We the people

or... who's this we, kemosabe?

1. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. Anyone who has ever heard an English person pronounce the word “clever” realizes that the entire feudal order struggles in that word.

One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference … Suppose … a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”

Although it is rare in the scholarship, or even non-existent, to pair Burke with Georges Bataille, there are distinct similarities between Burke’s argument here and Bataille’s in the Bad Part [La Part Maudite] against the notion of utility in political economics – and its leakage into our general consciousness as useful consumers in the social net.

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Burke was clever – but he was no dialectician. Thus, while expelling the theorizer from the social order founded in Delight, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order.

Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systemeticity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself.

2. If, in fact, the social order cannot be founded on utility maximization, then we must – following in Burke and Bataille’s footsteps, or rather leaps – question the notion of a “people”.

I’ve been thinking about the emergence of “we the people” and the nation-state since reading Simon During's thoughts from his Facebook post on the nation as being a sort of concept of the people. For During, the nation, however wooly and ambiguous that notion might be, is a kind of natural kind for the people – for an ethnic group. For what we call the Irish, the French, the Tutsi, the Huron, the Japanese, etc.

I have my doubts about this. Not that history has not shown that, given the right circs, the Czechs in the Austro-Hungarian empire wanted to be an independent nation. And so on. My doubt is that the people preceded the nation. The perhaps most innovative part of the U.S. constitution is its self-address: we the people. A righteous and world-shaking performative, that one!

There is a joke-non-joke in the movie, Little Big Man. The protagonist is adopted into the Cheyenne and learns to call the Cheyenne what they call themselves: human beings. The Tsistsistas. Now translation, as we all know, is freighted with the history of the language into which the terms of the other language are translated. Human beings is not people – although other translators would have used people. Thomas Berger claimed that the novel used a variety of testimonies about Plains Indian life. Among ethnologists the studies of the Northern Ojibwa by A. Irving Hallowell has exerted a lot of influence: Hallowell did not find a term corresponding exactly to “person” among the Ojibwa. He did find a number of terms centering around the vocabulary of powers. The Ojibwa, according to Hallowell, did not group together things outside the human in some macro-group that was conceived of as nature. As Hallowell writes, having no Western sense of “nature”, the Ojibwa gave no credence to what is called, in English, the supernatural. Of course, that a concept doesn’t find its lexical anchor doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist for the speaker. But it doesn’t mean, as well, that we can assume it exists just as it does for the English speaker.

And because the word exists in the English language doesn’t mean that we know what particular English speakers mean by it – and not the small sample who attended philosophy classes in college. If the Cheyenne and Ojibwa have different notions of the person than a sociologist at Harvard might have, we should not extend the notion from our Harvard man to our Spanish smallholder hunting game in 1990. I reference, here, Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, who perhaps I all too often reference when writing about these things – but his one essay about hunting and the personhood of animals is a landmark in my intellectual life. What Dalla Bernardina teased out of his informants was not that the animals were grouped with the machines, a la Descartes, or given some status as useful or non-useful – rather, they were conceived in terms of personhood. They were conceived as in a sense responsible for their deaths, just like people. In fact, the same logic applied that we see every day in human to human violence: the violent often blame their victims for a sentiment of rage that propels the violent act. I will just gesture here to Une Personne pas tout a fait comme les autres, published in 1991, and found here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1991_num_31_120_369443?q=dalla%20Bernardina%20 – an article that should be in the corpus of any philosophy class about personhood.

3. I see that my personage – I’ve become a garrulous old man, an ancient mariner slash blogger – has gone on too long. Which is one of the things wrapped up in personhood – going on too long. The age of chivalry is not dead, as long as geezers such as myself are there to mutter the tale.

Love of brooding: Cioran

In the lexicon of cognitive states, brooding has a distinctly low ranking. We meditate or reflect to achieve illumination; brooding, however, is the prelude to a tantrum. To think means trying to see the object of thought whole – but the brooder is peculiarly averse to letting go of the object of thought, and thus condemns himself to repetition and compulsion. Argument is meant to persuade us to let the personal go, to, in effect, accept the autonomy of discourse. In Socrates’ dialogues, the argument is often treated as though it were some live thing, a spirit, a genius that must be respected. As such, the argument is extra-personal. From this perspective, brooding is a failed, or at the very least, a pariah cognitive act.

Yet, the brooder does have one fierce insight on his side, for the ideology of cognition obscures the moment of surrender, or sacrifice, in the release of the object of thought to the drift of discourse – to “what everybody knows”. The brooder understands that argument’s aspiration to universality is founded on blooding the personal, and that universality operates under the rule of polemos, or war. To surrender a thought is, among other things, to surrender.

Cioran is one of the great brooders. His longer essays can seem wearying because his sentences are so highly worked that they seem not to be building an argument, but to be resisting one. The readerly flow of the essay is impeded by the brilliances of its individual moments. Cioran sometimes seems like one of those brilliant conversationalists who never, actually, converse – in as much as conversation is marked by listening, while the brilliance of the conversationalist seems impervious to hearing. It bears the mark of a certain deafness. And so it is, sometimes, with Cioran, especially in his first texts.

