finds, down the daisy chain, a greater fool, a crypto pseudo billionaire as high on coke as, uh, it is rumored, the purchaser is.

 

In this economy, that isn't going to happen. So what will happen? Here's where the comedy starts. Musk has decided he is a deep philosophical type, and so I could see him opening twitter to the army of Trump. But what I can't see is the advertisers who are twitters source of real funding going for this demographic. Switching from Disney channel (communist and gay!) to Depends Underpants (blessed by Fox) is not gonna pay the bills. Of course, a lot depends on whether some hungry corp sees the possible steal here. Say Instagram develops a bloc note service that essentially copies twitter, with a few bows to IP rights.

Given Musk's history of getting away with larceny, even if he comes out poorer, I can't imagine he will lose his shirt. Leave that to his cult members. Anyway, as a regular twitter person, I'm experiencing that wonderful thing - free contempt and joy. Usually you pay for your contempt - karma is real - but in this case the universe is offering a free raree show, so why not take a ticket?

Reflections on Sherlock Holmes

 I like reading to Adam at night, before he goes to sleep. It is a ritual which satisfies Adam – he follows the story until he is sleepy, which puts together the two great ends of tale-telling, the enjoyment of following an event as it unfolds itself and is unfolded by the observer, and the enjoyment of being slowly induced into closing your eyes on the way to unconsciousness – and it satisfies me, as I get to try out all kinds of voices, from Huck Finn drawling Southern to Sherlock Holmes nasal British.

Sherlock Holmes has delighted me since I was eleven or so – about a year older than Adam. I’ve read them over countless times. There’s a certain paradox here, since the stories are motivate by the need to solve a human problem, and end on the solution to the problem – which would seem to close them up and make the reader averse to a second reading, not to mention a fifth or seventh. This is the mystery of the mystery – why it transcends, in some small way, its neatly tied two fold structure as problem-solution.

Of course, reading these stories always involves being irritated by the same things that irritated you before – it awakens that irritation again. Certain stories are, really, partners to the reader – even the irritations are dear. For me, the irritation is Holmes’ infamous use of the term deduction.

There are whole books on this subject. Eco and Sebeok’s collection, Dupin, Holmes, Pierce: the Sign of Three, is probably the best. I explained, to Adam, that deduction is something like proving from a given, while what Holmes is doing is an induction, or an inference from probability based in experience. Adam listened and nodded, but the nod was the here comes sleep nod rather than the I get it nod.

Of course, reading Sebeok, I want to retreat from my sophomoric objection. Sebeok makes a good case that Holmes’ guessing – although Holmes claims he never guesses – is illuminated by C.S. Pierce’s notion of retroduction, or hypothetico-deduction, or abduction.

There is quite a literature on the inspiration for Holmes’ method – the human model that Doyle converted into the fictitious device. But for a philosopher, as important is the method itself – philosophers do like a method. Methodus – the Greek for pursuit, which brings us back to the function of “following.” Method is natural to narrative, although how we follow, tripping from topic to topic, is still a misty matter. Holmes’ soliloquies about his method are quite pretty:

“The ideal reasoner ... would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.”

I like to think that this is true. It is fundamentally monism, or its contemporary descendent, connectionism. When Holmes winds himself up and delivers these maxims, he seems like one of the Greek sages whose best hit bits are quoted in Diogenes Laertes.

He also seems a bit like Lichtenberg. Take another Holmes quote:

From a drop of water ... a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagra without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it."

That is a grand view. I relate it to this jotting by Lichtenberg, in his scribble book, when he is considering the vibrational psychology of Hartley (the 18th century predecessor of today’s neuro-philosophers).

“Suppose a pea is blown into the sea at Helvoet [in the Netherlands] and suppose my brain is something like the sea, then you may suppose that there will be an effect on the coast of China. This effect would be strongly modified, however, through every impression made on all the other objects in the sea, through the wind that pushes on it, through the fish and ships that plow through it, through the vaults that break open the shoreline. The form of the surfaces of a land, ist mountains and valleys, etc., is one with a written history of natural signs of all ist changes, every grain of sand is a letter, but the language is mostly unknown to us.”

The adjacency of the largest and the smallest, of the murder that ends a human life and the most trivial thing, a fingerprint, that “proves” who did it, is where crime overlaps with metaphysics. And I suppose that this is one of the reasons that I keep returning to Sherlock Holmes.

christ's shoutout to BLM

 I am greatly enjoying Wolf Hall at the moment. And loving, as well, the takedown of Thomas More, at least as seen by Thomas Cromwell, who is seen by Hilary Mantel. Mantel was born a Catholic and had obviously fought against her Catholic heritage – so much so that certain writers in the pious journals have implied that she relies too much on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a ferociously anti-Catholic book.

