Deutsche Herbst

It is thirty years. Thirty years since the Deutsche Herbst – the attack by the RAF in Germany that was meant to free their imprisoned members. Spiegel, which is falling all over itself with nostalgia and comparisons to 9/11, labels it the war of “six against six million”. The fall brought the assassination of General Siegfried Bruback, an attack on the government offices in Karlsruhe, the kidnapping and execution of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the head of the German Employers Association, and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 in which the hijackers coordinated their demands with the Schleyer kidnappers. The airplane eventually landed in Mogadishu, after the hijackers had killed the pilot. The plane was stormed by a special commando force from the BDR and all of the hijackers were killed. That night, Death Night, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe supposedly committed suicide. The one survivor, Irmgard Möller, who nearly died of stab wounds she supposedly inflicted on herself with a regulation piece of cutlery – a butter knife - has always denied that they committed suicide. You can read her side of the story in this interview. The laborious inquiries set in motion by the state came to the suicide conclusion in spite of the fact that the story is, even on the face of it, preposterous. Myself, I don’t believe that Andreas Baader had a gun smuggled into prison so that he could shoot himself in the back of the head. According to the official account, they were able to communicate with each other, in spite of the prison’s attempt to stop them communicating with each other, by wired together their radios and turning them into transmitter/receivers, although they had been caught at this before, and - as Moeller points out - their cells were often searched. A lot of wire was definitely ‘found’ in their cells, enough for Gudrun to hang herself, the next morning. However, the wire and smuggled ammo stories never did become believable. Yet the press accepted it, mostly without question – since to question the story would be to admit that the State operated outside the law in crushing a Revolutionary group that claimed that the State’s laws themselves were a form of violence.



LI has written other posts on the RAF. We admit to a fascination. The RAF communiqes of the time have changed from the late sixties and early seventies. In the beginning, the RAF was communicating with a sizeable outside group of potential sympathizers. By 1977, the audience had dwindled down to two groups: the cadre and the cops. Similarly, the RAF was no longer striking to bring down the system, but merely to rescue its people. It isn’t the dull Marxist jargon that makes the communiqués so sad, but the dwindling of their scope. In 1977, remember, the Western world was going through the kind of crisis that offered a number of different possible futures. The neo-liberal path was merely one of them. Rüdiger Safranski, the biographer of Nietzsche and author of a new book defending the Romantics, points out in this interview that the RAF had a certain glamor rooted in the romantic culture :

S: How much of the great and beautiful in literature, in music has arisen out of the aetheticization of death? what would literature and art be without the glorification of violence? without the celebration of martyrs? But in politics one doesn’t want that – for good reason. There, we both want and need a system that carefully filters out these aspects.

q: The We of which you speak doesn’t include the Rüdiger Safranski of 1968. At that time Safranski propagandized the the “Dionysierung der Politik”.

S: Yes. “Imagination in power” Thus, at the end of my Romantic book I become ganz cool and say that that has never been a good idea. 68 was for me, strongly, a romantic movement, all the way up to the RAF. The described their struggle internally, in reference to Melville’s novels, as one against the white whale. This way of blending political action with literary images and thus giving political business a deeper meaning has been described by Novalis: "When I lend the common object a higher sense, the usual a secret aspect, the known the value of the unknown, the finite an infinite semblence, I romanticize it.”

I think Safranski seriously underestimates the social root that binds the artist to the politician, which was so clearly seen by Weber. Both are types which were freed, in the early modern era, from the system of patronage – it is one of those fine, archaic nuances about Goethe that he actually returned to the system of patronage, in Weimar, making himself the last kept artist, in a sense – and both unconsciously reflect that act of emancipation in everything they do. The idea that we have found an ideal political system and can now all go to sleep, in the era of Bush and the criminal war in Iraq, is one that LI rejects, of course.

I had not know about the RAF’s appropriation of Melville. So I went to an interview with Stefan Aust, which was also pointed to, last month, in Harpers by Scott Horton Horton quotes this part of the interview:

Q: In the language of the RAF [Rote Armee Faktion] the state was not just “the pigs,”[the pig system] but also Leviathan, the Great White Whale, Moby Dick. Why did the RAF members use code names taken from Moby Dick?
A: Gudrun Ensslin had this idea, in fact she thought up code names for the group members, in order to mislead those who were conducting surveillance. She took almost all the names from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. The demonic, mono-maniacally crazy captain Ahab meant Baader, Starbuck was used for Holger Meins, the Carpenter for Jan-Carl Raspe, Quiqueg for Gerhard Müller, Bildad for Horst Mahler, Smutje for Ensslin herself. The whale Moby Dick, who appears in the book as a parable, a deeply coded complex of symbols, was taken yet again as a code. The whale is Leviathan, and Leviathan is a symbol for the state, a state whose papier mâché mask of deceptive appearances the RAF was committed to smashing. “For by Art is created that great Leviathan, called a Common-Wealth, or State (in latine, civitas), which is but an artificiall Man,” that’s the opening sentence of Hobbes’s Leviathan, which is quoted in Melville’s Moby Dick. This Leviathan-State, this white whale, was the object of the terrorists’ pursuit. That’s why this was an extremely appropriate parable for what the terrorists did. The figures that appear in Moby Dick correspond in fact very closely to the individual figures of the RAF. “

He didn’t translate the next part:

Q: Let’s stop for a second with Ahab as Baader.

A: Listen to this about Baader: „Nor will it all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or through his particular circumstances he have what seems a half willful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. All tragical greatness rests on a certain break in their healthy nature, of that you can be certain.” [this last sentence doesn’t accurately translate the passage in Moby Dick, by the way] So writes Gudrun Ensslin, citing Melville over Captain Ahab, to Ulrike Meinhof about Baader. Actually, this says a lot. Ensslin was actually a great psychologist. She was on the trace of the fact that Baader’s struggle against the state bore features of a metaphysical end struggle, similar to that which ruled Ahab against the Whale.
…
“I would even strike the sun itself if it offended me,” says Ahab about himself. And further on. “How can the prisoner be free, if he hasn’t broken through the wall? For me this white whale is the wall, close before my face. Behind it, I often think, there is nothing.” You cannot better formulate the transcendental self-styling of the RAF.

You will even find this when you look behind the other code names. As I said, Starbuck, the chief mate, was Holgar Meins. About Starbuck Melville writes in Moby Dick: Sie werden das auch finden, wenn Sie hinter die anderen Decknamen schauen. Wie gesagt, Starbuck, der Erste Steuermann, war Holger Meins. Über Starbuck heißt es in „Moby Dick“: „Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred the captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it.“ Yes, this was exactly what it was like between Holger Meins and Baader.”

For the standard view of the deaths of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe, you can read this LBR article, focused mainly on Gerhard Richter’s paintings. You will notice that the state's version of those deaths and the smuggled in guns is accepted without a whimper, or even noting that the one survivor disagrees absolutely with the account.

Surely some of this stirred Delillo to make one of the characters in Falling Man an art dealing sympathizer with the RAF.

Usually, histories of the radical enlightenment wind through the philosophers and the natural scientists. May LI suggest another path? A primal scene of resistance, no less – which, like all primal scenes, begins with the opening of the eye – although in this primal scene, there are only shadowy proxies for Daddy fucking Mommy. It begins like this:

“Don Quixote raised his eyes and saw coming along the road he was following some dozen men on foot strung together by the neck, like beads, on a great iron chain, and all with manacles on their hands. With them there came also two men on horseback and two on foot; those on horseback with wheel-lock muskets, those on foot with javelins and swords, and as soon as Sancho saw them he said:

"That is a chain of galley slaves, on the way to the galleys by force of the king's orders."

"How by force?" asked Don Quixote; "is it possible that the king uses force against anyone?"

"I do not say that," answered Sancho, "but that these are people condemned for their crimes to serve by force in the king's galleys."

"In fact," replied Don Quixote, "however it may be, these people are going where they are taking them by force, and not of their own will."

"Just so," said Sancho.

"Then if so," said Don Quixote, "here is a case for the exercise of my office, to put down force and to succour and help the wretched."

This is from Chapter 22 of the first book of Don Quixote. It is a key chapter, for it provides the motor that ties together the first book. By freeing the prisoners, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza become, themselves, outlaws. This provides the loose plot into which Cervantes can fit his episodes – a blessed structure, that shows up, in variations, throughout the succeeding centuries of the European novel.

Blockhead!" said Don Quixote at this, "it is no business or concern of knights-errant to inquire whether any persons in affliction, in chains, or oppressed that they may meet on the high roads go that way and suffer as they do because of their faults or because of their misfortunes. It only concerns them to aid them as persons in need of help, having regard to their sufferings and not to their rascalities. I encountered a chaplet or string of miserable and unfortunate people, and did for them what my sense of duty demands of me, and as for the rest be that as it may; and whoever takes objection to it, saving the sacred dignity of the senor licentiate and his honoured person, I say he knows little about chivalry and lies like a whoreson villain, and this I will give him to know to the fullest extent with my sword…" – Chapter 30

The relationship between the intellectual and power has always fascinated intellectuals, who like to think that they are the repositories of true power – the poets will always trump the legislators in that long run where we are not, contra Keynes, all dead – some of us live on in books. But the line of philosophes, sages and, I’ll admit, buffoons who represent LI’s notion of the intellectual elect spring out of that twenty second chapter of Don Quixote.

It is much to my purpose, here, that the whole of Don Quixote can be read as a comically misshapen imitatio. Indeed, Don Quixote is just at the right age – middle age – to have his head so addled by romances that the traditionally strong urging of the middle aged heart in the pre-capitalist world takes its shape not through a meditation on the savior, but through a meditation on the knight redeemer.

