iN PRAIS OF QUITTING

 Philosophy got its start in slave and serf societies, so it is no wonder that it is structured, systematically, around the master – slave (or serf) encounter. All of modernity is summed up in the simple phrase: I quit. The slave or serf can escape – which is at the root of adventure – but they cannot simply quit.

Modern philosophy should, then, be able to tell us something about quitting. Mostly, though, it doesn’t. It is most unhelpful about this simple fact of secular life. Heidegger in Being and Time can start a discourse about technology with some observations on a tool or instrument breaking – that is, no longer working. But the idea of no longer working as a voluntary act for someone, stopping doing this or that for pay, which is a small baseline for understanding one’s whole adult life in the "Free World", is part of the modernization project he rejects.

Myself, I’ve had, I reckon, at least thirty jobs in my life, from the time I was eleven and started bagging ice for my Pa’s ice company up until I had a part time job trying to sell over the phone a software designed for doctor’s offices. In the 00s, I’ve basically lived a hit and miss life on gigs, writing or editing, freelancing my way to the poorhouse.

I sort of miss quitting.

Quitting is a very context-specific kind of deal. It has inherited the slave’s escape, at least unconsciously, but the quitter is not pursued. Or, if pursued, only by the usual suspects – the landlord, the power company, the peep’s you owe five hundred more dollars to on the used jalopy you are tooling in. Sometimes, quitting is resigning, and has that sad little dignity, crowned by going out for drinks somewhere with your fellow workers. Sometimes, not. One inglorious job that sticks out in my mind was working as a laborer at a site where they were building warehouses, which I got via a highschool friend, Woody. We worked in the Atlanta summer heat – which was not great – and we did things like put down the asphalt for the parking lot, etc. I would have stuck it out except that somehow, I got assigned to follow around a spoiled son of one of the warehouse owners – or, perhaps, the son of some bigshot in the construction company that was erecting said warehouses. In any case, he was a rare combination of stupid, arrogant, and bully. Not my friend! I’m averse to the put on servility that is the mask demanded in such situations – I just can’t do it.

I remember little about that job, but I do remember the day I quit. I had no money nor prospects, and I was thus in a pickle – but that quitting was a high like unto some heroin user’s finest shot. It glows in my past. Sometimes, quitting is the best thing.

Other times, it isn’t. Quitting for instance a job I had as a searcher for a real estate insurance company in Santa Fe was a sad thing. I was leaving town. My supervisor said I was blowing my chance, and that was true – I probs could have stayed there and climbed the ladder of real estate insurance searching, such as it is. But I had wandering feet, at the time. Still, it was a big suppressed sob laden farewell.

As everybody knows now, the air of freedom is being sucked out of the Western neo-lib societies, and nowhere is that truer than in the way quitting has dropped out of our popular imaginations, except for those on the upper level – the top echelon can be seen to quit on tv shows and movies and in newspapers in the same way they take vacations to beach destinations in the far niente. Beyond our means, viewer.

You can dream a little dream, but can you afford it?

Bring back quitting.

It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway…

 

 

In Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, the nihilist hero and the son of an old army doctor, makes a remark to his friend and disciple, Arkhady, son of Nikolai Kursanov, an aristocrat and landowner, about the latter: “The day before yesterday I saw him reading Pushkin,” Bazarov continued… “Do explain to him that that will never do any good. After all, he’s not a boy: it’s time he threw that he threw aside that nonsense: wanting to be a romantic in these days!”

I recently re-read Fathers and Sons. It was in this remark, and others of that type, that I recognized something, that a grand thesis suddenly presented itself in my mind.

But I have to preface the grand thesis riff with a little autobiographical remark.

In 1970, I was 12. In 1980, I was 22. That decade marks me – though I have ranged pretty far to be sitting here in Paris, with a wife and a boy and my life, such as it is, entering the retirement twilight, it is most likely the case that I am of the 70s generation.