I view Mantel’s view of Cromwell’s view of More through Cold War eyes, for it was in the sixties that More became a pop martyr, a truth teller. And, indeed, nobody can deny that More was burnt. Nor deny that he himself burnt – books and Protestants. He had one suspected heretic held in stocks at his own house.

All of which leads us to More’s great antagonist – not Henry VIII, who was merely a king. I’m talking about William Tyndale. The first translator of the Bible, whose translation was the go to crib for the 80 people assembled under King James to translate the Bible. This is not just a matter of the Bible: rather, Tyndale’s was the democratic spirit, re-emerging in common life. In a dispute with a priest who told Tyndale “we were better off to be without God’s law than the Pope’s”, Tyndale replied that he defied the pope’s law and added: “if God spare my life, ere many years I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.” (the story is in Foxe – receive it under that caution).

This remark is not simply a bit of casual repartee, but at the heart of democratic culture. It has since been the aim of those who believe in democracy to cause the boye or girl who dryveth the plough to know more of the secrets of the CIA, more of the sources of money that go into the laws, more of the background considerations of the wheelings and dealings of the Justices, more of the inner workings of corporation honchoes, than any powerful heretic burner would like.

Alas, the ethos of “need to know” is accepted all too docilely by the citizens in our quasi-democracies. As a sign and symbol of this retreat in America, I would point to the tragic decline of knowledge of the Bible.

When I grew up, the Bible was not only in every hotel room but was actually read by high and low. It informed the prose of our culture, both as it came out of the mouths of people and as it poured into media. I was given my first bible, with a nice red cover, when I was six, I believe. I was promptly scolded by my Mom for writing my name in it in my utterly henscratching handwriting. I thought at the time and think now that I did no wrong, there.

If you look at the Hollywood portrayal of Americans – and of religious Americans – you will notice that none of the scriptwriters seem to have more than an impoverished Dummies guide to the Bible knowledge of the text. This reflects a great and sensible diminishment of knowledge of the Bible by those who supposedly are all about it, as for instance Fundamentalist Christians. American Christianity, of course, has long been something other than Christianity, as Jesus’s vita, ending in crucifixion and resurrection, has been replaced by Horatio Alger's Christianity, with Jesus preaching feel good messages that will help you in business as you get rich rich rich. In order to believe the latter, you have to very much cherrypick a few messages from the New Testament and add to it the Gospel as spoken by Ronald Reagan, or Donald Trump.

However, down at groundlevel, it used to be that there was some genuine knowledge of the psalms, the prophets, the histories, the vita, even Paul’s letters. Now, it is a mouthful of rightwing slogans and some knowledge of Revelations, a book that should never have made it past the Nicene Council.

What would Tyndale say about his ploughboys now? Perhaps: wake up! “ Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.” You know, Christ’s shoutout to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The skin of the judge

 

The  third branch of government, the judiciary, has long been the feudal instance in the democratic or quasi-democratic nation-states. It is a system framed by, on one end, cages for people, and on the other end, retainers of the worst and the dullest, otherwise known as Your Honor.

 

I am aware that this feudal instance might work as a bulwark not only against the power of the masses, but against the oppression of the minority. Sometimes, these things overlap. In the United States, for instance, the brief flare of juridical liberalism was one of the great cogs in the machine that battered down apartheid – although it then acted as a great cog to re-Jim Crow the country by caging millions of African-Americans. In same way, the Court is now caging women in their own bodies, merrily making up precedents for its misogyny oujt of quotes from witchhunters and defenders of wife-rape in the 17th century.

 

My favorite quote about judges and the judiciary from a  16th century comes from a Hugh Latimer sermon, perhaps his most famous sermon. Hugh Latimer is famous as a martyr under “bloody Mary.” He was burned to death nearly five hundred years ago, on October 16^th, 1555 with Nicholas Ridley. History today gives a nice short account:

 

“Ridley went to the pyre in a smart black gown, but the grey-haired Latimer, who had a gift for publicity, wore a shabby old garment, which he took off to reveal a shroud. Ridley kissed the stake and both men knelt and prayed. After a fifteen-minute sermon urging them to repent, they were chained to the stake and a bag of gunpowder was hung round each man’s neck. The pyre was made of gorse branches and faggots of wood. As the fire took hold, Latimer was stifled by the smoke and died without pain, but poor Ridley was not so lucky. The wood was piled up above his head, but he writhed in agony and repeatedly cried out, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me’ and ‘I cannot burn’.”

