arcanii imperium and us

 

 

 The scope of covert action could include: (1) political advice and counsel; (2) subsidies to an individual; (3) financial support and “technical assistance” to political parties; ( 4) support of private organizations, including labor unions, business firms, cooperatives, etc.; (5) covert propaganda; (6) “private” training of individuals and exchange of persons; (7) economic operations; and (8) paramilitary [or] political action operations designed to overthrow or to support a regime (like the Bay of Pigs and the programs in Laos). These operations can be classified in various ways: by the degree and type of secrecy required [,] by their legality, and, perhaps, by their benign or hostile character. - Richard Bissell, ex deputy director, CIA, in a secret conference, 1968. https://publicintelligence.net/cia-covert-action-philosophy/

In French, there are two words corresponding to conspiracy in English: conspiration and conjuration. All analogy hunting is imperfect, and I will leave out a third word, complot, to make a conceptual point: conspiration is usually taken to refer to the machinations of an occult society from below, seeking some purpose that dare not be pursued openly due to the forces of order that would crush it.  Conjuration – a swearing-together – is usually taken to refer to a secret group on some higher echelon of society – aristocrats, the king’s ministers, generals. A cabal, the Littré says. Conjuration survives in English as conjure – to call up spirits. In Greek, horkos is to swear, from which we derive the latin exorcizo – exorcize. There is, in the semantic field of the oath, some further connection with the spirits, with elemental powers. That’s a rich field, since it encompasses not only the popular dread of secret policemen and the hidden moves of power players, but also the notion of the unearthly, the uncanny. Indeed, both of these themes have converged continually during the Cold War – that war culture that began in 1945 and was declared over after the overthrow of Soviet power in Russia in 1991. A war culture that gave birth to our own war culture, which is continually searching for a general purpose and a demon enemy.

Although English does not make the same distinction between conspiration and conjuration as French does, you can see that the concept works in any discussion of conspiracy. Conspiracy is allowed, even used as a justification, if it is a breathing together of the enemy, the Other. Thus, communists, the dangerous working class, the Islamic terrorists, are targeted as conspirators, and have been regularly shown to conspire by the establishment press in America, and the political/academic establishment in general. Osama bin Laden’s band conspires. On the other hand, hints of conjuration – of high levels working together as a cabal – almost immediately drive the establishment crazy. The CIA would never conspire to, say, bring narcotics into the country. The FBI would never be an accomplice to the assassination of civil rights leaders. And if by some happenstance we uncover, say, a scheme to sell arms to Iran to supply arms to mercenaries in Nicaragua, this is an aberration and not something that the American government would in any way regularly do. This is conspiracy theory territory. In the post World War II period, the theory of conjuration has been medicalized (as a paranoid delusion) and diabolized (as a myth akin to the anti-semitism of the Nazis).

2.

Because of this conceptual line, we still have an odd and unbalanced history of the twentieth century. After the Soviet Union fell apart, for a brief period, the records of the KGB became available on an unprecedented scale, as did the secret police records of all the Eastern European states. These records have been read naively by academics – mainly the ideologically hardcore among them – as though they told the complete truth. From them, we can get a record of subversives among us. Never mind that bureaucratic files overflow with optimistic statements, obfuscations, lies and error in any organization, not to speak of a secret one. But the records of the intelligence agencies on the winning side – those of the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, etc. – are still a matter of dribs and drabs, of troves of documents heavily redacted by the intelligence agencies themselves, or of troves discovered accidentally and revealed, usually, in hole-in-the-corner lefty publications. One would think that the enormous expansion of police powers and the various “organs” of intelligence should have, by now, achieved the kind of gravitas to deserve serious historical treatment even given this hostile terrain, but as Alain Dewerpe points out in Espion: une anthropologie historique du secret d’Etat contemporaine, the historical profession has made investigation in conjuration a no-go area, one that arouses suspicion of kookiness. Which is why the literature on, say, the CIA during the postwar period is still driven by journalists, sewing fact to fact, speculation to speculation. These journalists are regularly jeered at by the “historians” of the CIA’s house journal, Studies in Intelligence, for their use of anonymous sources and their method of using associations and analogies to establish causes. Of course, the cynicism of these in-house, bought off  historians is functional: after all, we use indirection and supposition because the CIA has laws to protect the release of its records, and has long dodged any uncensored release of the material around, for instance, even such an ancient matter as the Kennedy assassination. It is important to see, too, that it is  ideological: in the twentieth century, the right and its allies have long made their homes in spy agencies and police departments. From taking the Soviet Union for an enemy to taking any supposed “weakening” of attitude towards the Soviet Union for subversion is an easy step. Similarly, these departments were, for most of the cold war, very very white, and very very suspicious of black politicians and activists. Thus, your average libertarian or far right group had little to fear from the cops or the spies: but every leftist group offering even the mildest critique of the war culture, capitalism, or the state of race relations was on the target list.

