What the gin and tonic sez

 Mostly, the politics of the U.S. is a measure of the public opinion of the upper 20 percent. For that cohort the U.S. has gone from strength to strength since Reagan's time. They live in a United States that we all recognize, since it is all we see. When we get a tv show about the 80 percent, it is usually cops or loveable comedies where the knockabout characters are just like us - played by millionaires.

Once upon a time, an actor playing a king or nobleman would have a status and assets much below that king or nobleman. Not now.

I would look with a less jaundiced eye at this history if I had been bathed in the waters of that prosperity, but alas, this was not my fate. Money has never blessed me. I attribute my money curse to a prank I played in the 9th grade, when before a group of friends I burned a couple of dollar bills to "prove" that money didn't really exist as a thing. The spirit of the bill took notice, and has since abundantly proved that money exists as more of a thing than I will ever be.

I mulled over these things in Felix's, a French cafe near the American embassy, yesterday. I am at present in Montpellier, but I had to visit our American embassy and prove who I am to the social security office there. Things went well. I even had pictures of myself, taken by authorized officials, showing I was who I said I was. It is a theology a bit more complex than that of the holy Trinity - I am my picture and my picture is me. There is something delightfully ancien regime about the social security card - there's no picture on it. For the state, though, there are only selfies, and no selves. So I nursed my gin and tonic, there, and thought of the life of my selfies.

In my retirement, I think I'll become an influencer. That was what the gin and tonic said.

Vico: "a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs."

 Vico and us

1. In the preface to his translation of Vico’s Le Méthode des études de notre temps, Alain Pons notices that Vico, in contrast to his opponent Descartes, recognizes the distinct cognitive and cultural and philosophical status of childhood and youth.

“. It is doubtlessly in their respective attitude to childhood that best reveals the depths that separate Vico from Descartes. Descartes could not console himself from the fact that “we have all been children before being men, from which it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they could have been, if we had had the entire use of our reason from the instant of our birth and had never been led but by it. The Research of the Truth is even more explicit: “One of the principle causes why we have so much pain in knowing” is that, with the child, “the best comes last, which is understanding”, and that before this, for years, we remain given to the senses, “which see nothing beyond the most vulgar and common of things,” to our natural inclination, which is “completely corrupted”, and to “impertinent nurses”. Vico, on the contrary, could be defined as the philosopher of childhood, of the world of the child as the childhood of the world. From his first inaugural discourse, he declares to the students, “Quivis vestrum puer maximo praelusit philosopho” – every child is the prelude to a great philosopher, because in him is spontaneously amassed a treasury of theoretical and practical wisdom that the speculative knowledge would have to “explain”, to deploy rationally. The child is not infans, he speaks, one must know how to listen to him. Vico reports, in the De Constantia philologiae, the phrase of one of his sons: My heart is always talking to me, and what a lot of things it tells me!” “

Pons is right to elevate the child – that evidence that maturity is, itself, but a phase – to the emblem of what Vico saw as the cultural decadence spread by the geometric spirit. He wrote his small tract on method at almost the same time Fontenelle was writing his on the utility of mathematics. It is a good contrast, since Fontenelle was resolutely on the side of the moderns, and Vico wanted to have his say about this quarrel. I see Vico as one of the primogenitive advocates of the imagination – leading the power of ingenium against a fundamental shift in the way we think of the human limit, that is, the restriction of what the human can do to the world. A shift that leads us, in the 19th century, into the building of the artificial paradises of metal and chemicals.

Pons quotes a letter Vico wrote to a friend concerning the education of the young man of his time: “It [Cartesianism] has filled their heads, Vico will say in a letter of 1729, “with such great words as ‘demonstrations’, ‘evidences’, ‘demonstrated truths’, thus preparing them to enter in a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs.”

That is our world now, of course, and we are ruled by those men.

2. Thanks to printing, books are published everywhere; this is why, with the moderns, those are so numerous who, not content to know one or two authors, have an erudition which depends upon abundant, varied, and almost infinite reading. And finally we have universities, which are institutions organized in view of the study of all kinds of sciences and arts, thanks to which intelligence, esprit and language are carried to their perfection. And in almost all these studies a single end is aimed at today: the truth. To the point that if I undertook to make a speech in praise of the truth, I would deserve the fact that one would respond to me, with stupor: But who has ever thought to dispraise it? - Vico.

Foucault revived Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural causes and consequences of the Will to Truth in the sixties; the diagnosis has rapidly penetrated to every sphere of the discourses devoted to the social sciences, and to the humanities. One hundred fifty years before Nietzsche, Vico was expressing his own discomfort with truth as the ‘single end’ of study, for reasons that reappear in Nietzsche’s account. It is a protest, on Vico’s part, that is almost wholly prophetic – for though, as Fontenelle wrote, the new mechanical ingenuity was appearing under the very noses of the poets and philosophers, in trades and shops, without the poets and the philosophers being aware of it, certainly the great European metropoles – London, Paris, Naples – had not yet been wholly caught up in the great transformation that instituted monetized commodity markets and industry on a mass scale, the concomitants of the artificial paradise created in the twentieth century, the isle of Synthetica that we are still exploring. Fontenelle, as Nietzsche noted in a passage in The gay science (a Viconian book), ‘grew after death”: ‘Those small, bold words over moral things, that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal eloges, seemed to his time to be paradoxes and games of a not inoffensive wit; even the highest judges of taste and reason didn’t see anything else in them – yes, including Fontenelle himself, perhaps. Now something unbelievable has happened: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read these dialogues with another feeling than that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and lift their progenitor into another and highter rank of intellects, as these did – justly? Unjustly?”

