Sartre's round trip

  

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Every bike rider knows that moment when, pumping the pedals, there is a certain jerking, a certain skip that interrupts the smooth interaction of the teeth of the pedal wheel against the links of the chain. The skipping does not immediately lead to the chain coming off the bike – the teeth catch and disengage in a certain jumpy pattern.

The coordination and possible dis-coordination between the chain and the teeth of the wheel is a metaphor, in Sartre’s essay on Brice Parain, Aller et retour – Round trip. Parain’s magnum opus was published in 1942, Investigations on the Nature and Function of Language; when it was translated into English it was as a thing to fill out French intellectual history, and not to address Anglophile philosophers. But it did make a big impression on 40s intellectuals: both Sartre and Blanchot wrote essays on it, and it was generally part of the discourse in which Bataille, de Beauvoir, Paulhan and others took part. Parain latter became one of the mandarins behind Gallimard's Pleiade editions. He was a bit of a backdoor man, a bit of a celebrity.

The metaphor of the round trip points us to Parain’s uniquely existentialist take on language. While the Vienna school and the Analytics were trying to find the logic that would constitute a Language in which the truth function could be logically interior within propositions – the Tarskian dream of a self-contained language – Parain was fascinated, in Sartre’s phrase, by “the vertiginous sentiment of an inexactness of language.” Parain was a Hegelian, not a Heideggerian, but he too thought that philosophy begins with the way something doesn’t work – the broken tool opens up its “toolness” (“toolness” is so verbally ugly that it makes an aesthetic fit for the notion). Through that break, Parain saw into the problem with treating language monologically – via examples such as formulas and instructions. What pleased Sartre was that Parain saw the subject situated in language – in dialogue.

Sartre, notoriously, neglected the philosophy of language at a time when philosophers were making the linguistic turn like gangbusters. But in the Parain essay, he sketches certain questions that might introduce an existentialist theory of language. In particular, the decalage, the ungearing, between language and experience: “how to insert in language an experience that was made without it?” Of course, all experiences and their names are lifted out of themselves by the generalizing power of language. One can approach this calmly, speculatively, imagining experiments – or one can have this confrontation thrust upon one as the world changes around one. Sartre makes much of Parain as an interwar writer, originally from a peasant family, who was defined by the trenches on one side and the concentration camps and the other. Or, in a less lurid light, as one who saw the collapse of the old order in real time.

Sartre roots the philosophy of language, or the metaphysical need for one, not in science, but in social crisis. In doing so, he overdoes Parain’s peasant roots – as I have learned from other sources. But he puts his fingers on something that the language turn philosophers have ignored by turning to the “timeless” methodology of science: the language turn comes out of an existential social situation, one in which words and silences are undergoing a systematic connotative change. The word war itself, a defining word, becomes at the same time an ambiguous one: was the interwar period really a peace? In 1944, are the Allies really allied? In 1949, when the essay was included in Situations, what was war and what was peace in Europe, or Asia, or Africa?

There’s a bit of Round trip that is less about language’s failure in general than about the crisis and responses to the crisis in the interwar period. Parain’s choice was of a certain kind of silence, which Sartre calls infrasilence – a silence that surround the word with its occasion, with its painfulness, its cruelty. The kind of silence that is described, in a story, as “stunned”. Sartre is still placing Parain in the generation that came out of WWI looking for a solution – in Parain’s case, finding it in communism for a period of his life. There were also the surrealists and the “revolution in poetic language”, to borrow Kristeva’s phrase. Sartre was thinking of how the twenties and thirties could give us both Breton and the PCF, Bataille and the ultra-right – like other French intellectuals of the 1940s, chewing over the mystery of France’s defeat.

“All those destroyers that he had followed for an instant are possessed, in one way or another, by the demiurgic, Nietzschean pride in this one thing, that they all believed in the plasticity of human nature. If they burned the old man, it was to hasten the coming of a new man. There was the surrealist man, the gidean man, the Marxist man, who all wait for us on the horizon.It was a matter of both unmasking and fabricating at the same time. In one way the future is empty, and noone could prevision it; in another sense the future exists more than the present; the inebriation of all these smasher-uppers was about constructing a world which they wouldn’t know and wouldn’t recognize once it was built; the joy was in the risk, in not knowing what they were making, the bitter joy of telling oneself that we were to lead people to the threshold of the promised land when one would remain, on that threshold, and regard them all going away. These sentiments were completely foreign to Parain. He had no eyes for the future, he didn’t believe in it. If he spoke of it, it was to imagine a world which unmade itself; here was a man who had, when all is said and done, lost himself; his theory of language must lead him, had led him for a moment to the idea of the plasticity of man: change the words, change the person. But nothing was, in reality, more distant from his deepest reflexion. The image that was most deeply embedded in his memory was of the natural order. The return of the seasons and the birds, the growth of plants and children, the fixed order of the stars and the planets. This was the order he opposed in secret to the factitious order of discourse. To this order, the beasts submit; and also man, that beast who speaks.”

