Drifting. A song for the 4th, sorta

 

1.

Comes a time when you’re drifting, sang Mr. Neil Young in 1977. Or was it 78?

I thought about that line this 4^th.

The news about the slow downfall of secondary education at the state and private levels since January hasn’t really surprised me that much. When the jewel of American culture, the amazing college and university system that arose post-WWII, was at its peak, it seemed pretty obvious to the right that this was a very bad thing. The protests about the Vietnam war, the coddling of leftwingers among the teachers, and the idea that the children of the mob could study Shakespeare and write poetry instead of learning how to optimize their movements on the assembly line  – this simply and absolutely went counter to the tradition-based view of society. The solution, which started in Reagan’s California and became the norm, was to raise the price of education. But as the mob still wanted in, the compromise with the liberal-center was to keep raising the price while at the same time making it easy to get loans for that price. Thus, out of the jewel we extracted a mashup of the system of indentured servitude and the system of liberal education. But mashups are not syntheses. Eventually, they come apart.

Thus slowly, slowly, one of the great features of modernity – a feature that has roots as much in the medieval city and the culture of pilgrimage as in the breakup of the old patriarchal household, in which the extended family all lived together – the period of drift, fell prey to the new norms of debt and continuous labour.

Hard workin’, as Democratic candidates like to say. Hard working families. They work hard. Hard hard hard. It is hammered in with nails. Because the master always wants the serfs to work hard. And in that hard work, you fill in the space of drift. It is an offense and also leads to crime and drugs!

2.

I look at myself as a relic from that older era.

At that time Mr. Young was singing his line about drifting, I was a young sprout and I was drifting. Like many another young sprout, patched and peeled in the suburbs and spit out into the great America that I romanticized through numerous books and popular songs and movies.

I thought of it then, because I did recognize this was drift,  as a necessary phase, especially for a young buck who wanted to become a writer. To me, a writer was attached by every thread to experience, and experience was an adventure. The Wild West was not some historic fiction, it was right outside, you could walk into it any time.  Everything about the America of the sixties and seventies encouraged the thought that drifting and experience were all balled up together. Ishmael’s feeling was mine:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

The period of drift was made extraordinarily easy for me and my kind by the wondrous archipelago of colleges and universities across the Grand Old Country. You check in, you check out. And even while I was taking classes, I was working in all kinds of jobs.

I worked as a washer in a pizza place, a carpenter’s assistant, a parking lot attendant, a janitor in a Sears Warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, a clerk in a hardware store, a furniture maker and deliverer, a landscape crew manager. I worked in a bookstore, I worked in a library, I worked in a diner. And I quit. Oh, quitting was one of the greatest pleasures in the world. To quit – who has ever sung the song of quitting? I remember, for instance, one summer when I was on a crew building a warehouse, and because I was too afraid to work on the roof, which required walking on crossbars yeah wide while carrying tools with the ground 30 foot under,  I was put under the thumb of a young thug, the pup of the owner of said warehouse, who would make me get in the cab of a lift that would take me up  those thirty feet. The thug would juggle me for a joke there, lowering and raising the cab. I took it for a week, being this idiot’s assistant. And then I quit. I think that day, the day I quit with no job in sight and no mowhney to pay the rent on the lousy little attic apartment I had at that time in Atlanta, was one of the happiest days in my life.

This could only have happened in a culture that preserved, reluctantly, a social space for the drift. Almost all my friends drifted, at one point or another. When I worked in the pizza joint – a place called Jaggers cattycornered from the entrance of Emory University, where I’d learned, for instance, all about Dilthey from a professor named Rudolf Makkreel, I fell into a crewe consisting of a lesbian cook who wanted to be a rabbi and goat breeder, a Gay Rights advocate waiter and Don Juan, a long haired, rather short punk who turned me on to Captain Beefheart, and the genial husband of another waitress who took me out to his favorite strip joint. I remember scrubbing the pizza pans, black iron pans, with steel wool, and how I’d get little splinters in my fingers. I remember throwing out the garbage, so much garbage, in the dumpster in the parking lot. I remember feeling this is it: the Wild West!

3.

And such was drift for one middle class white boy. But it would be a huge mistake to think that drift in America, a country founded by drifters, expanded by drifters and killers, and immigrated to, hugely, by drifters – it would be a mistake to think this was some privilege of my race, class, and gender. My aspirant rabbi friend, the Wiccan who I was afraid of who lived across the street from me there in Atlanta and sold drugs, the gay rights activist, the woman who I worked with at the hardware store who alternated between berating her husband, the fireman, and cheating on him with an obvy lowlife, the manager of that store who eventually went to prison for dipping in the till to pay for his gambling losses – this whole glorious collective that I can only call “my” life with a distorting simplification, so much was it ours – this was all within the drift.

