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.

See less

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.

Free Love and Alienation, or the Proverbs of Hell, rewarmed

  A long post for a hot day

1.

Free love is a phrase that is well and truly dead – dead of mockery, dead of the emotional exploitation of which it became the instrument, deniability raising the old ghost of guilt in the service of nubile bodies forever lined up at the porn shoot. Yet it had a long, long career, and it is still not so dead that the phoenix of some kind of program joining sex, liberty and utopia cannot leap from the ashes of lovers, factual and fictional, who took the principle of free love with deadly earnestness.

Free love was the politics of Bohemia, and Bohemias were political entities as well as artmaking contexts. A Bohemia that does not contrast love, as the central socially binding feeling, to the bourgeois compromise with desire – happiness – is no bohemia at all.

 

We must begin with alienation – when have we ever not?  Alienation, in the Cold War, found its advocates – the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen, the sort of house philosopher of Adenauerism in Germany, saw alienation as the great civilizing process. But more generally, throughout the 19^th and 20^th century, alienation was a negative. There were, by my count, three great separate interpretations of alienation:  the reactionary, the liberal and the radical – all in one way or another turned from happiness to love as the foundation of society. That perfect bourgeois conjunction of happiness and utility – consumerism – lead to alienation, which was akin to but causally different from the alienation resulting from the social conditions of the working class.

Yet in these traditions, it is the liberal that is most critical of love. I remember once talking with a Mexican Trotskyist friend of mine, who remarked that love was the most important thing in life. At that time, I found that an astonishing statement. I found it shockingly sentimental. Looking back today, I can’t say I disagree so much about the love part as about the ‘most important’ part – my perpetual inner émigré has a hard time believing that lives happen in such a way that there is a most important part to them. This might be either the wisdom of the Dhammapada, or cheap nihilism, or a little of both.

 

Still, love has been a pretty powerful legitimating force in face of alienation - it has provided the single biggest rival to the modernist cult of happiness. The idea that love is the foundation of the truly human community is perhaps central to the counter-traditions that emerge under capitalism.  The critical viewpoint on happiness is drawn back to love by the force of historical events, as the family is reconstituted around the love match, and the sovereign is reconstituted as either the state or the “people”.  Of course, from the liberal point of view, there is a strong critique of the notion that love is the foundation of community. The word for that is totalitarianism. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Hannah Arendt went from doing dissertation work on love to writing her massive opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Calasso speaks of how the ancien regime sweetness of life turned sour – how Wormwood fell to earth and turned the waters bitter – he is touching on the fact that what volupte loaned the incipient happiness culture – a more and more simple tie between pleasure and happiness – produced, as it were, a cultural vacuum which the literature of sentiments, that quasi-institutionalisation of romantic love, filled. A dangerous void.

There is a dimension of the alienation from the happiness culture which seeks, in the mythic, to re-discover the human limit. At first, this might seem an entirely reactionary program. Yet it turns out not to be so simple.

The symbolic definitely does battle with the utilitarian. The two arise in a shared cultural space. And the fatal tendency of the utilitarian to take its claim to the concrete, its grasp of pleasure and pain, and turn them into abstractions – the decisive step of which is turning them into units, as if, like a stream of light in Newton’s sense, we were talking about corpuscles – means that utilitarianism has a secret need of symbols. On the side of myth, however, the tendency is to look for the secret histories of the great tradition – surely there is a minotaur of some kind at the center of the encyclopedia. This brings us, by sure steps that have been repeated over and over again, to conspiracy and chance. To which the gnostic historian must dedicate, finally, his narrative, these being his tropes for cause.

2.

Free love, then, might not be so silly after all. Or rather, it is so massively silly that it poses a question that eventually undermines all social arrangements that deny that the question has any validity. To deny, for one thing, that there is anything free save free enterprise. Against which, we can put Novalis’s manifesto-like remark: “Love is the end of ends of world history, the amen of the universe.”

Novalis is not a nobody in the history of free love, but a clue. Myself, I think of the “free love ideology” as a product not of the libertines of the 18^th century in France, but of the German romantics of the end of the 18^th century in various little burgs in Germany. Like Therese Huber.

3.

These are some facts about Therese Huber between 19 and 25.

 

She was born in Gottingen, the daughter of a wellknown professor, Christian Gottlob Heyne, and Therese Heyne, born Weiss, in May, 1764. She was thus a little older than the revolutionary generation, those born in the 1770s.

According to Therese Huber’s correspondence, her first memories were of her mother – of her mother being ill. This was when she was three. “I was never my Mother’s favorite, certainly not, I was ugly, bulky and probably never brilliant. Until my thirteenth year, I don’t remember anybody ever tell me I had a mind or that I was droll.” Of her mother she says, further, that she was “no housewife, we were raised in filth and disorder.” Her earliest memories were of her stained clothing. Moreover, her mother had “a lover until she died, almost in her forty fifth year.” Her lover lived in the house. He was a music student by the name of Forkel.