Sartre understood this, while at the same time developing a theory of liberty that involved the most radical plasticity. I like the contradiction, or rather, the stitching. The metaphysical stitching.

on reading Christopher Sorrentino's Now Beacon Now Sea

 1. Memoir is not so much a genre as a congery of genres that include essays, autobiography, autofiction and other circus animals. Memoir is, itself, popular in the hinterlands but not so much in the academic canon, where it is difficult to locate its coordinates, its trajectoy, its landings.

Embed the thing in history. That's always been my gambit. Like this:

Andre Chastel, the great art historian, once suggested that Petrarch found, in St. Augustine’s Confessions, a portal to a new sensibility:

“This avowed taste for Saint Augustine, less the theologian than the man, is a great teaching: the example of the Confessions shows the passage from the life of antiquity to that of medieval Christianity – yet Petrarch betrays its spirit, since he uses it as an aid to define a troubled state corresponding to Saint Augustine’s when he had not yet discovered the peace of Christ. The imitation of Saint Augustine led Petrarch to unmake, more or less consciously, what his model had made: he was attracted in St. Augustine to the sickness rather than the cure.”

One wonders whether Castel is moved, perhaps unconsciously, by Michelet’s The Witch here.

In The Witch, Michelet presents that figure of the victim of medieval Christianity, the woman, in herself, as effecting, through her unconscious representative, the Witch, as affecting a diabolical reading backwards, against the grain (as for instance in reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards) in order to go forwards – indeed, in order to leap over the present.

Chastel was writing in 1953, when the place of Petrarch in the cultural history of modernity was canonically to have represented a new spirit. Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux had been made into a parable of the individualism of the Renaissance by Burkhardt, and that image was very strong in the first half of the twentieth century.

An ideogram: the cultural history moves forward by way of exempla.

2. Memoir, memory, life. These are the good fairies, or bad witches, that attend the “recounting” that is memoir’s excuse and pattern. I like the notion that memory, instead of showing how things were, is an exercise in “undoing” – a sort of psychoanalytical walkabout. To undo what has come since – this seems to distinguish a certain angry energy in the memoir, even as the traditional memoirist is recalling no matter how turbulent a past from a supposedly peaceful, or at least recollective present.

These are notes I keep as I read Christopher Sorrentino’s excellent memoir of his mother, Now Beacon Now Sea – and not his well known father, Gilbert Sorrentino. Christopher Sorrentino, rather like Noah Baumbach, was raised in the heart of the New York intellectual scene – born in 1963, and patched and pealed in an odd experiment in bohemian welfare, Westbeth, an apartment house located in the Greenwich village. Before the Sorrentinos moved to Westbeth, Gilbert and his wife Vivian and Christopher lived in the dangerous Tompkins Park area. The memoir is addressed to his mother – addressed to his readers, to himself, but mostly to his mother, his dead mother. To undo death is a witch’s work.

The book begins, then, with his mother dead. And in particular, his mother’s decaying corpse. The beginning is overwhelming, and would definitely sink a lesser work.

“I spoke to my mother for the last time on May 27, 2017. Sometime within the next few days, she died. I found her on June 15. The sight of a decaying corpse is horrifying, but it’s also a wondrous thing. My mother’s body lay on its back on her bed, one leg crooked at the knee, identical to the position in which I usually fall asleep. One small, blackened hand lay across the abdomen. The face was a nightmare, although her hair was still lustrous, the corpse wearing it down in a way I hadn’t seen my mother wear it in years. It framed her skull on the pillow. The body seemed simultaneously collapsed and inflated. Maggots were busy at work. Her expensive mattress was ruined. The oxygen machine was still grinding away. The smell was overpowering; I felt that I deserved it. But abruptly, without thinking about it, I cut off my examination. I closed the bedroom door on her; I closed it as if trying to shut out something that threatened to engulf me. That was the last time I saw her.”

He was, indeed, shutting out something that engulfed him. By presenting his mother in the harshest possible light, Sorrentino accuses her – and himself. How could he not have known? How could he have known and started with this paragraph, this smell of a fact?

