Friday, August 19, 2022

From Poyen to Hitchcock - for a mesmeric history of the new world



Alexis de Tocqueville landed in America in May, 1831 and spent nine months there; out of that experience he wrote Democracy in America and became famous.
Charles Poyen never quite became famous, and is now utterly forgotten. He came to America by a convoluted journey worthy of a Greek hero – his itinerary was littered with omens, pronounced by somnambulists. He consulted a somnambulist, Madame Villetard, in Paris, looking for a cure for a chronic pain he suffered from. Her remarkable knowledge of his disease- which, we are assured in his memoir, The Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, was not altogether beyond Poyen’s own comprehension, since he was a medical student – led him to ask her about his proposed journey to Guadaloup, where part of his family resided, apparently as plantation owners. Madame Villetard gave her approval, so off our hero went, to convalesce and further explore the mysteries of somnambulism. He did so, using some ‘colored servants’ as subjects, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mesmeric trance touched on something universal: …the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties among every nation and under whatever skin, black red or white, it may be concealed.”
Admirable sentiments. However, the somnambulists of Guadaloup predicted that his illness would not resolve itself any time soon, so he set off for New England, where he had relatives. He went to Maine. He went to Lowell. He taught French. And, admiring his new country, he resolved to plunge into its difficulties, writing a book that ‘was calculated to avoid all social commotions and give equal satisfaction to the parties interested.’ This was in the 1830s, and it was to be expected that a plantation owning Frenchman would attack abolitionism – but, of course, not in the meantime defending slavery. Then Poyen turned his hand to translating and lecturing on animal magnetism. Of course, he felt the heat of prejudice – after all, the theory had been exploded by the ‘great Franklin’ fifty years before, alluding to the committee, including Franklin, Bailly, Lavoisier, Thouvet and other notables that investigated Mesmer, under the direction of the royal government in 1784, which concluded that Mesmeric effects were the result of pure suggestion. It was patriotic to disbelieve in animal magnetism. But the enlightenment America of Franklin’s time had disappeared. Paine, coming back to America in 1803, had already written bitter articles about the narrow and bigoted class that had supplanted the enlightened colonial elite. Poyen didn’t find the class particularly bigoted, except, of course, among the establishment medical men.
Poyen was just the kind of enterprising individual that America in the age of the Great Awakening tended to embrace. He had a story of sickness. He had a story of a cure. And the cure was not simply a cure, but a metaphysics, a cosmology, the beginning of a new world. From our diseases we make our discoveries.
Poyen confesses that he himself could not ‘magnetize’, but he quickly found a countryman of his, a Monsieur Bugard, a French teacher, who could. Thus began a practice that was also an exhibit.
It wasn’t that Poyen was the first Mesmerist in America, but he was the first well known Mesmerist missionary. And he had an effect in America that was, in some ways, larger than Tocqueville’s. He attracted a number of New England mechanicals who put down their tools and took up magnetic cures. Among them was a Mr. Phineus Quimby – the very name is like a Jules Verne character! – who heard Poyen lecture in Belfast, Maine, where Quimby worked as a clockmaker. Poyen saw that Quimby was a natural, and Quimby believed him, so like many a disciple, Quimby gave up his former life and embarked on a new one as a healer. Among those Quimby operated upon was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.
Between Poyen’s stay in America and Quimby’s own practice, certain parts of the mesmeric doctrine melted away – or rather merged with other intellectual currents in New England. It is no accident that Poyen was attracted to the slavery debate – abolitionism and other social causes – woman’s suffrage, temperance, etc. - and spiritualism were joined at the hip in pre-bellum America. As was the intellectual culture that, for Edgar Allan Poe, was the only ‘aristocracy’ in America.
Poe, in the 1840s, took up mesmerism as a convenient device for producing uncanny effects. It worked – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a fan letter to Poe, mentioned that ‘Valdemar’ had produced a sensation in England. Indeed, it produced a sensation in mesmeric circles in general. The story begins with a pitch perfect reproduction of the tone of the animal magnetism pamphleteer, with its mixture of personal experience and scientific ‘fact’:
“My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extend, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.”
Of course, the experiment in magnetic influence is held upon M. Ernest Valdemar – who is, of course, originally a Frenchman now resident in Manhattan. Poe has a lot of his usual fun setting up his joke: Valdemar, skinny and dying, is prevailed upon to allow himself to be subject to the mesmeric influence during his ‘dissolution’. Startlingly, after his death, Valdemar still communicates with the mesmerist:
“… here were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.
I have spoken both of "sound" and of "voice." I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. Now he said:
"Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead."
The story was published as a true account, originally, in England, although Poe didn’t intend it as a hoax. Poe’s own obsession/compulsion was with erotic resurrection. Always a great griever, Poe found a woman who reminded him of his dead wife – one Sarah Helen Whitman. She knew of him from common friends, one of whom had written to her about his ‘uncanny’ ways – ‘the strangest stories are told, and what is more believed, about his mesmeric experiences.’ He had talked to her a total of one time when, in 1848, he received a Valentine from her. That prompted one of his spookiest love letters, an outpouring that even ‘Helen’, as he decided to call her, must have found daunting. This includes this passage:
“Immediately after reading the Valentine, I wished to contrive some mode of acknowledging – without wounding you by seeming directly to acknowledge – my sense – oh, my keen – my exulting – my ecstatic sense of the honour you had conferred on me. To accomplish as I wished it, precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however; and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems; and then the lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first purely idea love of my soul – to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you – flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all – all that I would have said to you – so fully – so accurately and so exclusively, that a thrill of intense superstition ran at once through my frame.”
A voice at a distance, so gelatinous as to be congealed into dead print. Naturally, Poe's one meeting with Sarah/Helen had led to a walk in the cemetery. The actor being captured by the act - such things always seem to happen to America's outlaw writers.
I do not know how thoroughly Hitchcock knew Poe, but Poe's theme, and the theme of the mesmeric influence of the dead, pervades Vertigo. While another fifties classic - Lolita - toys of course with Poe's fascination with girls. Oh, that male desire for the resurrected femme fatale!

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

the geography of lost

 


There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream.

There is a vital connection between this dreaminess and adventure. Simmel wrote that adventure cuts itself off from normal life and is recalled as a kind of dream – but what kind? Lostness, I think, is the condition of adventure.
In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. There are people we know who fall in love, say, with a certain type. From outside, you recognize it. But from inside that lover’s illusion, as you might think it, there is all the difference in the world between x and y. How does this person’s radar pick out these loves? Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our libidos. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again.
Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction:
“Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.”
Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life:
“When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that this difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other. And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.”
That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course:
“While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, within this movemen it becomes a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which is somehow bound up with the center.
The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb].”
As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear.
Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on.
“The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.”
These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future.
Simmel’s adventure concept, as one can see, is akin to lostness. I’d suggest that the most characteristic lostness there is is being lost in a wood. The beginning of the Inferno casts its shadow precisely because the forest represents a certain alienness to human settlement. It is a tree settlement, a bushes settlement, something that arises without human thought or intention, but that is visibly a settlement, a matter of mutual interdependence, something that is, perhaps, beyond us. To be lost in the world is, partly, in my way of conceptualizing it, about giving ourselves up to the strange – and the stranger. The ultimate strangers are non-human coordinating communities – the community of the sea, the community of the mountains, the forests. These strangers are echoed in the strangers, the human ones, where adventure takes its course.
And the moral of all this is Miranda’s:
“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!”

On the social utility of fat cats

Since we have just decided to make our unofficial plutocracy official, I thought this essay I wrote in 2019 might be useful. We need to disc...