The Bishop and the spider: George Berkeley's grand tour

 

It is interesting to contemplate the fact that in the period between 1712-1717, Vico, Shaftesbury and Berkeley were all either living in or visiting Naples. Schaftesbury, who was raised, in a manner of speaking, by Locke, and rejected his tutor unequivocally – Berkeley, who grew to detest Shaftesbury’s philosophy as the very antithesis of religion and a much more poisonous skepticism than that he was accused of promoting; and Vico, whose sense of doing battle with the moderns has much in common with Shaftesbury’s sense that raillery and wit were marks of true intellectual freedom, and conversation the method of wisdom – which is another aspect of Vico’s defense of topoi against mere logic. All, in turn, knew Paolo Doria, into whose salon each man, at various times, ventured.

The trip Berkeley made with a young nobleman, Ashe, through France and into Italy, was notable for the legendary meeting between the Bishop and the French philosopher, Malebranche, in which the Bishop murdered Malebranche. Or, more kindly, accidentally sorta killed him: “Father Malebranched died at Paris on the 13^th of October, 1715, in his 77^th year. If we are to believe the common story of his illness, Berkeley and the young Ashe must have been there in the autumn of the year, for Berkeley, according to the story, was the “occasional cause” of the death of  Malebranche, according to one Stocke: “’He [Berkeley] found the ingenious father in a cell, cooking, in a small pipkin, a medicine for a disorder with which he was troubled – an inflammation of the lungs. The conversation naturally turned to Berkeley’s system, of which he had received some knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of the debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of the disputation, he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely ot the natural impetuosity of a man of parts and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days later.”

Few philosophical refutations have ever been this complete.

And so to Rome and points South. However, as Thomas Jones puts it in his biography of Berkeley from 2021:  “There is no evidence, however, that Berkeley read Vico or met him during his time ­there.” Which means that Berkeley did not have another philosophical notch to put on his belt.

I wonder if Berkeley spoke to Doria of the tarantella. I wonder if there is any meaning in the fact that this idealist metaphysician – to label him in the classroom way – was so fascinated with both the tarantula and the stories of the effect of its bite. Surely as a clergyman, Berkeley was enrolled, forcibly, in the struggle against popular superstition. But Berkeley did not have Shaftesbury’s Tory contempt for the people - his Italian journal is full of incidents that show Berkeley as something more like an anthropologist than judge, recording the dirtiness of cleanliness of towns, the agricultural prospects of the countryside, the speech of the peasants with a certain tone of equanimity and fairness that surely was his tone, and one of the reasons he could get on with Swift.

But to my business: the future bishop and the spider.

The first mention of the tarantella in the journal is about a doctor who is met with on the road as Berkeley is going into Calabria. The doctor has cheerful contempt fo the peasant superstition of the tarantella, and attributes it to the peasants almost sexual love for drama. seems fascinate
After this, Berkeley records what a certain “Consul” in Tarentum told him about it:

“Tarantato that we saw dance here, no lookingglass or sword ; stamped, screeched, seemed to smile sometimes; danced in a circle like the others. The Consul, &c. inform us that all spiders except the long-legged ones bite, causing the usual symptoms, though not so violent as the large ones in the country. He tells me the tarantula causes pain and blackness to a great space round the bite; thinks there can be no deceit, the dancing is so laborious ; tells me they are feverish mad, and sometimes after dancing throw themselves into the sea, and would drown if not prevented ; that in case the tarantula be killed on biting, the patient dances but one year ; otherwise to the death of the tarantula.”

The next day, passing through a small Italian town, Berkeley talks with an Albanian priest about the spider: “The priest told us the arm, e. g. being bitten by the tarantula swelled, confirmed, as indeed everybody, that common notion of the tarantula's death curing the bite. His house very neat. Everywhere great respect for a knowledge of the English, owing to our commerce, fleets, and armies.” In a stop at Gavina, evidently to his enquiries, Berkeley learns this: “Tarantula not in this country ; he hath seen several bitten with a black swoln mark as large as half-a-crown ; they knew not they were bitten till dancing ; tarantula bites only in the hot months ; a peasant at Canosa laughed at their biting, and said he had often taken them in his hands.” In Ascola, or in the environs of the town, Berkeley and his companion eat beans with some peasants in a field: “They boast of a saint's finger kept in a church of a convent on a hill overlooking the town, which, so far as the church is visible, prevents the bite of the tarantula.” Approaching Vesuvius, Berkeley notes: “Taurasi and La Torella. Fricento belongs to the Principe della Torella ; 25,000 souls [2500. M.J ; July and J August without fires. An image on Monte Virgine protects the country about as far as visible from tarantulas, which, say they, are here likewise. Two bears slain last year in a neighbouring wood.” Berkeley wrote a letter about Vesuvius to John Arbuthnot – one of Berkeley’s set, along with Pope and Swift- in which he recounts its eruption and the horrible noise it makes – a letter that makes one wonder if Swift slyly poked at it in Gulliver’s Travels. He would have known of it not only because letters were passed around in the set, but also because the letter was published by the Royal Society. It was one of the odder gothic habits of 18th century intellectuals – like Wincklemann, in the 1760s – to climb Vesuvius and marvel at the lava flows. Wincklemann and his companions, the rather louche Baron d’Hancarville, tossed down a few bottles of wine on the summit. Berkeley doesn’t mention drinking anything.

