elegy for the record: on the nature of things

 

Elegy for the record: on the nature of things

“Look”, he would say, drawing an imaginary line with his finger., “it’s like this. I start here with the intention of reaching here – in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I have arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon and it leads me off in another direction and develops into a phonograph.” -Edison

 

Was there song before there was song

in the universal throat,

all unwrought dark intensity

all systems ungo,

ungo

ungo?

 

“The very thing of itself declares”

in the needle’s track left on

the deaf man’s thumb.

Hearing is touching is scratching

 

hums in the ear unheard

or unheard light crackling sounds

sinking away in the retired depth

of the abandoned laboratory dark.

 

Lucrèce writes, in his native French:

“Les formes d'un seul choc seraient anéanties.

Mais, de ses éléments variant les accords,

La matière demeure éternelle, et les corps

Durent, cohésions rebelles au divorce,

Jusqu'à ce que l'attaque ait dépassé leur force.

Ainsi, rien ne retourne au néant;

While the headline sez:

 

“A talking machine made by Professor Edison”.

Song before song, throb before throb

Where in the universal throat a single shock

Sings the unsung folded around a needle

 

 Lifting angelic choirs out of available material.

“I took the night job which most oprs

didn’t like, but which I preferred

as it gave me more time to experiment.”

 

I saw it all end, Thomas Edison.

Prophets wearing earpods.

«Oprs» listening to satellite radio

Driving to the night shift on the I-5.

 

But end? End only in this spoonful

Of the universal time-space.

Song there will be unsung and sung

At the end, as at the beginning. Song.

Surrounded!

 

There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy that has no common name or phrase. I call it dis-identification.  It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of competition. To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with, even if it is not clear what the contest is all about or what the rules are. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of Donald Trump,  etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison with liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Donald Trump, etc. At least I am not X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the origin of the enemy is in combat,  which is the contest absolutely realized; there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and the horror that it wishes to avoid most is: being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by liberal types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, centrist reactionaries. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is where English comic writers come in. In French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – which is on account of the fact that the French have a genius for enmity. In English writers, those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens, of course, is the first writer who comes to mind.

But Dickens rather ends a certain line of humor than opens up the kind of humor, the kind of odd frivolity, that imbued English comic writing in the 20^th century. Evelyn Waugh, whose character Tony Last is, famously, captured by a maniac and forced to read Dickens to him, is not only dis-identifying with Dickens but mocking, snobbishly, Dickens appeal to the vulgar masses -even as those masses include jungle explorers. Frivolity, as Fintan O’Toole pointed out in his book on Brexit, Heroic Failure, is the mask assumed by English nationalism.  While celebrating loudly the struggle of good and evil, the battle of civilizations, and English yeoman values, the celebrants are all such scoundrels and trust fund brats that it is hard not to suspect they are on to themselves – that they too have been dosed with English comic writing, from Wodehouse to Amis.

I’d like to make generalizations about the American version of dis-identification, but this subject requires way too much coffee for me to make it this morning. This will have to do.

 

On Careers

What do you do?

I’ve been asked that a lot in my life. As I child and teen, I was asked, what do you want to do? But that question dies on the tongue of the speaker after you reach a certain age. What do you want to do becomes a more localized question – to be asked, say, on vacation. It is not a request for a mission statement. Because, presumably, at some point in the twenties, your mission was set.

This presumption indicates a whole anthropology. The anthropology of the career.

In the Oxford English dictionary, published in 1913, the word “career” for the course of a professional life is a “modern usage”. Career, up until the early nineteenth century, was more normally used for horses – horses careering, or galloping. The late latin root, here, is a word for cart. Or a word designating the road a cart takes. A way, in other words. A way and a race. The Occidental variant on the Dao.

In fact, the Hollywoodish way of talking about a career at the moment is a “journey”. My journey. And not, say, my rat race – we don’t even want to smell a rat race when we talk of our journey. But careers, in as much as they are races, are defined by rivalries. This sets the career apart from, say, Being in as it is figured in an ancient Greek poem, where a man tells this tale: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.

The two choices in Parmenides are pretty stark, and they do seem to subtend the question: what do you do? If you leave the beaten track of men, if this is your “search”, you might look back on your path, the race you raced, and wonder: where is everybody?

I wonder that all the time.

ordinary sense and democratic culture

 

When Whitman came to fight his great opposite and fate, These States, like some happier Ahab taking on the Whale, in Democratic Vistas, he issued a caution:

 

“Bear in mind, too, that they [these pages] are not the result of studying up in political economy, but of the ordinary sense, observing, wandering among men, These States, these stirring years of war and peace. I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between Democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the People's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this book.”

The ordinary sense is your most democratic organ. A transparent eyeball for some, for others a nose for tabloidery, but always wandering – that is, refusing to settle in one circle or clique. And this is why, for Whitman, democracy is not a constitution, or an election, or a set of politicians – it is based on the ordinary sense writ large and small: literature. In “feudalism” – Whitman’s name for all that is past and undemocratic – literature is ultimately the reflection of a system of patronage and elevated and elegant subservience. It turns away from the ordinary sense.  Whitman sums up his credo in a one of those wonderful outbreathings that no other poet can do:

“It is curious to me that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus, and the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a  class, and the clear idea of a class, of native Authors, Literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole- mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses, radiating, begetting appropriate teachers and schools, manners, costumes, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of The States.”

I’m moved by this declaration of faith. It is to what is inside and underneath elections that, I think, democracy goes on. The allergy to “wokeness” seems to me an allergy to the ferment within and underneath, the ferment that has opened the doors in this Bluebeard’s castle of a civilization and seen the bloodshed and the butchery, and is trying to cope with it as it can. The first impulse, trained in us, is to throw down rules. But Moses went up to the mountain a long time ago, and came back with rules, and the democratic terror consists of the suspecting and more than suspecting, acting upon the perception that rules must be subordinate to sympathy, and that sympathy does not exist without a wandering with ordinary sense. It doesn’t get to fly, to unfold its wings, in coiled up rooms and relations.