Vico’s examination of the “method” of the ancients versus the moderns is, on its face, an examination of the most modern of methods, that of science- as we find it in Descartes – with the ancients. But there is another face of his essay. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to look at what Vico says about printing. Remember that Vico, in the smallest of parentheses in his autobiography, tells us that his father owned a bookshop. Remember that the great encounter in Vico’s life – with the Bishop of Ischia whose patronage made him – occurred in another bookshop (Michelet mistranslates this as a ‘library” in his rendering of Vico), where Vico seemed to charm the Bishop with his knowledge of canon law, and his latin. Vico’s autobiography mentions several incidences concerning finding books, which was of course the bookseller’s trade. Among all these books and their quarrels we will surely find something a bit Oedipal, then, in Vico’s remarks about printing, and the preference for the quill – for copying.

At the same time, it is important to note the conjunction of the intellectual and the material here. Vico sees that matter is, in the human world, always a matter of routine.

“In fact, when books were written by hand, the copyists, in order to make their labors worth the pain, only transcribed authors who had a well established reputation, and, as they sold their copies dearly, the amateurs were sometimes constrained to copy them with their own hand. What admirable profit one takes from this kind of exercise! We better meditate a text that we write, and chiefly that we write in calmness, without precipitation, peacefully, and in always following the order. Thus is established between us and the authors not a tie of superficial acquaintance, but a long habit by which we finish purely and simply by identifying with them. It is for this reason that the bad authors, when one copied them by hand, knew disfavor, and the good saw their works diffused for the great benefit of all. Bacon made proof of more cleverness than good sense when he remarked that, in the influx of barbarians, the authors with the most weight sank to the bottom, while the light ones swam on the surface. In all genres, the most important, the best authors have come down to us, thanks to writing, and if this or that author has disappeared, one must attribute it to chance. When I question my memory (I wrote this when I was still not an old man) I perceive that I have seen writers who enjoyed while alive such glory that their works had been printed twelve times or more, and who are now disdained and even held in contempt. Others, remaining too long in obscurity and indifference, now see their name celebrated by a change in circumstance by the greatest experts.”

3. This is an odder passage than it might at first appear. It is not a plea for some quaint utopia of the hand held. Consider – it sounds themes – notably, the warning that mechanization works against authenticity – which are distinctly post-revolutionary. Furthermore, the man writing this is the son of a bookstore owner, who – one can say, literally – owes his bodily being to the printing press. Furthermore, the chance to study came to him from a chance conversation in a bookstore with a Bishop, carefully recorded and placed in the autobiography.

The ancients versus the moderns was a battle of the books, as Swift puts it (at about the same time as Vico), but it is the making of books as well as their content that concern our man. While it may seem that the analysis of mechanization is far removed from Vico’s protest against the geometric method, in fact, it is part of the same problem of exteriority. Just as the deductive method, in philosophy and physics, is nothing more than a baroque ornament, expressing no intrinsic truth about philosophy or physics, the printing press is the extrinsic mechanism that gives us no information about the quality of the rhetoric and themes of the books it produces, as it deviates from the track of the word – the special art of Hermes. To put oneself, by copying, in the track of the writer is a form of ‘magical’ materialism, one that is hard – and perhaps impossible? – to entirely give up. I’m ever your man for tracks and paths, backwards and forwards, and as such would link Vico’s words about copying with a more famous Viconian theme that is given to us a year later in his essay, “The wisdom of the ancient Italians. This is a passage translated from Michelet’s French translation:

The words verum and facturm, the true and the fact, are put in a relation one for the other by the Latins as inter-convertible, as the schoolmen say. For the latins, intelligere, understand, is the same thing as to read clearly and to know with evidence. They call cogitare what, in Italian, is called pensare et andar raccogliendo (ratio reason) designating among them a collection of numeric elements, and this gift proper to the human, distinguishing him from the beasts and constituting his superiority, which is why they call man an animal who participates in reason - rationis particeps – and who, consequently, doesn’t possess it entirely. Just as words are the signs of ideas, ideas are the signs and representations of things. Thus, as to read, legere, is to gather together the elements of writing out of which words are formed, intelligence, intelligere, consists in assembling of all the elements of a thing from out of which emerges the perfect idea.

One is able thus to conjecture that the ancient Italians admitted the following doctrine on the true: the true is the fact (the made) itself, and by consequence God is the first truth because he is the first maker (factor), the infinite truth because he made all things and the absolute truth because he represents all the elements of things, external as well as internal, for he contains them. To know is to assemble the elements of things, from which it follows that the thought cogitatio is proper to the human spirit and intelligence to the divine spirit, for God unites all the elements of things, external as well as internal, since he contains them, and he disposes of them, while the human spirit is limited as it is, and outside of all of what is not of it can relate to the external points, but can never unite everything in such a way that it can think about things, but not understand them – this is why he participates in reason, but does not possess it.”

In the background, outside of the window of a bookstore in Naples, on the branch of a figtree, two birds have settled from the Rg Veda, “one of the twain eats the sweet Figtree’s fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only.”

from the ancien regime to hemingway

 In the Revue Critique of May 23, 1921, there was a brief notice about the death of Comte Greppi at Milan. He was more than one hundred years old. The writer of the notice, Andre M. de Poncheville, alluded to the fact that when Stendhal was the consul at Civita Vecchia, he must have run into Greppi, then a young man who was in the entourage of the ex-empress Marie-Louis. De Poncheville noted that Greppi was trained in the art of diplomacy by Metternich himself – or at least he saw how Metternich did things in the years before 1848. Although, in a small event that signaled the end of Metternich's world, Greppi resigned in 1849 and only resumed diplomacy under the government of an independent and unified Italy.