 

This man to be burnt was a great sermon-maker, and this is his sermon about judges. It has the whiff of the pyre about it – Latimer was always primed for the flames, that’s how he lived.

 

“Cambyses was a great Emperor, such another as our master is; he had many Lord deputies, Lord presidents, and Lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago sith I read the history. It chanced he had under him in one of his dominions a briber, a gift taker, a gratifier of rich men, he followed gifts, as fast as he that followed the pudding, a hand maker in his office, to make his son a great man, as the old saying is, Happy is the child whose father goeth to the Devil.

2

The cry of the poor widow came to the Emperor’s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin in his chair of judgement, that all judges, that should give judgement afterward, should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge’s skin: I pray God we may once see the sign of the skin in England. Ye will say peradventure that this is cruelly and uncharitably spoken: no, no, I do it charitably for a love I bear to my country. God saith, Ego visitabo, I will visit. God hath two visitations. The first is, when he revealeth his word by preachers and where the first is accepted, the second cometh not. The second visitation is vengeance. He went a visitation, when he brought the judge’s skin over his ears. If his word be despised he cometh with his second visitation with vengeance.”   The second visitation I identify with the terrible swift sword in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I hope that chopping time isn’t coming, but with the SCOTUS poised to issue any ruling it pleases and be obeyed, I think the established order is near a breaking point.

The death of the author, the life of the misprint

 

(Cartoon from Punch)

In the Summer Critical Quarterly, Chris Townsend has published an article that almost directly targets a person like myself – a person who loves to chase through old newspapers and current biographies and pop history books, looking for the errant factoid, the misspelled name, the comedian as, indeed, the added or subtracted letter, messing up names and causing vast comedies of misrecognition among the minor players of history. Forgive me for being obscure – I am writing a story, at the moment, about J., a woman whose head was supposedly shaved in the Liberation because she had collaborated with the Nazis. It is a story that is extremely minor, save for J.’s family relationship with Winston Churchill – a very stretched and tiny one – and her walkon role among the Anglo French glitterati of the thirties and forties.

As I have plumbed what plums there are in her story, I find her misrecognized in dozens of texts, and the story of what she did or didn’t do almost impossible to say for sure. In the breath of stories told at the high table and over cocktails, bits of history or fictionary leap out. It is as if the clinamen of fiction edges the direction of history one way or another.

I’m going on, here. But to return to Chris Townsend’s article: it is an examination of the way a line in Wordsworth’s poem “A slumber did my spirit seal” – precisely that line – has had a frolic of its own, as it gets perpetually misprinted as “a slumber did my spirit steal”. That “t”, like an imp, keeps climbing into that line.

“‘A slumber did my spirit steal, /I had no human fears.’ Given that Wordsworth’s celebrated lyric is suspended in its entirety above this essay, there is a decent chance that you, reader, will have noticed the typographical error in that opening quotation: a slumber did my spirit steal. Then again, perhaps not. Exactly that typo, or misquotation, or mishearing, or misremembering, has proven to be a surprisingly pervasive one, and the poem has been accidentally made into one about stealing by readers both relatively unfamiliar with Wordsworth and those very familiar indeed.”

Among those very familiar indeed is Richard Holmes, who inserted the “t”. So did E.M. Forster (whose name I have often reduced, when writing, to Foster, as though he were the descendent of the man who wrote “Way down upon the Suwannee River”, which I also often misspell). In fact, Forster wrote (with Derridian karma forcing his hand), ‘it does not matter who wrote “A slumber did my spirit steal”’ – surely daring fate as much as the ancient Mariner did when he shot the albatross.

In some essay or another, Gore Vidal made fun of the fact that F.Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscripts are full of spelling mistake, as if the second grade lesson that good writing is good spelling was the law and the prophets. I’ve always been sympathetic to Fitzgerald, being a bad speller myself – C on the report card when I was in fifth grade. In contrast to the A in reading – what happened there? Partly this is because I have always kept reading and music close together – the words sound off in my head – and the musical version of “salmon”, for instance, is not exactly replicated in that devilish “l”.

As Townsend points out, the Oxford Companion to English literature went with the “t” over four editions, from 1932 to 1967, reminding us that one of the “companions” of Jesus was no true friend and sold him out for a bag full of steal. And by a false kiss sealed the deal.