Cervantes does not present his knight as a completely deluded man in this chapter. In fact, he raises the moral risks by having Quixote talk to the prisoners. Each confesses to his crime, and one of the criminals is “the famous Gines de Pasamonte, otherwise called Ginesillo de Parapilla,” whose feats have apparently entered into common lore. Unlike the headlong charge against the windmills, here there is no case of hallucination, even if there are comic verbal confusions. At the end of learning that one man is a thief, another a pimp, another a committer of incest, Don Quixote still tells the chief guard to let the men go free – and when he refuses, Don Quixote attacks. Later, in chapter 29, a curate, who has been told of the action by Sancho Panza, will supply the liberal voice of conscience that tells us of the consequences of our knightly acts. Of course, the consequences, as described by the curate, are entirely fictitious:

"I will answer that briefly," replied the curate; "you must know then, Senor Don Quixote, that Master Nicholas, our friend and barber, and I were going to Seville to receive some money that a relative of mine who went to the Indies many years ago had sent me, and not such a small sum but that it was over sixty thousand pieces of eight, full weight, which is something; and passing by this place yesterday we were attacked by four footpads, who stripped us even to our beards, and them they stripped off so that the barber found it necessary to put on a false one, and even this young man here"—pointing to Cardenio—"they completely transformed. But the best of it is, the story goes in the neighbourhood that those who attacked us belong to a number of galley slaves who, they say, were set free almost on the very same spot by a man of such valour that, in spite of the commissary and of the guards, he released the whole of them; and beyond all doubt he must have been out of his senses, or he must be as great a scoundrel as they, or some man without heart or conscience to let the wolf loose among the sheep, the fox among the hens, the fly among the honey. He has defrauded justice, and opposed his king and lawful master, for he opposed his just commands; he has, I say, robbed the galleys of their feet, stirred up the Holy Brotherhood which for many years past has been quiet, and, lastly, has done a deed by which his soul may be lost without any gain to his body."

According to Roberto Gonzalez Echeveria’s Love and the Law in Cervantes, the 1560s saw a typical modern response to a military and economic crisis: the state swelled the numbers of prisoners, who could then be used on galley ships. To do this meant expanding the number of offenses and expanding the role of the police, such as they were, much as such things have been done for twenty years in the U.S. The crimes, of course, are all individual, and fill, link by link, the prison factory space, while the larger crime – a system of criminal law that constitutes itself a crime – is committed by nobody. Don Quixote, charging against the proxy person of the king in attacking those raffish guards on the open road, makes himself a criminal, and turns Sancho Panza into his accomplice. Yet according to his own standards, he remains evermore the loyal knight to a king whose real traits are supplanted by romantic ones.

Without the outlaw knight, the radical enlightenment would be a legalism. With it, it becomes a rich drama of false starts and causes. A true outlaw knight ventures even outside that law which the intelligentsia now imposes on itself – the law of the smart. The law of the test. The law of the grades. The insane chain gangs of meritocracy. It is colder outside, and you might work in a gas station or a grocery store, but … this is where the knights are.

NYT - in the genteel psycho tradition

LI has to point our readers to a fine, fine example of media contempt, brought to us by our good friends at the NYT, a newspaper that has showcased so many of the great intellects of our time: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Condi Rice – you name it. Intellects like sounding brass and organ music to the ever sycophantic promoters of the current elite. Yet outside of the magic circle, occasionally some upstart Gunga Din figure creeps in. One who isn’t with the program! One who isn’t on the page! Such, of course, is Mohamed ElBaradei. The wog won a Peace Prize, which marks a man as a deluded leftist, unless the man is a distinguished op ed contributer, like the blessed Henry Kissinger. And here he is again, in fuck up mode, keeping the Bush administration from rolling out their next war! The latest round of negotiations with the Iranians is described in these intro grafs:

“Late in August, Mohamed ElBaradei put the finishing touches on a nuclear accord negotiated in secret with Iran.

The deal would be divisive and risky, one of the biggest gambles of his 10 years as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran would answer questions about its clandestine nuclear past in exchange for a series of concessions. With no advance notice or media strategy, Dr. ElBaradei ordered the plan released in the evening. And then he waited.

The next day, diplomats from the United States, France, Britain and Germany marched into his office atop a Vienna skyscraper to deliver a joint protest. The deal, they said, amounted to irresponsible meddling that threatened to undermine a United Nations Security Council strategy to punish, not reward, Tehran.”

This sets us up for an exciting and comic adventure in El Baradei’s personal life.
Oh, the quotes!

“He has become a compulsive name-dropper, diplomats say. ''He remains a shy man, but one who is somehow dazzled by his own destiny,'' said one European nonproliferation official who knows him well. ''He's always saying, 'Oh, I talked to Condi last week and she told me this,' or 'I was with Putin and he said this or that.' He's almost like a child.''

Or this long description:

“That Nobel night, he was celebrating with friends in his suite at the Grand Hotel in Oslo when thousands of people appeared on the street below, holding candles and cheering. Unsure of himself, he froze.

''He was clearly nonplused and adrift at what to do,'' Mr. Franck recalled. ''His wife told him to wave back.''

A tall, shy man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Dr. ElBaradei is so averse to small talk that he refuses even superficial conversation with staff members in the agency's elevators, aides say.

Rather than venture into the dining room or cafeteria, he brings lunch from home and eats at his desk. He must be arm-twisted to make even the briefest appearance at important agency functions.

''He is very reserved, very aloof,'' Mrs. ElBaradei said recently over tea in their apartment, filled with rugs from Iran and the awards and other baubles that come with her husband's persona as a campaigner for world peace. ''He thinks these diplomatic receptions and dinners are a waste of time.''

The rugs from Iran and the baubles are such a nice touch! These are obviously colored people, and you know colored people: tasteless gatherers of the gaudiest stuff! Children! Imagine the NYT quoting someone describing say our solemnly elected Commander in Chief as having the emotional and intellectual bearing of a retarded adolescent, going around talking about why the Iraqi's aren't more grateful. Isn’t going to happen.

Of course, here LI has to confess, our media critical side and our urge to use the NYT's genteel racism to wipe our ass came into conflict.

And so it goes, row row rowing the boat of bile and ignorance that is the trademark American style at the moment for column inch after column inch. And occasionally timidly venturing outside the psycho American circle of poisonous groupthink to hit on a few truths (after which, of course, there is the hasty retreat back to fairytale land). For instance, the truth that nobody trusts anything this administration says. The truth that Iran has a perfect right to develop nuclear power if it wants to. The truth that the knowledge of how to develop that power is not going to be expunged from Iran, by hook or crook.

So we end on this bittersweet note, taking up the first three grafs:

“In the days that followed, representatives of other countries hammered Dr. ElBaradei with sharp criticism. But a week later, many governments had begun to believe that their strategy was backfiring. They decided to try to co-opt Dr. ElBaradei rather than isolate him.

The new thinking went like this: he and the Iranians had won this round. Much of the world would consider the agreement on a timetable a step forward. By contrast, Western diplomacy was hopelessly stalled.”

You think? You think that the U.S. being run by shabby and psychotic runts like our horrendous VP, whose quarters, no doubt, contain many a bauble from many an energy company, and our collapsing President, whose TV appearances should be sponsored by Disney and Hustler, since they exude the air of some failed masturbator’s painful exercise in childish fantasy – you think this has something to do with the World?

polarity and PAM

As one would expect, LI’s researches into the origin of the positive/negative classification of affect [I’m calling this the polarity of affects model – PAM] is forcing us to modify our original hypothesis. Our original hypothesis was modeled, to an extent, on Philip Mirowski’s history of the constituting metaphors of economics. Economists, around 1870, began to adapt a physicalist language to defend a rigorously mathematical equilibrium model of economics. Now, it struck us that the experimental school of psychology was doing the same thing. This would make psychology fit very well as a module within the capitalist field – or its cognate, after 1917, in communism. Accordingly, LI held that PAM diffused outward from the scientific high culture into industry, education, and the sphere of personal relations.

However, further research has made us see that this story, as it stands, can’t be right. While it does focus on the problem correctly – how is it that PAM became, in the twentieth century, the dominant classification system for emotions? – the answer is a bit more complex than some resort, by psychologists, to that familiar form of scientism, the borrowing a vocabulary from physics.

As we see it now, there are three sources of PAM. One, indeed, is that scientism that we have been pursuing, following in Mirowski’s footsteps.

The second is the hedonic calculus. We noted that Kant was already considering whether pleasure and pain could be represented quantitatively in his pre-critical writing. Bentham, who ‘invents’ the hedonic calculus, is drawing on work by other Enlightenment figures. But the calculus is always meant to be a heuristic. It is not meant to represent pleasure and pain in any dynamic sense. Thus, from the point of view of the hedonic calculus, pleasure and pain must appear as units. If they are not units, if they are not, for some reason, separable, then the whole basis of the calculus is overturned. This isn’t really that much of a worry to the first utilitarians, however, since the calculus is a measure suggesting action, rather than an introspective probe.

The third, and perhaps more surprising antecedent of PAM is the re-discovery, in romantic science, of alchemy. Specifically, the re-discovery of force and polarity. Schelling was so impressed by Coloumb’s experiments on magnets in the 1780s – experiments that, for the first time, showed how to measure magnetic force – that he magnified polarity into one of his cosmic principles in his natural philosophy works, such as the Soul of the World. Schelling’s followers, like Oken, tried to find allegorical schemas throughout the natural world. One of his followers, Carus, used polarity to discuss Seelenlehre. And here we begin to see a new tone added to the idea of negative and positive feelings.