Jones notes Berkeley’s personal experience with the spiders: “Whilst sitting by a well at Matera, Berkeley discovered he was surrounded by tarantulas. Berkeley noted connections between tarantism and the practices and beliefs of con­temporary Italian Catholicism that in general he found superstitious. Franciscans at Casalnuovo (except Capucins) ­were neither bitten by nor afraid of tarantulas, as they ­were ‘cursed by St. Francis’. Apparently ‘the habit worn 24 hours cures the Tarantato’.”

It is easy to think of Berkeley as a man who developed from philosophy books his own philosophical account of perception, the perceived, and the mind. To trace from Locke to Berkeley to Hume a certain theme. But Berkeley was embedded, as well, in a world in which superstition and miracle were on one side, and an orderly consideration of reason and the symbolism of the Gospel was on the other. Unlike Locke and Hume, Berkeley was a well travelled man. He went across the Atlantic and spent time in Rhode Island; he drew up plans for the colony of Bermuda; and he hired peasants to find spiders in the fields of Southern Italy.

 

After arriving at Naples, Berkeley seems to lose interest in the tarantula, and takes up another custom: the nasty habit of murder that has sprung up among the inhabitants of Southern Italy. In a letter to Pope about the island of Ischia, he writes: “and were they but as much strangers to revenge as they are to avarice and ambition, they might in fact answer the poetical notions of the golden age. But they have got, as an alloy to their happiness, an ill habit of murdering one another on slight offences. We had an instance of this the second night after our arrival, a youth of eighteen being shot dead by our door : and yet by the sole secret of minding our own business, we found a means of living securely among those dangerous people.”

on Loafing

 

 I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

“Loafe” is one of the great verbs, I think. Partly, this stems from the homonym “loaf”, as in a bar of something – bread, for instance. The loaf of bread is not something that can loafe – alas, it exists either on a plate for you to eat, recently made or at least shot up with enough preservatives to seem recently made, or it starts to look greenish and ready for the penicillin factory, at which point it is given the unceremonious heave ho into the waste can. Of course, when bread was much more precious and famine was a real possibility in the hinterlands and urbs of Europe, you would not be so cavalier with a loaf of bread. Hans Christian Andersen begins one of his characteristic fairy tales (which mix sentimentality and a truly satanic sense of punishment) with the sentence: “There was once a girl who trod on a loaf to avoid soiling her shoes, and the misfortunes that happened to her in consequence are well known.” The backstory here is that Inge, product of a poor family but gifted with such beauty that she was adopted by a rich family, much to her satisfaction and pride, was given a loaf of bread to carry to her poor family and tossed it, instead, in a mud puddle so she could walk across it. Ah, the simple but symbolic actions that bring immediate grief in Andersen’s universe! “… the loaf began to sink under her, lower and lower, till she disappeared altogether, and only a few bubbles on the surface of the muddy pool remained to show where she had sunk. And this is the story.

But where did Inge go? She sank into the ground, and went down to the Marsh Woman, who is always brewing there.” As in The Red Shoes, it is Inge’s footwear that spells her doom: once she is underground, the loaf of bread is stuck like a lead weight to her foot, bringing her, of course, to the gates of hell. A very fine tale to tell children – what child would not like to see the Inges of the world get their comeuppance! But this loaf has made itself, in a sense, the very opposite of the loafing and inviting one’s soul among the tall grass that Whitman has in mind. The OED gives a rather unbelievable etymology of loaf – it is a “back formation” from loafer, which comes from Landlaeufer, a tramp. The earliest use of loafer according to the Oxford boys is in 1830. Henley and Farmer, in their 1927 slang dictionary, derive it from the French, louper.

From ranging about like a beast to tramping with one’s hands in one’s pocket, this was the image of the loafer in the mouth of the street, from which Whitman took his verb. But in so taking it, he strips it of its desperation – rather, he discovers a tramp Zen in the word. Unlike poor burdened Inge, Whitman loafing among the grass is unburdened and more than unburdened.