Even, even (sob) Rene Wellek misquoted the poem, in a polemic against all those deconstructors destroying literary studies. That is the thing about polemic – it falls under a charm that inevitably makes one commit the same error that one is decrying.

I don’t know whether that spelling C was the decisive event that decided my whole paraphiliac career of looking for errors in others’ texts, or being fascinated by the game of “Chinese whispers” – as it was once called – because to my mind it is the very model of information transfer. But I am so so glad when I meet fellow obsessives. We all sit in the back of the class and make fun of Miss X when she hands back our pop spelling quizzes.

Voltaire and commercial society

 

Voltaire’s history of the reign of Louis XV begins with a study of the system of John Law, seen from the point of view of the civilizing process – or at least the domesticating process. Voltaire is at pains to put Law’s bubble in the context of the “habit of obedience” ingrained in the French under the reign of Louis XIV, comparing the troubles that the latter Louis faced, in his regency, from an upstart aristocracy, with the mildness faced by the regent, the Duc D’Orleans, even in the exercise of truly autocratic power. Out of the disempowerment of the nobility brought about by autocracy of the Sun King, Voltaire spotted another power on the rise, which would maintain a social order by the somewhat paradoxical support of those whose political power was abridged by it.  This passage should be underlined by those looking for the genealogical ancestors of Marx’s sociology of capitalism:

“Finally, Law’s famous system, which seemed that it must ruin the regency and the state, actually sustained, in effect, both one and the other by consequences nobody had foreseen. The cupidity that it awoke in all conditions of the population, from the basest upt to magistrates, bishops and princes, turned away the attention of all minds from the public welfare, and from all political and ambitious views, in filling them with the fear of losing and the avidity of gaining. It was a new and prodigious game, where all citizens wagered one against the other. The obsessed players hardly quit their cards in order to trouble the government. And so it happened, by a prestige of which the hidden mechanisms could not be seen except by the finest and most practiced eyes, that a chimerical system gave birth to a real commerce, and played the midwife to the rebirth of the Indian company, established in the past by the celebrated Colbert, and ruined by the wars. In the end, if there were many private fortunes destroyed, at least the nation become more commercial and richer. This system enlightened minds, as the civil wars, in the past, had sharpened braveries. It was an epidemic sickness which spread itself in France, Holland and England. It merits the attention of posterity, for here it was not a question of the political interest of one or two princes that sent shockwaves through the nations; rather, the people themselves hurried into this madness which enriched some families, and reduced others to beggary.”

Voltaire sees this as a madness, but it is now a norm. The rise of the financial industry in all its branches is a sort of surprising result of industrial society. In defiance of the economist’s fetish of “efficiency”, the very size of finance in contemporary capitalist society is a marker of vast inefficiencies, of rent-seeking for its own sake.

Because most economists work for the man, though – the financial man – or hope to, this little insight is lost in the footnotes. We don’t want to bring to the floor the fact that our form of capitalism is, by its own standards, a vastly inefficient machine. That would discourage the poky and the plunky – the little ones who have to be taught to identify with the plutocrats.

The Third Wish

 

A. says I am obsessed. She keeps catching me watching Hurricane Ian related videos on YouTube, or Twitter, or Tik Tok. The amazing footage of the waves rolling down the main street in Naples, or the water rising against the window of a house in Fort Myers. The from-the-air footage of drones, or planes, or helicopters. The waters receding, leaving that enormous ring around the shore of houses reduced to gunk. The piling up of everything one had on the sidewalk.

I am obsessed. I understand the hurricane and tornado chasers. The longing and fear that come together in some apocalyptic act, which passes – as all apocalypses in America pass – with aftermaths of junk piled by the street. Our enduring symbol of … what? The pioneer spirit? William Carlos Williams missed an important moment in the American poetic when he passed over junk piled by the side of the street. The rent is way passed due, the billcollectors and the sheriff, in that enduring tandem, are wheeling away the moveables and fixing the lock on the door. In this case, the billcollectors and the sheriff are celestial.
It is my nightmare, and I can’t resist watching it play over and over. The water that claims everything you have, the wind that lifts the roof off the building. I’ve built a thin surface of normality over this mad panic expectation. The third wish is, always, secretly, the death wish.

