Cultural relativism, mon amour

 I think of myself as a cultural relativist, but I am constantly irritated at my fellow culture relativists and the debate they wage with their antipodes, the various kinds of moral absolutists. I have a list of complaints, but I will hold back the full thesis, and content myself with merely two of them.

1.       The wrong enemy. There has been a long and, to my mind, futile hunt and peck debate between the relativists and the absolutists concerning the universality of this or that custom or norm. Relativists like to point to things like the fact that the pharaohs of Egypt married their sisters, and absolutists like to point to the universality of the incest taboo. This debate was waged to an extent in the ancient world, but in modernity, it was the discovery of America, and the difference of the Americans, that kickstarted it in the seventeenth century. Seventeenth century writers loved to list the odd beliefs and customs they found among the Americans, and from these lists sprang the science of anthropology. From these lists sprang, as well, modern historiography, as the discovery of American difference led to a re-reading of the classics, and the discovery that the ancients were not the civilization that the European humanists took them to be. Lafitau, remarking that the beliefs of the Iroquois reminded him of nothing so much as the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, was on to something. That something was: European civilization was, at its root, un-European. In fact, looking around at the vast majority of the European population (which consisted of peasants) and the folk beliefs that flourished in villages and courts, Voltaire joked that the territory of the savages began twenty five miles from Paris. He was exaggerating – savages inhabited the streets of Paris and the halls of Versailles as well. It was not just the Nahuatl who believed men could change into beasts – this was a belief solidly upheld in court in Rouen in the 1690s.

However, cultural relativism is not the thesis that there is no universal norm. It is the thesis that there is no society that upholds and follows an absolute norm. In fact, cultural relativism gets its strength from the universality of normative structures. What the relativist observes is that those structures are not coherent, but conditioned, hinged, in a double bind one with the other. Characteristically, a norm binding on individual members of a collective does not bind a collective itself, which may well demand that the individual make an exception of every norm in the service of the collective. On the blog, Crooked Timber, a few years  ago, there was a discussion of universal norms stemming from a post in which one of the Crooked Timber writers proposed that no society condones torturing to death infants for pleasure. This was a curiously conditional absolute – why was the “for pleasure” included? Because of course the ruling class in collectives routinely demand that the members of the collective go to war with other collectives, and in so doing they demand that children be tortured to death – as they were in Hamburg and Hiroshima, in Stalingrad and Falluja, for instance. The justification for bombing and warfare is, however, serious – seriousness is the real legitimating foundation of the collective’s norms. Here, of course, in modern liberal republics, we run into a little logical problem, in as much as the collective is supposedly ruled to the end of allowing people to pursue their happiness – and it seems that a roundabout case could be made that babies are then tortured to death for the pleasure of the collective. But there is no real need to make that  torturous case about torture – all the relativist claims is that the structure of excuses, of the temporary suspension of norms as a norm, is universal in all collectives. There are, then, no morally homogenous collectives. All collectives have hinged norms, structures that code other structures and, in effect, annul the absolute condemnations that run through those structures.

2.       Judge not that ye be not judged. There is, in liberal societies in which cultural relativism has flourished, a tendency to say that the moral of cultural relativism is that you cannot judge other cultures. This idea quickly leads to the idea that cultural relativists have to accept Nazis, slaveholders, etc.

Once again, this confuses the cultural relativist argument. In fact, the conflicting structures that the relativist observes are all based on judgment. A collective holds to its identity by judging, differentiating itself. The relativist does not conclude from this that we need another absolute at another level, a trans-cultural one – for there is nothing in that other level which would “solve” the problem of hinged structures. Far from claiming that the individual can’t judge other individual in other cultures, the relativist claims that the individual can’t help judging other individuals in other cultures. A collective will use the idea of absolutes to create exceptions for absolutes – this is how social logic differs from logic.

Interestingly, absolutes are socially overdetermined. The absolute can introduce a vital, unstructuring moment into the collective. From Socrates to Rousseau, from Jesus to Mohammed, there arise representatives of the popular perception that the permanent state of exception claimed by the ruling class of the collective is wrong. These figures stage their protest on behalf of the absolute, and thereby create a kind of anti-social community – a sort of expropriation of the charisma of the powerful. In this moment of protest, a dream emerges – the dream of a morally homogenous, non-hierarchical community. This is one of the great prods to the softening and humanizing of culture. As a relativist, paradoxically, I am all for these instances of unstructuring, as long as they are not completely successful. For the dream of the morally homogeneous community, when it isn’t futile, quickly turns monstrous, as it purges those who threaten that homogeneity. Most of the time, the unstructuring moment succeeds not by converting the collective, but by weakening its inhumanity. The pacifist, the civil rights advocate, the seeker after truth –  I have tremendous respect for these righteous figures, who have modified the horror of life. Relativism, by contrast, has spawned only one doubtful prophet – Nietzsche. On the other hand, the recherché de l’absolu, which has spawned thousands of prophets, has spawned no wits – save Chesterton, who is an odd case. The wits largely fall into the relativists camp.