Panoramas - a long chant

1.  We know for certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo da Vinci


Among Leo Steinberg’s great monographs, the one entitled  Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper holds its place as one of the controversial art historical pamphlets, as it were, after The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. Modern oblivion might be Steinberg’s great theme as an art historian, and how he links up to the modern – to the Heidegerian sense that Being is forgotten. The forgotten is what was all around us, all before us – was in a sense our instinct and our habitus. This is both an essentially reactionary response to the modern and a New Leftist way of understanding marginality and its imposition.  The Leonardo text is about forgetting a certain interpretation of one of the most famous paintings, which, with convenient symbolism, really doesn’t exist anymore – rather, its “restorations” have taken the place of Leonardo’s painting. Steinberg tells of meeting the woman who undertook the last restoration, Dr Brambilla:

“The campaign was well under way the first time I climbed the scaffolding in front of the picture (1983). Bram-billa had me peer through a microscope while she aimed her scalpel at scattered flakes of original pigment. She would point to a chip, the size of your smallest fingernail, saying, “here’s a bit of Leonardo.” Then the scalpel would inch away to pinpoint another. It was these vestiges she was saving, using watercolor infill to join them. What we now see, if we look close, are aits of original pigment afloat in flat washes of pale, removable watercolor.”

I am reminded of Barthes reference to Argo: ““ A frequent image: that of the ship, the Argo (bright and white), which the Argonauts replaced piece by piece, little by little, so that in the end they had an entirely new vessel, without having to change either its name or its form.”

No change of name, conceded, but form certainly doesn’t capture content in the case of the Last Supper. It is an image we can all recall, and it certainly started with Leonardo, but after 20 restorations, after the  very chapel that held it was bombed in WWII and the wall painting was moved,  Leonardo’s Last Supper becomes a very corporate entity.

Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow, inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration does look like the end page fold-out - and we have no doubt it does – I suspect that this scene depicting the sacramental event and the announcement of the coming betray – themes that Steinberg braids – are attempts to reach a Last Supper that has been physically obliviated.  One has only to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ’s left, as he has been “restored” to earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting, and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree with Jacques Franck: "Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."

This is not, I think, Steinberg's opinion.

But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg’s essay was the comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The moment portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus’s revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Although Steinberg does not draw out this aspect, surely the drama here goes back to the Machiavellian effect on European culture, in which power and betrayal became a crisis duo, from Shakespeare to Hugo. Goethe was one of the great institutors of this secular (and political) interpretation although, as a dissident pointed out in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael Morghen that left the wine out of the painting -  the wine in the glass before Jesus’s upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:

19: And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.

Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus’s pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered, by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor, while the disciples, human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can’t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I want you to eat these things in order to remember me.

This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves, there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh is the world - that we live in a fully carnal world. The cannibal’s speech is that the mouth that speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:

51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?

So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions  that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian sense, of these two events, a Verdichtung.

So what is the connection between the Last Supper and the Panorama? Both, I think, explore ways of making an image that, in human terms, doesn’t move – however much the light it reflects is a moving thing – but thatstills shows something moving. Some event. In the Last Supper, the Gospel texts act as a control, and the “moment” in the painting is embedded in, and embeds, a narrative, something that moves “through”: “The story line coils and recoils, weaving duration into simultaneity.” A perspective that awaits its technological moment. That moment, of course, came in the form of the motion of the railroad train, which moves through a landscape that, unmoved, moves in relationship to the passenger. Unlike the carriage or the horse, it is a landscape in which the human is always and only all too human – taken from animal life and placed in the mechanical. In Leonardo’s time, the only thing like this was the boat. But the moving water it moved through did not have the human density, the organic density, of the land.

2.  Taine’s introduction to his history of English literature became famous as soon as the first volume was published, in 1864. Its fame has dwindled, as fame does, into an exercise in memorization for grad students in comparative literature: Q: what was Taine’s thesis? A: History is about race, milieu and the moment. Which you can know without ever reading Taine – it is the kind of knowledge you get in an overview written by someone who may, perhaps, have acquired his or her knowledge of Taine from another overview.

This is not to bitch – Taine’s intro begins with set pieces in a Believe it or Not diorama style that has aged as badly as the American Natural History museum’s Culture Halls, with their celebration of how the Peoples of the World live in their natural setting. The diorama style is not just Taine’s, of course – he is writing in the wake of fifty years of ethnographic shows and exhibits, including the great Crystal Palace one in 1851 (in which the U.S. was represented by our amazing gunsmiths – the Colt rifles and revolvers, and the way they were made of standard parts in factories in which, it was rumored, machines made machines, so shook the British that they sent a special mission to the U.S. to observe and report on U.S. manufacturers).

But Taine intellectualized this hybrid of scholarship and entertainment. So, he urges the historian to act much like the visitor to one of these shows – to view the country and culture, instead of merely drawing philosophical conclusions from the logic of texts its might produce:

“In order to understand an Indian Purana, begin by imaging the father of a family who, having seen a son on the knees of his son, retires, according to the law, into a solitary state, with a vase and an axe, under a banana tree on the edge of a stream, ceasing to speak, multiplying his fasts, standing nude between four fires, and under the fifth fire, the terrible sun that devours and incessantly renews all living things; who, by stages, during entire weeks, keeps his imagination fixed on the foot of Brahma, then on his knee, and then on his thigh, and then on his belly button, and so on, until, under the pressure of that intense meditation, hallucinations appear, presenting all the forms of being, transformed confusedly one into the other, oscillating inside that head carried away by its vertigo, up to the point that the man, perfectly still, breathing once again, his eyes still fixed, sees the univers vanish smoke above the universal and empty Being, in which he aspires, himself, to plunge.”