3.

These are circumstances that have, as it were, blown back on the spirit of democracy in many countries – the U.S. being one of them. If the population is largely suspicious, as every poll shows it is, of the Warren Commission story about the JFK assassination, and if the response of the establishment defenders is to label such suspicions “paranoid”, it will soon become impossible to trust the establishment defenders, and indeed the state itself, as an honest dialogue partner.  The historian Richard Hofstadter, in 1964 (the year in which the Federal government lied about the Tonkin Bay incident, thus pushing U.S. into the most active phase of the Vietnam War), influentially cast the idea that conspiracy theory is a product of a “paranoid” style in American culture. Distrust of the motives of the governors, and their tendency to hide information and manipulate events to their profit, which was common sense to the Founding fathers and is the premise of any advertising campaign worth its retainer, is haughtily dismissed when it is expressed by the groundlings.  The model, which has been followed to this day by such “influencers” as Cass Sunstein, is to laugh at  the notion that something is rotten in a state in which agencies who are resourced with hundreds of billions of dollars get to choose their level of transparency. The problem of conspiracy beliefs, then, can be countered with clever practical tricks. In Sunstein’s Conspiracy theories and Other Dangerous Idea), the suggest is:  “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.” This echoes the program followed by the CIA in the 1960s and 70s, called Operation Chaos. It has, predictably, spawned conspiracy theories about Sunstein himself, which then get turned around and used to show that look, all notion that there is some occult collusion at high levels of the government is nuts! – the last bit of the cycle falling to an article by Andrew Marantz at the New Yorker, who portrays Sunstein and his enemies with zero historical consciousness about the rich history of “cognitive infiltration” by the government in marginal groups, mostly leftwing, throughout the twentieth century.

 

 

4.

Marantz’s lack of notice of the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and the infinite variety of homegrown subversives divisions generated by urban police departments is in contrast to pop culture’s hyper-attention: Netflix writers, for instance, regularly so regularly use MKUltra as their muse that the heirs of Sidney Gottlieb could probably sue for points. Conspiracy (or, as I will call it from now on, conjuration) is a popular framework  for films, tv, and fiction, from Gravity’s Rainbow to the X files. For leftist artists, it has resulted in the replacement of earnest socialist realism (in which workers produce and are exploited) with glitzy assassination plots (in which freelancers with guns and no pension plans are the vital political players). JFK, here, is vaguely assimilated to King Arthur, just as the bogus Camelot label promised, and the king is always being brought down by evil. Conjuration, here, stands in contrast to  your random superhero film, where the enemy is more usually a conspirator of the old police tradition – a criminal after the wealth of the wealthiest, in alliance, often, with some vaguely leftist extremist – see Poison Ivy in the Batman films, a veritable Earth Firster, for testimony.

Given this pop richesse, you would think that there would be a rich social science literature on the effect of the CIA and military secret programs on American democracy, such as it is. I don’t mean by this just the study of the programs themselves – I mean the study, as well, of the effect of them being blown, being known, and being shown. American citizenship has been demoralized by all of this: by both the disclosures and the refusal to disclose. We know more about, say, lab leaks in China than we do about lab leaks in the U.S., and more about the KGB’s agents in place in the states in the Cold War than about America’s agents in place in the Soviet Union – which fell thirty years ago. Thus, our history is in a curious state, rather like the cat in Schroedinger’s thought experiment. And this is a scandal. Democracy has a past dimension – it requires clarity about the past. And we haven’t got that yet, not by a longshot.