Child of the Century

 I cannot prove this or weave too large a theme out of it, but I think there is a Mediterranean modernism, one that takes up the challenge of Nietzsche’s Gay Science.

“Man has gradually become a phantasmal beast, which has to satisfy a need more than any other beast: man must from time to time believe, know, why he exists, his species cannot thrive without a personal trust in life. Without the belief in reason in life! And time and time again the human race decrees that there “is something about which it is absolutely forbidden to laugh.” And the most foresighted philanthropist would add, not just laughing and the gay science, but even the tragic with all its sublime irrationality belongs to the means the necessities of species preservation! And thus! Thus! Thus!”

Nietzsche’s gay science entitles a minor tradition that I’d call Mediterranean modernism. I’m thinking about figures like Pirandello, Unamuno, even Borges. In the post-war period, I’d include in the cut Sciascia and Pasolini. As the list shows, there is something very masculinist about this modernism, although it is also one in which the macho ethic is definitely mocked. When the late De Chirico forged the paintings of his earlier self, he did it not only for the money but because it was funny. That’s the classic Mediterranean modern gesture.

In the forward to Mist, Unamuno’s novella, the protagonist of the novella, Augusto, comments on his author:

“Don Miguel is fascinated by the buffo-tragic… …a tragic farce or a farcical tragedy, not one in which farcical or grotesque elements are mixed with tragic, but one in which the elements are fused – and confused – into one.”

If we are living in some post-something era – that is, one that has broken with the past and at the same time has the past in its craw, unable to swallow it – then I’d nominate that something as “seriousness”. In other words, we are in the era of the Freak. Of course, one could say we have been here, some of us, for a very long time, and that seriousness and its other, Rameau’s nephew, have been having a ‘discussion’ for 275 years now, long before the defining event of the 20th century, the global collapse of peasant societies. History is the history of false beginnings and bogus endings – it proceeds through the limbo of trends to the next catastrophe with the rictus of laughter painted on its face, our It, our Pennywise. As such it is the very image of the insufficiency of the serious. Myself I have a special affection for the buffo-tragic. I feel it in my bones.

This is what I get for having grown up a sarcastic boy. I’ve internalized that joker, but I still feel the tickle in my ribs in every one of my thoughts. Which makes me a typical specimen, a child of the century.

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For E.D.

 

 

I’d as soon lay hold of Emily’s dash

and trifle

as I would lift my uncle Jeff Cash’s

favorite rifle

 

from out of the case where he keeps it

in his den

- under where the head of an 8 point buck sits

and scares men

 

and little girls who enter – I should know

who used to stare

back at the monster until I’d go

Beyond my fear.

 

From this I culled my fiercest dreams

- the dash from Emily

would be heavier and scarier than it seems

similarly.

Marginalia, a poem by Karen Chamisso

Like everybody else, I live among my marginalia.

The orange peels, the leftover lentil stew, goes in the trash,

I presume. I let the maid take care of it.

There are drawers full of photos, although I

Am a blur in them all, as though some thumb came down

and pressed and turned viciously in the emulsion.

There’s no end of it, until there’s the it, which must be tossed

Into the furnace or the coffin

And the marginalia is cleared away, testimonials all.

I will let the undertakers take care of it.

I presume they know how to do that kind of thing.

-Karen Chamisso

Against Craft

 Tennyson, famously, was averse to the word "scissors". Something about the s-es. I don't know if Tennyson had a lisp. When I was a child of six or so, I did. Scissors would be a treachery. My own aversion is for the word "craft". How I hate to hear "craft" applied to writing! The "craft" of the story, poem, whatever. It repulses me, with its overtones of some genteel, antiquated hobby. Engineering, that would be alright, I suppose. Art, design, plumbing, all of that, which puts writing where it should be, in the world where people build, repair, create fixes, mob up, make spaghetti, help their kids with homework, and are alternately illuminated and tired. Craft comes from the early modern guild economy, the fierce nostalgia for which has fed the fascism and reaction of the 20th and 21st century. (Even though I should add that guild organizations, from doctors to profs, have endured to our day with more vigor than unions. Alas.)