And nobody hated the drift so much as those whose distant ancestors were all drifters. The whole of post 70s politics and social science was dedicated to eliminating, once and for all, drifting. And replacing it with debt and a policed underclass. Drifting moved to the Style section of the NYT, and was strictly for Nepo celebs. Who business planned and selfied their whole drift.

4.

When this is over, when the Chinese century has buried the brief time of the American hegemon, I think that drifting will reappear. It is structurally part of the revolution in social time that took place when the patriarchal house disintegrated, and though that house is being put back together, thirty year olds are now living with their parents and the age at which people marry is going up and up, I am certain this will fail. The stocks will fail. The tech companies will fail. The AI will fail. The climate will fail. The attempt to reinstitute racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The attempt to negotiate a centrist racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The housing market will fail, the police explosion will fail, the borders will fail.

And drift will remain. Thank God. Happy fourth!

 

Plath

 I was a bit afraid when I read the byline: Patricia Lockwood. Who, perhaps unfairly, I have defined as the London Review of Books putdown artist.

She is reviewing Sylvia Plath’s prose.

Or that is the excuse. As we know from Lockwood’s other reviews, the book at hand is a skelton-key to all the books and the life

And we all know that Plath’s life is a pinata, everybody has a whack at it.

Nobody seems to be at all fascinated by John Berryman’s suicide. Or Randall Jarrell’s, if, as some of his friends assert, the accident (a car, he was walking by the side of the road, apparently) was no accident. But Plath’s suicide, with the gas, the door to the children’s room stopped up with some cloth to make sure they didn’t breath in the gas, the milk and bread for their lunch – this is a scenario that keeps floating out there, as though the poems were simply adjuncts to the story.

I have a lot of sympathy for Plath, and for the poems: basically, I heart those poems, and not just the Ariel poems. Janet Malcolm’s telling of the Plath tale was oddly numb to the poems; although it was really a telling of the Plath story as told by others. Malcolm is upfront: she is with the Hugheses.

I’m not.

So I was a bit afraid that this would be a takedown, a tackle, once again, of the “poet-ess” supposedly loved by Coeds in their Ivies. With such an audience, suspicion falls on the author. Or so goes the usual rant.

However, Lockwood twisted herself from her own grip, her own take down routine. And her essay about Plath is one of her best essays, I think.

She does some likeable things, Lockwood. For instance, she starts writing poetry herself. Yes! The academic grin about Plath, all her nonsense, becomes especially sardonic about people writing like Plath. That form of grin does not, of course, form on the mouth when regarding all the poets who started writing like Eliot. But Plath!

Lockwood writes:

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.

Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0

Aseries of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10 lb biography of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring. I thought then that she seemed too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal.

The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.

The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.

If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around the shoulder, that need to shelter someone who has proved almost frighteningly enduring. People pass out of the narrative while still she stands. Her death seemed to drive people back on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar:

I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fever 103°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerising cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. ‘I have done it again!’ Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying: ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap!’

I’m not sure whether it was fast or gradual. The assignment was The Collected Prose, released by Faber last year and clocking in at around eight hundred pages. I read that first and then her journals; they are especially rich to read in the mornings. Then The Bell Jar, as good as I remember; then a glance at the smoking crater of the Plath-Hughes myth; then The Collected Poems, fresh as fish, and arrayed in shining scales. The rhythm of my notes changed, went in threes, lapped, lengthened.

“One day in metalsmithing class, I picked up a book called Dynamarhythmic Design: A Book of Structural Pattern, first published in 1932. It is about everything that can happen in a rectangle. The rectangle was the page. I thought of Plath’s poem ‘Stillborn’. I read ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ in the courtyard of the coffee shop, where two students at the next table were having a loud conversation about whether it was ethical to bring children into the world. I wrote, very quickly, a poem called ‘Dynamarhythmic Design’. For some reason, for the next three weeks, it kept going. Three, four or five poems a day. There were rules, seemingly handed down from her; I followed them. Write the poems straight through from beginning to end, and tell people you’re doing it. It felt strangely joyful, propelled by its own velocity. I was not solving the problem of the death, the life, but I was remembering the real thing, insoluble for anyone who has not done it.

We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the god. She is part of it as a woman in a painting – a blank reclined space, sketching everything around her. Eventually the blank must be filled in totally: it completes the scene, but is fatal. This is why hospitals were fruitful for Plath. It is clear what is happening in them: a visceral tableau, with attending flowers, and a stripped human form at the centre. You could write, perhaps, as if every room were a hospital room, but it would not be very comfortable.”