 

Dreams of the Neoliberal Reich

 

When I was a callow youth – or even, one might say, a stupid one – I used to take great pleasure in making up prank tapes for my answering machine. I made one which I considered a true chef d’oeuvre in which, after saying I was not in, I said: today we are having a great sale on heroin and cocaine! Its our way of saying thanks to our many customers. Kilo of H at a mere 100 bucks! We must be crazy to sell it so cheap, but we can: cause of Volume!

My roommates at the time did not think much of this prank. It was soon changed.

Freedom of speech has always been a bit of a compromise. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech – both, as we well know, are freedoms you have to pay for, one way or another. In the lectures to the introduction of psychoanalysis, Freud uses the image of the customs office as a support for the observation that the “eigene Ich” – the Ego itself – enters into every dream, “even where it has hidden itself under the manifest content”. The dream involves a man who is traveling across a border with a lot of baggage, who claims he has nothing to declare. The customs officers open the baggage and find contraband.

I think this is a nice instance of the pervasiveness of the collective ego function. As is my prank answering machine tape, with its jejune transgression of a taboo. In fact, the total power of the “state” – and I include in the state the powers that be, the multinationals, the billionaires, etc., as I find the separation between the powers and the legally instituted powers to be, for the purposes of analysis, subordinate to their solidarity – has its nightside in dreams.

Charlotte Beradt, who fled Germany in 1939, made a survey of the dreams of her  colleagues, friends, etc. She worked at the Fischer publishing house, and in New York was a great and close friend to Hannah Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Bluecher. Fleeing with her husband to New York, she lacked the money and patronage to set up shop as an intellectual, so she made her apartment into a beauty shop. She cut and dyed the hair of intellectuals. She published her book, The Third Reich of Dreams, in the sixties, after she had returned to Germany. It struck a chord.  

This dream struck me:

"It was about eight o’clock in the evening. As usual at that time of the day, I was talking on the telephone with my brother, my only friend and confidant. [This appraisal of the brother’s relationship was a true one.] After having taken the precaution of praising Hitler’s policies and life in the National Community, I said, 'Nothing gives me pleasure anymore.’ [In fact, he had said this on the telephone earlier in the evening.]

"In the middle of the night the telephone rang. A dull voice [corresponding to the expressionless faces we have encountered in previous dreams] said merely, 'This is the Monitoring Office.’ I knew immediately that my crime lay in what I had said about not finding pleasure in anything, and I found myself arguing my case, begging and pleading that this one time I be forgiven — please just don’t report anything this one time, don’t pass it on, please just forget it. The voice remained absolutely silent and then hung up without a word, leaving me in agonizing uncertainty.”

 

This nightmare, and my prank call, are related structurally in the same way that Freud thought that jokes and dreams are psychodynamically related. The Ueber-Ich, which can’t allow any deviations from the rule, actually does allow deviations from the rule – for the Ueber-Ich, like all policing institutions, is corrupt. The draconian War against Drugs in this perspective comes out in all its totalitarian glory, claiming the subject’s very chemistry. And the idea that joy does not come through strength, through the Fuehrer-prinzip, is so censored that even in Beradt’s friend’s dream it must be whispered on the phone – and be punished by an even greater degree of whisper, a mere menacing phone silence.

Is someone collecting the dreams of the Neoliberal era, which in my case are all about debts and empty bank accounts? Someone should.

a man with back pain speaks - or the poetry of the Ouch

 

Should a man with back pain read the Philosophical Investigations?