I’ll have more to say about this in another post.

A warning to UFOB

Convalescing means watching a lot of YouTube, which is how I came across this alarming video of a Democratic Fund Raiser that makes me fear for Mr. Scruggs life.
I hope the crewe at UFOB resisted that invite to the Hilary-Ralph Reconciliation Potluck. Oh, it might look like a fun time, and you all might have been thinking, what the heck. We'll let bygones be bygones. That Hil has a dazzlin' plan for the Middle East, too. And talk about your single payer plan reconciling the legitimate interests of insurance company with the needs of the little guy! Why, I'm seein' stars. I'm seeing security and victory in our war on terrorism and being able to afford getting Betty Sue's appendix yanked! Sure, now, she's had that there appenddycitus for nigh on to two years. She made an awful moaning in the back house, couldn't get to sleep. Lately she does seem to have settled down, though...

But let me tell ya, fellas, it is a trap.

a word on the recent non-event...

When the U.S. congress was considering banning acid, a senate panel took testimony from people like Timothy Leary and Allan Ginsberg. They also interviewed Arthur Kleps. Kleps, of course, was the founder of the Neo-American Boo-Hoo Church. The chief hymn in the church was Row Row Row your boat, and the chief sacrament was LSD. Anyway, in contrast to the load of malarky that we have been treated to on Iraq, and the jabbering of a Democratic leadership that has given new life to the word Dupe and Traitor (insofar as new life can arise from malfunctioning automatons), Kleps gave the Senate something worth hearing. When questioned about the scientific soundness of the claimn that LSD deepened one spiritually, he said:

Listening to the testimony before your subcommittee on Monday, I was, of course, struck by Dr. Goddard's characterization of what we call consciousness expansion as 'bunk,' and I would like to reply to the reasons he gave for making such a judgment when Senator Dodd questioned him further.

"Dr. Goddard said that consciousness expansion did not occur with LSD because the results of objective tests of intelligence and so on given during the session showed negative results; a drop in performance. His argument contains the unspoken assumption that consciousness expansion is necessarily associated with a rise of measured IQ during the psychedelic session. I do not know of any psychedelic person who would agree that that is the case.

"If I were to give you an IQ test and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you a vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional color movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test.
"LSD puts you in the mind of God, and God has little interest in our IQ tests. We might say that God has no IQ. God is not a verbal being as we are to such a large extent.

"Now this assumption that consciousness is somehow equated to, or is an aggregate of, those mental faculties which are measurable by objective tests is representative of an entire approach to the subject of psychedelics which is superficially plausible and yet is fundamentally erroneous. It is the only approach which finds favor in the eyes of those administering research grants. It is based on the assumption that if you cannot measure something, it does not exist. In psychology it is rooted in a kind of professional, if not personal, atheism. It produces the horror stories we read about in the field of animal vivisection experimentation resulting from a narrow-minded fixation on trivia, an almost trancelike inability to see the forest for the trees. It results in thousands of people each year earning advanced degrees because they have proved, in effect, that when you put 13 rats in one end of a box, lo and behold, 13 rats come out of the other end of the box in some combination or other.”

Unfortunately for the Boo-Hooists, the golden age in which American high hatters could put 13 rats in one end of a box and get 13 out of the other has long gone. Instead, they squat over the box, deliver a delirious load of their shit, and then assure everybody that, in God’s good time, we will see pure gold, oil, and the winds of liberty come out the other end. The twenty five percent of the self-lobotomized cheer. The newspapers report that the zombies like it, the serious people like it, and by God it tastes good and seems like progress. The oligarchs pat themselves on the back for having spent twenty five years destroying unions and having merged all other organizations into perfect little party pods, where they come out every four years to collect money for the election of a complete suite of ghouls. It is lovely. It is called democracy, or actually cacocracy, rule by the worst.

Row row row your boat…

my disease, my lover

Alas, LI seems to have a non-Darwinian cold. I’ve been kind to my microbes – I’ve taken the aspirins and robuttuson so I could get out and about and spread them, just like a good American. I reduced my diet to soup and bread. I spend ungodly amounts of time hacking my lungs out and slumbering on my bed. Any fair observer would say I was doing my part. But my microbes seem to have some kind of jihadist philosophy. I mean, they seem to want to kill their host!

By killing me, you are killing yourselves, silly microbes, I say. And they reply by giving me another coughing fit.

This is a crying shame, since I went and checked out Mann’s essays and was all prepared to be an ambassador of sweetness and light. Damn. I have some vague plan of applying that notion of imitatio to Goethe himself – for Goethe is a unique case in world literature of a man who quite happily made himself his own monument. There is a biography of Henry Miller entitled, I believe, always happy and bright, and Miller did love to go on about his happiness, but who doesn’t see that this was guff? Not that I mind. But Goethe seemed to have decided, very young, that there was nothing better than being Goethe.

… Which is unfair. The tone of the above. LI is expressing that impression that Goethe gave, and gives. And who among us can be Goethe? I’d even grant that it is the best thing you can be. Much better than being Jesus, or Nietzsche, or even Thomas Mann, god help us. If one of LI’s eternal bitches is that the sage has been driven out of the culture, then we do have to explain Goethe.

Now, I realize my leaping about and cavorting from Lady Ray to Goethe might strike some as highly undignified, or perhaps a sign of my present feverish state. Mann, in his essay about Freud, wrote that Freud showed us how much we owe to disease – how disease is a form of knowing. Mann loved diseases, the slight fever, the restlessness, the brilliant flashes, the highly specialized eros of convalescence.

“L’humanité,” says Victor Hugo, “s’affirme par l’infirmité.” A saying which frankly and proudly admits the delicate constitution of all higher humanity and culture and their connoisseurship in the realm of disease.”

So writes Mann. Above, I wrote that Goethe was his own monument, an unoriginal and sarcastic jibe. A better image comes out of Puysegur. Puysegur was one of the disciples of Mesmer, or perhaps it is better to say that he was an independent researcher in the field of animal magic. In the book, Magic as a Science, Carl du Prel wrote:

“Since Puysegur, the student of Mesmer, it has been known that the somnambulist has the ability to perceive the inner processes of his body, i.e. to take his autodiagnosis. For the sake of briefness I will call this self-seeing (Selbstschau).”

Actually, even Caligari’s somnambulist could not do any such thing. But Goethe seemed to have that magical ability, so perhaps I should say he was his own mesmeric subject, and out of of his autodiagnosis - reading his own entrails - he became a prophet.

imitatio Goethe

One of the most puzzling parts of my happiness thesis is that dealing with age. I’ve been fumbling around, looking for ways to express my instinctive feeling that the extinction of certain age defining roles within the economy of the Great Transformation was the result of the rise of the happiness norm. Say, there’s a crafty mouthful for ya! Last year, LI was all about the persistant coupling of the sage and the buffoon and its variants, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza traipsing across the interior landscapes of Western history, figures that figured a dialectic as surely as Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers.

So imagine my joy, yesterday, as I was hunting and pecking about, looking for stuff on Goethe, to find this:

In his 1936 essay, Freud and the Future, Thomas Mann wrote: “… the father play [Vaterspiel] and its transference to father substitutes of a higher and spiritual type – how much this form of infantalism determines, seals and educates [bildend] the individual life. I say develops: for the most genial, joyful specification of that which one names ‘education’ [Bildung] is to me, in all seriousness, this formation and marking through the admired and beloved one, though the childish identification with some one father imaged chosen out of one’s deepest sympathy. The artist, this ludic and passionately childish person, could very well sing a song of the seacret and yet public influences of such infantile imitation in his biography, in his productive life performance, which is so often nothing more than the revival of some hero’s vita under very different conditions of time and personality and with very other – we’d even say childish – means. So the imitatio Goethe starts with memories on Werther, the Meister stage and the olderphase of Faust and the Divan can still, today, lead the experience of a writer unconsciously, and determine him mythically – I mean, from his unconsious, although in the artist the unconscious of every moment tends to play over the happy object of his consciousness and his childishly profound attention.”

I love this. I love the idea of the imitatio Goethe. Imitatio of that kind is exactly how the sage (and the buffoon) ended up as a mad knight and his peasant page, or a social parasite and a philosophe. LI is busy today, but we must return to this soon. With, of course, the appropriate questions, among them: whether the father in this fatherplay doesn’t bring with him that fatal inauthenticity of all substitutes. Or whether, at the end of the imitatio, I have to look at Dad’s face in the mirror. Me, a child of the homunculus, like all the rest of us.

lady bitch ray

Occasionally some brave soul will speak up in the theorysphere and say that not only should porno be defended, but that it should be made, and made better. For instance, the Love and Terrorism blogger has announced his own porno project. IT’s money shot post still provokes responses, such as this indirect one from Naught Thought - and I believe IT has hinted that she has the utopian hope for better


porn in the future, something that would be erotic and overthrow the old, crusty structures of the Oedipal complex. Angela Carter, in one of her best essays, Sade and the Sadeian woman, announces the same project, which flowed into what is, for me, her finest novel – The Passion of New Eve. But – perhaps due to the language barrier – the academic who has actually crossed the line is hardly known in the English world. I’m talking about Ladybitchray, aka Reyhan Şahin. She is, as ralkorama puts it, “firstly a bitch, secondly a turk, and thirdly an academic.”