This gets Plath in a way that escapes Janet Malcolm, who is a often mentioned presence in Lockwood’s essay, making it almost a counter-argument, the kind of exorcism of a strong writer that some – for instance, Harold Bloom – posit as the royal path to becoming a strong writer. Malcolm is who Lockwood – and indeed, me myself – would like to be: the observer who, starting out from some maxim like a slap in the face (instead of building to a moralizing tag line), understands how, in the light of that shock, we are able to trace the shadowplay of dramaturgy of those around her subject and her subject around his or her crew. At the same time, she is aware of, and represents herself as, the woman in the painting, off to the side. Reversing Susanna and the Elders, it is she who spies on their naked old flesh. Lockwood builds up to the confrontation with Malcolm over Plath – which makes this a more interesting essay, but one that reconstructs the usual sidedness of all essays about Plath. Like Plath, who in the anecdotes is often the silent, burning presence (rather like Plath’s poem, The Courage of Shutting Up, which could have been inspired by Ted Hughes sister, Olwyn) observers are not simply and always observers – because the line between observer and subject is dirty, tainted with unconscious desires, thematic dreams, bigotries, the higher morality, and everybody’s striving to be the teacher.

Perhaps there are such sides to the Plath story because she generated sides. It was her poetic. Sidedness.

It shows my age, but I was entirely surprised with Lockwood’s notion that Hughes big poetry book is Birthday Letters. I have bits of Crow memorized, and any poetry loving guy of my generation would probably list this as Hughes contribution to the great Wheel of poetry.

“God tried to teach Crow how to talk

'Love,' said God. 'Say, Love.'

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.”

To those with austere tastes, this might sound like the Doors. But I’ve never had austere tastes.

Plath, too, is stunt royalty, but she doesn't make her play against the old English Anglican Gnostic, to which Hughes, after her death, tried to reduce her. She makes a play against the schoolroom, the style page, the influencer, the types of totalitarian shallow that she had to ram her head against every day.

“Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.

I am no drudge

Though for years I have eaten dust

And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

Blue dew from dangerous skin.

Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover ?”

I open to this. It is bad news, the worst news, and I am its admirer beyond the daily tasks that make me not want to deal with it now, or tomorrow, or tomorrow, procrastinating my own deathdrive.

Trump's Gleichschaltung

The NYT gave us a splash of  its usual ideology-washing  prose yesterday regarding the resignation of the UVA president, which came about as one of the Trump administration's demands:

"The extraordinary condition the Justice Department has put on the school demonstrates that President Trump’s bid to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives, is more far-reaching than previously understood."

This construction is a sentence of such moderate-centrist bothsiding excess that it could have come from Stephen Miller himself. It invokes the oft expressed idea (in the NYT) that the universities are not "safe" spaces for conservatives, but are packed with lefties. Oddly, that the oil industry from the CEOs to the mid managers are packed with raging rightists has never provoked any demand for an ideological righting of bias by forcing EXXON to hire socialists. Must just be overlooked. Guys, since the oil industry has so lmuch influence in the world, is it right that it is hostile to liberals and leftists?

Ah, a question that the NYT would never ever ask. 

Now, how could they have reported this latest bit of Trump thuggery? There was a nice little German word that cropped up in 1933 and afterwards: Gleichschaltung. The party that came to power in 1933 (the name of which is left up to the reader to find out) used the word to fire Jews and Leftists in academia and bring about a synchronization of the makeup of the Universities with the makeup of the party in power.

Which is what we are seeing the Trumpies do. The Civil rights department is much concerned about the civil rights of whites. You might not know it, but whites, poor rich whites, are descriminated against by DEI. Blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, etc., have long been underrepresented or not represented at all in the U.S. and the name for that is systemic racism. A name that makes the NYT editors and all their country club buddies bristle. 

So remember this term. Gleichschaltung. Because that is what is happening. 

Not that you will ever read about it in the paper of record. 

We live in dumb times. 

Hearing the past: Michelet and the French school of historiography

 In his book on Michelet, Brahami points to a little revolution in method that follows in the wake of Michelet’s metaphors. Michelet, who was as close to skin, bone, blood and sex as any nineteenth century bon vivant, did not like the idea of the historian looking at history through a telescope or a loupe. Brahami goes outside of his strictly historical work, and finds in such texts as “The People” and “The Bird” the key to Michelet’s method – a auscultation of history. Michelet work as a historian was contemporaneous with the instrument invented by his contemporary, Laennec. He uses the image in a rather charming way in The Bird: the woodpecker « ausculates to see how the tree sounds, what it says, what it is in itself. The procedure of auscultation, so recent in medicine, was the principle art of the woodpecker for millenia. It interrogated, sounded, saw by hearing. »

This is a rather fascinating out of the frame metaphor. The British and American historical method was a sort of junction of positivism and epic. But the French school, from Michelet to Foucault, has always been directed by another metaphoric, a combination of folksong and positivism, if such a thing is thinkable.