I’m the man with back pain in this question. Last Saturday, due to some untoward twist of my posture, I think – I am not certain of this, I have a vague sense of the cause that is mixed up with a vague and exasperated sense of the unfairness of it all – I suddenly got a pain in my back that quickly spread. Lumbago, a word that, like abracadabra, gives us a spell rather than an exact name for the event, is what we all call it. It is my excuse: I say I have lumbago and I can’t do such and such. Although, unlike many of the excuses I make, “can” here is pretty exact: My pain threshold gets passed pretty quickly if, for instance, I walk more than a block or so.  

Famously, Wittgenstein took up the question of “inner sensations” in what is called the Private Language section of the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein lived in England, and the English tradition of reflection typically took pain examples from the high life – the pain of a toothache in the study, for instance – and not from the lowlife – say, the pain of wearing manacles in a slave ship. In the forties, when Wittgenstein was questioning the idea of pain as an utterly closed off property – an inaccessible inner object – pain was being delivered by the air and on the ground in massive shocks. Like Henry Green, who utilized  his volunteer work with the fire department during the London Blitz to write Caught, Wittgenstein, a hospital volunteer during the same time, must have had plenty of opportunities to see pain in a variety of situations. In Caught the upper middle class character, Richard, the volunteer auxiliary fireman, has a talk with a Czech refugee named Ilse about the bombing. Usually, in talking with English women, he gives a speech about the dangers presented by the fires and gets the response that “you’ll be alright”, but Ilse responds by saying Yes, you do have a high chance of dying and then says of the famous English stiff upper lip/jokey attitude: “I, I like you here, but you have no idea how you are hated abroad, yes, even by your own allies.”

Wittgenstein, I think, shared Ilse’s attitude about the English flatness: the idea that if you avoided the depths, they would go away. Far from being “common sense”, this flatness corrupted common sense, making it an obstacle to feeling.

“Why can't a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing.”

Indeed, I don’t think I am the only one who wonders if my inner dog isn’t simulating pain, limping around: to say I feel pain is not the simple report it seems to be. Back pain is fleeting and then it is not. This week, I have had a lot of encounters with the enemy, but I have not seen through its tricks, or quite understand the hand to hand moments. For me, the morning is a terrible time – then my back feels all of a block, a heavy block, but not a happy one: a crushed in turtle shell. And then I lay down on something called, in French, a tapis champ des fleurs – that is, a towel like thing that has about four dozen “fleur”, bristly plastic circles, that press into your skin, acupuncture like. It works. I can’t lay down naked on it – I need a t shirt or an intervening towel. But long sessions ameliorate the pain, and make me wonder if I wasn’t… well, faking it?

Of the feigning of pain, there is no end. In Patton, the George C. Scott vehicle that gave my seventh grade a patriotic buzz, there is a scene in which Patton slaps a soldier in shell shock. I probably imitated it, as did my friends. You god damned coward! It is, looking back on it, a rather shocking scene. I’m not the first person to say Patton was generally on the Mussolini right. Scott played that role, down to the way Patton angrily breathed through his nose, with a great gusto. And of course Patton was on perma-play in the Nixon White House. The issue of shell shock, though, has always been treated gingerly in American popular culture – it makes bombing people suddenly less fun.

The army put great stock in research devoted to sussing out the malingerer from the truly shell shocked. And in common life, Freud’s patients were neurasthenics who doctors often diagnosed, in fancy terms, as fakers. Fake pain and real pain – the two go arm in arm throughout the fraught history of twentieth century medicine. And especially as that history is gendered: from Chronic Fatigue to Long Covid, the more a condition is identified with women, the more it is likely to be considered “fake”. Even then, however, the pain is not considered “fake”. The pain is like some real physical event – a rock thrown, a brick dropped.

Pain (and not pleasure – sadly, pleasure is not a common object of philosophical reflection) when it is genuine seems no different than other qualia – say, the color red. It requires some sensing apparatus to make its appearance. And in as much as that seems, to some degree, a magic trick, Wittgenstein surrounds pain with questions – as indeed pain is surrounded with questions in a clinic. Do you hurt here? Do you hurt when you do this?