In Russian intellectual history, the members of the “1830” generation, like Herzen, self-identified as such. So did the “youth” – the generation of the 1860s, the shestidesiatniki. These identifications are, of course, fluid and non-binding – and yet they evoke something like different moods and modes that are actually experienced. In the 1830s, Herzen and Turgenev, among other intellectuals, took it as their task to propound, or to pound out, what it meant to be a member of the Russian civilization. An important word, for this cohort – to be a member of a civilization was, above all, an existential task. Were they to be real subjects, like the Europeans (the idea of a European subject, here, meant basically a thing composed of bits of the French Enlightenment, bits of Hegel, and bits of the English economists, but it meant, as well, to dress in a certain way, feel in a certain way, love in a certain way – above all it meant freeing the serfs), or were they condemned to be Russians under Nicholas – a sort of slough composed of Dead Souls, samovars and flies. And yet, wasn’t that slough a warm and live thing, unlike the mere surface of the Europeans?

For the sons, however, the shestidesiatniki: this generation of the 1830s, which rose up and were put down in 1848, was full of the most pathetic dreamers. Reading Pushkin! What rubbish.

The struggle between the heirs of these decades was fought out, most openly, in Russian literature – in poems and novels. Novels such as Fathers and Sons.

Now: here’s my grand thesis. If I think of the generation of the sixties, and the generation of the seventies, in America, and so on, it is striking to me that the terrain in which our generational mood, so to speak, was fought out – our Russian novel – was popular music. Instead of Herzen and Turgenev, instead of Chernyshensky and Pisarev, instead of Doestoevsky and Tolstoy, the terrain was the British invasion, Bob Dylan, Motown, R & B, Disco, and Punk.

This is not about the aesthetic quality of these cultural products, but rather their existential, identifying effects. What Bazarov says about poor Nikolai Kursanov and his affection for Pushkin could easily have been said by some late seventies punk about some aging hippie child’s affection for the Beatles. It is not just a comment about the Beatles as a group, it is a comment about the whole little world in which you would listen to the Beatles, you would know their songs, you would quote them occasionally, you would care for them in a certain way.

It is a sociological fact that I don’t quite understand about my own growing up that it was not novels, or movies, or television – which were all massively consumed, of course – but popular music, albums and concerts, that provided the terrain upon which was fought out a certain mood and a certain existential identification that gets harked back to, that still can suddenly start up in the brain. A sound, lyrics.

Myself, I read enormously between 12 and 22, and would not have thought of myself as a “fan” – but I know, now, that even though I did read the Russian novels then and thought I was Ivan Karamazov, my lodestar was really Bobby Dylan. Like everybody else I knew,  my little bit of this history was enacted more through music than anything else. This was true for the back of the class, the fans of Freebird and Southern Rock, as well as the front of the class, the fans of David Bowie and Patti Smith.

I don’t think that popular music plays this role for, say, my son’s generation. Rap is very important, but it doesn’t set the communal mood. I’m sure that mood is set by Internet genres that we don’t really have genre knowledge of – social media, for instance. What is Tik Tok or Instagram? I’m not sure they bear the burden of the Russian novel. Perhaps, in fact, the task of existential identification comes and goes – is there any need of it, or desire for it, at the moment?

In the creche, the nursery located behind our apartment, the three year olds are chasing each other around and screaming at the top of their lungs at this moment. I can’t tell you what their communal mood will be. Out of those screams, what art, what tragic love, what happy or sad life arrangements are to come I can’t divine. I can only look backwards, it seems.

But Fuck it. Lot’s wife has always seemed much saner to me than her husband, with his bizarre methods of childrearing. Three cheers for the backward’s glance.  

Breaks

 

 

Breaks on a bus, brakes on a car  Breaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s. I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain.  One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see: then, “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.” Adam, in this example, is the gull that any hustler dreams of.

And as in a dream, Hume’ Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. The gull is fleeced – he comes, in fact, pre-fleeced.  Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

It is important that these figures were certainly not invented in the eighteenth century. Rather, they come out of a longer lineage: that of the sage and the fool. Bruno and his ass, Socrates and Diogenes the cynic, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – it is from this family that all these deprived souls in the texts of the philosophes are appropriated and turned into epistemological clockworks.  

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it. Lucretius’s clinamen is, for the philosophical hustler, the original break.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system. The problem, of course, is that the great unwashed didn’t often write down their thoughts, so that we have to depend on those thinkers that did, using them to angle backwards like surveyors do.