And maybe we don’t want democratic flights all of the time, and want our rooms and relations.

But don’t want them too much. This, it seems to me, is where Whitman’s Democratic Vistas come in.

 

Southern California Death Trip

 

 

“He was kind but he changed and I killed him,”

reads the caption of the photo of a woman

in an old tabloid. She was headed to

the deathhouse, I suppose.

 

The American poem comes through the prose.

The grapple with the facts in the fur coat store.

“Somehow, she said, she felt as though

he had a spell over her.”

Don’t we know it, sister.

 

Under the night’s minus we register our discontents:

item: the silver fox stole;

item, a pack of Luckies; item, a silver lighter;

item, the .22 Ruger pistol

bought in Tijuana.

“How about it, honey, he asked.

“Sure, I’ll give you some loving, she said.

They found five slugs in the body

“where they would do the most good, she said.”

“The liquor store clerk said

the woman bought a bottle of 27 cent wine.

I just bought this coat across the street, she said

and I’m going to celebrate.”

Later, she made her escape with two others

Climbed the 12 foot high chain link fence.

Exit, stage right.

The ‘petite fugitive’ is a crack shot, the cops said.

Beyond the all points, she’s still out there

considering her options.

-Karen Chamisso

 

The Pure products of America

 

William Carlos Williams knew a few things about America. He knew the pure products of America went crazy, and he knew of the American lovemaking out there in the fields:

succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—

William was torn between admiration and horror, fight or flight.

And listen to American balladeers. They are never so wrought to a pitch as when the song is about killing women. Leadbelly via Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix via Patti Smith. Joe is going to shoot his old lady. And that, that is terror unnumbed. That is terror that comes out in buckets, and that entertains us all, one slasher audience under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Patti Smith is the interesting transitional figure here. Her way of collaging Hey Joe and Patti Hearsts kidnapping – or Patti Hearst’s joining the Symbionese Liberation Army, an Army dedicated to the liberation of nothing – has to be a nodal point, a cultural political nodal point, of the seventies.

But I don’t understand it. I sing along, but I don’t understand it.

Joe won’t have a noose around his neck – a symbol, an event, that is linked by every vein in our American bodies to lynching. And Patti Hearst – Patti Smith’s secret sharer of the name – won’t wear that name around her neck, the name her father and mother gave her. Her father’s pathetic speech to the press that she was a good girl – grind that back into his face.

But whose bodies litter the path to this liberation? And why is it, why, a “freeing”? Why this ecstasy in the face of such violence? On the down low side of an inheritance from the darkest Child ballads.

Williams came to no conclusions in the 1920s, when he wrote his poem. Although he was writing In the American Grain, he was never going to give you the word on high, like his Enemy-Double, T.S. Eliot. Categorical judgments put a noose around all our necks. But the game, that patriarchy speaks for “women”, is crooked, a matter of House rules when the House is an All Male Pimp show.  Which might be what Patti Smith, inveterate trans-performer, was moving towards.

Gaza notes

“The question of the qualification of the enemy is at the heart of the modern law of war. Without a doubt, since antiquity one has distinguished the private enemy (inimicus) from the public enemy (hostis), and that last from the brigand and the criminal. The distinctions were taken up by theoreticians of the rights of man in the 18th century. The question, thus posed, is not only who is one’s enemy, but what type of enemy one is dealing with.”

These magisterial lines open an essay by Michel Senellart entitled “The Qualification of the enemy in Emer de Vattel” , an obscure name to introduce one of the great turning points in Western “civilization” – which is more often an alibi than a description, but what the hell: one can hope.

Senellart’s topic is the civilizing of warfare in the eighteenth century – and by extension, the “barbarization” of warfare in the 20th and 21st century.

“I want to examine, in this article, the way in which the division between a combattant force and a non-combattant population was established in the law of modern war, and what consequences ensued. This distinction, as we know, is the foundation of the laws of war formulated for the first time by the Brussels conference in 1874 and then that of the Hague in 1899 and 1907, with the view of “serving the interests of humanity and the progressive demands of civilisation.” It cannot be separated from another distinction, the object of bitter controversies, between legitimate and illegitimate combattants. It is in the work of jurisconsul Emer de Vattel (1714-1767), author of a celebrated treatise on human rights (droit des gens), that their articulation appeared most clearly. However, it gave rise to two opposed readings, the conflict between which manifested the tensions inherent in the modern law of war.”

The use of this distinction has been, of course, utterly annihilated by the state of Israel, which has thus pledged its troth to a disastrous moral catastrophe, adopting the very means by which, once, the Jews of Europe were massacred and tortured to death.
One of the deep structural factors in racism is the unwillingness to recognize the Other’s imagination even to the degree of recognizing the other’s humiliation by the culture of violence and subordination visited upon him beyond the Pavlovian exterior marks that come with electroshock and reward. Sense, in the Other, doesn’t develop into sensibility. That is, from the point of view of the temporary Master. But the Other knows the master’s moves and the supposed rules of that Master utopia, civilization.
Within the Other a judgment forms. A sort of Last Judgment. It is shaped by every bomb dropped, every child smeared across the landscape, every widow and widower, every leg or arm torn away.
Having done away with the difference between inimicus and hostis, the government of Israel has endangered its population – and by propagating the myth that Israel “represents” the Jews of the diaspora itself, it has, with sinister intent, tossed that population into the same trap.
We’d do well, or at least we would be less satanic, to listen to the word that came out of the prophets and exile:
“Vanity[a] of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.”

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