“But isn’t it absurd to say of a body that it has pains? And why would one feel this was absurd? In so far as my hand does not feel pains, but I in my hand?“

And even – as we know from the battlefield – when the hand is gone, there can be phantom pain in that hand. This somehow makes sense: pain may be as real as rocks, but we know that there is an infinitely small but infinitely crowdable margin in which the experience of pain and the expression of pain don’t align. The poetry of the ouch is not dead, but can be as variable as fuck, can be metaphored, signified, lyed and dyed in a million different ways.

This is one of them, wiling away my back getting better.

 

 

cioran's style

 

Unlike, say, happiness or sadness, despair doesn’t easily select, among a repertoire of performances, those which express its substance – or rather, its tone. The attraction, such as it is, of Cioran’s work is that here, one feels, despair gets free play. Massively, in fact. In his essays, the absence of act that characterises despair, its sunken violence – for despair, as Cioran sees it, is the child of a precedent and excessive violence – becomes the substance of the text, and as such fights a rearguard action with its very motive. If despair cuts us off from motive itself, it seems to remove at the same time its elemental right as a mood. This isn’t a matter of auto-erasure, as it is about the futility of all marks.

Cioran started out as an intellectual as a Romanian fascist: this is the point from which, whether overtly or implicitly, he always start in his subsequent writings. It is the image of that intellectual madness that haunts him. He was cured of this set of beliefs/prejudices – including the nastiest and most sinister, anti-semitism; but the rescue was not logical or discursive, but characterological, and as such, confirmed his notion that the logical and discursive were a kind of foam on the wave – an epiphenomenon, and not a matter of the depths.  The Cioran who praised Hitler as a young man had pulled himself out of that violence when, in 1944, he pled for the life of Benjamin Fondane  

-          Cioran went with Jean Paulhan, who he had contacted,  to the police station where the Gestapo was keeping  Fondane and his sister. He wanted to get them to release Fondane, and thought he’d plead the importance of the man.  The Gestapo offered a nasty little deal: Fondane could leave if he’d leave his siser. In an act that Cioran must have reflected on  often, Fondane refused to abandon his sister.  So they took them both, and both were murdered at Auschwitz.

There’s a famous passage in his History and Utopia which outlines Cioran’s notion of what is, for any real writer since the early modern era, the real thing he was after - the Work in all its dark and frustrating glory. But what a self-divided goal it turns out to be!

“The idle man who loves violence safeguards his savoir-vivre in confining it to an abstract hell. Unhanding the individual, letting go of names and faces, he goes after the imprecise, the general, and, orienting his thirst for exterminations toward the impalpable, imagines a new genre: the pamphlet without an object. “

 In Cioran, every lapidary statement is eventually thrown back in his face. In “Drawn and Quartered” one of his last books, Cioran’s idle man conceives a different genre under which to classify his writing:”One should not chain oneself to a Work, one must instead say the kind of thing that can be murmured in the ear of a drunk or a dying person.” The ephemeral and the absolute must, somehow, be forced to merge. This is the very duty of style.

A wonderful and terrifying artistic credo to work under.

Travel notes: Avignon

We were too late to catch the 1:15 train to Avignon from Montpellier, so we went to eat lunch at Le Faune, the pretentious restaurant attached to MOCO, the modern museum just up the street from the gare. Unfortunate choice – inedible fare – but nice exhibition of a very German German artist, Neo Rauch (we discussed whether his birth name was really Neo, but I can’t find different on Google) and then got the train into Avignon and arrived around 5:30. We left Montpellier on a summer day and got to Avignon on an autumn day – the season had changed in the couple hours of our train trip, borne northward on the Mistral. The wind flows like a river over Avignon. Its most famous inhabitant, Petrarch, disliked the town with the dislike of Jonah vis-à-vis Ninevah. He disliked it for the corruption during the brief era when Avignon was the seat of the Popes, but I suspect that the Mistral gave him headaches.

It didn’t give me headaches: in fact, the river of wind above the town, at night, was somehow wildly exciting. But a constant wind in your face is unignorable.