Brahami quotes the preface from Michelet’s The People:

“Thus, I closed my books and I placed myself in the people as much as I could ; the solitary writer plunges into the crowd, he listens to the noises, notes the voices.” The opposition between the book and the crowd, here, may be a little rough – but even in the book, the books that contain the noted voices, the popular media, there is a sort of historiographic listening that is extraneous to the spirit of the British and American schools, until recently. The failure of historians in the U.S. to use the amazing material of the slave narratives gathered after the Civil War was a failure due to both racism and a predominantly visual sense of history, as if we could “see” the past better than we could hear it.

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A sigh

 

If what the paleontologists say is true, homo sapiens has been walking around on this planet a pitiful 350,000 years. Of that amount, I, at 67, have been here 0.00019142857 of that time. It ain’t much. When I raise my eyes and look at the politics of my time, or the past 200 years or so (0.00057142857), I notice that I have been, except for certain exceptional periods, pretty much on the losing side of all political battles.

At one time, working class leftist politics was animated by the idea that it was inevitable. The working class, being the productive class, would eventually realize its power and overthrow the aristocrats and plutocrats and institute the reign of plebocrats – democrats.

That, I should say, defined politics in the supposedly “short” twentieth century.

The working class decisively lost. The plebocrats, it turned out, were bureaucrats from the Party. And on the other side of the wall, after a number of concessions were made after WWII and up until the sixties, the Free World reverted to the old capitalist order in which those who succeeded in maximizing their wealth a thousand and ten thousand fold more than those who produced the wealth held all the power and made all the decisions, although, as is right and proper, through various representatives who could claim to represent not only the interests of the richest but also, on marginal things, the interests of the rest.

Working class leftist politics, in my time, shifted its focus: it became a matter of those who had the most cultural capital. A wholly untrustworthy group, blind for the most part to their socio-economic function and retreating to a Left of the Mind. Not that I am bitching – I’m a camp follower of that group.

At certain points in my life, I have said, oh fuck it and unplugged from reading about politics – the politics of the 0.00019142857 of the time that homo sapiens have been here – because it was so frustrating. I was at a mook’s distance from any real power. I understood the non-voter better than the voter, really. Alas, I’ve grown old and no wiser, and here I am again, a wee little American pea, raising my voice against war, atrocity, and the bestial stupidity of the ruling class. I know in my bones what happens, having seen it happen over and over – the current crop of idiots will fall, and power will once more return to the technocratic representatives of the plutocrats, who will make little deals for us all, to an extent. The poohbahs of the left, with their cultural capital, will alternatively bitch and tell us all that our very lives are at stake if we don’t elect a buncha oatmeal to “fight” for us. And so on.

Well, what was I, a 0.00019142857-er, expecting?

 

And the prep school boy says: I didn't wanna be mayor anyway! Cuomo' bows out

 Perhaps the oddest thing about the whole Cuomo race is the end of it - or at least this phase. He did not give a concession speech shouting out to his hardworking campaign workers, his voters, etc. He ended it like a prep school boy who did not get accepted at his fourth choice on the list of Ivies. No biggie, he didn't want it anyway!

Throughout the campaign, Cuomo made it crystal clear that his interest in NYC was merely as a stepping stone to the greater things he, as a Cuomo, deserved. Has a man ever run for mayor with greater disdain for the city he supposedly wanted to be mayor of? True, Giuliani, after eating up his 9.11 publicity, decided to jettison the Big Apple for real income opportunities, and eventually for real drinking opportunities, and eventually to star in his candid hair dye apocalypse vids - but he ran to become mayor because, underneath, he actually liked his home town.

A campaign of "vote for me you stupid New Yorker so I can check this box on my resume" turns out, much to the astonishment of the absolutely out of synch Dem party poobahs, not to work! You mean the plebes don't want you to treat them as so many playing cards with your CEO and Republican friends? Well, you don't get any Abundance then!

Perhaps, the Clintonite machine is thinking, they should have called on Dick Cheney for a surprise appearance. That would have wowed em!

