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 19th 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 19th 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.”
Hume’s 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. 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 17th 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.
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.
Which is why 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.
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