Still,  we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live.

 

On the death of Leonard Bast

 E.M. Foster is an admirable writer, who can be read simply for his technical perfections. Here’s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass, in Howard’s End.

“And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly.”

This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate - and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn’t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader’s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel - whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. The reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking - that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.

Which brings us to Bast. Those who’ve read Howard’s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk, the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces “We are not concerned with the very poor.” The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn’t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly.

And the lowly must be squashed. In Howard’s End, literally.

“He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.” This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man’s excess is the absence of another man’s bread.

What Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There’s a fierce defence of caste encoded in it - a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells’ characters were all about - as well as Dickens, although his poor are definitely helped by godfathers and the death of distant relatives. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for a rentier caste into a liberalism of what we would now call identity. His caste might take on a progressive role, but that role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards - between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.”

The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face, because I am much like Leonard Bat than I am at all like E.M. Forster. It is rare for a novelist to so forcefully hustle the reader out of the door because the reader doesn’t have what it takes to be the author’s friend. This, I think, is snobbism raised to a novelistic principle. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Bloomsbury set so curiously indifferent to Ullyses – when Woolf compares Joyce to an undergraduate scratching his pimples, she is Bast-ing him. She was too great an artist to let this be the final word, and in fact Woolf, like Joyce, was a genuine socialist, one of the few British writers to support the General Strike of 1926, and a pamphleteer whose pacifism is, to my mind, so much more convincing, on a moral level, than any George Orwellish bellicosities.

In my opinion, the corpse of Leonard Bast is buried under the British novel of the twentieth century, which is why it never quite adopted to modernism, save in a comic mode.

Pretend as a state doctrine is failing

 So Trump's Florida state senator, the one representing the Mar-A-Lago district that Trump won by 11 percent in 2024, just swung by 13 percentage points and elected a Democrat to the state senate. The election results on the granular level - which the DNC and Washington-centric Dems with their idiot campaign industry have neglected for years - is showing what people think of the asshole in the white house. And we all keep sailing on.

Elections are becoming the last impulse of the reality principle in the U.S., where Pretend is now state doctrine, and rules, as well, the Financial sector. Lets pretend wars, Lets pretend stock market, Lets pretend climage change aint real policies, all the lets pretend we can stuff ourselves with. Long ago the question was posed: Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? And now we have an answer on a nationwide scale - cause the Epstein class in all its glory is distributing stones and snakes to all! Are we happy?

All the little Kissingers and Trump's war with Iran

 One of the more curious tax-exempt institutions in the U.S. is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which naturally and Orwellianly embraces every beautiful war the U.S. has ever fought. It is a much more reputable org than, say, the Fifa Peace Award committee, but I prefer the latter – at least its obsequiousness is not buried under the rhetoric of a thousand “position papers”.

Naturally, Karim Sadjadpour, the Endowment’s Iran expert, has been pounding the drum for war with Iran ever since he discovered this is the kind of stuff that gets you interviewed on CNN and published in the Atlantic Monthly (a magazine that proves, every month, that it is edited by a former Israeli military prison guard).

In January of this year, Sadjadpour’s article on Trump’s opportunity in Iran was not noted enough – there is so much to note, after all!

The article took note (we note) of the riots in Iran, dubbing them, of course, a revolution (in other countries the U.S. does not like, riots are always a revolution; in the U.S., they are instances of looting by an immoral and “dark” underclass, which prove the need for an ever more militarized police!).

And then Sadjadpour pulled out the rhetoric for which peacelovin’ institutions are universally known: “Trump now confronts a fateful choice. He can make good on his promise [of hurting Iran] and face the always unpredictable consequences of military action [which is how the Carnegie Endowment for International peace describes the crushing of the bones, the deskinning of the bodies, the incineration of buildings, and the mass pain brought on by bullets, bombs, and our wondrous array of chemical devices RG] or he can face the shame of having given false encouragement to freedom fighters…”

Kudos to that last phrase. The idea that Trump has any capacity for shame whatsoever is laughable. So laughable that we can see how brilliant its use is here – our great president, embodying humanity itself, can have shame on a Mount Rushmore level! Sycophancy is a high art -in spite of the televised cabinet meetings in which Trump’s ministers routinely compete to reach their tongues ever higher up his rectum – it can be done much more subtly! And here we see a masterly touch. Trump is being given the Eisenhower presidential treatment. He is so PRESIDENTIAL that his shame, his potential shame if he doesn’t crush some bones, strip the skin off some bodies, incinerate some buildings, and in general smash faces into jelly on a large scale, will penetrate even his adorable orange hide! He'll have to talk gravely about it in his presidential library, perhaps seated on his gold toilet!