We made a reservation at Le Bercail. However, it was no good. When we walked through the town in the direction of the restaurant, we saw that we would have to cross the Rhone to get to it. There was a navette, a little boat, that crossed the river every fifteen minutes, or so the sign said. But that was no good. The air was cold and the boat was distant, and we calculated that we’d have half an hour to order and eat and finish our meal to catch the last passage on the boat. So we turned reluctantly away and found a small but tasty couscous place. It will be marked in my memory by this: I had my first glass of Algerian wine there, Sidi Brahim. I felt very Hemingway-esque sipping it: somewhere in his memoir of Paris, A moveable feast, Hemingway mentions cheap North African wine. I haven’t read A moveable Feast in a shark’s age, so I might be wrong about this reference, but still: the town, the wind, the square, the little Pied Noir man who served us with a few outdated server’s flourishes, it was all so the American abroad experience.

The next day we went to the Dom. We went to the Palais de Pape. We talked about Petrarch. But the main thing, the striking thing, the civilized thing, was nothing like we had previously planned to do. Walking down from the Dom, we noticed that there was a museum with no line outside the door – unlike the Palais. It was called the Petit Palais. So we ducked into it and there saw a collection of early Renaissance paintings in a space where we could really look at them. They were unframed. We were within real human space of them. And they were all remarkable. They were from Italian masters who travelled the circuit from Florence to Siena to Avignon. There were few pagan references in these paintings, but there was perspective and there were faces that, as Jacob Burkhardt might have said, were individual. Real expressions looked out at us, unsubsumed by their ritual  position, their beatification, their place in Biblical narrative. It was startling and exhilarating and it rapidly became  one of my top museum experiences.

The drain on a painting when it is being gazed at by a moving mass of people makes it as hard to experience them as it is to get to know a politician who shakes your hand at a reception. Acquaintance is not the same as knowing. But here, I knew these paintings.

We agreed, after they chased us out of the place for lunch, that we’d just done something incredibly touching

Then we had another go at Le Bercail, but again there was the problem of time with the navette. So we ate at a bistro with plenty of Provencal items on the menu. I bobbled it, having a middlebrow steak-frite. Then we did a few more tourist routes, got on the train at 5:30, and returned to Montpellier, satisfied with our one day jaunt.  More satisfied than ever Petrarch was with Avignon:

 

nest of treachery, where all the evil,

 

spread through all the world, hatches,

 

slave to wine, delicacies and good living,

 

where Luxury performs her worst.

 

 

age, breath

 

Age puts a hole in your pocket. You reach in there and find out that, without you knowing it, somewhere in the course of your days and wanderings, you’ve lost … well, all kinds of things that you thought you absolutely needed.  Memories. Desires.

Or, for instance, breath.

When I was a child, I thought about breath in terms of holding my breath. I’d exaggerate the whole not breathing thing, mumping out my cheeks, keeping from breathing through my nostrils, until I’d have to stop, breath in, breath out noisily. The rumor was that you could do this and at a certain point you’d turn blue and pass out. For some reason, I thought that sounded great, a feat worth doing. I never passed out, though. I never met anyone that did. I began to think this was a myth.

I also learned to hold my breath when I swam underwater. I tried to make it from one side of the pool to the other underwater, to build up my stamina.

Later, in my spiritual twenties, I took Yoga. As part of the routine, I tried to meditate upon my breathing.

And the Yoga phase passed. Decades passed. Wine and beer and coffee and all the starches and sweets of a developed economy passed.

Then, a few years ago, I came down with pneumonia. I’d had pneumonia before. We were old friends. But this was ultra pneumonia, like I never had before. It carved a month out of my life. Afterwards, I was short of breath whatever I did.

Since then, I am not ever long of breath. I sit here, breathing in and out, nothing simpler, but I know that I can easily get out of breath if I get up and run around. Breath has dribbled out of the hole in my pocket.

Mallarmé, in an essay he pieced together out of three previous essays and published in Divagations – Crise de Vers, 1895 – imagines poetry, or literature itself, as a sort of institution of breathing: “replacing the perceptible respiration of the in-spired ancient lyric (la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique)  or the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.” I could go all deriddian on this notion of a replacement, but I am more interested in the transfer of the breath in one body, human, with its tongue and lungs, to another, the written, lungless, an imprint of a long lost breathing – rather like the X rays that they took of my lungs when I had pneumonia.