Actually, schlampe here really should be ‘slut’. On her website, she has posted a rather bizarre french video of herself in which she claims to be the whore of Germany. There are also three songs on the site. Now, yours truly truly does not like aggro rap. Ladybitchray is the only German rapper we can really stand. Partly this is because her voice does not produce a harsh or hard effect, as though it were trying to close itself off and become that bullet in your ear that goes through and takes out all your brain matter – which is how Bushido sounds to us. At the same time, Deutschland siktir lan is a great example of what makes Reyhan Sahin interesting. Siktir lan is turkish for fuck you. As Ladybitchray, Sahin straddles the polysemy of fuck, the insult and the caress intertwined there, just as she loves to place herself atop other cracks – the Turkish/German one, for instance. There is a notorious anti-Turkish element among some German rappers, so this is a position that holds a real risk. And that she plays with it by playing with the whole patriotic German thing is, well, admirable. But fucking, whether in Turkish or German, is not the word she is famous for. She is famous, in Germany, for her constant use of ‘pussy’ and ‘cunt’. She was dismissed from Radio Bremen when the owners of that station discovered that she used ‘inappropriate language’ on her internet videos. Being a very good self-promoter, Şahin peddled that story, plus some T and A, to Bild, a news magazine that combines the delicate sensibilities of Maxim with the investigative reporting style of the National Enquirer. It has long been the mainstay of the reactionary media empire built by Axel Springer. Sahin correctly bet that T and A would overcome the bias against a guest worker’s daughter.

On the other hand, the bigotry she evokes flows pretty effortlessly in the German press. Here’s a typical review from Citybeat:

“The woman suffers from a penetrating exhibitionist’s need to show herself, and is obsessed about building a career no matter what the price. We are talking about “Lady Ray”, alias Reyhan Sahin, from Bremen-Gröpelingen. This underclass rapper created in the beginning of the year a private broadcast that she advertised in the Bild paper and in Boulevard Magazine, after which, out of easy to infer grounds, her collaboration with Radio Bremen was pulled. The ‘female rapper’, whose demo seems to be the underclass of the underclass, is thus just of the type who drops out of the 8th grade and tries for a career a la Bushido.”

Before she became a pornorapper, she was a student in the sociology of communications. In this Spiegel interview, Şahin proclaims that she is bringing pussy style to Germany, but her fashions are not exactly avantgarde eroticware. The camera follows her to a library table in the Rosa Luxemberg institute at the University of Bremen. And she explains her double personality by grabbing her tits – one representing Ladybitchray, one Reyhan Şahin, I suspect that she is referencing one of the famous cliches of German literature, Goethe’s ‘two persons, alas, live within this breast”.

I suspect this because she has gone from a rapper to a surrealistic talk show host, and her show is cluttered with phrases and innuendos making Germany into a magpie’s nest – here horror, here a puppet, here a strudel. For who else would feature a puppet named Dr. Mengele, a dreadlocked pianist, and a stolid looking German hausfrau cooking, on a set that centers around a bed? On which bed she invites her guests, German rappers, to lie with her. She inevitably introduces them as guys with “big cocks”, and casually talks about her pussy, her tits, and her need to fuck, which – when her guest is a real asshole – can lead to pretty hilarious results

chemical people

John Maynard Keynes famously remarked that Newton was the last of the magicians. He was referring to Newton’s fascination with alchemy and the book of Revelations. Keynes was, of course, wrong – there were certainly magicians after Newton. But he was right in the most important respect, which was that the Whiggish history of science, in which Newton figured as a hero of positivism, was founded on a fiction. And it was not an unimportant glossing over of minor Newtonian penchants – according to Dobbs in The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought, one of the great books in the science wars, Newton took his notion of force from the alchemists. In fact, although the positivists still seem not to recognize this, the father of positivistic physics, quite purged of alchemical crap, is Descartes. The only problem with Descartes notion of vortices is that they are, mathematically, crap, as Newton proved. In place of the vortices – which at least adhere to the old materialist image of one thing causing another by means of contact – we have the mathematically proven magic of attraction at a distance.
When Goethe started reading the alchemists in the 1770s, preparting to write Faust, alchemy was good and dead – but only in the sense that psychoanalysis is good and dead. While alchemy seemed, especially to the 19th century positivists, to have been overthrown as a rational task by scientist, in reality its concepts became part of the background of natural philosophy, aka science.

Which brings us to the homunculus. Goethe’s critics claim that Goethe first read about the artificial manniken in a dialogue written by a Dr. Johannes Praetorius, a prolific seventeenth century popularizer of wonders, against Paracelsus. Gerhild Williams, in his book on Praetorius, summarizes it as a very curious dialogue, in that Paracelsus never claimed to have made a homunculus. Like Praetorius, Paracelsus believed in the elemental spirits literally. Praetorius, however, claims he instructed his disciples in how to create chymische Menschen – literally, “chemical people”. You needed wine, yeast, sperm, blood and horse dung to do the deed. ‘When he is done, you have to watch him very diligently. Though no one will have taught him, he will be among the wisest of men; he will know all the occult arts because he has been created with the greatest of skill.”

In one way, we are the children of the homunculus. We are certainly chemical people. Our environments consist of synthetics absolutely unknown in this solar system before we began to produce them – and now, of course, they wrap about us, a giant oil-n-corn slick, and we rarely touch dirt, or unprocessed wood. If by some magic I waved a wand and wished away all the chemical products in my nearest neighborhood, the apartment complex I sit in would collapse, the cars would vanish, the plants would wither (fertilizers gone), the food in the grocery store, what was left of it, would immediately start to grow rapidly stale.

None of which were things foreseen by Goethe, Newton’s fiercest enemy, in 1769.

cyber-goethe

At what point in time--a line always continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the negative? – Unamuno

In Claudio Magris’ Danube, there is a discussion, early in the book, about nature and artifice. The occasion is a proposed hydro-electric plant which would require damming the Danube. The Greens were protesting against this as a crime against nature. One of Magris’ friends uses Goethe to point to the fact that nature cannot be the victim of a crime – for all things are enfolded in nature.

“But, around the table at the inn near Breg, someone is inclined to be doubtful. That second nature which surrounds us – the jungle of symbols, of intermediaries, of constructions – arouses the suspicion that there is no longer any primal nature behind it, and that artifice and various kinds of bio-engineering have counterfeited and supplanted her supposedly eternal laws. Austrian culture, in fact, born in the homespace of the Danube, has with disillusioned clarity denounced the falsity of postmodernism, discarding it as stupid nonsense while accepting it as inevitable.”

For Magris, the place to look to understand this retreat from the inevitable, this denunciation of our artificial condition upon which we are wholly dependent, is in the second part of Faust, specifically in the creation of the Humunculus.

“Indeed, even Goethe in his late, more enigmatical work, did not overlook that fear: in the Second Part of Faust he not only tells the story of the Humunculus, the man created in a laboratory, but he conjures up a vision of a total triumph of the unnatural and the defeat and disappearance of the ancient Mother, mimicked and replaced by fashion, artificial products, and false appearances.”

LI is not exactly an expert on Goethe’s Faust, Part II. This comment of Magris’ made me feel like I should check it out, however. And low and behold, when Wagner succeeds in creating a little man in a vial, here is one of the first things the Humunculus says:

Das ist die Eigenschaft der Dinge:
Natürlichem genügt das Weltall kaum,
Was künstlich ist, verlangt geschloßnen Raum.

- This is the essence of things:
Nature finds the limits of the world hard to bear
while for the artificial, closed spaces are de rigeur.



or - what is artificial requires closed space (sorry, that is a bit clumsy). It occurs to me that the humunculus might be a great symbol of the dialectic of vulnerability, which I have yammered on about here and there over the past couple of years. So I’m going to give another post to him this curious grotesque.

the triumph of happiness: a tragedy

Running yesterday, I came up with a brilliant title for my little livret on happiness. Check this out: The triumph of happiness: a tragedy. W..well, at least it seemed brilliant at the one mile sweat point.

I meant to organize my notes and begin my essay while I was in Atlanta, but this didn’t happen. While the great midnights sometimes happen in guest bedrooms, or in clinics, or at desks so unfamiliar as not to be invisibly chained with the thousand and one reminders of failure and projects half finished, my great midnights now happen, usually, between eleven a.m. and two p.m. I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Now, in my last two posts, I translated bits of an essay by Stendhal to recall us to a historical factum: that a sharp, or even brilliant observer of the four most developed European societies in 1830 – those of England, France, Italy and Germany – registered a distinct change in the intellectual atmosphere of the time, and connected that change, in the essay, with the advent of a new form of speech a l’allemand – the language of the Critique and of the Phenomenology. At the same time, he began writing a murder story set in a rural area in which industrialization was beginning to emerge.

In the essay, Stendhal’s whiggish philosopher claims to be speaking the language of Cabinas, and of the Civil Code. Nobody reads Cabinas anymore. I certainly don’t. But curious about the connection between Cabinas and Bentham, I went to the OC, and found this interesting passage, in an essay about medical practice:

‘When one is young and without knowledge of the world, the pleasure of doing good is very connected to the recognition that one flatters oneself that one will obtain thereby. But time and experience soon detach by degrees a hope too often disappointed; and one finishes by doing good only for oneself, for the pure satisfaction that attaches to it; for conforming to the general social order, which, it is true, gives us more or less advantages in return. Such is at least the sentiment the the proofs of ingratitude produce quickly enough on those who join reason to soulfulness.For the doctor, the passage is perhaps a little more difficult; the blows are sharper. The pleasure of comforting a suffering being is so sweet! the care that one expends has something so sacred about it! in restoring life, health and happiness to the patient, in rendering him back sound to the objects of his affection, one has associated oneself so closely with his existence! In a word, one feels oneself guilty if one even suspects that an eternal recognition will not be forthcoming that when, in fact, it isn’t forthcoming, one is struck, at first, by astonishment, and swollen with indignation; and the wound to the heart is joined to the confusion and bitter discontent of a first demystification.