3. There are many memoirs of NYC bohemia. Most are deflating. But bohemia refuses to be deflated. Rather like adolescence itself, we can leave it, we can hate it, we can try to forget it – but we carry it nonetheless. Anybody who writes carries some bit of bohemia, willingly or unwillingly.

Vivian or Vicky Sorrentino was most unwilling, and this memoir is an act of undoing her son’s resistance or absence from his mother. A corpse is an accusatory thing, which is why humans have always surrounded it with some kind of cult. Sorrentino’s New York is very much of a piece with Baumbach’s. It was a hard place to be a kid, since the kid position is competed for by a hundred adults, all of whom were “older then, but are younger than that now. “ That Ur-60s thought.

Well no. Older just gets to be older. You can’t skip over the second law of thermodynamics, which is infinitely sneakier than the mere human product. You can try, though. You can go back to the Saint Augustine of the stolen apples, rather than the redeemed and terrible saint. But no memoir yet has overcome that stone cold barrier. Sorrentino’s gains its pathos, its depth, by understanding the inherent futility, now, of understanding, investigating, somehow recognizing his mother then. That’s the cosmic sink we are in. In for good

An old fear

 

 Does the old serpent look back on its life of shed skins and… sigh?

No herpetologist has ever heard a snake sigh – no doubt for sound biological reasons having to do with snake anatomy. But the sighing old serpent has a cartoonish plausibility, and takes its place in my imagination along with all the other cartoons.  I’m that serpent, and those shed skins are mine, sort of.

Which is a serpentine way to get to this: when I was a child, it seemed that children were always finding dead bodies. Murdered people lying  sprawled on building sites. Horribly mutilated victims in forests. Skeletons of long ago suicided men in creek beds. Criminal statistics in backyards, or near picnic sites (the parents dozing, outstretched on the picnic table benches, the Colonel’s bucket attracting flies, the children playing hide and seek, screaming with laughter, Dad’s face concealed under the tent of the newspaper). The child who, secreted behind the bush and all attentive to IT as IT stalks by, becoming focused on two bare and twisted feet sticking up on the ground just a couple feet from his crouch and gingerly lifting the leafage to behold what the feet belonged to. The disposal problem, it seemed, was continually in the news. The tv news. The tv shows, less graphic then, still showed killers hiding their victims, which implied that somebody was going to find those victims. This bugged me. I thought that I would, inevitably, as a child of the crime waves of the twentieth century, stumble across a corpse somewhere, someday. And horror films in the seventies became rather monomaniacally insistent on kids, teens at least, discovering cadavers.

I look back at this fear and am a bit surprised that it was never actualized. From my first steps to my now, more than 500,000 Americans have been murdered. Yet I have managed to scrape by without ever being in proximity to a bloody hair or twisted face. It is a big country, is all I can say. I long ago shed that fear, and its cousins (the fear of ghosts, the fear of some terrifying face staring at me from a window at night, the fear of confronting this or that bully, etc.). The old fears go where all my shed skins go – into my dreams.

And this must end with: a sigh.

The anti-charlatan charlatan

 

… jede Stunde mit dem letzten Schlag von tausend unschuldigen Herzen durch die Welt dröhnen müsste – “every hour must roar throughout the world with the last beats of a thousand innocent hearts.”

Optimist: But all wars have ended with peace.

Faultfinder: Not this one. This one has not taken place on the surface of life… no, it has raged inside life itself. The front has been extended to the whole country. And there it will stay. And this changed life, if there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is perishing and we won’t know it. Everything was yesterday and will be forgotten; no one will see today or be afraid of tomorrow. They will forget that the war was lost, forget they began it, foret they fought it. That is why the war won’t end.
 Ou
- Karl Kraus, taken from Calasso’s essay, The Perpetual War.

Calasso’s essay on Kraus focuses on an experience that Calasso himself, as well as most of his readers – all, now, surely – never had: Kraus’s readings. In particular, Kraus’s reading of his giant play, The Last Days of Mankind. The reading of this play, in absolute opposition to Austro-Hungary’s participation in the war and, more generally, to the war itself was an act that Calosso, using as his witness Elias Canetti, imagines like this:

“Outside there was still the war, and in the darkness of the hall, this tiny man with “a face so mobile that its couldn’t be pinpointed, penetrating and exotic, like the face of an animal, but a new, a different face, an unfamiliar one.”

Kraus was something we see in all the great polemicists: he was an anti-charlatan charlatan. Mimicry was the weapon, incitement by quotation was the point. I have long thought, since the Bush decade, of Kraus as a reference point to understand the moronic adventures of the U.S. in the 21^st century. The U.S. cam into the new millenium in the  most favorable circumstances possible. It could have continued to be at peace. It could have repaired and social and physical infrastructure. It could have made the necessary changes to repair the evident obsolescence of its constitutional order.