De Poncheville did not note, because he undoubtedly did not know, that Greppi had entered literature proper through another portal: Ernest Hemingway.

Here he is, under the name Greffi, in Farewell to Arms:
“Count Greffi was ninety-four years old. He had been a contemporary of Mettemich, and was an old man with white hair and moustache and beautiful manners. He had been in the diplomatic service of both Austria and Italy and his birthday parties were the great social event of Milan. He was living to be one hundred years old and played a smoothly fluent game of billiards that contrasted with his own ninety-foury ear-old brittleness. I had met him when I had been at Stresa once before out of season and while we played billiards we drank champagne. I thought it was a splendid custom and he gave me fifteen points in a hundred and beat me.”
There are few people, perhaps no other people, who are accorded this accolade by Hemingway: “and beat me.”
Hemingway’s character doesn’t mention Stendhal. Sciascia, in one of his little fait divers essays, Poor Rosetta, notices the connection. It is a human thread across a literary history in which Stendhal emerged, just as he predicted he would, in the twentieth century to be a literary force. It is a coincidence that evokes a revery, this sense of a connected world. Sciascia doesn’t mention Greppi’s typically at ease mention in Garibaldi’s memoirs. It was Greppi who introduced the rough and ready revolutionary into the higher echelons of the Milanese aristocracy.
A lovely ancien regime life.

The adventures of the psychosomatic

 The psychosomatic has fallen out of favour, or, more complexly, has become in the popular imagination a way of detracting from the reality of a malady or uncomfortable situation. Partly this is the result of a good thing - a feminist demand that the medical profession treat the ailments of women with respect, rather than dismissing them as "mental" things women do. Since this happened and happens, that critique still has bite. However, I think the bite is in the dismissal of female testimony. And it does not tell us, fundamentally, about the psychosomatic.

There’s an obvious antinomy in the argument that psychosomatic conditions aren’t real. The ground of that objection is based in a sort of common folk psychological positivism, a naïve materialism. The argument goes that an illness or something with sickness like symptoms is real if you can trace the cause back to some alien presence in the body – a virus, a bacteria – or some genetic or natal cause. Otherwise, the symptom or disease like condition is not real, in as much as its cause is some idea. It is, instead, feigned. However, how would feigning be possible if ideas in some sense had no effect on the physiological condition of the body? Once we grant that the effect can occur, we have granted another causal route for bodily conditions. We don’t really have to go too far afield in our folk interpretations of our actions to see the most commonplace instances of this. I have an idea that I want to run, so I run. Running causes my heart to beat faster and my breathing to quicken. Nobody would say that the heart beating faster and the breathing wasn’t real. One might say, however, that I was proximately responsible for this by my decision to run. We can change our example and make the responsibility charge (which, I should point out, is a term that is overdetermined – it is not just a way of talking about a cause, but a way of talking about the morality of an act) a little fuzzier. I’m afraid of heights. When, for instance, I went up with my wife years ago to to have drinks on top of a swank L.A. hotel in a balcony that looks out from forty stories, I experienced some slight physiological Wilfred Changes and a great deal of a sort of proprioceptive mental discomfort that I cannot trace back to a decision I made, as in the running case. Instead, the phobia has a subconscious status. I am aware of it, but I can’t turn it off and on in the way I can the decision to run. Even in dreams, when I go high up I get afraid. Even those peope who are resistant to the idea of a subconscious would probably try to persuade me to treat it like running or other actions I turn off and on, implicitly acknowledging that it has another footing. In habit, say.

The point is, whether a condition comes from chemicals or a virus or something unconscious, it is real in as much as it is felt. A therapist might speak of an unconscious decision to feel in a certain way, using the model of decision-making that would put the idea on the same plane as the decision to run, but this is a simplification and distortion of the unconscious idea. Eventually, Freud, needing “deciders”, came up with a topography of the self that included the ego, the id, and the superego. It is not clear, however, that decision actually describes the effect of an idea on the unconscious level. We need, as Freud knew, to get rid of our authoritarian illusion that there are deciders all the way down. There isn’t. The rock does not decide to be a rock, the tree the tree, the sky the sky.

The unconscious is back in style, scientifically, although neurologists try to make clear that they are not talking about the yucky Freudian unconscious, with all that sex going on. This unconscious is sexless and data driven. It has become obvious that we take in far more sense data than we can consciously process. It has to go somewhere. The popular model for this is the User illusion – taken from computers. Users downloading a file will look at the little graph showing the file being downloaded as if it is connected to the activity, instead of being a mere icon pointing to the activity going on, and thus unconnected to it in a real sense – in the same way that the blinking light warning you to get oil for your car is not the thing you pour the oil over when you get the oil. The user illusion idea is that mostly we deal with icons in our consciousness instead of the real processes going on in our unconscious.

This view of the unconscious dovetails with Freudian theory much more than the neurologists and pop scientists think. That is because most of them have never read Freud at all, but have read magazine articles about what a kook Freud was. Oh well.

The violent resistance to the suggestion that a symptom or condition can have its ultimate cause in the unconscious is another symptom of the flatheadedness of our time. On the other hand, the original Freudian therapeutic impulse, which was about understanding our unconscious idea and thus ‘curing’ the condition or syndrome, seems to have been way too optimistic, way too premised on a conversion motif . What changes the body necessarily operates through the bodies tools, and corporal tendencies can reinforce themselves in different ways once a condition is established. It is likely that if a person were really suffering from some psychosomatic condition, he would really need certain physical treatments. Just as I would need, say, treatment if my panic over heights caused me to have a heart attack or something.