This kind of speech cries out for a showman’s cane – and in fact was quickly absorbed into popular literature and then into films. From Taine to Tarzan and back - this is one way of going around the world of kultcha.

While Taine’s prose is a little, well, funny, his point is interesting – he wants the historian to begin his own meditation by way of starting with the novel, or the drama. To make a history is to visualize the settings and persons in the history. Thus, Taine counts, among those who have put history on the right track in the 19th century (the track of science), Walter Scott.

‘This is the first step in history: we have made it in Europe thanks to the renaissance of the imagination produced, at the end of the last century, with Lessing, Walter Scott; a little later in France, with Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, M. Michelet and so many others.”

Taine's instinct makes sense to me, for the novelist, when working at his or her strongest, does stand naked between four fires, and does meditate about the foot of the protagonist, the knee of the sidekick, the thigh of the love interest, and the belly buttons, outie or innie, distributed amongst the lot of characters, not that they necessarily show them to the reader. Who amongst us can claim to have seen the back of David Copperfield's head? And at the end of it, this imagining his characters into a world, we get some dizzy glimpse if we are lucky.

3. The culpable relation between the story line and the pictorial is one of the themes in Dolf Sternberger’s work, Panorama: Views of the 19^th century. The Frankfurt School exiles tended to see this work as one by a collabo – myself, I see it as a work of internal exile, in which the current of European liberalism confronts both the dialectics of the Frankfurt school and the utter smash of liberalism embodied in Naziism.

Sternberger means the Ansicht – the Views – in the title to be taken non-tritely. Views in Sternberger’s schema are a very nineteenth century affect. It is the kind of thing Stephen Daedalus draws out to the newspaper crowd in Ulysses, with a story about two Dublin “vestals” who decide to “see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson’s pillar.” In so doing, the vestals body forth one of the senses of Dublin in 1904 – one of the senses that is sensed. The ineluctable modality of Dublin from atop the Nelson pillar turns out to be sensitive to heights and hunger and curiosity and boredom.

But the urge for the view in Ulysses, a view that becomes more kaleidoscopic than panoramic, brings us back to the panoramic urge as Sternberger describes it. There is a sense that all the literature on panoramas – still a fashionable topic – go back to the passage in Walter Benjamin’s One Way street about visiting the Kaiserpanorama when he was a kid. There is was, on Unter den Lindon, and there the little boy went to see a series of pictures that allow the seated visitor to visit the exotic world outside of Berlin. These, at least, are the pictures that Benjamin remembers. The details of the Norwegian fjords, or of the dust in the park of the city of Aix-en-Provence. The Panorama, here, is close in spirit, is clasped by the first strophe of Baudelaire’s Le Voyage:

Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah ! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes !
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit !

From that mixture of dialectics and nostalgia, Benjamin could only receive Sternberger’s book as a theft, a plagiarism. That is, however, a very false charge. Sternberger is, in fact, taking Benjamin’s program in a different direction. Against Benjamin’s collagist view of reference and affect, Sternberger joins documentation to another vein of essay – going back to Simmel – and even, I’d content, a long submerged tradition of the anatomy of errors – books that gave themselves the licence to sprawl as errors sprawl. The larger themes in Sternberger – for instance, the way the mechanical becomes the trope by which the modern bourgeois human interprets himself – collect around the notion of the panorama as both a technique of vision and a sort of cult of objectivity.

The panorama at the center of Sternberger’s attention is not the Kaiserpanorama, but the Sedanpanorama. Instead of views captured on a trip – protoselfies of the European vacationer – Anton Werner’s 1883 spectacle was concerned with a battle that, in a strong sense, made Germany – and hence, made the political culture in the the panorama was mounted.

I’m following Sternberger in naming Werner as the author of the panorama, but of course, like a movie or a county fair, the panorama was, at best, directed by Werner. In actuality, the panorama was housed in a building that was produced by an architect (Hanke) working with the firm of Ende and Böckmann. Werner had conceived of the scene and painted many of the figures. It was quite the sensation in Berlin when it opened on September 1, 1883. The Kaiser himself visited it between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m., according to the correspondant from the Hamburger Correspondant.