Of course, none of that happened. We are creeping out of this year with the U.S. government owing 40 trillion dollars, engaged on a smaller scale with an even stupider war than the unnecessary wars it engaged in in the 00s. Our constitutional order is now a bloody abortion, done to death by a lynch mob Supreme Court, and allowed to do so by an inane, inert, and senile legislature. Our economy is dominated by the illmeaning and cretinous offspring of the “third way”, our plutocrats, who make our 19^th century Robber Barons look cultivated and gentle by contrast. We have seen the government, aided and abetted by corporate media, shit all over the proudest product of 20^th century America, the civil rights movements. The climate is ruined, and not a hand has been raised to stop that foreseeable event.

Even the golden age of TV seems to be over.

Yet I’ve grown suspicious that my reference, my admiration for “prophetic denunciation’ is simply false consciousness patting itself on the back. When the poetry of indignation holds itself unaccountable for the predictable effects of total negation – depression, listlessness, quietism – then it is bad poetry. Poetry should not be employed to promote a cowed attitude towards life and energy. Those who pronounce the end of the world – or the end of this or that – are too slick, and too self-pleased with their disease. Ending is either an existential experience or another cause for making a pronunciamento, for self-advertisement. The end-makers are, really, all in the great muddle with the rest of us.

Note to self.

A gnomic note

Comparison: an old and reliable enlightenment tool. The philosophes loved the whole idea of comparison, for it seemed to magically produce progress in ideas. Ride the comparison into the modern was a kind of program. See, for instance, how the savages in America had myths and practices startlingly like the ancient Greeks. Ask yourself if progress hadn't made the contemporary European (which consisted of a handful of European bourgois urban intellectuals and forgot the peasant and artisan masses) the crown of civilization.

Unfortunately, comparison, as the elementary student of dialectics knows, simply fossilizes the embryo idea – leaving it forever in a pre-natal state unless it is vigorously moved forward via the forceps of antithesis and inversion. Thus, the revelatory smack of Diderot's The Nephew of Rameau.

However, under the shadow of that dialectic move, comparison still holds a great deal of anarchic power – satirical power. The enlightenment prehended the limits and fate of comparison in the preference given to satire. Gullivers travels is the satiric odyssey of civilization - a predecessor of Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, but one stripped of pathos.

The expression you can't compare x to y is inherently reactionary, supposing a natural and forbidding hierarchy. You can compare the lillies of the field to Solomon, or to an extermination camp. You can compare my digestion to the big bang.

Comparison is free. It is an existential property of the universe. It is impossible to imagine comparison without the universe - and vice versa. A universe without comparisons is not thiinkable by the monkey we are - or even thinkable.

Notes on an Irish vacation

 

- On the last day here,  in the sauna of Dublin’s Boddington Hotel, to be exact, I saw, or perhaps the sensory word I’m looking for is heard, the origin of Joyce’s Dubliners. Not denying the mythic pattern, the Irish and indeed world history, the immense theological knowledge, the intertextuality that Joyce could pull out of his ass by the yardful – to all of that I tip my hat, of course. But the birth is from Irish small talk, of which I was a privileged witness sitting there absorbing the heat on a bench above two types – a good looking gent in his fifties and a pretty woman who in the course of conversation revealed her age to be 58. It was hard to say whether these two knew each other extensively or had met for some convention at the hotel, but the man was sharing his tale of stomach upset and ulcer that had put him off his feed for who knows how long and the woman was full of commiseration, for hadn’t she too had a sickness in her 51^st to 54^th years? And he was on about how the pills worked but he didn’t want to get addicted, and she was on about how you can’t let things go to fast, for they will go fast, and the man said he couldn’t even fucking take a walk and his dad had said the same thing about time, said it to him when his dad was sixty, and the woman instanced a recent news item, even from yesterday, the whole family in that terrible car crash, out for a vacation they were, and the man had heard of it, and the woman said they’ll never get back their life.

And I had to think of the two Dubliners who bought tickets to go to the top of the Nelson pillar of accursed memory. Or of Stephen Daedalus’s extensive and crumbled jottings. Notes to self.