My point is that the rejection of the psychosomatic is something encouraged by the positivist trend in medical science that is ultimately therapeutically unsound.

The unconscious – can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Backrooms

 Went to see Backrooms yesterday with my son – who is an ardent fan of horror movies – and I began sceptical and came away impressed. Our first anti-AI allegory! It makes sense that AI is best attacked from the horror angle – it rather comes out of horror gothic, out of Frankenstein. The movie, I feared, would be boring, but the director, a twenty year old youtuber, Kane Parsons, is pretty expert at playing the dozens with the scary story/scary film genre. The jump scares are all, or almost all, built from implication, from noises and shadows.

I think I have detected, from the Descent and As Above, So Below to Barbarian a subgenre, aptly named on Reddit as Underground horror, in which the primal memory of going down the birth canal (okay, perhaps there is none back there in the cortex, but still) is twisted into the adventure of being chased through ever narrower corridors, from which one must escape the monster.

But to return to the Anti-AI motif – AI slop really is monstrous, so why not draw the obvious conclusion? We always turn to some gothic motif to make our liberal political points – to dystopia or allegory in Animal Farm and 1984 (and as a piece of art, incidentally, Backrooms is far superior to 1984) – and now it is the turn of the evil empires churning out AI. It is apt that a Youtuber feels the danger here – it is not a fake Luddite sense of all technology being bad, but a real sense that this technology is debasing the internet technology we have, in the same way cryptocurrency debases money by creating fake money.

So, I was wrong to irritate my son by making the Dad joke of calling it Bathrooms consistently when we were discussing going to see it. My bad.

Anger and repetition: a non-Kierkegaardian excursus

 

In Repetition, Kierkegaard’s founding binary is that between recollection and repetition.

As founding binaries go, that is a good one.

Myself, though, I have been thinking about anger and repetition. And here there is a psychology that, I believe, escapes the Kierkegaardian remit.

My own experience of anger, phenomenologically interpreted, is peculiarly driven by repetition. That is, my anger will express itself to me, in my head, as a sort of dialogue with the person I am angry with. This could be someone I know, or it could be someone on social media, or it could be someone with whom I have a bad encounter, etc. The anger will flow into formulas in my head that keep repeating themselves. Anger, I have noticed in angry arguments, does take that blamemaking, repetitive form. I would wager that if you record any angry argument – from societies as different as the Irish-Americans and Balinese – you will find a significant percentage of phrases or words repeated. Repetition is not only the form into which the feeling of anger is pressed, it becomes the motor of anger as it is experienced.

Now I would contrast this with that particular form of happiness called satisfaction. This is not Kierkegaard’s notion of happiness. It has a utilitarian spirit that is alien to his question about repetition – when repetition becomes conceptualized as a part of, or a critique of, dialectic.

But in my own experience, the thing about satisfaction is that it is shaped by refusing further repetition. It is not only absolutely of the moment, it is, in a sense, a refusal of both the past and the future. That is, of recollection and repetition.

My son used to have a very cute trait. When he was happy about, say, a meal, he would say this is the best thing I ever ate. And in that moment he meant it. Neither the past nor the future would alter the satisfaction that here, this food I am devouring, is the best I have ever eaten. This did not express a real quantitative judgment. I don’t think he was actually remembering a series of foods. Rather, the food presented itself, in the moment, as overwhelmingly satisfying.

Consumer society is, in its fundamentals, opposed to this peasant satisfaction. If satisfaction as stasis is encouraged, consumer demand will flatline. Satisfaction, from the corporation’s view, must be edged with dissatisfaction. No perfect moment – no satisfied moment – can be, theoretically, allowed. As this is impossible, the corporate compromise with satisfaction takes many forms. One of which is to take some satisfactory situation and make it more uncomfortable. To, in other words, make the customer just a little unsatisfied, without losing the customer. An unsatisfied customer might be willing to pay a bit more for a higher level of service, meaning discovering, once again, that satisfaction. In this case, satisfaction becomes positional – it becomes competitive, a minor triumph over other customers.

And we know how that goes. That is, if we have ever gone to the airport and flown on a plane. That is the whole business plan of airlines nowadays.

Repetition and anger can well become a political norm. I am not sure how I’d quantify this, but I do think periods of ebb and discontent are partly articulated by an increase in the use of wooden language – which is designed to be repeated. It is so designed that it can be used without actually giving the words any semiotic seriousness. This is a fact noticed by all polemicists – from Jonathan Swift to Karl Kraus.

I should ps this post: Freud, of course, conjoined repetition and anxiety - finding anxiety dreams that were curiously rife with repetition. Freud eventually used this material to develope the notion of the death drive, in which repetition is used as a control mechanism. I could go on... but I won't, except to point out that repetition as function sees repetition as subordinate to the drive, whereas I think that this misses the way repetition can take control of the control - the song, so to speak, is subordinate to the tempo, becoming a different song - a deformed song, a song varied beyond its canonical essence - as the tempo alters.

Karen Chamisso Poem

 ''I'm like a mike -- I have no set sound of my own,'

Said Peter Sellers, nailing

the twentieth century poetic.

I have emerged in the shambles after

and have witnessed the death

of all that imitative fury

which once seemed the modernist escape

from the boring drawl

of one’s perpetually Victorian parents.