Such minutia in the matter of the Kaiser’s entrance was breathed by the entire enterprise, which prided itself on given the spectator the minutia of a moment in the battle. “For the price of two Groschen at the entrance, the spectator could enjoy those minutes between one thirty and two o’clock P.M. [in the battle] during which the French army – in particular the 7^th French army division – was surrounded by the left wing of the Prussian army and driven back to Plateau de Floing-Illy, and made a last desperate attempt to break through the Prussian line and gain a withdrawal route.”

Sternberger quotes from the account of the panorama left by Werner: “Stepping on the platform, the viewer gazes over the lovely valley of Maas where in the depths before him lies the village of Floing, which since 12:30 p.m. was completely occupied by the Germans. Before the church, from the depths emerges the 2^nd company of the 82 Infantry…”

Sternberger, unlike Benjamin, is not enjoying a memory of the Panorama, which was torn down in 1904. Unlike the experience of the photograph of dust and trees in a park in Aix, Sternberger’s experience has receded, so to speak, to the illustrations and newspaper stories and memoirs that he can see and read.

This account of the battle is, in 1938, a prefiguration – it was easy to imagine, at this point, the Sedans ahead. It is also as a battle a site of the model event, the event of events, the secular sacrament as it were, where the blood and body of the soldier was turned into the state. Here, in all the novels in which the hero comes to fight with a vision of glory, the hero is undone – the participant observer finds that the battle can’t be found, just as Fabrice never experienced the battle of Waterloo even as he was in, bodily in, the battle of Waterloo.

One is reminded of a passage in Steinberg’s work on Leonardo: “Our task is to declare how the work looks to an eye that no longer insists on Seeing the Renaissance as a movement of triumphant secularism; how it appears in a climate that is no longer averse to reading pictorial symbols and multiplex signs. The word ambiguity, Cicero’s latin translation of amphiboolia, originally referred to a martial predicament: it means being attacked from two sides at once.”

4. In 1941, an 18 year old fresh out of school, Reinhart Koselleck, volunteered for the army and was sent to the Eastern front. On May 1, 1945, the war “ended for him” in Oderberg in Mahren, which is now called Bohumín and is now located in the Czech Republic.  On May 8, V-E day, Kosellek was in a giant group of prisoners, 10 rows across, marching towards Auschwitz. There he encountered some survivors, including women, “whose fates were written in their eyes”. The POWs were there to disassemble the IG Farben factory and send the parts back to the Soviet Union. Later, to add a little context, some of the chief scientists, including a man named Blome, who experimented on prisoners at Auschwitz with Sarin, would be extracted from Germany and taken to the U.S., where they would help the U.S. Army develop its own germ and chemical weapons. But to return to Kosellek – in an interview, he was asked about how much he knew, as a 22 year old soldier, about Auschwitz:

When I came to the front in the summer of 1941, as a replacement after the battle of Kiew, I heard that behind us in a stone quarry, 10,000 Jews had been murdered, which I took to the the unambiguous truth. I can’t remember if we discussed it much. Thus I knew it theoretically. But in Auschwitz I was not thinking of it, actually out of self-defense, out of fear: If I told that story, I would surely be caught in the mills of the GPU.”  And he further remembered:

The scene, for me, was unforgettable. We had to peel potatoes – for which we only got a thin watery soup – and were guarded by a one time concentration camp prisoner. He demanded that we peel the potatoes quick, and became enraged. He took one private slowpoke, lifted him high up and slammed him, full of anger, in the corner, breaking his leg. And then he said, I should crush your skull, you people gassed millions. And I thought: he could not have made that up.”

It is of interest that this man became one of Germany’s most influential intellectual historians. This man, with this past.

At the beginning of  the first essay of Kosellek’s collection, Futures Past – Modernity and the Planes of Historicity – this former prisoner of war takes up a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer from 1529, the Alexanderschlacht. “Alterdorfer reveals to us upon a canvas of one and a half square meters the cosmic panorama of a decisive battle of world historical significance, the battle of Issus, which in 335 B.C. opened the epoch of Hellenism.”

Why this battle at this date? The answer is inscribed, materially, in the depiction of Alexander’s army as a collection of European knights and peasant infantrymen against a turbaned army of Persians – much like the armies that struggled, in 1529, at the siege of Vienna by the forces of the Ottoman empire. The battle scene on such length and breadth of canvas cannot be taken in by the eye in a momentary glance – it demands scanning.  The banners held by some of the soldiers tell us certain things about the battle – for instance, the number of troops. But neither the year of the painting, 1529, nor the year of the represented battle, 335 B.C. – a date that would be meaningless to anyone in 335 B.C. – are shown. The panoramic style, the extended moment, and the ideal contemporaneity of the scene are not foreign to Altdorfer’s intention and are impressed, as well, on the spectator. For Kosellek, the painting serves as what Benjamin named a “dialectical image” – an image that exceeds the possibilities in which it was produced, in as much as Kosellek centers it in a schema of the layers of expectation of that time, and of our time. Expectations that change the past and the future, and that hypothesize endings that revise our sense of beginnings. Kosellek is not content to reproduce the trope that modernity is bound up with the acceleration of time – but points out that it is also bound up with the disassembling of the end of time, a Christian trope. And just as Steinberg’s interpretation of the Last Supper depends on a full history of the reception of the Last Supper, Altdorfer’s painting, as Koselleck shows, has a certain canonical reception history, starting with Schlegel’s writing about the painting in 1800 – a year in which the French troops under Napoleon were starting their mission of “liberating” Europe.  Schlegel called it ‘the highest adventure of the old knighthood”, essentially recognizing the conflation of two separate time planes. For Kosellek, Schlegel’s remark helps us put this painting in a gallery, so to speak – a conceptual gallery, one in which politics and religion, or theology, were coming apart. Kosellek takes the painting to prefigure, in some weird way, using some prophetic vibe emanating from the aesthetic sphere, of the coming breakdown of the cosmic order – ratified in the treaty of Augsburg in 1551:

“Religious Peace of Augsburg was signed so

that “this praiseworthy nation be secured against an ever-threatening ruin,”

as it says in paragraph 25. The Stände agreed that a “stable, secure, unconditional,

and eternally lasting peace was to be created.”7 This was to hold even

if (and while disputed, this was conclusive) the religious parties should

arrive at no settlement and find no unity. Henceforth peace and religious

duty were no longer identical: peace meant that the fronts of religious civil

war were to be shut down, frozen in situ. Today we can only with great difficulty

gain a sense of quite how monstrous this imposition seemed at that

time. The compromise, born of necessity, concealed within itself a new

principle, that of “politics,” which was to set itself in motion in the following

century.”

For a former POW in Auschwitz and the Soviet camps, these impositions have, perhaps, a different sound than they do to my ear.

5. In 1885(we are told in an entry in the Margaret Mitchell Encyclopedia, by Anita Price Davis), the American Panorama Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin received a commission to produce a “Battle of Atlanta”.

German artists supervised the production. Two in particular, F.W. Heine and August Lohr. Heine had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, out of which the German state, and, incidentally, the panorama of the battle of Sedan arose. The artists came to Atlanta in 1885 to scope out the landscape. They consulted with veterans of the battle, including one Theodore Davis, who had followed the Union troops as an illustrator for Harper’s magazine.

The chain of title to the completed work, which is 52 feet high and weighs nine tons, is complex. Upon completion, it was exhibited in various cities before being stored in Atlanta in a facility on Edgewood Road. It was a for profit venture – at this time in the post-Civil war hinterlands, many cycloramas were being commissioned for many battles. The Battle of Atlanta was first sold to a Mr. H.H. Harrison of Florida, who originally intended to exhibit it at the Colombian exposition in Chicago in 1893. It proved to be too expensive to move and house. It was then sold to Ernest Woodruf (presumably of the Coca Cola Woodrufs), who sold it to two businessmen who proposed to move it to one of Atlanta’s parks. Thus, it came to Grant Park. As every Atlantan knows, Grant Park is also where the zoo is. Foreigners might think naming a park for Ulysses Grant is an act of reconciliation – but the park was not named for Ulysses, but for Lemuel Grant, a railroad engineer who designed Atlanta’s fortification for the Confederates. In its new quarters it was visited often by the young Margaret Mitchell Mitchell was also a great admirer of Grant’s mansion, one of the few that escaped the burning of Atlanta.

About sixty years after the young MM visited the Cyclorama, it was visited by a group of Jolly School elementary students from the fifth grade, who made the scary trip into the big city on a schoolbus. I was one of them. I don’t remember the school bus and the faces of my classmates have fallen from into the underchambers of my memory and I don’t even remember the name of my history teacher – Miss Waters? – but I do remember loving the exhibit. A spotlight would shine down on a particular scene and the P.A. would describe it, naming the battalions and the officers and, accompanied by some sound effects, impress upon the visitor the awfulness and significance of the struggle. It was most thrilling to me. Some thirty years later, these Cyclorama effects showed their durability in Ken Burns tv documentary, the Civil War, where pictures and photos and drawings of men in battle, accompanied by sound tracks heaving with whizzing bullets and bugles, would hypnotize the tv viewer.

I must have visited the Cyclorama many times when I was a kid, as we liked to show Civil War things to our visiting Northern relatives. We all had come to the metro area from the North in the spring of Atlanta’s post war expansion. So I, as a nine year old, spoke different from my Southern classmates. I was sometimes asked if I was British. This was long before such provincialism would vanish under immigration and media. These kids had simply never heard a Yankee speak.

In the early days of the Cyclorama at Grant Park, the job of narrating the battle fell to one Charles W. Hubner, who had served as the chief of staff of the telegraph division of General Joseph Johnson – Sherman’s opponent in 1864.  Hubner’s was not, in that era of panoramas and cycloramas, that unusual – many civil war veterans found work as cicerones to the battles they’d survived. And then the movies came.

