A gnomic note

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on an Irish vacation

 

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

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

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

“And then I think of old George Pollexfen,

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 On the West Irish coast

Ocean, cold, farmers’ suicides

Enter as spirits the grudging blood

In its system ticking forward

To no purpose or landing

That she can see.

Unless – the girl in the crone’s cast skin

- she dreams of happiness,

of honey on good cottage bread

or the first can in the pub.

Never the thick tongue in her ear,

Never the man’s flanking motion

His barnyard antics.

Which they called love

In the pig ignorance and trickery of back then.

Unless the ocean, the cold,

The self inflicted escapees

Gives you, in the clearing morning

A sum, a summoning, salt sufficient

In the headland gusts.

- Karen Chamisso

The prisoner of cool, or down among the zeros

 

1. I’ve always believed that you will only see a culture in its totality, see it thoroughly, sees its wonders and damage, when you go through the cracks.

I don’t know where this belief comes from. Perhaps it is a vestige of the New Testament I was taught in Sunday School. It severely underestimates the effects of going through the cracks – this I know from experience. Most often, instead of trying to understand the culture you spend that experience counting your pennies and looking for cheap intoxicants, Going through the cracks is terrifying, and terror is not conducive to collecting the forces of your spirit and understanding the mechanics of the great wheel of fortune that is crushing your bones. Splinter and crack, splinter and crack.

Nevertheless, the theory is not wholly flawed. A culture’s vision of itself is manufactured by those paid to manufacture such visions – follow the money and you will soon find that the mass of our images and understandings attach to the advertisement for reality these people manufacture, often in all sincerity. This is the vision from the gated community, from the Eloi and their children. It has long been stuffed down my throat good and proper. I’m no longer the Morlock I once was, but I know I am made, essentially, of mud, and am not going to rise much higher. The Eloi will forever be out of my grasp.

Politically, we are supposed to believe that these issues can be understood by a simple dualism between left and right. I lost that illusion in the 00s, at least. To understand the culture when you are going through the cracks, your best guide is to follow your instinct and think of the culture as a many-splendored thing, for which you have to make up categories in your own home or hole.

What struck me in the Bush era wass how, instead of a left opposition, in America, you have an opposition that is the prisoner of cool. Cool has taken the place of ‘respectability’ as the ‘moral civilization’ in which all move in lockstep, even those who have some contempt for the images projected by the Eloi.

2. It is a long, strange trip for cool. At one point, in the fifties, cool came in a binary: its opposite was square. Square, now, is one of those words that can only be quoted, never said straight. It is all too reference laden with a certain ersatz Hollywood swinging culture – a culture that seems more improbable than the culture of Edwardian England or the fictional Mad Max cultures of the apocalypse.

Square, of course, stood in for the respectable back in the early era of cool – which would make cool its negation. And it is in this vein that the change from respectability was actually interpreted. Robert Erwin, in a 1983 essay, What Happened to Respectability, assessed the changes of the 60s and 70s in terms of a wholesale decline in the forms of the culture that used to add up to respectability, and the triumph of the informal – a dialectic that he captures by contrasting Nixon and Saturday Night Live. Incredibly enough, in 1983 Erwin could plausibly present the rather pallid vaudeville of Saturday Night Live as a sort of revolutionary symbol of a change in mass behavior.

”The degree to which the ideal [of respectability] was internalized also indicates its strength. Richard Nixon seems classic as well as villainous when he wears a suit, pressed and buttoned, to board a private airplane. Elliott Gould seems only show-biz carbonated when, smiling sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, he tells a national television audience that he is glad to host “Saturday Night Live” because the progam, in his words, “has balls.” You cannot imagine, Class of 1975, what a fright, embarrassment and hostility Gould’s breaking of a taboo would have triggered in the heyday of respectability. Millions upon millions of ‘dent’ people in 1860 or 1960 went from one year to the next rarely speaking, hearing or reading such words in the open.”

Erwin, I think, mistakes a shifting of exterior symbols for a change in substance. What he was watching, I think, was the absorption of cool into a new domain of servitude – the servitude inherent in the service economy – rather than a true Bastille moment. Gould’s audience, perhaps, could not imagine a figure like Father Coughlin, in the 30s, casually talking down Jews on national radio time, or the kind of dialect humor that was omnipresent in the Gilded Age and right up to the 1950s. This is not to say that the shifting of terms was insignificant – it is merely to say that in the shift from formal to informal, from an ideal of respectability to an ideal of cool, the contradiction traversed was shallow.

3. The January 1, 1951 of Commentary carried an article by Anatole Broyard entitled KEEP COOL, MAN: The Negro Rejection of Jazz. In the corner of the article, there was a little bio of Broyard: “Anatole Broyard, anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world, here lays open the deeper meaning of the injuction to “be cool, man” now current in Harlem music-making.” The ambiguity of being the anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world trailed Broyard around throughout his life. He was a pale skinned man, apparently, and though he did not call himself white, there was a rumor that he ‘passed’ as white. Race, that chopping block in American culture! Broyard was, it is said, the figure that Phillip Roth referenced with his character Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. Roth himself denied it, in a strange “letter” to Wikipedia, where this rumor was referred to as fact.

Whether Broyard presented himself as black – whatever that means – or had some responsibility to do so is wrapped up in the white supremacist subtext of the American dream: one that it is difficult to drain out of that dream without popping it entirely. However it is certain that he wrote a lot about black culture for magazines like Commentary, who accepted him as a “guide” – setting up one of those informant-explorer relationships that always come to a bad end, unless you have the genius to understand how to make the joke and slip the yoke, like Ralph Ellison.