Now the jokes in my childhood jokebook are all dead.

He said

- she said.

The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century

  An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts" - but the bottom 80 % does the deciding. The top 20 % is happy with their stocks, but appalled by Trump's boorishness. The bottom 80 % is unhappy with all of it.

For the top 20 percent, this has been a very good century. Their stock portfolios have made them rich. After an oopsy moment that spanned the 2007-2010 period, they were on the road to wealth once again, and have stayed on it for a remarkable 16 years.

Among those people, politics really is a return of the same: a sort of cartoon band of the same figures going around and around, and you could be fans of one or the other. And their political spokesmen - their pundits and pollers, their Nate Silvers and Matt Yglesiases - all agreed that what you do, if you do politics, is you looked at polls - to figure out what the underling class thought - and then you figured out messaging, and then the game went on. A serious game, absolutely removed from historical context or any perspective that would make the great 21st century they experienced as anything more than a grand success.

The 20 percent have had a lot of success slowing politics until it reflected this pivot: keep the means the wealthy use to get wealthier, and bend everything else to that. This is now called the Abundance ideology, before it was the third way, but its posiitional/class character is all about the same configuration.

The crushing of labor in the final stage of the Cold War and the post-Cold War neoliberalism created the social environment in which this 20 percent could talk aloud, one to the other, and call this politics. Now one part of this discourse is fraying - the alt-right is going back to its old openly racist, sexist, lbgt-phobic ways. The liberal gaze that once made overt racism a no-no even while instituting neo-Jim Crow jailing policies and the like has broken down. But the 20 percent is still having the best time.

Most of our analysis will continue to be milled by these people. But the collapse of the liberal gaze is a symptom that underneath, there are anxieties that all the stuff that was put away - for instance, the threat of an international labor movement, or the threat of street activism, etc. - are not so put away.

Oh Saul Alinsky - America turns its lonely eyes to you!

"The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on."

sanity and poetry

 

How much madness we’ve flushed down the drain!

The correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is instructive. Bishop stood for sanity, as much of it as she could stand. She grew up in a house with a mad parent, her mother. Lowell stood for insanity, or sanity shaken to vertigo – and of course suffered from madness himself.

I take this from Colm Tóibín's essay/review: 

“Some of their exchanges remain fascinating, such as the letter in 1957 in which Bishop responded to a draft poem (which became ‘For Elizabeth Bishop 2: Castine, Maine’) that Lowell had written about her in which he mentioned that her mother had tried to kill her. ‘I don’t remember any direct threats,’ Bishop wrote, ‘except the usual maternal ones. Her danger for me was just implied in the things I overheard the grown-ups say before and after her disappearance. Poor thing, I don’t want to have it any worse than it was.’ The following year, it must have struck Bishop with considerable force to learn that Lowell, who had had a breakdown, was incarcerated in the same mental hospital as her mother had been. ‘My mother stayed there once for a long time,’ she wrote to him. ‘I even have some snapshots of her in very chic clothes of around 1917, taking a walk by a pond there.’”

We have, of course, an odd and slightly menacing way of talking of ourselves as "wired" - as though nerves were wires. It is an odd thing, since the wire model of the nerve was pretty much a dead end, and the synapse showed us that it was something else that is happening in the brain and body. Yet we calmly speak of hard wiring, as though we were all appliances. A vision that has its roots in the maddest of delusions, truly of Schreber-like proportions. Wires, of course, don’t go mad, they rust, they misfire, they loosen. There are shorts, there are circuits.

It is a funny thing, but for me, it is only together, only in the circuit of their friendship, that I really appreciate Lowell and Bishop. We do like to take our writers one at a time, but often they come in twos – Blok and Bely, for instance; Verlaine and Rimbaud. Perhaps it was the unhappiness of Baudelaire’s life that he really didn’t find a pairing – he was always the albatross. 

Folie a deux – granted; But sanity is a deux, too. Don’t credit yourself with it if you have it – cause you didn’t make it, baby. You didn’t make it.

Left conservatism

1.Norman Mailer used to call himself a left conservative – a conservatism with no connection to capitalism.

In Mailer’s case, he had an allergy to progress and its symbols – to plastic, to contraceptives, to a certain bio-politics.

Well, I have sympathy for the allergy to plastics, but I don’t take chemistry as a force I oppose. My Old MAN, an a/c OG, bitched in the 90s about the regulations that we imposed on Chlorofluorocarbons. Those regulations were righteous, however. In some ways, the only presidential action since LBJ that was actually worth a shit was George H.W. Bush’s convocation of the big wigs to get an agreement signed to end the chemical aggravation of the ozone hole. The agreement moved the technology – it didn’t destroy HVAC.

Mailer, a Manichean, would have disapproved, perhaps. He definitely didn’t like the products of air conditioning – for instance, Miami Beach.

I think left conservatism is almost impossible in the U.S. – though certain alt-right people have poked at it. But it had a career that is worth looking at.

2. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

“There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.”

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

‘Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.’

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

‘It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.’

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

“It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Now, there is a sense in which this passage can be overemphasized. In the Great Transformation, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systematicity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defence of irreducible human and social qualities, the unbought grace of life, that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology.

Left conservativism does not have, cannot have, a great thinker as its totem. It pops up in the romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Hazlitt, Eliot, etc., but it is always a guest at the wedding, never one of the nuptial air. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself. Frankenstein’s creature is a casualty of this tension – the new man who comes into the world entirely without the unbought grace of life, though endowed with an irrepressible Lockean potential.