So where did it come from, this blight of "craft"? I suspect it came by way of the conservative modernists, the agrarians, the Tates and Ransoms, who viewed modern society as a blight in contrast to the organic societies of the pre-bellum South, i.e. societies held together by slavery. As opposed to the Russian formalists, who were seeking a vocabulary of devices and machinery, in line with their sympathy for socialism and the stripping away of superstition, the conservative modernists wanted a vocabulary that would make supplant the radicalism of, say, the futurist with the dark port wine views of a Spengler, moaning for an aristocracy.

In spite of this, "craft" did, to an extent, democratize literary culture. That culture was overwhelmingly masculinist, and I feel that it is turning. Put that in the balance with the trivialization effected by craft, the mini-industry that has sprung up around it, the mystification of the culture producer's position in the system of media and entertainment. Everything that I value in literary culture is anti-craft. Sloppiness, guesses, rants, jibes, reportage, stories told while waiting in line, raps while drinking in the park, emails, tweets, porno fan fic- these are the forms I want to go back to.

the stub principle: there has never been a Truth era

We are not living in a post-Truth era, for the simple reason that we have never, ever lived in a Truth era.

We are living in the era of data availability. For instance, I don’t know whether it has quite been realized in the social sciences that when archives and libraries throw unimaginable masses of texts – books, newspapers magazines - on line, and subject them to the search engine, we have a very interesting means of catching the way histories have been written – and have overwritten troubling details. I’ve been working on a non-fiction/fiction story about the assassination of Dmitri Navachine, a minor figure, cut down in 1937 in Paris. And I’m seeing how from the get go the assassination was lied about, Navachine was lied about, specific parts of the whole scene were taled and re-taled like some chromosomal code gone awry, with mutations galore, and how this seeped into almost every historical account of the 30s in France written by historians, many of them Anglophones. Navachine is supposed to be part of a series of the minor lives of the Cold War – I’ve already written about X, a real figure whose murder was solved, but never prosecuted. Navachine is a variation on this theme. The one and only certainty I go by is the stub principle. Stub was the word introduced by William Gibson to designate alternative time tracks – pasts that don’t converge on one canonical past. The reviewers all reference multi-universe theory and what have you, when they could just reference our common past, our twentieth century past, where stubs proliferate. The thirties were an intense time – a low decade, as Auden put it – as compared to, say, the fifties. Or so it might seem looking back. But once you dive into the huge datapile that the internet has made available, you find out that it is stubs all the way down.

I suppose the hope is that at some point, the violence leaks out: that the I – you relationship is re-established. In Lucretian terms, ultimately love rules the universe. I think that is in fact a better account than one that relies on the truth. The truth is a cold thing, as cold as a clue, while love is an organic thing, and warmth is not just its milieu but its essence. We can’t live in a truth era, ever; we can’t suppress the stub principle. The dream should not be everybody agreeing on one canonical version of the world, but rather, a polis in which the citizen is taught to sublimate the violence inherent to their stub – to live in it with the appropriate humor.

IMO, as the kids text.

what is this poem selling

 

What is this poem selling?

For the plausible, the uncle looking man

On the You Tube channel is definitive:

It is by selling that we die and live

 

All things we see above us

And the terror in which we are dressed

Is to sell something to someone

And so on. I was impressed

 

By this cosmic vision. When God made the earth

And it was good – it was to sell

And even the devil is a pr man

Marketing property in hell.

 

Well well well. Everything is sales,

 And always be closing, you hear?

This poem is selling an irony

While I’m shedding a tear in my beer.

 

O O, I can’t argue with the uncle looking man

But suspect selling everything’s a bad bad plan.

- Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

genteel and mongrel politics: the Democratic Party trap

 The genteel trap

When Santayana used the phrase “genteel tradition” to refer to a certain strain in American thinking - a romantic avoidance of the real, haunted by Calvinistic rules that equated happiness with sin – the phrase escaped his essay and came to stand for an damning avoidance of the vulgar in American art and by extension, America’s middle class self-consciousness. An editor at Scribner’s magazine, which was popular in the 1920s, wrote that he refused stories that contained “slang, profanity, vulgarity, agnosticism or radicalism.” (quote from The Black Genteel Tradition by Gorman Beauchamp). This rule was, as well, once the rule of genteel politics, and most especially of the Republican party, centered in the Northeast among businessmen.