Therese always had the fantasy that she had been adopted.

Therese Huber later wrote about her first husband, Georg Forster: “He had the fortune of unpretty men, that women had to come to meet him half way, which, with his very soft heart, always vouchsafed the joy of a very intense friendship.”

At eighteen, Therese was mad to get out of her house and the town of Gottingen. By this time, she had a stepmother. Georg Forster, her father’s friend, though much older than her, promised to get her out of the house. So she accepted his proposal for marriage in early 1784.. He promptly took off for Vilnius, where he’d been promised a position. He was gone for eighteen months.

Therese promptly set out for Gotha to care for a sick friend, Auguste Schneider, the mistress of the Baron of Gotha. In a letter, Therese wrote a friend that “people’s image of me as a coquette, the girl in a novel, had begun to disappear, and one sees only the girl of reason, whose lively foolishness is forgiveable on account of her good heart.” But if she thought of herself, now, as calming down and assuming the dignity of the betrothed woman, she found, on her return to Gottingen, that things were difficult for a headstrong girl whose older, ugly fiance was in Vilnius. She was surrounded by admirers in her father’s house, while her father remained at his desk and her stepmother remained unconcerned – a situation that Henry James would have known what to do with. It was now that she encountered a man, FLM Meyer, who proved to be, as her biographer Geiger puts it, ‘fateful’ – misfortunate - to her. Later she wrote a friend that “Meyer led or ruled me, for he took my childish virginity in thought and deed.”

Meyer was a well known writer at this time. He was, according to Geiger, ‘shamelesslessly” egotistical. And he couldn’t do without women. He moved in that Enlightenment society under the motto that he couldn’t, ‘for the sake of one woman, be untrue to the whole sex.” The Casanova type. One of Sade’s fuckers.

At the same time there was a friend.

Henry James, too, would have given Therese the ambiguous friend.

This friend was the most ambiguous of the Romantic divas, Therese’s “evil spirit”, according to her biographer: Caroline Michaelis. “Sensuous and without morals already as a girl.” Over her lifetime, Caroline was married thrice, once to a man named Boehmer, then, when he died, to August Schlegel – this marriage was partly because she’d been banned for revolutionary activities in Gottingen when it was occupied by the French, and partly because she’d scandalized the town by having a child as the result of an affair with a French soldier, a situation Schlegel volunteered to remedy - and then finally, in Jena, marrying Schelling. According to Geiger, this woman urged Therese to marry Forster, who she – Karoline – knew Therese didn’t love – out of jealousy. When Karoline and Schelling were living together in Jena, Hegel came to stay with them for a year. He knew the two well. When she died, Hegel wrote a letter to a friend, expressing his relief and joy that she was gone. She had an effect on people.

In 1785, Forster came back from Vilnius. He then “committed out of weakness or goodness or blindness one of the unbelievable errors of his error strewn life: instead of standing apart from the third man [Meyer], coolly, peacefully, with the intention and the hope of driving the memory of his intruder gradually out of the heart of his bride … he entered into the intoxicated state of friendship, full of illusions, that filled both of them. Soon he was using the brotherly ‘du’ on the newcomer and the secret lover; Meyer became his “Assad”, he appeared as a member of the “trinity” in the letters to theological friends. “Forster was more enthusiastic than both of us,” Therese wrote 20 years later, “had us all swear eternal love, and never asked for a kiss from me that I should not also offer Meyer.”

4.

For this little circle, the French Revolution came as a revelation.

I don’t want to claim for Caroline and Therese the “invention” of free love: but rather, its modelling, its performance. This circle did not arise out of the 18^th century’s decaying patriarchy as eccentrics, since all around them people were devising stories about the happy social order, the order of the future. Against Sade, who had a very darker vision of happiness – Sade realized deeply that the happiness of some not insignificant few depends very much on the unhappiness of others, and not some unintentional neglect of the exploited but a very intentional enjoyment of that unhappiness – there stands Swedenborg, Henry James’s father’s master thinker.

Even though Swedenborgians proper disclaimed the free love ideas that grew out of certain Swedenborgian factions in the nineteenth century, it is certainly true that Swedenborg was a great promoter of the notion that liberty is love. As his biographer puts it:

 

“We must guard, however, against supposing that the spiritual is not real and bodily; for everything inward has its last resort in substantive organization. The bodies of angels are as ours in every part, but more expressive, plastic and perfect. Their conjugal union, which is true chastity and playful innocence, is bodily like our own; nay, far more intimate: its delights, immeasurably more blessed.”