Helas, nous avons tous devenu des Frankensteins, mon vieux, A planet full

on Leo Perutz

 

One of Leo Perutz’s classmates wrote that his first memory of Perutz, an “uncommonly untidy boy” next to whom he sat on the bench at the Patres der Parister school in Prague in the 1890s: “In my first memory of him, I see his dirty, bloody hands; he was the enviable possessor of a wonderful pocket knife with which he’d cut his thumb under the bench, not accidentally but intentionally: “I’m going to shock the teacher,” he said. The he lay his hands stretched out on the desk top. The effect was enormous.”

This is a good story, made better by the fact that, unlike most schoolboy’s with a sense of grotesque (a set that includes almost all schoolboys I have ever known), Perutz went on to employ this sense in novels that somehow combine an extraordinary literary merit and the adventure theme of the thriller. Romances, as R.L. Stevenson called them. He wrote a number of them in the 20s and 30s – becoming a best selling author in 1928 with Wohin rollst Du, Äpfelchen. Then the 30s happened, and Hitler came, first in Germany and then in Austria in 1938. Leo Perutz, a Jew, emigrated to Palestine. He did not like Palestine or Israel, and returned in the 50s to Austria, where he died, failing to publish his last book, By Night Under the stone Bridge. In the late 80s, Perutz’s work was rediscovered. It is almost all translated, now, into English.

Borges was a great fan of Perutz’s novel, The Master of the Last Judgment: he ranked it as one of the greatest locked door mysteries. So, out of idleness and because I’ve been thinking about “investigative” novel plots, I read it last week.

I found it wonderful, although I also found it full of seemingly arbitrary transitions and subplots. They should not have functioned – the book should not have been so gripping – but they were sustained by Perutz’s knack for creating an atmosphere in which the ordinary becomes intermittent. The book was written in the 1920s, and set in the prewar period; perhaps the intermittence of the ordinary has its source in the ordinary slaughter of World War One, in which Perutz served. Or perhaps the source is in the Prague of Kafka and Meyrink, the very birthplace of modernist “weird” literature.

Daniel Kehlmann, the contemporary German novelist, wrote a long essay about Perutz in his “Kommt, Geister. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen”. Many are the essays that take up the tired rhetorical trope of “compare and contrast” – but Kehlmann does something clever with the trope by dipping it into a passage in a letter from Freud to Arthur Schnitzler. Freud apologizes for being so distant from Schnitzler, attributing that distance to Doppelgängerscheu – fear of the Double. Freud wrote that “behind the aesthetic appearance” of Schnitzler’s work he saw an identity with Freud’s own “presuppositions, interests and conclusions.”  Kehlmmann uses this idea to pair Perutz and Kurt Gödel.

It seems absurd, but Kehlmann makes it work. It turns out that Leo Perutz, besides being a novelist, was also a mathematician. His dayjob, in Vienna, was as a actuarial mathematician for an insurance company, and he even invented a formula in that field which is named for him.

Thus, Perutz is a mathematician and writer of fantastic novels that continually play with the conditions of their form, while Gödel is a mathematician whose work concentrates on the very form of the possibility of truth in mathematics who became a paranoid fantasist in the latter part of his career. In fact, it was out of paranoid fear of poisoning that he starved himself to death.

Gödel, I learned from Kehlmann’s essay, had to flee Austria after the Anschluss not because he was a Jew, but because Nazi officials fired him from his post as a Jew, reasoning that logicians such as Gödel were, practically, all Jews. He was the literal victim of a misconstrual of set theory.

Kehlmann’s pairing is imaginative. I, however, kept thinking of Chesterton while reading the Master of Judgement Day. The Chesterton of The Man who was Thursday, which is also an adventure tale in which the pieces don’t seem to add up. In which the protagonist thinks, about the anarchist group he was investigating:

“He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked.”

This is so fine a thought that I will never understand it – which is perhaps the only way to understand it. It could be said about the narrator in Perutz’s novel, Baron von Yosch, who stands as the puzzled investigator/victim of a circle of acquaintances among whom there occurs an epidemic of suicides. The Baron’s story is about those suicides. But the story doesn’t end with the Baron, but – in an epilogue – with the finding of the Baron’s story among the papers he had with him when he fell at the battle of  Limanova. The epiloguist, whoever it is, treats the Baron’s story with peremptory harshness – it is all lies, excuses for the Baron’s crimes. And so the curtain comes crashing down.

Chesterton is, in some ways, not at all Perutz’s Doppelgänger – he was an anti-semitic Catholic fanatic. But like Baron von Yosch, it was as part of Chesterton’s vices, rather than in spite of them, that he forged his narrative vision – his peculiar method of paradox. In one of the Father Brown stories, The Duel of Dr. Hirsch, Chesterton took the Dreyfus case – which, for Chesterton, had at its incongruous center the innocence of Dreyfus, a Jew – and transposes it to the case of Dr. Hirsch, who develops a formula for a weapon for the French government. A messenger with a letter from Dr. Hirsch to the German command explaining where that formula is to be found is discovered by a “chauvinist officer” named Dubosc. Hirsch challenges Dubosc to a duel. One of the officer’s seconds is Flambeau, a French detective and friend to Father Brown. Brown, looking at the letter, sees that is transcribes the location of the formula in a precisely opposite way from where the formula is. It is, in fact, so opposite that, using a rule of opposites, one could easily locate it.

But opposition is, in Chesterton’s view, less a semantic abstraction and more an incarnate absurdity. But means of opposition Father Brown deduces the truth about Hirsch and Dubosc – that in fact they are one man. Hirsch has simply disguised himself, written the letter, accused himself, and shown up Dubosc. “It is all like I was saying to Flambeau These opposites won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight.  If it’s white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line – there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong.”