The Democratic party was quite different. From the beginning, it was the libido to the Whig Id. It welcomed both the Southern planter and the ethnic immigrant, mainly Irish. And it was animated with the anti-Black fevers of both groups. However, by the 20th century, due to this tradition of welcoming, it gradually made way for POC – especially after Roosevelt.

For Santayana, I think, the opposite to gentility was a vulgar pragmatism – vulgar in the best sense, akin to vulgate, a literature of the common tongue. To me, the Democratic party in its period of greatest effect, was not vulgar, but mongrel.

I take the word from Ann Douglas’s great Mongel Manhattan, an attempt at a real synthetic American cultural history that doesn’t dicker with the segregation demanded by the academic inventorists, but sees the black strain in every cultural artifact of white modernism and the white strain in the disjunctions of the great products of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a two-headed monster, this America, at least, or two times x heads, with the white head continually trying to destroy the others, though that would mean the death of the entire body.

It is as a mongrel part that the Democratic party stepped into history. It is as a mongrel party that it reconciled the ethnic bosses, the Cold War, civil rights and social democracy.

And it is the mongrel rawness of the party that the generation after the seventies has tried to kill. Though it speaks with a mongrel voice, occasionally – just listen to Bill Clinton go on about trickle down! – it has adopted the forms and norms of gentility. It has trivialized racism, which is a systematic hole in the pocket of every black household in America, as a lingo rule to guide rich privileged people in talking about those they lord it over. The mongrel democrats dreamed big and loved to press publicly on the levers of power – the genteel democrats dream little and far be it from them to use their power in any dishonorable, viz, helpful to the people they represent, way. Like Scribners, they don’t want any “slang, profanity, vulgarity, agnosticism or radicalism”, which is why, when a shortfingered vulgarian claims the election was stolen cause he lost, they don’t holler back that the election was as close as it was because of systematic Republican suppression of the vote, stealing the rights of the people, which are your property. No, it is all – when President Bush lost, he sent such a gracious letter. Gracious , I tell you!

Depending on your enemy to be gracious is a way to lose everything. Which, I could care less except those schmucks represent us. The Republicans are a faux mongrel party – full of white working class resentment, directed towards propping up the worst excesses of the mostly white plutocracy. It is as if the Confederate part of the Democratic party was cut out and implanted in its opponent.

I’m hoping that somebody in the D side in DC is remembering that they represent a vast constituency, and not a small circle of people who send each other gracious notes. Cause those notes are valuable enough to wipe your ass with, and nothing further.

Fight

wasted

Throwin time away - hattip BLCKDGRD

The story of the structural anthropologist and his deconstructive sidekick (his Sancho Panza, his Gilligan, his Groot). How they go out, like shamen, into the bush to listen to the phrase and fable of the tribe. How they ponder, back in Sherlock Holmes apartment, the cliches they have collected from the folk like songs. How it stitches together into a mythology – the structuralist – and how the weave unweaves itself – the sidekick.

 

Take the phrases, the binary: wasting time/saving time.

In the wasting corner: masturbation, addiction, hobbies, the masculinist view of emotional expression. In the saving corner: technology, devices for home and work, rationality, investment.

When I was growing up in the seventies, a mark of the way the parental order was being overturned was the elevation of waste to an honorific. Man, you were wasted last night was said not as a reproof, but as a sign of respect, as though the waster had won a battle. Indeed, by being wasted, that is, intoxicated, high, time was wasted in a superbly aristocratic way. Outside, in the parental order, savings were squandered: schoolwork wasn’t done, grades were falling, teens were sullen and alien.

The parental order, for my generation, reasserted itself, but the mark of time wasted was on that generation. And indeed, time saving devices – the computer, the connected computer, the Internet – were touted as ways in which time would be available – for wasting. As it turned out, the more time that was saved, the less leisure there was. Instead of the computer making the office easier, it made the office ubiquitous.

Such is the structure of late capitalist culture. The tear between the stone age metaphysics of our consciousness of time and the physics of time, in which time became the space-time continuum, glimmered before us in films, which can give us the retro-illusion that time goes backwards – a hopelessly Newtonian illusion – and can also give us a sense of how backwards and forwards are not part of the fundamental structure.  But these facts are not part of our stubborn experience. You can go to Santa Monica and send postcards saying: Having a good time in Santa Monica, wish you were here. But you can’t find cards saying: having a good space time in Santa Monica, you are already here – cause that wouldn’t have any meaning for the sender or receiver. Here would crack open, and out of it would emerge something formless.