And this, from Conjugal love:

“The Lord provides similitudes for those who desire love truly conjugal, and if they are not given in the earths, he provides them in the heavens. The Divine Providence of the Lord is most particular and most universal concerning marriages and in marriages, because all the enjoyments of heaven stream forth from the enjoyments of conjugial love, as sweet waters from the stream of a fountain; and that on this account it is provided that conjugial pairs be born, and that these are continually educated, under the auspices of the Lord, for their several marriages, both the boy and the girl being ignorant of it; and after the completed time, then that marriageable virgin, and then that young man fit for nuptials meet somewhere as if by fate, and see each other; and that then, as from a certain instinct, they know that they are partners, and, as if from a certain dictate within, think in themselves, the young man, that she is mine, and the virgin, that he is mine; and, after this has been seated for some time in the minds of both, they deliberately speak to each other, and betroth themselves.”

These words, abbreviated for conversation’s sake, could have issued from the mouth of Georg Forster.

5.

In 1792, Georg Forster had ended up in Mainz, a city in Hesse. The region had become a conflict zone between the French revolutionary armies and the various armies of the coalition formed under the terms of the Brunswick manifesto, to rescue the ancien regime, i.e. the house of Bourbon.

Forster was overworked as the head of the archive and library. At the beginning of 1792, he had not taken a public political stance, although in private letters he expressed a clear sympathy for the Jacobins. He was hiding from his wife Therese the exact extent of his indebtedness, which was crushing – Georg Forster was never a prudent man when it came to cash.

Therese seems to have been emotionally and intellectually of the left. Geiger, her biographer, in 1909, found this so scandalous that he tried to mitigate it by claiming that Therese was Forster’s ‘pupil’. It was far more likely she was his comrade. This marriage and its failure has attracted a host of commentators who have puzzled themselves over the fact that Therese left Georg for another man, and yet the two seemed to rely on each other even after the separation. The solution – that their sexual incompatibility did not hinder their affinity with each other on the basic level of friendship – seems too shocking to propose – especially for those who want to tell a story of betrayal. But Therese seems to have cared for Georg, although she didn’t love him.

The man she did love was Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, a Prussian official and intimate of Schiller. Therese met Huber through Forster, in 1788. In 1790, Huber was living with the married couple. Therese was moving in a direction taken by her mother – who lived with her lover in the house of her husband:

 

“We stood in a doubtful relationship one to another for 1 ½ years. In the beginning I pushed him away, everything now came together, he wanted to forget [his relationship to his fiancé, Dorothea Stock], and a miserable doctor pulled him away from the border of the grave. The noble, humane Forster saw a lot in the young man, drew him nearer, I became used to him, he saw me for a year and went through all the gradation of feeling, my unhappiness strengthened my love for him – although I though of none – finally circumstances offered a hand. I don’t know in which moment, before we could guess ourselves, he had exposed to me his relationship with that girl. I pondered the thing and found decisively the result: he must confess to her that he didn’t love her any more, that time had changed his feeling, that he had no more rights upon her heart. … “ As Therese says, it took 2 ½ years for Huber to come to this point.

Some biographers have said that Therese Huber used her status, when Forster was dead, to suppress much of the information about what was happening in Mainz in 1792.

If the scene was not loaded for an explosion yet – a disaffected couple, sickly children, an overworked world famous intellectual, the French revolutionary army in the area, the wife’s lover in the house – into this scene came the ambiguous friend: Caroline Michaelis.

Why Therese would invite her school friend Caroline, lately widowed, to stay with the household in Mainz is a puzzle. Or perhaps it isn’t – perhaps Therese, out of fairness, wanted Georg to have a lover too. Although Georg was not sexually faithful, apparently he had sex in the approved way, with lower class girls. The libertine solution.

Caroline was of course as strong willed as Therese. Caroline’s letters from Mainz give another account of the Forster-Huber household. It is a sign of how narrowly the circles intersect that he chief correspondent was Meyer, the writer who had been Therese’s admirer – who “took” her virginity from her, according to Therese in an ambiguous reference. Surely Caroline knew about that. Even before she went to Mainz,she had written to Meyer: “I have never depended on her friendship – among women, there can be none.”