The survival of the Atlanta cyclorama owed much to Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA, which helped restore it. And it owed much to Gone with the Wind, which permanently enshrined the Battle of Atlanta in American popular culture.

In 1939, Clark Gable came to Atlanta for the opening of Gone with the Wind. He went to the Cyclorama, and remarked that none of the soldiers looked like him. Mayor Hartsfeld then commissioned a WPA artist to paint a figure like Clark Gable in the battle scene.

Later, in the 90s, I worked for a while in a bookstore patronized by Margaret Mitchell’s nephew. He would come into the store followed by an old black woman, who would carry the books he picked out. His valet. Or nanny. It was absurd. There was an old Southern voiced clerk who always served him. Others made jokes.

Atlanta burning is an exemplary instance of layered expectations a la Kosellek. For my Southern classmates it meant defeat. For me, it meant victory. And I’ve come to think that it represents what happens when commerce and slavery are concentrated as a reactionary power. And I’ve come to think that Atlanta burning must happen in the soul of every generation that has to fight that reactionary power.

And yet, the history of Atlanta is such that it is now a city governed by an African-American political machine. The white reactionary politicians have seceded -  making Buckhead, once Atlanta’s white rich plantationed section, into a separate city. So what should burn?

Let Buckhead burn, I guess. Not as resonant a motto.

 

 

 

 

The final girl

 "The final girl is a trope in horror movies, referring to the female protagonist who remains alive at the end of the film "– Merriam Webster dictionary

The final girl writes her scenario

in the blood of the stabber

she outstabbed in the finale

Not once but twice. Fortunate she.

Are these all things that totally must be?

Whose friend by toxic hand

Of masked psycho was skewered

Such einsatzgruppe of serial killers!

And such normal neighborhood streets

Where victim and slasher meet n greet!

In this landscape mourning has no memory

but as is borne in backyard barbecue dusk

- only the synaptic jigger

of jumpscares endless, sequel after sequel

and in the tired end, the prequel.

Here’s the closet where he hid.

Here’s the garage where he hid.

Here’s the kitchen where he hid

implement in hand

- I know it’s hard for you to understand.

Still, the final girl proves to be

our real desperado

as full of tricks as a rattlesnake,

frozen in teenhood for a thousand years

See: In her eyes there are no tears.

Summer's mind by Karen Chamisso

 

In summer’s broil, I went to the closet and found

the coats scarves hoods and muffs of winter

looking like prison guards waiting

for their claustrophobic convict.

 

Winter, in the mind of summer, is

An exposed imposter. Never was there

Such cold. We pulse in the heat

That enslaves the winds: north south east west.

 

We will strip ourselves, each season

Taking off bra pants boots and all

The etc that once, in a delusion

We clogged ourselves with wearing.

 

All our sweltering flesh we will disinter

From the paleolithic jaw of winter.

The King Fink

1.It is a widely distributed, old motif. It is Harun Al-Rashid in the Arabian Nights, who, in order to “secretly to observe for yourself the manner in which justice is done and order is kept throughout the city,” as his advisor says, goes through the bazaars of Baghdad disguised as a foreign merchant. It is the king in the fifth book, Les Fers, of D’aubigne’s Les Tragiques:

A king who sometimes, for justice, abandons

the capital, the very place of the crown

To make a tour of his entire kingdom

To see if the viceroys are doing their jobs

There are a few Greek myths in which the gods so disguise themselves to walk among men. The motif pokes out in the new testament, when Jesus asks his disciples a puzzling question:

“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

The passage ends like this: “Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”

2. This motif resonates with a very common political opinion, which can be summed up by the phrase: “if the Czar only knew.” People in an authoritarian order, an ancien regime order, had to guide themselves with regard to the powers that be – the nobles, the bourgeoisie of the cities, the judges, the land surveyors sent out from the capital, etc. – with a sense that it all was, somehow, ordained. When injustice, or what was perceived as such, was widespread – when there was famine, when there was seizures of property, when the center did not hold – the explanation that the ruler at the nominal center was being mislead becomes powerful. Famously, on January 22, 1905, a procession of workers, led by a priest, was taking a petition to the Czar when the Czar’s soldiers gunned them down. The very motive for the petition was that, outside of the throne, in the vast folds of Russia, the Czar’s supposed officials were operating in a way that the Czar would have disapproved of, if only he knew. The sovereign in disguise is an enigmatic figure in a riddling tale that responds to real material conditions. The conditions are accepted, on the one hand, as the way things are, but they are rejected, on the other hand, as a deviation from the way the ruler, who by his very position is justice incarnate, would want things to be.