We can see where this is going. Whatever. The important thing, here, is that Sadjadpour has not shamed himself by continuing a mouselike existence as an expert, but has seized the opportunity of career advancement that will put him in the running for the next Democrat wanting to prove his hawk bonifieds! Like the Kagans and Kenneth Pollack in the Iraq war, Sadjadpour is going to be the go-to “intellectual” for the Abundance set, the liberal hawk in the liberal hawk magazine!

It is a brilliant move. However, it does not get you everything. Ask Kenneth Pollack. In fact, ask anybody below 25 who Kenneth Pollack was – you will draw a blank. At one time, though, he was the powerful anecdote to wishy washy libs who did not want to invade Iraq – the non-muscular ones.

Ah, all the little Kissingers!

I’m expecting great things from Sadjadpour.

anecdote and essay

 Mood tugs at the essay with a stronger hand than it does at other genres. Poetry has all its armored prosody to protect it; fiction has narrative, the monograph has method. But the essay absorbs proof, rhetoric and story into what is eventually, what is inevitably, whim. Which is, itself, not one thing but one thing and another. The wind bloweth where it listeth, said God in an essayistic mood.

The wind, though, is, to our human vision at least, a shapeless thing. For an essay to give shape, to shape its reason to exist, it needs technique. You don’t need a weather man to have weather, but if you are a weatherman, you need some way of depicting and even predicting the weather.

Benjamin, I think, has a certain genius for the essay, and for that moment in which the essay makes its strong play for the readers attention: I am talking about the anchoring anecdote. The essayist is most at home, is a citizen even, of literary culture – a culture of books, pictures, music and gossip. I think Benjamin learned the power of the anchoring anecdote from reading Kafka. That at least is my sense. Kafka’s anecdotes have a certain judicial quality, as though they were really decisions handed down by some supreme, invisible court. And so it is with Benjamin’s best anecdotes.

For instance, this one, from a brief essay on Robert Walser. Benjamin’s take on Walser is that even if Walser’s claim that he never changed a sentence is not, technically, true, it is a key to Walser’s manic stroller style. Manic, but quietly manic – a simple inability to stop, so that it goes past its point and into the fields, so to speak.

This inability to stop is curiously paired with the inability to start. Both moments require a decisiveness that the stroller is afraid of, shy of. Not wanting to make a fuss. And to illustrate this, Benjamin tells an anecdote:

“This story is told about Arnold Bröcklin, his son Carlo, and Gottfried Keller. One day they were sitting at their usual table at the café. Their table was famous for the way, among these comrades, they were unspeaking and closed off. So here, again, the three sat together in silence. After a certain amount of time had crawled by, the young Bröcklin said, “it’s hot.” And, after fifteen more minutes of silence, the older said: “and no wind.” Keller, for his part, sat there for a piece. Then he rose up and said: “I don’t drink with chatterboxes.” This peasant shame of talk, which is underlined by the excentric punchline, is Walser’s thing.”

That anecdote opens up, to me, a whole line of inquiry, stretching from Swiss peasants to Robert Wilson’s legendary play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a seven act, twelve hour piece in which, or so I’ve read, one of the characters advances by very slow footsteps from the wing to the center of the stage, which takes twenty minutes, stands there as though about to speak, and then, doesn’t, and then makes his way to the other wing of the stage, taking twenty minutes.

Slowness, silence, a certain terrific glue that seals in the human product: these are the anecdotal partners of Blake’s book, Proverbs of Heaven and Hell. Proverbs slowed down to the barest, syllabic beat.