However, we have to say, for everybody needs to know this, nothing is more common than that ingratitude. Soon, one takes it as a piece of pure childishness to expect anything else. Far from letting oneself be discouraged by this in his zeal for humanity, the virtuous man no longer expects anything except from himself., recognizing that he is thereby more independent and free.”

Cabanis, here, is outlining a theory of selfishness that resembles interior exile. In fact, the doctor’s progress from the youthful hope of joining glory to virtue to the older and sardonic notion that virtue is a matter for oneself alone, and glory is an aspiration which is not worth the price of disappointment, traces an intellectual reaction to the French revolution. It is important to remember that the figuration of the self does not happen in an empty and unclaimed space, but occurs in a highly charged historical context. In fact, that is true to the point of truism, but unfortunately, like so many truisms, it is mentioned by the intellectual historian and then ignored. Facts aren’t inert, and they aren’t atomic. They are more like stains on a cloth – they spread out, they intersect with each other, they have unpredictable circumferences. So, here, the medical philosophy – and remember that the overlap between medicine and philosophy has been a consistent theme in the materialist line we have traced in earlier posts, from Gassendi to La Mettrie – encodes a self-satisfied selfishness. It is a twist in the moralist’s great theme of amour-propre – for it protects amour-propre, in the end, from any outside test. But any dialectician, any of the newfangled type that Stendhal so despised, would see that this twist is not an endpoint that leads to virtue, but is, instead, a moment in the dissolution of amour-propre into self-interest. Cabanis does have a relationship to Bentham, but the effect of this seemingly more cynical view of virtue is to make obsolete the volupte of the heroic, to sweep away the Reguluses. Stendhal’s fictitious philosopher sets up a challenge not only for eclectic philosophers, but for Stendhal the novelist. And, in effect, Stendhal’s major works show that Cabanis’ ideological defense of public virtue guarded by private indifference to glory is wholly inadequate to cope with the wholesale transformation taking place in economic and emotional customs.
…

Oh, and here is the all important epigraph for my essay: “Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.” – Nietzsche.

After a midnight inspiration - Stendhal, 1829

Stendhal had a very busy year in 1829. He was finishing up his book, Walks in Rome. He was involved, according to his first biographer, R. Colomb, in the conclave that elected Pius VIII. And he had a famous night of inspiration on October 25 – one of those great midnights. It was on such a midnight that Kafka wrote The Judgment. Any writer would give up years for such midnights. They don’t come often. He had read an anecdote in the Gazette des Tribunaux about the attempted murder of a married woman, and it suddenly leaped out at him that this murder was ‘the real thing’. As with James, Stendhal’s inspirations came from anecdotes.

Stendhal, then, is at his intellectual height when he wrote his sardonic article on Transcendental Philosophy. It was published in the Revue de Paris, in response to an attack on Stendhal as a partisan of Helvetius – an old “perruque”, as he puts it. The figure of Louaut, the old Napoleonic conscript crippled by attacks of rheumatism and left to suffer in solitude, is obviously on some level a projection of Stendhal’s own sense of himself. Stendhal copied the article and sent it in a letter to an English friend in December, 1829.

Louaut’s letter is a premise for an analysis of altruism (a word that had yet to be invented by Comte, one of those tedious enthusiasts for “transcendental philosophy”) from a “philosopher of the school of Cabanis.” If Louaut is two degrees of distance from Stendhal, the philosopher is one degree distant. These gradations mark out the essential fiction of the essay.

‘I am the philosopher to whom lieutenant Louaut wrote his letter and, what is a bit more irritating for me, I am of the school of Cabanis: I am making a book on the motives of the actions of men and, as I am not eloquent, nor even a great writer, not counting on my style, I am trying to assemble facts for my book. Having read the story of the action of M. Louaut, I went to see him. How did you do that, I asked him – and we have seen his response: I have only erased a few grammatical faults.

It seems to me to prove marvelously, as the new school says, and in a very wise manner that the motive for human action is very simply the search for pleasure and the fear of pain. A long time ago, Virgil said: each is carried forward by his pleasure: Trahit sua quemque voluptas.

Regulus, returning to Carthage, where horrible tortures awaited him, ceded to the fear of pain. The public contempt of which he would have been the object if he had remained, in violation of his oath, was more painful for him than the cruel death he had to suffer in Carthage.

The search for pleasure is the motive of all men. It would truly be a pleasure for me, and this is what has placed the pen in my hand, to see the new school of eclectic philosophy respond to this. But as I am not eloquent, I wish they would respond to me without eloquence and without beautiful obscure phrases, a l’allemande, but very simply, in small and clear french phrases, as in the style of the Civil Code.

My treatise on the motive for human actions will be, in effect, a supplement to the Civil Code; it will require heroism to publish it. I see from her fifty thousand persons, all tenured, who have a monetary interest to say that I am immoral; they would have said the same of Helvetius and Bentham, the best of men.”

Of course, the question of motivation isn’t answered by Stendhal’s old wig, or whig, for why the fear of public opprobium is more painful than torture does have a deep and disorganizing effect on the thesis. Still, the notion that philosophy should be written in the style of the Civil Code – a notion that Nietzsche, Stendhal’s great reader, picks up on – has had a long and fruitful career.

Finally, let me translate three more paragraphs.

My challenge to the new school, which calls itself eclectic, is, for the moment, only concerned with the explanation of what passed in the soul of lieutenant Louaut during the quarter of an hour preceding his immersion in the Seine.

I value the eloquence and the virtues of the eclectic philosophers, and my estime is so deep, that it triumphs over the distrust I have for any man who is obscure in his language and who is not a fool. Every day we see in life that a man who understands a thing well explains it clearly.

The French born around 1810 feel a lively pleasure, according to me, the child of pride, in going to philosophy talks and going out of them. However, during the talk itself, the pleasure is less lively, they try to understand. How many people have an interest in praising the new philosophy! While waiting for the jesuits to have all the professors hung, the best they can do is to favor german philosophy, a little obscure as it is and often mystical; one might say that all its adherents are obscure for the sake of pleasure…”

I love this, I have to admit. I love the way Stendhal’s fictional philosopher – who exists, so to speak, on a hypothetical level – takes his grand notion of the motive of human action and uses it not only to explain cases, but to explain objections. There is a certain comedy – an old Voltarian comedy – in shifting from everyday action to conceptual explanation. Making theory human abases theory, and the abasement of theory is funny – it is funny when Gargantua makes a student full of macaronic French shit his breeches, and it is funny when the eclectic philosopher’s obscurity is traced not to the obscurity of his object but to the pleasure he takes in being obscure. I could trace a line here from Stendhal to Dostoevsky to Shatov – but I will have mercy on my readers and not.

lieutenant louaut - Stendhal's story

Okay, campers. I promised this a month ago.

In 1829, Stendhal wrote a pieced entitled “Transcendental philosophy”. In a note under the title, he wrote that the phrase was a ‘pleasantry”, and that he valued clarity too much to begin with an obscurity. Which, of course, clues us in: Stendhal was ever the child of the Revolution, which meant the child of Rousseau and Helvetius. Hegel, for him, was a mystagogue.

The piece consists of a letter written by an old conscript of the Emperor’s armies, the son of a fisherman who swam, when he was younger, like a fish. He includes this revelation in the first paragraph for a reason: he has a story to tell about swimming.
Here’s how it goes:

“The other day, I was walking towards the Jena bridge, on the side of the champ de Mars. There was a heavy wind, making waves on the Seine and reminding me of the sea. I was following a little boat filled with sand up to the brim, which was attempting to traverse the last arch of the bridge. Suddenly it flipped; I saw the boatman try to swim, but he was doing pretty badly. “That clumsy fool is going to drown,” I said to myself. I had some notion of throwing myself in the water. But I am forty seven years old and inclined to rheumatism; and the cold was stinging. ‘Someone will dive in from the other shore,” I thought. I looked in spite of myself. The man re-emerged on the surface and started screaming. I walked away immediately. ‘That would be too insane,” I said to myself. When I will be nailed to my bed with a severe attack of rheumatism, who is going to come and look after me? who will even think of me? I will be alone, dying of troubles just as I did last year. Why did this animal decide to imitate a sailor when he didn’t know how to swim? Besides, he had filled his boat way too full…” I could have been about fifty paces from the Seine. I still hear the screams of the boatman, drowning and imploring for help. I hurried up. “Devil take him!” I said to myself. And I began to think of other things. Suddenly I said to myself: “Lieutenant Louant (my name), you are a b…d; in a quarter of an hour that man will be drowned, and you will remember his screams all your life. B…d, B…d, said the part of prudence, that’s an easy thing to say, and how about the sixty seven days that you suffered your rheumatic attack last year, forced to stay in bed?” “oh, devil take him. He should have learned to swim if he was going to direct a boat.” I marched quickly towards the Military School. Suddenly a voice told me: “Lieutenant Louaut, you are a coward! This word made me jump. “Ah, this is serious,’ I said to myself. And I began to run back to the Seine. In coming to the bank, I threw off my coat, boats and pants in a moment. I was the happiest of men. “No, Louant is not a coward! no, no!” I told myself out loud. In fact, I saved the man, without a problem, who would have drowned except for me. I had him taken to a warm bed, he soon regain his faculty of speech. Then I started to fear for myself. I had myself put into a warm bed, and I had my whole body rubbed with eau de vie and flannels. But in vain, all of this did nothing – the rheumatism began again. in truth, however, not as severe as the year before. I wasn’t too sick. The devil of it is that nobody came to see me, I began to get seriously bored. After having thought of marriage as I do when I’m bored, I began to reflect on the motives that made me commit my “heroic action”, as the Constitutional put it in their story.