What is mad, truly mad, is the political journalism beat at the moment. In spite of polls, in spite of a spate of local elections on everything from the Philadelphia DA's office to the rejection of the Huntington Cali "lets bring anti-woke to the library system" election, the top political "analysts" have their finger on the pulse of Tech bro billionaires and Trump's one hundred closest friends. They still don't have a clue. Which is what happens when you look at everything through the poll, and nothing through the the culture, with its narratives, heartbreaks, ordinary sublimities, loves, hates and all the rest of it.

Surprise is coming. You just won't read about it in the news.

The black and white photo/the Color photo

 

In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.

Newton’s prism is, from a certain positivist perspective, a step on the road to color film. In America, the first “commercially viable” color photography film came out in 1907. It was called Autochrome. In John Rohrbach’s history of the inventions of color photography, he notes that Stieglitz was, at first, a fan. But the color photograph did not smoothly replace the black and white as one might expect.

“Almost immediately, it became apparent that photographic color delivered a world that was simultaneously too real and not real enough. Discerning eyes found a surreal brittleness in the spot-on renderings delivered by most well-exposed color photographs, as if the air had just been sucked out of their subjects. They recognized that photographic colors would pull forward or recede, not fully adhering to the objects they described…”

Interestingly, in the early twentieth century, in which the object lost its “aura”, the most recognizable objective correlate was the black and white photograph or film. Aura, in this sense, created a certain visual equilibrium that the color process could not compete with. Color was too busy. The crowd’s desire for a perfect mimesis was frustrated by the addition of an element that the 20-20 members of the crowd saw in every waking moment.

With Kodak’s invention of Kodachrome – the beta version – in the late thirties, and its innovations in the 1940s, color film became a tool not only of trained photographers, but of the masses. Color in moving film followed.

And thus the visual media that people received, the world of black and white films and photographs, changed around them, with black and white becoming something other than the standard.

This has a psychological interest for the historian. The historian’s work, the archives, the statistics, the newspapers, the memoirs, etc. – all of that stuff – is accompanied, of course, by the historian’s imagination. And how does the 21^st century historian imagine, say, Paris in 1920? In color or in black and white? Or in a mix of both?

 

Compare two pics:  The first is recognizably the in the vein of the realist turn in the Great Depression in America, Edward Weston’s 1932 Monterey coast picture, all so starkly black and white and the greys running out to the horizon. In my childhood, going on “cartrips” to North Georgia, you would always see plenty of abandoned shacks. It was all in the American grain, get up and go, leave the house, the lean-to, to rot, the sharecropper cabin, get in the truck with the furniture you were saving stacked in the bed, roped down, and get the hell outta dodge. Here, of course, Weston is tickling with the surface elements of the sublime: ocean and thunderclouds behind, the weathered and beaten structure  – a fishing shack? – in front, performing its slow routine tumble into the seagrass.

A place for  bums to spend the night. The black and white and grey do a lot of work for the eye and the imagination here. We know someone must have worked to put the roof on, to punch in the doors and windows, but that work is, in this moment, all over and futile.  The waves slamming into the rocks jutting up on the shore are eroding them, sure, but the comparison between their stony time and the time of the fence almost completely gone framing  whatever that bit of land was – a pea patch, a place for goats – is stark. The fence is pointless. The distances are preserved, the coolness of just this moment is a  black n white job.

 

The second is post-war. Cities have been targets, photos have gone through the technological revolution wrought by Kodak, the atom bomb has fallen and colors now come out of our photos and films. 1946,  of the water front in Monterey, California,  Edward Weston.  In 2014, we drove up the coast and spent the night at Monterey out of respect for Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. It was not the town I read about when I was a teen – although when I was a teen, back in the 1970s, maybe that town still existed. I knew it wouldn’t be. We did hit the place in a storm, and that was nice to see out of the hotel window.

It was not, also, Weston’s town from this photograph. We know those colors more from old

 

 

 photographs than from the colors we see in the world.  

 

 

It is of some interest that historians of, say, Monterey or California or of the Great Depression or of the Post-war have at hand such pictures, and that the color photographs of this time remind us of color photographs, while the black and whites remind us of the objects we see in them.

We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues.

Nostalgia, I think, has changed in subtle ways in tandem with the media of representation. To be nostalgic for the ancien regime means being nostalgic for a very static set of paintings and museum style installations in castles, etc. To be nostalgic for the 1930s in America, to me, means being nostalgic for the America that ghosts through in black and white. And to be nostalgic for the fifties means longing for the technocolor world, or the Kodochrome world. If the first world is of our self, our damned cogito, and the second world is for what is out there, direct phenomena, the third world, the world of representation, is a definite mediator of the past that sometimes tricks us into thinking we can see the past. I’ve often wondered why nobody has, I think, really made a research object out of  exploring how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.

It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.