And here's our old friend, the reindeer

 

I’ve been reading one of Calasso’s last big books – The Celestial Hunter. As is often the case with Calasso, I am struck not just by the “shock of recognition”, but by the shock of deja-ecrit. The theme of this book – the dive into the period 20 thousand years ago when God saw that the world was good and the people in it saw that the world and the animals and the trees and the spirits were immensely bigger than they were – is more than congenial to me. It touches on an obsession of mine, which springs from having read books about the cave paintings and being fascinated by Chauvet (which I have “seen”, in as much as seeing it is going to a cave that is the simulacra of it). Long ago, in 2006, I wrote a review of a book by Greg Curtis, a man who edited Texas Monthly and then just suddenly decided to follow his spirit and write  a book about cave painting, I wrote, in part:

 

“Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000 volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were, max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally – no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from ‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago. However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”

I went on to outline my speculative position:  the cave art of 25,000 years ago, with its relative  absence of the human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew – the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.

There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive - the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.

Calasso’s book is more sophisticated than my speculation, but it shares the sense that “man” was level with “nature” – in fact, that split between the humans and nature was inconceivable because neither category in the modern sense existed. Enemy and friend, transformation and death, hunting and eating existed. “When it began, the hunt was not a person who pursued an animal. It was a being who pursued an other being. No one could say with certainty who was who. The pursued animal could be a transformed man, or a god, or simply an animal, or a spirit or a something dead.”

And so it was I think through most of the Holocene. This recent change of earth time – the Anthropocene – was prefigured when a divide, a borderline was built, in heads and hearts and fields. Did that border have to thicken into plastic strewn oceans and the kind of yuck that we can see in pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian? I don’t believe it. What is strange about the anthopocene story is that we have a story from science that would make sense to the cavepainters – that we are brothers and sisters of other animal tribes, that there is nothing called “nature” that causes anything, that everything has a material unity that we can play with but never overstep, that metamorphosis is life.

The fascist franchise

 

On September 11, 1936, two bombs exploded in Paris, one in front of the Conferation du patronat francais, the other in front of the building housing an association for metallurgy on 45 Rue des Boissieres.

On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploed  in the Banca dell'Agricultura on Milan's Piazza Fontana that left seventeen dead and eighty-eight injured.

On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the Congress in Washington, trying to annul the results of the 2020 election in the United States.

What unites these events is that they were all committed by far right groups, and the first two were committed, we know now, as part of a strategy to create a seemingly “leftwing” terrorism that would justify a coup d’etat. In the case of the Trumpists, there was a considerable campaign, after the attack on the capital was made, to blame the so-called anti-fa.

It is interesting to consider the success, or at least partial success, of  this false flag strategy. In Italy, the blaming of right wing acts of terror on the left was covered for months by the police and the prosecutors, until the entire story connecting left wing anarchists or communists to the bomb broke down. In its place, the police and prosecutors found a trail that led to the real perpetrators – who were either not prosecuted or let out of jail on technicalities by the higher courts. In France, the group of people behind the Cagoule – the people who financed it, the people who were in the know about it – all found homes in the Petain government under the occupation. As for the members of the Cagoule, some came back and fought against the Germans – such was their interpretation of the mix of anti-semitism and nationalism of their creed – while some collaborated with the Germans, adopting Hitler as a path to “cleaning” France of Jews and Communists and degenerates, blah blah.

As for the mob of patriot boys and blah blah, they can look forward to a court system seeded with far right figures, including the highest court in the U.S.

History, in as much as history is biased by the media of the time studied, has been kind to the neo-fascists. That fascism was the reigning power in 1970 of three of the main Mediterranean countries – Greece, Spain and Portugal – and that many on the international anti-communist front, including many Americans, some of them having posts in the CIA and Army, thought that the danger of the Italian Communist party called for “extreme measures” – made it geopolitically logical that Italy, too, would have a coup and a neo-fascist government. As it turned out, fascist doctrine was not as pervasive in the  Italian army and security branches as it was in Greece, where many of the “colonels” of the Junta had tasted their first blood under the Nazi occupation, as collaborators (although changing sides to the British and Americans in 1945, and becoming vital to the American side in the Greek civil war that pitted the communists against the forces of “freedom.”

I am a bit startled that this history has gone into the crapper, and the only reference that is made when the fascist party wins in Italy is to Mussolini. There is a reason for this: referring to the Cold War would definitely mess up the Manicheanism between freedom and communist tyranny, which is the paradigm favored by the older generation of Cold War scholars.

There’s a sort of Freudian rule about covering up the fascist part of the anti-communist alliance: it is the rule of the return of the repressed. The repressed were never, looking back, very repressed. And they are now at the door.