What made me do this beautiful thing? for heroic is too strong. My God, it was the fear of contempt. It was that voice that told me: Lieutenant Louaut, you are a coward. What really struck me was that the voice, that time, didn’t use the “tu”. No, it was the formal “you” that was a coward. When I understood that I could save the drowning man, that became a duty for me. I would have despised myself if I hadn’t thrown myself in the water, just as much as I would have if, in Brienne, in 1814, my captain told me: Forward, Louaut! climb up on the upper deck, and I had amused myself by remaining below. Such is, monsieur, the story you asked for, or, as you say, the analysis, etc., etc.”

zazie dans la banlieue

Well, I’m back chez the shambles I call home. Of course, my suitcase is out there on its own, in that black hole called American Airlines, but I hope with all my pea pickin’ heart that I get the fucking thing at some point in the near future.

LI has always been an urban guy. Right, we did our Thoreau time in Pecos New Mexico, but the horror the horror of heating the place – a house that originally aspired to be a restaurant, developing an odd allergy to insulation along the way – and the distance I had to drive, me and my tithe of CO2 for the fifty mile roundtrip into Santa Fe to support my unpublished masterpieces, plus of course the curse of the House of Usher that seemed to dog me, D. and H. as we fumbled through the outlier lifestyle of artists, will keep me from ever repeating that mistake. Probably that sentence will bring down all kinds of curses on my head, by the way. The sacrifices I make to amuse, god damn it!

But mainly, from the sprout time, I was attuned to urban locales, and desirous of draining the drop of burbia in my blood. What happened in the last twenty years, however, is that burbia invaded the inner city. I have lived in many an area where the prostitute bloomed on the corner by night and the crackhead loaded up in the apartment complex just up the block 24/7. Places where the corpses were always being discovered and filmed to send a frisson up the spines of the watchers of the local newsshows. Being a liberal sort, at one time I thought it was unfair that the poor had to bear this shit, this lousy policing, this breakdown in services. However, I was not being very foresighted. As soon as they drove the sisters of mercy and the rocks in their pockets type out, the riskless symbol pushers came pouring in – of course, displacing us. And they created that ineffable boutique blandness they all love. Dark corners, the wild west, the rough and tumble lifestyle – that has been shoved out of valuable city property and distributed elsewhere. In Austin, it is the North and Southeast, and perenially the East – although we all know they have the East in their fucking range. So living restfully in Gwinnett is now not that much different from living in Austin. Less clubs, admittedly. Although when I said that to my brother D2, as we were paddling kayaks around the Stone Mountain Lake, he claimed that the roadhouses in Gwinnett were simply discrete. And – after a night of drinking we did go to a fine Gwinnett establishment promising, for a five dollar cover charge, bikinis, which was, it turned out, more like a wan hope. It is an old dodge, the Royal Nonsuch with swimwear. There was, instead, a buncha pool tables and a bartender who was, unconsciously, all about the way the Atlanta area has broken open – she was a Romanian exile in Italy, come to the States for a lark, and briefly marooned in a roadhouse near the county line. She would have been a complete exotic twenty five years ago, but now – when the major Clarkston Georgia grocery store advertises a Hallal deli – she blends into the scene comnpletely.

So, that’s the end of Zazie dans la banlieu. I will now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

lawn 2: last hydromulching season at marenbad

Lawn 2

Myself, I was a grassman a long time ago. I got a job in Shreveport with an alcoholic Jehovah’s Witness landscaper, a man with a permanent keg in his kitchen, a warehouse full of fire ant infested sod. However, where my man was really 20th century was the pride and joy of his small business, the hydromulch truck.

Now, I’d done landscaping time before, in Atlanta. Back in the pre-Reagan era, landscaping was the post-hippy job to have. My first day on the crew, I hopped into the pickup, which was loaded up in back with push mowers, blowers, rakes and shovels, and the guy at the wheel casually rolled up a doobie and offered me a hit. A fine way to take in the glories of the unfurling Atlanta morning. Yes, in those days LI would actually spring out of bed at, like, six thirty or something to get to work before eight. Clearly, now, I can see this as a form of abuse, although one alas that has still not been organized and baptized in the DSM-IV. Fuck rosy fingered aurora, give me an extra hour of sleep (so often, nowadays, a compensation for the two hours of bed time in which the mind just doesn’t fucking shut down, like some bar run by a man with no respect for the blue laws). I’m aware that around the country there are many afflicted who have to get up at six thirty or even earlier to drive to work. Brothers and sisters, how often I have wished to take you in my arms as the chick takes her chickens, and urge a more sensible schedule! No economy is worth this somatic perversion! However, such was my dewiness back in those days that I actually welcomed the early morning stuff.

So I had been a grassman of a kind, before I worked under my man in Shreveport, but I’d never been an extreme grassman. To be an extreme grassman, you have to man a hydromulch machine and spray the countryside with the odd combination of seed, fertilizer and dyed fiber mulch, which is the element anchoring our seed and fertilizer combo to the soil. The truck was a cumbersome thing to drive, since the machine was pretty huge. I can’t remember how many hoses we had, We took on a lot of state jobs – one spring we just hudromulched a vast housing project. At other times my man would round up a crew for me to command, for apartment jobs. Your rapid whack the grass, edge the hedges, clip and collect job. I was, of course, a little martinet to my charges. Whenever I get a little authority, it goes right to my head and I make an appalling jackass out of myself. Evidently, the American system isn’t totally fucked, as – by the wisdom of the invisible hand and the power invested in Bushonomics - I am very rarely given any authority.

So these half submerged memories flooded up in me last week as I proposed to my bro that I’d do his lawn.

Which will be continued if I feel like it, And hey, to all LI readers, happy boss day! I will soon be back in Austin, and will cut the throat of these thrilling tales from the burbs.

lawn 1

In Michael Pollen’s memoir, Second Nature: A Gardner’s Education, which is an account of his experience gardening in an old bit of Housatanic Valley farm he and his wife bought in the eighties, while they were living in Manhattan, begins with the ur-suburban experience of lawn mowing….

At least, ur-suburban for a certain generation. LI’s old man was a farmer wantabee from the day the farm he owned, outside of Syracuse, New York, arm wrestled him into bankruptcy, two out of three falls. Fate shoved him into the heating and air field, and the rest was history – actually, a history that placed him and his family, Yankees, in the suburbs of a Dixie city during the sixties, when the South was breaking out of its apartheid slumbers, and large numbers of Yankees were changing the demographic. So, coming home from another day of dealing with idiots who hadn’t checked the pressure on the lines, miscalculated roof tonnage for their units, or had otherwise fucked up, as was the wont of the whole world besides my Pop (a trait LI has, unfortunately, inherited in spades, although luckily countered by my Mom’s serenity of the long term, which I have also inherited0), he would take comfort in watering, fertilizing, edging, weeding and in other ways pampering the lawn. Like so many places in suburban Atlanta, our subdivision was created by drawing a thin veil of red clay and rock over a former woods-cum-garbage-dump – the woods as a garbage dump being one of the primal modes of contact between the American householder and a buncha trees – and thus was not a promising soil from which to coax dwarf plums, or to transplant friendly Yankee deciduous, like redleaf maple. Yet transplant my old man did. Transplant, actually, a whole generation of landscapers did. From kudzu to pittis porum, the natural history of northern Georgia was remade to the extent that mere humans with bulldozers, nurseries, fertilizers and pesticides could remake it.

Michael Pollen’s father was, apparently, that well known blight in the neighborhood, the guy who DID NOT MOW HIS LAWN. Our neighbor, Mr. Fox, suffered from a similar defect, and his lawn became a terrorist refuge – for indeed, dandelions and crabgrass, to my old man, evoked emotions of horror and anger much like those evoked by the Taliban creeping in from Waziristan in our fresh faced doughboys in the valleys of Afghanistan.

Here’s Pollan:

“The summer he [Pollan’s father] stopped mowing altogether, I felt the hot breath of a tyrannical majority for the first time. Nobody would say anything, but you heard it anyway: wo your lawn. Cars would slow down as they drove by our house. Porbably some of the drivers were merely curious: they saw the unmowed lawn and wondered if someone had left in a hurry or died. But others drove by in a manner that was unmistakeably expressive, slowing down as they drew near and then hitting the gas angrily as they passed – this was pithy driving, the sort of move that is second nature to Klansmen.”