Soon Caroline is writing in a more sympathetic way about Georg. In particular, she writes a letter linking the ugly men of the revolution – Mirabeau, ostensibly – with her own “beauteous” figure. Strikingly, Caroline “reads” herself into her situation – which has forever been the subject of speculation – with Georg by reading Mirabeau’s famous at the time letters to his lover, Sophie, of which she writes to Luise, her correspondent, that she should read them, except that she imagines Luisa won’t have time, and won’t read in bed, being more inclined to sleep, and is too “good” for a “ugly monster” [hassliche Bosewicht] as the extraordinary Mirabeau was, who had virtues and talents enough to supply a thousand normal people, and too much true intelligence to seriously be a monster, as one can conclude out of particular features. He may have been ugly, he says that often enough in the letters – but he loved Sophie, for women certainly don’t love the beauty of men – and yet the ugly man imposes himself through his exterior on the unruly masses…”

Caroline provides an interesting insight into a aesthetic dimension of the Revolution: the part played by ugly men. Mirabeau. Robespierre. Chamfort, the great pamphleteer of the revolution. Marat. It was a revolution of ugly men, diversified by a few beauties, who in the course of the revolution all had their heads chopped off.

6. According to no less an authority than Josiah Royce, to understand the philosophy of Schelling, one must understand Caroline Michaelis, his wife. In 1792, when she joined Therese Huber’s household, she was still Caroline Boehmer, recently widowed. Already August Wilhelm Schlegel was obsessed with her – and already she felt herself puzzingly superior to him, an intuition she was never to overcome. Later, after the occupation by the French and the counter-occupation by the forces of reaction, later, after Therese had fled to Strassburg (which is when, apparently, she wrote Georg that she was leaving him for Hubner), after Georg left for Paris and received the condemnation of almost the entire German intelligentsia (poor mistaken Forster, Wilhelm Humboldt signed), and that after Therese might have written Caroline a letter giving her a green light for Caroline’s own affair with Georg, after the pregnancy with the unknown father, probably a French office, after being released from Mainz and exiled from her native town of Gottingen as a danger to morals and public order, she would be ‘rescued’ by Schlegel and cozened, cozening herself, into an loveless marriage, which broke up on the rocks when she finally met the man she did love, the young philosopher, Schelling. Caroline, it seems, spread her own version of what happened between Therese and Georg.

This pattern of split ups, rumor, and leftist politics is going to fasten to free love from the revolutionary period onward. The great charge against free love is its fissility – just as the great charge made against bourgeois love, from the standpoint of free love, is its creeping dissolution of the amorous impulse, which decays in the acids of repetition and over-familiarity. They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad. Love loses its courage, that side of its character that is a perpetual test. The family withdraws into its comforts, loses its curiosity and generosity, becomes fasco-tropic. Or as Shelley puts it later in the Notes on Queen Mab:

7. The triangles of the Therese and Georg Forster household seem to pop up in bohemias, to become its romantic myth. Jules and Jim, again and again. In the ruins of the patriarchy, in that wreck, we see how difficult it is to get away from the Father and his arts of sublimation.

8.  The anonymous genius of the fairy tale is the genius of history as well, with that same penchant for the fatally ambiguous symbol, where, as though in a besieged city in an endless backlands war, love and death exchange sniper fire with each other among bombed out buildings and constantly shifting zones of engagement. This city could be the New Jerusalem. It could be Stalingrad. It could be the Republic of Mainz, where Georg Forster assumed a revolutionary role in 1792, as his household expanded to include his wife Therese's lover, Huber, and the ever present Caroline Boehmer. It was in December of 1792 that Therese took the kids and her lover and left. Forster went to Paris, as a delegate.

One has to be sensitive enough, then, to the way the fairy tale sticks in the historic fact to understand the depth of certain symbols.

8. It is to this fairy tale genius that I dedicate this jump-cut finale. From German towns in the 1790s to, for instance, this: on November 19, 1831, Prosper Enfantin, responding to the uproar in Saint Simonian circle that had greeted his proposals for free love, responded with a speech in which he outlined the details of his system, which echoed Fourier and Swedenborg in separating marriage from “true” marriage, the latter of which would rekindle the numbed feelings of conjugal couples by giving them the theoretical liberty to love. It was hard to tell how this theoretical liberty translated into physiological fact, although by this time, Enfantin had, like Swedenborg before him, lowered the barrier between the symbol and the thing.

The uproar continued, with certain leaders of the Saint Simonian family denouncing Enfantin’s plan, and the newspapers reporting on his immorality. So he lead a retreat to his home in Menilmontant of forty male apostles, who attempted to live a life of pure communism. As one of the signs of sublime fraternity, Enfantin had shirts made for the apostles that buttoned down the back - and thus could only be buttoned with the aid of a helper.

Enfantin’s shirts deserve a place with Aristophanes unsexed circular human, in the Symposium, and Magritte’s hooded lovers blindly kissing – symbols that overwhelm one’s ability to immediately interpret them. Enfantin’s shirts hangs in the great museum of love, high and low, pure and dirty,  – half a sign of mutual aid, without which there can be no freedom, and half a strait jacket.