In The Hour of the Wolf, the Ingmar Bergman film with Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, von Sydow plays one of those tormented artistic types who takes his depression out in being mean to women. At one point, von Sydow tortures Liv, his wife, by holding up his watch and demonstrating how long a minute lasts. Nothing happens but the watch ticking, and it turns out that a minute is an infinite thing. Here, time and waste collapse into each other. Indeed.

 I write this in Paris and Margaritaville. Man am I wasted. Wish you were here.

Political advice, of a kind, from your friend and mine: Northrop Frye

 

In my opinion, one of the worst pieces of advice in all American history is: 'when they go low, we go high.' This is not just appeasement, it is smug appeasement - the kind of passive aggressive gesture that makes you want to go lower. It is a symptom of what George Santayana called America's genteel culture. So what is the counter-model to be adopted by those rejoicing in the ruin of Trumplandia - or its temporary ruin?

American politics is a revenger tragedy, and the liberal difficulty - liberalism in the purest sense - is to disentangle the toils that keep the revengers and the offenders united in the slaughterhouse. One can't pretend the slaughterhouse isn't there. Or lift yourself out of the revenger tragedy by thinking pure thoughts. Who by thinking, as the Man sez, can grow a cubit taller?

The liberal answer must, at last, make peace with ritual. Rituals operate in the now - they have the vaguest sense of the long term. The now has to be welcomed: the spontaneous overflow of gloating, cursing, crying, laughter can't be dealt with by references to page 454 of the U.S. Treasury's report on the budget deficit.

So, how to be low in a limited sense? Here, politicians should turn to their well thumbed copy of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, who gives a good hint for those caught in a revenger tragedy:

 

"We notice however the frequency of the device of making the revenge come from another world, through gods or ghosts or oracles. This device expands the conceptions of both nature and law beyond the limits of the obvious and tangible. It does not thereby transcend those conceptions, as it is still natural law that is manifested by thetragic action. Here we see the tragic hero as disturbing a balance

in nature, nature being conceived as an order stretching over the

two kingdoms of the visible and the invisible, a balance which

sooner or later must right itself. The righting of the balance is what

the Greeks called nemesis: again, the agent or instrument of nemesis may be human vengeance, ghostly vengeance, divine vengeance,

divine justice, accident, fate or the logic of events, but the essential

thing is that nemesis happens, and happens impersonally, unaffected,

as Oedipus Tyrannus illustrates, by the moral quality of human

motivation involved. In the Oresteia we are led from a series

of revenge-movements into a final vision of natural law, a universal

compact in which moral law is included and which the gods, in the

person of the goddess of wisdom, endorse. Here nemesis, like its

counterpart the Mosaic law in Christianity, is not abolished but fulfilled:

it is developed from a mechanical or arbitrary sense of restored

order, represented by the Furies, to the rational sense of it

expounded by Athene."

So, that's the plan, guys and dolls. Let's hop to it!

 

seems like total destruction the only solution

 - Bob Marley The Real Situation

The stories of Noah and Jonah in the Bible mirror each other to the extent that they seem variations of some deeper story, one sprung from the Apocalypse that happened at the very beginning of culture.

The story of Noah is about a righteous man who is told that total destruction awaits the world. He is given the mission to save himself and his family and every living thing, which he does by building an ark. In the ark he is marooned from the deluge that destroys everything. So goes the best known part of the story. But what comes afterwards takes up as much time as the story of the ark in the Noah narrative. Once he lands, God makes a covenant with Noah and all living things to never again bring about total destruction. And then we are told that Noah planted grapes, and invented wine. On that wine he got drunk and uncovered himself in his tent. His youngest son went in andcovered him up. When Noah woke up, he cursed this son. He cursed him the way the father in Kafka’s The Judgment cursed his son. There’s a certain gleefulness, a certain casting off the mask, a psychotic seizure here, as though the darkest part of the unconscious was peeping out.

Survivor shakes, the prophet’s PTS.

Jonah’s story is that God gave him a message that Nineveh was to be totally destroyed unless it repented. Instead of relaying this message, Jonah fled the message, hiding on a boat. He, like Noah, marooned himself from total destruction on the ocean. But a storm came, and Jonah was thrown overboard, to experience an even deeper marooning as he was swallowed and remained alive in the belly of a great fish, or sea monster. It was only in this second marooning that Jonah stopped resisting the great No God had put in his head. The fish vomited Jonah up on shore, and he made his way to Nineveh and announced the total destruction of the city unless the city repented.