After getting the message, Pollan’s father did a rather American thing – he took his lawnmower out into the tall grass and simply mowed his initials into it. “…as soon as he finished writing them, he wheeled the lawn mower back to the garage, never to start it up again.”
With this family history, it is no wonder Pollan is conscious of lawns. He has written about grass in The Botany of Desire as a sort of parasite on humankind. In Second Nature, he writes, rewriting his NYT article :

Nowhere in the world are lawns as prized as in America. In little more than a century, we’ve rolled a green mantle of it across the content, with scant thought to the local conditions or expense. American has some 50,000 square miles of lawn under cultiation, on which we spend an estimated 30 billion a year- this according to the Lawn Institute, a Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, outfit devoted to publicizing the benefits of turf to Americans (surely a case of preaching to the converted). Like the interstate highway system, like fast-food chains, like television, the lawn has served to unify the American landscape; it is what makes the suburbs of Cleveland and Tucson, the streets of Eugene and Tampa, look more alike than not. According to Ann Leighton, the late historian of gardens, America has made essentially one important contribution to world garden design: the cusotom of “uniting the front lawns of however many houses there may be on both sides of a street to present an untroubled aspect of expansive green to the passerby.” France has its formal, geometric gardens, England its picturesque parks, and America this unbounded democratic river of manicured lawn along which we array our houses.”

drift and panic, under new management and recently deceased translators

Note for a post: somehow, the whole issue of hyperbolic discounting passed by yours truly. But as I've been doing some desultory research, resting here on my laurels, I've run smack into it. Hyperbolic discounting describes an ordering of future preferences which reflects a non-linear and sudden shift in behavior, rather than an incremental and rationally spaced out one. Thus, for instance, the smoker may resolve, today, to quit smoking in the future, knowing that the effect of smoking is killing him, yet not, in fact, quit smoking in the near future, nor show signs of making plans to quit. Hyperbolic discounting is a nice phrase for drift and panic. Which seems to be the m.o. in the U.S., lately, about a lot of bad habits.

I just thought I'd mark the phrase for some future post.

PS – Correspondents have suggested I mention the deaths of two translators. Michael Hamburger, who translated Celan, Hölderlin, and other extremely dense German poets. Friend of Sebald, poet himself, and, according to his obituary, a big fan of East Anglica, Hamburger’s name is one that will be subconsciously familiar to any American who is interested in international lit, since it figured so often on the title page – “translated by” – but not so often (for our imaginary reader) in glorious solitude (“by”), since it is not by his essays and poetry that he is known.

Edward Seidensticker had a larger profile. The relationship between post-war Japan and the U.S. in the fifties and sixties is still somewhat shadowed by Cold War secrecy. Wiener’s recent book on the CIA pointed out that the party that has pretty much ruled Japan as the PRI once ruled Mexico, the Liberal Democrats, were systematically bribed by the Americans up until the seventies. They were bribed partly to violate the constitution that the Americans originally imposed on Japan – such are the vagaries of imperial whim. Running through the fifties was an undercurrent of guilt regarding the way the war was waged against Japan, most notably the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oddly enough, the most massive bombing of civilian targets in history, the US fireboming of Japanese cities, which resulted in at least 600,000 deaths in less than one year, never has been given the queasy fisheye by the American conscience. Perhaps Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the proxies. Into this mix of need and guilt stepped various influential go betweens who translated Japanese literature and explained Japanese culture, like Edward Reischauer and Donald Ritchie. Many had studied Japanese, during the war, at the Navy’s Boulder Institute – this is where Donald Keene gained his Japanese, and where Seidensticker gained his. The “Boulder boys” – so named by correspondent Edith Terry – dominated the discourse, post-war, in things Japanese. It is fascinating to see how Cold War culture assimilated and mixed themes that were appropriated and bricoleured against that culture – for instance, Zen, which entered into the American mainstream in the fifties as a sort of Cold War gift, and was quickly adopted by the beats and taken to be a route out of America, a form of inner emigration – before of course it became self-help and a part of Cold War therapy culture.

Seidensticker’s great translating feat is, of course, The Tale of Genji, which puts him in that rare group of translators of the essential books – comparable to Constance Garnett, Antoine Galland, Wilhelm von Schlegel. These are the translators’ translators.

a plea for a natural history of traffic jams

WE had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.

"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man --or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of --and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man --but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow.” –
Edgar A. Poe, Descent into the Maelstrom

Every five years or so, I like to drive a car into a traffic jam. Surely being in a traffic jam has become the American way to touch the mythic hero inside, a la Joseph Campbell. In simpler times, it was the big fish story. Gilgamesh wrestled Humbaba, Ahab took aim at the fabled White Whale, and your Gwinnett County householder descends into I-20 from several convenient ramps and takes on only two lanes of traffic open on that three lane Westbound. The third lane is closed for obscure reasons. Apparently, the highway department has decided to pile up big mounds of red clay at selected spots along five miles of the thing. Men in hard hats mill around these mounds, some of them in highly expensive earth movers. They look confused. Perhaps there are cultic motives behind the mounding.

Traffic jams are things of beauty to complexity scientists and a certain breed of architect who moves through the world of forms like a blind flatfish in search of a moderately priced oculist. Kas Oosterhuis, in Architecture Gone Wild, writes reverentially: … the traffic slow slows down, it becomes more dense. The movements go on the blink, the shape of the flow clusters into bloglike forms: this condition announces the impeding traffic jam, the flow in its liquid state. At a given point in the hardening process, the liquid stops flowing, traffic reaches its state of zero moment, it crystallizes (newspapers unfold, mobile phones come into action, the operating system (you) switches to stand-by mode, check Fellini’s film Roma). What shape does the jam have? There is no single shape, it is a dynamic balance possessing a multitude of states, from gaseous to crystalline.”

Well, I can report that the I-20 traffic jam was a cross-phaser – it went from gaseous to dyspeptic to boglike to the shape assumed by a man contemplating the purchase of viagra.

That human beings arrange these formations for their own amusement tells us, I suppose, something about what amuses human beings. Although there is a glory here. Here is something ultra-human, yet 6000 feet above all humanity. Something to compete with waterfalls and hurricanes. In great traffic jam cities like Atlanta, there is a quiet pride in the length and duration of the traffic jam. So, as I slowed the immense black truck that, by a concantenation of absurd circumstances, I was supposed to deliver to my sister at the Kingfisher school (which she owns and directs), into the auto bog, I had a sense that I, too, was an Atlantan. Well, not so fast. First I had a yikes moment, as I looked up from fiddling with the confusing array of buttons and switches that successfully fended off amateur attempts to turn on the radio and noticed that the Toyota I’d been following at 65 per had slowed to 10. As was good and proper, I brought an initial terrified glance into my encounter with the beast. Luckily, I am well trained in braking – ask any unfortunate who has passengered with me! I must admit to some feeling of betrayal. I thought we of the second lane were a team, a 65 m.p.h. team, and we were being let down.

Once inside the jam – I note these things for our post-peak posterity, riding on their mules and keeping the internet intermittently alive by generating electricity from turning giant gerbil wheels – a curious dissolution of the team spirit occurs. Though we are packed together as never before, now, now is the time to instantiate those outlying game strategies that contravene the rules of God, Man, and the equilibrium theories of neo-classical economics. Thus, the notice that the first lane was ending in half a mile operated as a curious invitation to many to get into the first lane. Yes, these clever minxes saw that the first lane was relatively open – due to the sign – and that while the cowed untermenschen in the second and third lanes were dallying, the Nietzschians were going to hurry up to the ending point and barge into the second lane. Of course, us second laners could have blocked that move, but we had already proved ourselves pussies by not plunging into the first lane from the beginning. This does raise a philosophical question about the third laners, however. Surely they were the ubermenschen. Surely they were the speeders, the risk takers. But here, in the midst of the jam (which at this phase had turned the shape of foie gras spread on wet toast), they were two lanes over from the gamers lane. In their tragic plight, the philosophically minded driver could see the whole history of the slave uprising in morals and the fall of the Roman empire.

Now, t.j. heads know that maximizing your jam requires not just plunging into one – any idiot can do that. No, you have to be low on gas, and you have to have a pressing appointment. Some of the fun of the later has been spoiled by the pernicious spread of cell phones. Luckily, LI has never and will never have a cell phone. Extra points come from having one of those cars that starts billowing steam from the hood. But the big black truck had been decently cared for in the radiator department, so I merely had to keep my weather eye on the fuel gauge, where the arrow was fingering the red zone. My plan, of course, was to stick my sister with the cost of filling up this monster. I definitely did not want to spend on it myself. Besides the gas tease, however, I had plenty of time to figure out the radio/stereo system, read a chapter of War and Peace, and gaze about, looking for the babes among my neighbors. Actually, most of my neighbors looked rather like pole struck oxen. The expressions ran from the stultified to the dissatisfied. Although of course I couldn’t survey the lot – surely some were heroically gleaming, aware of the historic occasion into which they had blundered. I would wager that all of them, however, would at some later point in the day mention that they had been in a traffic jam.

We edged past the Panola exit as in a dream. I know what dream, too. It is the one where somehow, you are trying to walk down the road or over the floor and you can’t seem to get anywhere.

Perhaps Leibniz was dimly foreseeing the traffic jam when he came up with that monad idea. Each of us did have a mirror in our vehicles, but otherwise we lived in our traffic jam with a maximum of self enclosure, on up to the microclimate produced by the a/c. And this is why I am rather surprised at the road rage fashion – none of which was really on display in this jam. In a sense, this was a break in the day. Each could meditate on the four last things, if desired. Or compose a recipe or grocery list. Traffic jams are ideal for poets and hermits. If the desert fathers had known about them, they surely would have deserted the caves for the friendlier, but still solitary, medium sized automobile.

At some point, as suddenly as it had congealed, the traffic jam took on the shape of a dead man pitching a spitball. In other words, it broke apart. There was, suddenly, empty highway – emptiness being, here, a metric for the possibility of going 75 miles per and not crashing into the bumper of the guy ahead of you. In fact, the guy ahead of you is going 80. And thus my big black truck freed itself from the posse of 18 wheelers and the inchworm action of the Jetta in the second lane who was breaking the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not hold up traffic. Yes, my jam time was over. And what had I learned?

