nostalgia to karma - scattered notes

Nostalgia, that longing for a past that longing has created, is a trap that is hidden in the path of that philosophical critic – like LI – upon whom the contemporary lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living. A revenant, in fact. For such a critic, this nightmarish condition is recognized, justly, as the result of multiple framing conditions constructed over the course of the past. The contemporary is a synthesis, and it is the critic’s job to dissolve it into it composite parts, each the result of decision after decision, systematic shifts in production and attitude, a social psychology that represses its lost opportunities, and even individuals, singularities, karma. And once the critic has done his job, he thinks he’s found the key, the story, the narrative. But, in fact, he’s still entangled in the synthesis he has supposedly dissolve, he’s still unconsciously seeing the contemporary as the destination to which the past tends. Which is how it becomes easy to slip into the language of heroes versus villains. And, if the critic is a dreamer, as LI is, he approaches his task with the sigh, “if only,” on his lips. “If only” is the prologue to the utopian dream.

So it goes with the strange story I am putting together, that story of the happiness of the people, the happiness of the individual, the happiness of the system. In Milan, in 1796, the occupation government set up by Napoleon’s soldiers launched a contest for the best essay on the topic, “which form of free government is most conducive to the happiness of Italy?” I can see that this is a beautiful question. The beauty of it is buried, of course, under centuries of trivializing the terms, but – it is definitely a beautiful question.

... I’ve been following the adventurer because it is under the form of adventure that an individual could range the positional social structure in the early modern period. And because, unlike the artist or the politician, other creations of the early modern period, the adventurer never ceased to be a character type and only a character type. It never became a vocation. However, as a character type, it loaned itself to both artist and politician.

And at certain extraordinary moments, the adventurer became universal. In a sense, that is what a revolution is: the interval in which everyone, whether they want to be or not, is an adventurer.

....

I came across a wonderful description of a Neapolitan poet, Eleonora Fonseca Pimental, who supported the French when the French army took Naples and proclaimed a Republic in 1799. The French were extremely unpopular with the peasants, the aristocracy, and the lazzaroni. Pimental was aware of this, but believed that education was the answer – the people must be enlightened. Unfortunately for her, the counter-revolution, led by priests, retook Naples for the King. It was a bloodbath for the Jacobins and Republicans. According to Christopher Duggan’s history of Italy, The Force of Destiny, many of the intellectuals, the radicals, were rounded up and hung or decapitated. About Pimental he writes: She went to the scaffold on 20 August, her brown skirt tucked modestly around her legs, and uttering the words of Virgil: Forsam et haec olim meminisse juvabit – “Perhaps one day even these things will bring pleasure.” Oblivious to such erudition, the crowd cheered loudly as she hanged.” (23)

Karma is a royal family. Pimental was hung due largely to the actions of the King Ferdinand’s Queen, Caroline. Queen Caroline had, at one time, been a patron of culture, and of all things French, at the Court, to display opposition to her enemy, the King of Spain. Everything changed, changed utterly for her on October 16, 1793. That was the date of the death of her sister. Queen Caroline’s sister was a woman named Marie Antoinette.