Survivor shakes, the prophet’s  PTS. Nineveh repented, God stayed his hand, and Jonah could not accept it. He camped outside the city wall and resisted the Yes. God then had a gourd grow, which cast a shadow over Jonah and sheltered him. And then the gourd wilted, at which point Jonah cast himself down and wished to die. Then God asked Jonah whether it was well to be angry for the gourd. Jonah, clinging to the No, told the Lord it was well to be angry. And the Lord answered back:

“Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night:

11 And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”

And so the book ends, with that wonderful concern for the cattle.

Both stories deal with total destruction. Since we live in an era that is, it seems, on the verge of total destruction, I think of these two stories as emblems, cracked mirrors on either side of us.

I think, as well, that as we are passing into this era, we are being failed ethically. Failed by the philosophers. The Anglo-American philosophers, for decades, have been busy devising a problem-centered ethics that revolves around highly contrived situations that “suss out” our moral intuitions. It is a form of advice columning with a little Bayesian probability thrown in for fun. And it takes no crack at the total system.

In the twentieth century, both the Kantian and the utilitarian modes of ethics failed to understand the system – the system that can lead to total destruction. They took no crack at it: in consequence, they failed to interrogate our real moral lives, we who live in the high income states, we who live in our individual comfort zones well knowing that the future will be brutal. The concentration camps went up. The atom bomb was built. The victims were piled high in proxy struggles in the Cold war. The oceans warmed. The atmosphere shifted. The permafrost began to melt.  

One of the popular topics of the day is the discussion about having children. Is it right or wrong? And if wrong, is it wrong because the child is marching into the future that we have made for it – a future of total destruction – or is it wrong because the child will grow up to be another, albeit unconscious, dronelike producer of the disaster: as a  consumer and a laborer, as a user of the total energy used by creatures like blue whales, except in a 150-250 poound packet? This discussion uses the child to discuss a problem about the parent: for this is really a discussion about us: does a real sense of the disaster ahead require, ethically, that we commit suicide?

This ethical requirement, I think, has sunk into the collective unconscious. It leads not only to the phenomena measured by statistics in terms of life expectancy, suicide, overdose, etc., but as well to the violence and hatred in our politics and collective sense of ourselves.

I am a late father, a father in my late middle age. I am against the big NO, I am for my son living within a disaster averted, I am against the total disaster,. I have even spent much of my thinking life wondering how to separate the total disaster from the total system: the war system, the treadmill of production, capitalism.

This autumn, I’ve been reading a book that actually does take a crack at the system, in the shadow of total destruction: Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I prefer I and You, since the “thou” is a tonally off. Instead of going back to Kant, or starting off with happiness, Buber starts from You. It is the You – of all living things, of the earth, of god or the gods, of persons – that comes before the I. It is out of the You that the I is derived. Once the I is derived, though, it struggles with all living things, the earth, god or gods, and persons. It struggles to contain them in an “It”. This struggle does illuminate our moral “intuitions” as they are, in fact, living bits of us. The struggle of the I to recognize the you is the moral story, the story that goes against the total disaster in which everything, every little thing, becomes an it. Even the ominipotent I becomes an it, caught in its own devices. Buber wrote I and Thou after World War I, and before the Nazi seizure of power, which is to say, in the shadow of total destruction. He took from Hasidic tradition and from Daoism, and he gives us an ethical understanding of the system – he takes a large crack at it. This is not ethics as consolation, as a consumer tipsheet based on the latest pop science findings from neurology. It is not self-help.

Everyone I know is suffering, lately, from the survivor shakes. From the Prophet’s PTS.

And to everyone I would say: get ahold of a copy of I and Thou and read it slowly in the long winter season, the season of imminent fascism and plague. Cause we need to take down this system.  

 

Paris

 

A ghost town lives beneath the skin

Of this metropole.

Abandonment is lodged within

each brick, block and pole

 

Coughs in the pipes, leaves skidmarks

On the staircase wall

Rustles in the pocket corner remarks

Of your neighbors down the hall.

 

Mene mene tekel uparsin

Says the Chinese fortune cookie.

Yver is icumin in.

We are all waiting here for delivery.

 

A pigeon sits on the roof of the burned out cathedral

Here are the horses, child, and here is the steeple.