Fan fiction and the stock market

 This is the year of the question: why is this bubble different from any other bubble?

I’ve pondered this. I’ve watched the stock markets in the U.S. follow Trump’s every word like ducklings following a big quacking duck. This, in spite of the fact that Trump’s every other word contradicts what he just said and will say again at the next opportunity. If there was ever an unreliable speaker, Trump is that speaker. Meanwhile, the price system, with its shaky grasp of reality, is showing a lot of spikes for a lot of those goods – petroleum, helium, nitrates – that constitute the global infrastructure.

If the theory that sought to deduce, from the financial markets, the sum total of information as it is quotidianly recognized, the goslings would not be following Trump.

But that theory is only right when it is right, which makes it less a theory than the economist’s dream. A dream at the basis of that vaunted thing, microeconomics.

I could batter on, but I’ll stick to one mania at a time, here.

So I began to think, what does this pattern remind me of?

Looking around, one sees the same odd trust in rhetoric over reality in every company Musk touches. From the point of view of mere profit and loss, Musk’s central company, Tesla, should be in big trouble in the market. Well, suckers, it is flying higher than ever.

Every time Musk issues another insane pronunciemento – for instance, that Tesla is gonna be king of a trillion dollar market in (human) driverless taxis, the goslings line up. The goslings invest. And then, poor forgetful ducklings, they see that Tesla is making a very pisspoor effort to enter a market that already has driverless taxis and there is no reason to think he has a plan for that. And they look to the next golden opportunity Musk announces. For instance, after loosing 18 billion on Space X, he’s set to IPO it, and the company is valued at a cool trillion dollars.

Why is this bubble different from any others?

It has come to me that what connects Trump and Musk is social media. Musk’s purchase of Twitter, from the business point of view, has been a disaster. The exodus of companies and the entrance of Nazi bots is impressive. But what if that purchase was, actually, great for Musk’s other companies? What if the valuation of Tesla, and the valuation of so many other “tech” companies, was a matter of fan fiction?

That, I think, is the key to the financial market in this visibly declining U.S. today.

Fan fiction is a very interesting genre. It takes some fictional celebrity – often a character from a video game or a movie – and it encloses that character in a fan’s fantasy. It quickly, of course, gets sexual, but what is more interesting is that the fiction is built on a sort of claustrophobic mandate: just that mandate that makes a fan actually fantasize about a character. This attraction is, of course, hard to build; and mostly fan fiction, of which there is floods on the internet, dispenses with the difficulties that went into really building the video game or the movie, and takes the props as givens.

What makes this bubble different is that it is a fan fiction bubble. And the “characters” in it have lent themselves largely to fan fiction construction. Trump is his own biggest fan, and his nightly visits to AI are definitely forms of fan fiction. Pomo, if you will, since the fan and the celebrity are one and the same. Similarly, Musk’s cult following is built on Musk’s own fandom for Musk.

What seems to be irrationality outside the sphere of fan fiction – narcissism, obsessiveness, Sadism of the saddest revenge porn kind – is fully justified and celebrated in fan fiction. The eerie parallel with the stock markets in the U.S. makes it impossible to construct a rational path towards investment or even towards gambling. It is all sucked into the fan’s dark hole. Outside the hole, we don’t, well, feel it.

curses

You could not, in words, writing, or printing, legally curse Queen Elizabeth. To do so put you on the road to having one ear removed, or half a tongue taken for fishbait -- that is if the hangman caught you. Guy Fawkes was prosecuted partly for saying that James was accursed. Progress has brought it about that you can legally curse Donald Trump, but you can't legally threaten him.

So to our question: what does that mean?

Cursing has definitely socially declined from the old glory, or inglory, days. Once it implied traffic with divine or demonic powers, and now it simply implies street level babbling, the unalterable fuck of all the movie script drug dealers. Once it was mixed up with blasphemy, slander, and a whole set of verbal crimes -- crimes that were, by their nature, eerie, insofar as they were hints of a black logos that operated just under the surface, just out of sight of the angels in paradise, which, to the streetview, was just a bunch of stinking losers and snitches. And indeed, there’s some truth in the idea that an angel is just a glorified snitch.

There's always been a bit of a mixup, within Christianity, about cursing. On the one hand, Jesus, in Matthew, seems to come out against it:

"Again, ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not perjure thyself: but thou shalt perform to the Lord what thou hast sworn. 34. But I charge you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God: 35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King: 36. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head: for thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37. But your speech shall be, Yes, yes; No, no for what is beyond these comes from evil." (Matthew 5).

 

On the other hand, our saviour enjoyed a good curse himself. Coming upon a fig tree that bore no fruit when he wanted fruit, like any fishwife he cursed it. Later it was observed to be dead -- quid erat demonstratum, or however the Latin goes. And then there are the Psalms, which are full of the most beautiful curses. And there are the Prophets. Nowadays, the secret service would definite pay an unexpected visit to Isaiah, to say nothing of Ezekial. These were men who knew how to wield a curse like a hammer, and ring down kingdoms. The Israel of then and the Israel of now are eerily similar in their sacrifice of babies to appease the god of nations. Isaiah would definitely be hung out by the media, nowadays, for his anti-semitic podcasts.

….