Well, it is hard to say. The true descent into the traffic jam (contra Godard’s Weekend) has still not been made. We need a Dr. J.M. Rossbach. In 1870, Dr. Rossbach realized that battlefields were not just battlefields – just as a rose is not just a rose – but occasions to study rigor mortis. Thus, he went traipsing over the battlefield at Sedan and Beaumont, measuring and observing the dead soldiers, and reported his observations in an article entitled Over initial rigor mortis in cases of immediate life-ending events (Ueber eine unmittelbar mit dem Lebensende beginnende Todtstarre). He noticed the “preservation of the expressive effects of the last moments of life in the face” of many soldiers, noting, however, a few anomalies – “in a group of six French soldiers, killed by a grenade blast, on an elevation at Beumont, [there was one] with a smiling, happy face, which only lacked the top half of its skull, torn away by the grenade blast.” My problem is that, unlike Dr. Rossbach, I did not have carte blanche to get out of the big black truck and walk about amongst my fellow jamites, to see how they were taking it. Someday, some sociologist should pack students up in a truck or van and plunge into a jam and, in the slow heart of the heart of it, let the students rush among the vehicles, taking pictures and giving out survey forms. Otherwise, this odd feature of modern life may pass away, in silence, when this civilization is good and extinct.

more chatter

LI, on vacation, doesn’t do that thing called thinking. Vacations are inherently anti-Cartesian. Into the vacuum enters, embarrassingly enough, poetry. And though I am rapidly making my way to the grave, I still haven’t given up such childish joys as masturbation and making one line follow another, and even searching for rhymes. But don’t worry, I am not about to throw a pile of poetry into the face of the public. This is just an observation of the automat within me.

If I were thinking, I’d look at the papers, I’d look at the current state of play on Iraq, the pre-September follies, the incredible demonstration that distance is the equivalent of the worst vileness – civilization and the moral imperative probably have a precise ending point, say at 2020.9 miles from one’s home - and I’d slit my wrists, metaphorically speaking, or try to shed this human skin and become inanimate. But those, too, are childish fantasies – if you live in the monster, you are the monster. That’s that.

Instead of which, I will translate this paragraph from De L’amour, chapter 33:

“Always a small doubt to tranquilize, this is what makes for that thirst persisting every instant, this is what makes the life of love happy. As fear never abandons it, its pleasures can never bore. The characteristic of this happiness is extreme seriousness.”

LI gets a deep satisfaction – the satisfaction one gets from all vertiginous art, or the art, simply, of the baroque – from the variations of tone and sensibility Stendhal gets out of one little word, here: ‘happiness’.

camp

When LI goes out hiking with our brothers, the scene partly resembles the chapter in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus slope towards home. Questions are raised - notably, the question of how it could possibly be the case that the intervals between the hour when the shadow points due east, the hour when it points due north, and the hour it points due west could be uneven. This involved much diagramming with sticks, calculations about preserving the percentage of the average day between sunrise and sunset as a circle with a greater or lesser diameter, representing the variation of the day over the year, and a few counterfactuals, one involving a world made entirely of glass, which sorta went over my head. Then there is the traditional argument about the pre-Columbian population of North and South America, which is always, for some reason, heated. The scene also resembles tradition redneck fiestas - for instance, back at camp, we all sing along to Freebird when its turn comes on the itunes playlist. Then there is the traditional beer, whiskey, rum and ... stuff. There is the straining to see a bird that just flew off from a bush, the shadow of a fish in a pool, and the hope of seeing a bear someday, at a suitable distance. There are the dirty jokes, which segue into politics, which veer into descriptions of crime scenes one has been a part of. There's the princess and the pea, or rather the princess and the fucking rocky gravel, effect to deal with in the confines of a tent upon which absolute forest dark has closed down; there's the amazingly delicious morning coffee, no longer cowboy style; there's the swimming in the pools under the waterfall.

To prove my distaste for shorts (excepting the right occasion): here's LI on a bridge in the mountains, wearing waterproof, non-commodifiable, thoroughly theory vetted trousers:



My brother, D., decided that LI was being silly. He opted for Lacanian lounging in a thoroughly American pair of shorts.



My other brother, D2, was also determined to trample the trails exposing his knees. To. Poison. Ivy. Having avoided the annual scourge so far this year, I was not about to dare that pernicious native american creeper:



Finally, we styled in the wilderness with this ultraneat camo budweiser tent for pooches. Featured is a model pooch, Cody:

various

Atlanta. LI successfully made it past the e-ticket, the woman who tells you to get into the big line that wends around just like it used to pre e-ticket, the man telling his wife that he thinks they should go home and call up American airlines and get their money back, the harried smiles from the multiple service monster snorting up information and baggage, the doffed shoes, the metal detector and involved search of the old Mexican guy in the wheelchair including his stretched out socks, the niceness of tvs not hanging everywhere unlike Dallas, the airport where tvs are as thick as passenger pigeons used to be in the autumn skies of Ohio, the tracking of hurricane Dean through holiday resorts, the Delta plane with barely any passengers within which one could settle back and enjoy the two count em two packets of peanuts to make this trip an enjoyable one since the pilot and the Delta organization he represents know (regretfully) that we have a choice when buying tickets showing that old institutional memories of 1910 when we didn’t have a choice die hard, and then my brother, with a bit more gray to him and me and both of us casting those surreptitious measuring glances of siblings who haven’t seen each other in a while and getting our footing and we are off…

So there is going to be less from LI. I planned to do a little more concentrated research while here for my happiness essay. Gonna mostly try to hike. Eat. Drink. Be merry.

In the meantime … do look at the whole festschrift of inanity pouring out of Gideon Rose’s defense of the foreign policy clerisy. Glenn Greenwald is on quite a roll, dismantling the various pretences. Oddly, over at Lawyers Guns and Money one of the bloggers is defending the idea that invading Iraq was at least a defensible idea back in the day. LI begs to differ. There were two parameters that the promoters of the war had to deal with: cost and manpower. Cost was figured by Glenn Hubbard at 100-200 billion dollars. Manpower was figured by Shinseki at 400,000 men or over. Both figures referred to the whole process, for the invasion and the occupation were one process. I discount any argument that compartmentalized those things. I only count those arguments for the war which absorbed the fact that it would take the resources projected by Shinseki and Hubbard. And any supporter who did that – I can’t think of one – would have, honestly, not been able to support the invasion. The testimony of Wolfowitz and of the Rumsfeld Defense department in the months leading up to the war undercut any serious case for the war. In the same way that advocating building a dam across a river conscientiously means advocating using the resources it takes to build a dam across a river. A bad engineer will build an insufficiently supported bridge and cause a catastrophe. A bad foreign policy analyst will build a case detached from the project realities of resourcing it and create a guerilla war, a falling state, four million refugees and some not small change in deaths – we’ve reached five hundred thousand or so last year in Iraq. In both cases, the irresponsibility is shameful. And that’s that.

wasting time

Damn. LI is going to Atlanta today. So we don't have time to post a long translation from Stendhal's 1826 preface to On Love. As we've been saying and saying, the 19th century experienced a change in emotional customs, following behind a change in the positional structure that derived from the emergence - or imposition - of the market society. What makes Stendhal such a great witness is that his early life was dedicated to the proposition that happiness in Europe was born out of the the French Revolution. This was what Napoleon's soldiers brought with them. If you remember the great opening chapters of The Charterhouse of Parma, he describes there the irresistibly joyous result of the contact of modernity - Napoleon's soldiers - with the petrified order of the ancien regime in Italy. Although the irresistibility was, in fact, resisted and rolled back in the 1820s. This was the decade in which Standhal saw political oppression in Italy first hand, in the career of the woman he was in love with, Mathilde Dembowski, a Milanese woman who was spied on by the Austrians for her work with the Italian revolutionaries. It was in the wake of Stendhal's affair with Metilde that he wrote On Love.

A.O. Hirschman, in "The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph", has given an account of the way the relation between passion and interest was reconfigured in the post-Smith era. Hirschman begins with a tres Stendhalian question: how did glory get subordinated to wealth in the West?

“No matter how much approval was bestowed on commerce and other forms of money-making, they certainly stood lower in the scale of medieval values than a number of other activities, in particular the striving for glory. It is indeed through a brief sketch of the idea of glory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that I shall now attempt to renew the sense of wonder about the genesis of the “spirit of capitalism.”

Indeed, all his life Stendhal strove to reconcile an intellectual preference for the strictly logical and cold - philosophy expressed in the style of the Civic Code, as he put it - with his notion of the 'happy few'. The meaning Stendhal gave to happiness is inseparable from glory. The glory that ran through the Napoleonic period had, for Stendhal, departed from Europe, atomizing into private ventures - such as Julien Sorel's. Stendhal's biting comments about businessmen and the wealthy comne out of this sense that they are essentially inglorious. The striving for self interest actually blinds the reader of On Love to its meaning: it is literally incomprehensible to them:

"In spite of taking pains to be clear and lucid, I can’t perform miracles; I can neither give ears to the deaf nor eyes to the blind. Thus money men, men whose pleasures are unselective [a grosse joie] who have earned a hundred thousand france in the year preceding the moment they open this book ought to quickly shut it, in particular if they are bankers, manufacturers, respectable industrialists, that is to say people with eminently positive ideas. This book may be less unintelligible to those who have gained a lot of money in the market or the lottery. Such profit can coexist with the habit of passing hours entirely devoted to revery, and to enjoying the emotions that come out of a painging of Prud’hon or a musical phrase of Mozart’s, or, finally, of a certain singular look darted by the woman one is preoccupied with. This is, of course, nothing but wasting one’s time for men who pay two thousand workers at the end of each week. Their minds are always pointed towards the useful and the positive."

Well, I will return to this when I can.