Interestingly, the sovereign in disguise can be paired with the abject fink or informer. The Confidential informant is a necessity of modern policing, as it conceives itself: essentially, a force to protect property. The protection of the security of the citizens is derived from the relations of property. However, the police are always going to be numerically few in relation to the people they are ostensibly protecting. Into this gap comes the denunciator, or the fink. On that January 22, 1905, the people who were petitioning the Czar were led by a priest named Gapon, who had ties to the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police. Gapon confessed this to the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, one of whom, Azef, was a long time agent and provocateur for the Okhrana.

The abject fink and the missing sovereign fink – two ends of the bourgeois revolution, I could conclude, all too neatly.

3. Modern political science is sadly enmeshed in models, a form of disciplinary capture by the science of economics, and sadly inattentive to the rich world of folk motifs. Those motifs did not disappear with universal suffrage. If only the king knew is still one of the strongest answers to the riddle of injustice.. In the U.S., for instance, many of the theories about the assassination of JFK rely on a variant of the king knowing. He was about to end the Cold War! He was going to withdraw from Vietnam! He was going to extend Camelot to all his subjects! And thus, he had to be struck down. The evil viceroys conspired and did it.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the evil viceroys didn’t do it. We are all touched by this motif, evil viceroys and filming spectators alike.

4. The critical intelligence, and rare and illfavored thing, is aghast at the mental subservience that comes with this seemingly impenetrable reverence for authority. Don’t you know that justice and injustice are arranged, in the social order, precisely to keep you down? Don’t you know that the sovereign’s trick is to surround himself with a certain ignorance, a need not to know, in order to function for his class? That ignorance is produced by the sovereign for the same reason the mullosk extrudes its carapace: to protect the creature as it does its nutritive and generative work.

But the critical intelligence has an unfortunate shorthanding habit of reducing the man to the concept, and to be always discovering self-interest in the form the economists imagine it – amassing more – instead of the passions for which that effort is made, among which are fear, honor, vanity, love, and etc.

5. Shakespeare of course has already been here. Wyndham Lewis took Coriolanus as Shakespeare’s most political play, starting a tradition in the scholarship. Myself, I think Measure for Measure is less stark, less liable to a reading influenced by fascism, and gives us a reading of the king in disguise that takes up the passions that sway the governors. The Duke of Vienna appoints the too well named Angelo to be his deputy as he takes off on a trip; but this is, of course, royal fooling, and the Duke comes back, disguised as a friar.

Angelo, as the Duke expected, surveyed the state of order and decides right away to strike at “moral crimes” – notably, he tears down the whorehouses and he sentences to death a young man named Claudio, who has impregnated his fiancé before they could celebrate their nuptials. Claudio has his sister, Isabella, go to Angelo to plead his case. Isabella is on the verge of joining the “sisterhood” – becoming a nun. Of course, Angelo is seized with lust when Isabella makes her case, which is a case for pity. Is there pity in the legal order? Pity has many critics – most notably Nietzsche – but has, as well, a great defender in Shakespear. She makes the case against the pitiless sovereign:

“O, it is excellent/To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous/ to use it like a giant.”

This is the very paradox of sovereignty. To attain a giant’s strength is here leaped over – as the critical intelligence tells us – but the fact of giganticism is before all our eyes. Though the motif of the disguised king, Shakespeare plumbs the depths of a certain kind of executive power, combining the legislative with the juridical. But if it has only rules, if these are the cold bounds of the giant, it can never ultimately be liberal – that is, generous. And as it rules illiberally, it purges the very image and hope of generosity from the subject.

6. Our kings. We so want the king to know. The Duke, in Measure for Measure, saves the order of the state and the outcome of the play – which is a comedy – by righting Angelo’s wrong not just to Claudio but to, as well, the woman Angelo abandoned. In the revelation scene – when the Friar who has helped Claudio’s fiancée and the woman who Angelo abandoned is revealed to be the Duke – Angelo speaks for the masses:

O my dread lord,

I should be guiltier than my guiltiness

To think I can be undiscernible,

When I perceive your Grace, like power divine,

Hath looked upon my passes.

And thus Vienna is restored, and a bonfire is made of non-disclosure orders. But as is common in Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, there’s a disquiet, a specter, that is not put down in the spectator as the play ends. Its formal solutions do not exorcise its enigmas. We fall back. We are not here for treatises and political science.

The king, the true king, knows.

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US versus the Shi'ites the puzzle of the great Satan

 I have been reading Kapuscinski’s book The Shah, about the Iranian revolution, and it brings back memories of the seventies. And it brings up a puzzle: how is it that the U.S. became the anti-Shiite superpower? Weirdly, Americans always conflate, when being Islamophobic, Sunni Islam and Islam altogether – for instance, in the American conviction that all Moslems forbid portraying Mohammed. In many ways, the Shi’ites are a better match for Americans, but by sheer chance – the alliance with the Saudis and Israel – the US really does act like the great Satan to Shi’ites. I doubt many Americans even know what Shi’ites are is the thing.

Sometimes, history is a concatenation of coincidences, much like a slapstick comedy routine.