Shakespeare's Richard III dramatizes the curse the way The Merchant of Venice dramatizes the contract. There's a nice essay Jane Shore and the Politics of Cursing by Mary Steible, which takes the case of Jane Shore who, according to one source, cursed Richard III – thus taking part, as Steible nicely puts it, “in the historiographical hazing of one of one of England’s most unpopular monarchs.” Jane Shore was one of King Edward the IV's official concubines. She was stripped of her goods by Richard III, and according to the anti-Richard III literature that flooded the Tudor market (Richard being an inveterate enemy to the Tudors, and conveniently Punch-like), Jane replied with a good many curses that, in the way of a good curse, came true. Steibel examines some accounts of Jane's curses, and shows how Shakespeare substituted Margaret's curses in his play. Margaret was the widow of Henry VI, and a grande dame at the court. Steible makes some excellent points about the way Margaret figures in the play as the spokesperson for the curse. She quotes Little, a scholar who has researched liturgical curses:

"Pope Gregory the Great, says Little, concluded in his study of scripture that "God is said to curse and yet man is forbidden to curse, because what man does from the malice of revenge, God does only in the exactness and perfection of justice." (40) The kind of cursing undertaken by Shore and Margaret is not of the divine sort, and therefore, in the strictest sense, could not be regarded as prophetic, even if they do foresee the known end of Richard's mortal life. Little concludes from his study of curses that the Church's position is that "[o]rdinary cursing by ordinary people [is] decidedly not legitimate. (41)"

The curse, like the oath, was officially a hierarchical speech act, and not to be usurped by the mob. But the mob had its own reasons.

Shore curses Richard over loss of position, fame, property--material goods. Margaret, to be sure, lost much more than Shore, but she wants vengeance, not the "perfection of justice." Her ravings are human, not divine. Shore's are equally human. Indeed, the uncontrolled anger of each woman implies the disorder that results from loss of control, and, in some ways, parallels the loss of control that leads Richard to his fated end.

Steible infuses a feminist colour to her view of cursing: "If words, just words, could cause harm--earthly or otherwise--to others, anyone who could speak could acquire a power that superseded rank, gender, physical strength, and so on. Perhaps curses were feared to "touch the hidden order of things," especially in regard to the divinely sanctioned order of the monarchy; Shore and Margaret both use words with the intent to wish ill upon Richard's body, their curses being directed against his birth, his body, and his soul. The king's body natural is stigmatized, dismembered even. Speaking through their characters, Churchyard and Shakespeare both protest Richard, both make treasonous noises. Embedded in the dominant discourse of the divinely provident, the subversive speech act of cursing is voiced by politically weak figures, "historical" women who are little more than disaffected players in the pre-Tudor court. Having further de-mystified the kingship of Richard through curses, their job is done. Cursed themselves with charges of witchcraft and stigmatized by their own foul cursing, Shore and Margaret are authorized to speak like women in the historical narrative, that is, like witches."

Political weakness, here, might be in the eye of the litterateur, since these women historically were not necessarily weak. Steible does not mention Michelet in her text, but in “La Sorcière”, Michelet reads the reversal of the Lord’s Prayer – the characteristic speech act of the witch – as a tie between the world of the polis, ruled by men, and the rule of the counter-polis, ruled by the Goddess.

“It took the Devil, that ancient ally of woman, her confidant from Paradise, it took the sorceress, this monster who does everything backwards, inversing the sacred world, to occupy themselves with woman, to crush under her feet their [the church’s] practices…”

It is a powerful trope, and a romantic one. At least in Shakespeare’s Richard III, it is the man-devil who is cursed. He has created the inverse kingdom, which is perhaps why the powerful curses come not from women, but from Richard's victims. These curses are definitionally pure, in a sense, because they are so starkly contrasted with the curse's opposite: blessing. Thus, Edward, and Clarence, and the young Princes, and all of Richard's dead victims visit him in his vision and pronounce his sentence, and then pronounce a blessing on Harry, progenitor of the Tudor line and Richard's opponent. It is as if one geneology -- Richard's cursed one -- is being formally replaced by another - Harry's blessed one. As the little Prince's say, "thy nephews souls bid thee despair and die!"

Richard is too modern a man to think that the curse has power. "Soft, I did but dream/O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me." Once the curse is so rationalized, it loses its magical power -- and in its downfall brings all magic with it.

Which brings us to De Quincey's strange essay on Modern Superstitions. The architecture of DeQuincey's essays is always Piranesian, a descent from the tower to the dungeon by an infinite amount of stairs. In this essay he takes us, by degrees, from those superstitions later comprised under Ruskin's term, the pathetic fallacy -- that projection onto the natural of the human - to the superstitions of the ominous. The ominous, according to De Quincy, was as much the ancient's burden as colonialism was the white man's. He is particularly feverish (De Quincey is always supremely feverish) about the the accidental coincidence of a given name with some ill thing, in which the ancients saw malign powers. De Quincy instances the refusal of a Roman legion to go into Germany under the command of a man named Umbrius Ater -- a "pleonasm of darkness," as he puts it: Shadow Black. Offering a series of similar anecdotes, De Quincy gets to the paradoxical crux: that crossing of sign and accident, language itself: "These omens, derived from names, are therefore common to the ancient and the modern world. But perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed as one subdivision or variety under a much larger head,viz. words generally, no matter whether proper names or appellatives, as operative powers and agencies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against some party concerned from the moment that they leave the lips."

The essay probes the very texture of God's invisibility, which is, of course, symboled, modeled, consistes in logos -- the word, out of spit and air. That movement from the silent movie world of our apishness to the incredible communications of our never stilled tongue -- it has left a scar inside us. Richard III was right: it is our conscience, superstition's last stronghold.