- In William Butler Yeats’s poem In Memory of Major Robert Gregory there is a verse that goes:

“And then I think of old George Pollexfen,

In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline…”

 

I quote this quite dispassionately, but I have memories mixed with it – walking down the slope of Church Street in Clarkston Georgia as a high school student whose sense of poetry and the larger life I thought I could never live on roads like that of Church Street in a suburban Atlanta was stirred by Yeats so that these verses were more than verses, once, but the smuggled in sawblade by which I’d saw through the bars of the prison – a heated adolescent idea, but mine once, then.

In Yeats’s biography, he mentions,  briefly, that George Pollexfen was a mystic, an uncle, and that he lived in Ballina. I have now been to Ballina and it is Church Street in Clarkston with uglier buildings and a Papa Johns that serves fries with its Pizza. It is true that “Many ingenious lovely things are gone/ That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude”, but lets not get carried away with Greek ivories- there’s always Church Street in Clarkston Georgia, in a point of view that has entirely dwindled, in a man that has waxed and waned and seen Ballina on a gloomy drizzly day.

Of course, very likely the Anglo-Irish relatives of Yeats’s were acquainted more with the Knox-Gore family, who lived rather eccentrically in a modest castle and a fairy wood, the Belleek forest, outside  Ballina. The Knox-Gores were great ones for horseflesh, and so was Pollexfen.

- The impressive mountain peak above us, which in the morning was wreathed with clouds, is called Croag Patrick, a name that our tongues play with a bit: Croag, Craig. It comes up from the Clewe bay, which made Westport a considerable export import competitor of Galway and Sligo at one point, until the bay’s comparative shallowness made for problems with the modern deeper freightors. All that is knowledge from the cruise, which we took three days after this ascent I’m talking about.

The Rough Guide says of the peak’s trail: “… taking an average of 3 and ½ hours return, is easy to follow, though steep in places – you will need good walking shoes and a stick.” True enough, although it would have been nice to add that it isn’t the steepness as much as the way the path up to the top is firstly dirt, scree, and some medium boulders, and secondly something like oyster shell, easy to tread, and for the last third is a winding nightmare of jagged broken boulders and small ones that seem deliberately designed to impede the walker and to send signals to the knees and legs that are received even days afterwards.

Hazel sticks are definitely a necessity, even as we are summing these things up from the parking lot and having no idea of what the path is like. So we get them, two euros a piece at the kiosk, and start off in high spirits. The clouds lift, the views spread out below us, and we talk of what the guide book says – that pilgrims make the trek on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July. Barefoot! That sounds like with a little tricky footing and sneaks we ought to do nicely.

Up we tread. Up we plod. We make our way up the path of dirt, scree, small boulders, and we see the hills on either side of us in panoramascope all the way to the Ocean and the islands in the bay, and we think that this is what we came for. We picnic on some boulders a third of the way up. Tuna sandwiches. Apples. Blueberries. Water.

At this point, unbeknownst to us, we were merely a ticklish distance along – a fourth of the way, maybe. The mile and a half to come would not be so easily covered. Oh, we were walking over the mountain, but, as we saw in retrospect, the mountain was also walking over us. I myself began to doubt of everything when, in the end, I was going up the craggy, helixy curves that were in steep ascent, in a sheer grade of crazy rockiness, to the grassy couple acres of the summit. I was being passed by young hikers chatting and picking their way without much effort, and by more middle aged and elder types who encouraged each other – we were strangers all but bound by the journey, I suppose. It was nice to see bare chested rather athletic looking men getting all deflated as the climb went on, and sitting down, finally, tacitly admitting that no, they were not going to bull their way up. And myself, I thought, what the fuck am I doing here? I knew the top would not be worth this much strain on the old body.

The mountain was definitely walking over me. Later, we made our way back to Enniscrone and had a quiet spaghetti dinner and exhaustion ran around the table.

- So many ruined fortresses, abbies, houses. So many cows and sheep and their odor in the wind. Particularly recommend Easky for its cliffs, and the cliffs near Ceid Fields, although the latter are not for wandering around on a windy day. Every day there is, of course, windy, so there is that.

Other notes will come as I think of them, my comrádaí!

 

 

 

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 On the West Irish coast

Ocean, cold, farmers’ suicides

Enter as spirits the grudging blood

In its system ticking forward

To no purpose or landing

That she can see.

Unless – the girl in the crone’s cast skin

- she dreams of happiness,

of honey on good cottage bread

or the first can in the pub.

Never the thick tongue in her ear,

Never the man’s flanking motion

His barnyard antics.

Which they called love

In the pig ignorance and trickery of back then.

Unless the ocean, the cold,

The self inflicted escapees

Gives you, in the clearing morning

A sum, a summoning, salt sufficient

In the headland gusts.

- Karen Chamisso