 

One thinks of Mallarmé as the high priest of the blank page, the page addressed in A throw of the dice. But by grounding literature in breath, he foretells such poets as Olson and Snyder. The beats. Ginsberg.

 

How am I to locate, what am I to do with breathlessness? I’ve long thought we build our strengths out of our deficiencies – not in denial, but in experiment, pushing against the limit. So what am I to do with breathlessness?

 

I’m not sure I can follow out some ideology of strength and deficit and make it all a happy end. But what I know is that it makes the stairs more stairs, the hill more hill, the stone stonier. Perhaps shortness of breath, too, is a device. A god in decline, but a god still.

sleep

There's no estate in sleep

nor does it possess

height nor depth

(clumsy crooner!)

 

 

Of the barbarous clangour

that makes up the names of its gods

you cannot transcribe

them with your sublunar diacritics.

 

 

The human tongue’s

euclidean vocables

have no purchase on

sleep’s 'evidently'.

Paul Nizan's love letter

 

One measures the sincerity of a love letter by its attachment to the receiver – the lover, or hoped for lover, on the other end of this outpouring of sentiment. That attachment is signalled by a certain privacy of tone more than anything else. The tone in writing is, overtly, a clumsy thing – it is underlining, italics, exclamation points, a rather miserable attempt to make the hand that writes take on a function of the tongue that speaks. To make the tone work, to rise above these poor instruments, requires, even of the most silly love letter writer, a certain sense of nuance. A certain sense of tickling, so to speak. And we know that some are born ticklish, and others aren’t.

Thus, the love letter is bound to an aesthetic purpose that may not be shareable. Love letters that have passed into literature, that please people beyond the narrow circle of the couple, are rarely the most successful love letters in terms of their immediate purpose.

I came across this love letter from Paul Nizan to his wife, Henriette, dated 5 November 1939. P.N. is in the army, at this point, but the war seems “phony” – nothing seems to be happening. It is one of the rare love letters that delights on the two levels sketched above. So, I thought I’d translate it. Which is inevitably to distort it.

Perhaps this gains in poignancy for me, knowing the end of the story – Nizan’s mysterious death in the woods six months later, and the way his name was dragged in the mud by Stalinists for years, and Sartre’s amazing preface to Aden Araby which brought Nizan’s name back into the light.

    “Rirette my dearest.  Received your letter of Nov. 1 yesterday evening. It is so very nice to be able to say, after fifteen years, that we love each other enough to exchange love letters, and that we have triumphed in the end over everything that separates people. This stay in the army has reminded me a bit of my stay in Arabia [About which Nizan wrote his first and most famous book], but we know more things, we are much more deeply complicit, we have learned to go beyond mere literature. So that without doubt this time will not be lost, if it isn’t prolonged up until I have a long white beard and promenade along the Maginot line in a little tank. Julie de Lespinasse, Juliette Drouet, and other women only had to hold tight. You know, the legend says that, in order to appease the combattants and consecrate them exclusively to thoughts of war and the contemplation of their military destiny, the powers that be put saltpeter or camphor in the wine, the salt, and the coffee. This legend, I think, is frivolous : if there were camphor in the wine and saltpeter in the coffee, men with more sensitive palate would have perceived it, but I have no need for the witness of taste : it is enough that I read a letter of yours, or write one to you, that I think of your rose Piana dress, your pleated dress of last winter, of that return from Prague in December 37 when you could not stop climaxing, in order for me to have a personal and physical proof that they haven’t put saltpeter in the wine.  So that we shouldn’t have any worries for my moment  of leave, and it will be enough for me to see your knees, your thighs, that you, without any previous sign, put your tongue in my mouth for us to arrive at some frank result. Perhaps it will be wise for you to renounce the vain usage of panties. And there will be time to talk and to say important things to each other. A propos of the Talmud, I just read that Eben Haeser prescribes that workers not make love more than twice in the week, that savants confine themselves to the sabbath, that muleteers do it once per week, and camel drivers once per month, and only rentiers can do it every day: I will have to put myself in the last category. Also, I read in the Talmud, a naughtier books than I thought, that anyone who makes love to a woman on the bottom will suffer from delirium: ah, but what a wonderful delirium! I embrace you in this spirit. »

jetlag and the astronaut

 