Cioran’s writerly development is that of a long, painful abdication of what seem to be the natural modes of his youth: the harangue and the monologue. To hear the other means, in a sense, letting your style – the verbal front Cioran is so careful to maintain – allow itself a certain vulnerability. Cioran begins to be readable, for just this reason, in The Temptation to Exist. It is here that he actually goes the distance, rather than contenting himself with the pure jab, the shadowboxing of the phrase.

It is here, too, that he takes as one of his objects of thought brooding itself – although he doesn’t label the negative space he opposes to reflection “brooding” as such. What he does is turn upon reflection, in its institutional forms (literature and philosophy) his suspicion that underneath the mask of liberality lurks the spirit of resentment, the eternal return of a grievance. This notion has a long history, and we know its avatars: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in particular. It is the reactionary road to enlightenment.

In Letter on some roadblocks (Lettre sur quelques impasses), Cioran uses a trick that he employs, as well, in later texts to detach himself from the brooder’s solipsism: the essay as a message to some correspondent. To write a letter is not the same as engaging in a conversation, because letters are not subject to the vital element in conversation – interruption. While conversations go by “turns”, the violent can bear them away simply by interrupting, and there is nothing in the rules that forbids this. But letters are, briefly, a space the producer controls. At the same time, the letter must, however grudgingly, acknowledge the addressee.

The impasses or roadblocks here collect around the hated figure of the writer. On the pretence that Cioran is warning his friend against publishing a book, he launches into an invective against the mere writer – the littérateur – which, of course, produces a performative “impass” - since Cioran is very much a writer. This allots him a paradoxical place in his argument. Cioran accepts the cynicism of the paradox – he even exploits it. It is as though he were not so much a writer as an anthropologist carrying out fieldwork on people like Cioran – other writers. And in this guise, he is reporting on their rituals.

What is it that Cioran hates about the writer? It is, I think, the writer’s tendency to be a moral entrepreneur – to wave about his sensitivity to right and wrong as though it were a superiority, a talent. Underneath the moral entrepreneur, Cioran spots the vacuity of the rhetorician:

‘Voltaire was the first litterateur to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method. Before him the writer, happy enough to be next to events, was more modest: doing his job in a limited sector, he followed his path and stuck to it. No journalist, he was most interested in the anecdotal aspect of certain solitudes: his indiscretion was inefficacious.

With our know it all (hableur) things changed. None of the subjects which intrigued his times escaped his sarcasm, his demi-science, his need for noise, his universal vulgarity.Everything was impure with him, except his style…”

Note a key term for Cioran: impurity. Impurity, for Cioran, is a hallmark of liberal enlightenment. To understand this, one has to understand Cioran’s dallying with fascism of the most violent sort in the 30s, and his brief stance as an admirer of Hitler. This, actually, is the center of what Cioran brooded upon his whole life long – his error, here, and his retraction. In the 30s, Cioran was very explicit about his hatred of the Jews, his desire for war, his faith in great and therapeutic violence that would stamp some hierarchy on the people for one thousand years.

Later, in the late thirties in France, he began to change his mind. He did not, as far as I am aware of, collaborate in the forties. Rather, he went over and over the logic of his position, starting from the idea that liberal Europe had suffocated itself under its own dead skin, exiled from the sources of life itself. And yet, he retreated to the liberal side and renounced violence: he renounced life-affirming war, and opted for death-affirming peace. Violence, in Cioran’s view, makes us gigantic, larger than life, and we renounce it at our peril. In History and Utopia he wrote:

“We employ our clearest vigils in taking apart our enemies limb from limb, pulling out their eyes and guts, popping and emptying their veins, crushing and pounding underfoot each of their organs, and leaving them, for charity’s sake, merely the enjoyment of their skeletons.” But, clearly, these are visions that Cioran now does not want to see realized on the streets of the cities (where, as he remarked somewhere else, he is always mildly astonished that everyone is not killing everyone else). However, that renunciation has a price. The price is paid in purity: “Not to venge oneself is to be enchained in the idea of forgiveness, it is to sink into it, get stuck in it, it is to render oneself impure by the hatred one strangles in oneself.”

Thus, the hidden dialectic between, on the one hand, the universal vulgarisers of liberal society, and, on the other hand, the stocking up of resentment and weakness. What distinguished the Fascist principle for Cioran was its recognition of the logic of purity: it advocated violence not for the sake of peace, but because violence was beautiful; bombing was beautiful because it smashed and hurt our enemies down to the last generation; mass murder was beautiful because you could see your true self in the pooled blood of the victims. Cioran, at last, recognized this to be madness, but he did not renounce the logic of purity – rather, he sought a catharsis through rehearsing extreme statements in the paradoxical mode. After getting off to a false start in life, he made false starts a hallmark of his style. And so brooding, in his work, takes the place of reflection, and reflects, pallidly, the dangerous fires that he had longed to light himself – and that then ran so out of control that he was condemned to live in a world that was singed by the destruction they wrought.

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.