Broyard’s essay is notable for appearing about the time that the notion of “cool” was slipping into the vocabulary of a certain white subculture, after circulating in a black sub-culture. For Broyard, the concept marks a certain loss of innocence. Broyard’s essay supposes, again and again, an equation between negro and primitive – meaning, positively, an innocent autonomy, and meaning, negatively, a certain essentialist imprisonment in which “civilization” is seen as the corruption of this innocence. The boundary at which innocence trucks with corruption is music – particularly jazz.

“In this period, Negro popular culture began to incorporate into its body proper certain elements of white society, drawn for the most part from the less favored ethnic and economic groups… Their incorporation as spectator, participant and devotee served to further split the consciousness of Negro popular culture. The Negro became increasingly aware of his role as creator and performer. He himself however was still the subject matter of his performance. His music – in lyrics and feeling – remained autobiographical and continued to express his reactions to his situation.”

4. The fifties was the heyday of the Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship – you can call it the Partisan Review effect, or at least I will call it that, ho ho. It turns up all over as the master trope to understand American society, and particularly, for obvious reasons, America’s system of apartheid. This is the context in which music and civil rights and oppressions background the formation of an existential attitude. That attitude takes the term “cool” as its own master-trope. Jazz, in Broyard’s view, is terminally anchored to “hotness”, which in turn has become, after the moment of spectatorship by a curious white sub-class – one that is marked as deviant by its very interest in black culture – a property lost, an innocence that could no longer be sustained. In the moment of that gaze, hotness turns to jive.

There is a lot of futurity in Broyard’s essay, themes that continue – through Mailer’s The White Negro – into the sixties and into the Black Power movement itself. My view is that the imprisoning idea of “cool” comes out of this image of an innocence that is corrupted in the moment of its consumption, which is less history than a nostalgic substitute for history. Here's Broyard pursuing his thesis: “Bebop, which began in the mid-40s, was the expression of the Negro’s search for new material in this period. It was the improvised interpretation of experience of the Negro musician as immigrant in white society. Because he was a foreigner, it was a kind of gibberish.”

The idea that he was a “foreigner” is a product less of the real economic and social situation of apartheid – for this foreigner was, actually, a laborer and consumer in the system, and had made the system work from the very beginning not as an immigrant but as a kidnapped hostage – than of the magic of the image of the master-slave relationship, which seemed to explain so much about racism while relying on highly abstracted essential types that could not explain the reality of a person like, say, Anatole Broyard.

5. So much for cool’s background. The problem with the history of concepts is the same problem that the cowboy faces on the plain – how to move the doggies forward. In other words, how did cool transform from an existential attitude into an imprisoning trivialization of affect? Which is, you might say, sharp eyed reader, a transformation of Broyard’s myth – the fall from innocence leading us to the corruption of the present. The story surely has to do with the attractiveness of “cool” in a postwar consumer society, in which “like” and “dislike”, those responses to the handcrafted, are elevated quantitatively to responses to the mass produced. The time to like, that is, the education of the sensibility that creates a patterned liking and disliking that signifies something about character, becomes something hard to resource. Where is one going to get this time, and how is one going to afford that education? Out of this dilemma, I think, comes the solution imposed by the ”cool”. Imported from the “stranger”, the black entertainer/artist, it goes out there as a short-cut to the sentimental education that is overwhelmed by consumer culture. Which Broyard lays out in racial terms that are pretty marvelously put.

“The circular quality of cool music is unmistakable. The orchestrations and the solos turn back on themselves as a result of the “cool” musician’s lack of interest in the autobiographical continuities which served as program, mood or configurations of jazz, jump or wing. The circle is the most self-contained form in nature, and thus, in cool music, nothing obtrudes, the effect is zero. The supporters of this music might argue that all music- i.e. “classical” “serious, nonfolk music – is tautological or equal only to itself, but their own habit of interpreting cool music and describing the musicians’ attitudes in psychological terms would contradict this. In other words, this zero is attitudinal, not an aesthetic effect. It is the cool man’s answer to the difficult algebraic problems of the marginal man’s place in society.”

The algebraic problems! Back, again, to the square, although this time we pair it with the circle, or the “attitudinal zero.” The zero degree of attitude in this 50s essay makes the hop jump and skipping mind advert to the zero degree of writing, which appeared in 1953. Barthes intro begins, rather intriguingly, as a sort of cousin to Broyard’s notion of be-bop as “gibberish”.

“Hebert, the revolutionary, never began a number of his new-sheet, Le Pere Duchene, without introducing a sprinkling of obscenities. These improprieties had no real meaning, but they had significance. In what way? In that they expressed a whole revolutionary situation. Now here is an example of a mode of writing whose function is no longer communication or expression, but the imposition of something beyond language, which is both History and the stand we take to it.”

The problem of cool as a prison is that it sheds history for a private mythology. Although it is not so private as all that. It totems and taboos are not DIY, but are all elements in the floating world in which the cool in solitary exists, or seeks to. Cool sets out to be the product of the experience of the cracks, I think, but its indifference speaks to another order of experience, a dreamt – of order of celebrity, of an indifference displayed to the cameras. The imagined cameras.

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

There are certain who can read a face

And certain who can’t.

 

A face like a novel

The wrinkles intrigue, the mouth irony

 

The eyes, who hasn’t been there?

Promiscuity at the heart of vision

 

And the hair ears cheeks

And the whole shebang in motion

 

The faces that populate us until

One of them, leaning over

 

Sez: she’s gone.

Someone to close your eyes.

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

 

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

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

Few philosophical refutations have ever been this complete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

on Loafing

 

 I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

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

I loafe and invite my soul,

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

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

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

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