D.H. Lawrence, drawing on Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, pins the ur-American hero as, famously,  isolate, cold, a killer. In fact it is easy to think that the American Adam, the first man in our cosmology, was clothed in a hazmat suit -  perfect for existing on this planet as a being entirely of the planet, from the rhythms of his blood to the Circadian cycles of his sleep. An astronaut in the anthropocene, a intruder from the beyond, perpetually alien, perpetually exploiter. Bless the alienation and count the money, we all say here.

A brilliant essay by Henry Sussman, The Phenomenology of Jetlag, Kafka is presented as the prophet of our time warped era, the era of insomnia and time zone smuggling – that is, smuggling time zones into other time zones. For instance, my cell phone doesn’t just tell me the time, now, in Paris, where I live, but also the time in the Eastern Time zone of the U.S., where I was visiting. And since I also visited Iowa, which is on Central Time, both of my numbers were off. Kafka, who worked with worker’s insurance and made it to many meetings in Central Europe to talk to factory officials and the like, was well aware of the hazards of sleep deprivation. Its effects could be tabulated in so many injuries, so many fingers cut off, legs wounded, muscles torn, etc. The effects of tearing away the natural attachment of our circadian rhythm from the light and night to which they are primordially coordinate makes for the heavy presence of sleep in his novels and stories. Sleep as something put off, sleep as something that occurs in highly inappropriate settings, such as in the Land Surveyor K.’s meeting with Buergel in The Castle.

Sussman writes: “… the recovering victim of a significant act of spatio-temporal dislocation and abuse, otherwise known as jetlag, is, unwittingly, subject to two sets of spatio-temporal parameters. There is the explicit one, clearly prevalent at the point of disembarkation in the form of a very loose etiquette defining the business day, customary periods for dining and rest and other conventional interactions: and then there is the holdover protocol of what Proust would call habit still operative in the zone of embarkation. It is surely in the most “jarring” and subliminal manner, Fraud would call it “unconscious” and Proust “involuntary,” that the recalcitrant regime operative a the journey-origins asserts itself in such forms oas sudden involuntary waking in a hyper-attentive state or equally abrupt onsets of fatigue at the least felicitous moments of the active day. We associate the sudden-onset phenomena of depth or unforeseen complexity that definitely establish the activity and output of  the parallel and embedded universe of aesthetic sensibility. Via this particular circuit of modernist invention we come to learn that K.’s pronounced episodes of jetlag toward the end of Das Schloss, of a jetlag before the fact, belong to his own heavily disguised apprenticeship as a performance artist.”

I’m unsure about that anachronism of “performance artist” in that last sentence – a phrase from a different embarkation zone than that of K, even if Kafka, as the author of the Hunger Artist, does come close to embodying, with dream-like precision,  the conceptual art theory of the seventies. Sussman’s larger point, though, is something I can affirm in my own disembarked experience now: the grogginess that succeeds a night of highly interruptible sleep on a transatlantic plane flight, and the ordinary surrealism of all the subsequent manoeuvres in the airport, the seemingly endless corridors and stairs and escalators, the passage through security, the waiting for your luggage at the carousel, the barking of the airport security, the awareness of one’s haggard appearance as one waits for the cab, and the sense that one is not in a good state, that one has been pickpocketed of something one didn’t even know one had, i.e. placement in a certain timezone.

Jonathan Crary begins his book, 24/7, with a story about the white crowned sparrow. The Pentagon is very interested in the white crowned sparrow. Why? Because this sparrow can stay awake for up to seven days during the migratory season. The Pentagon wants to unlock the sparrow and apply its lesson to the human astronaut – the astronaut human – in order to correct that flaw, our ability and need to sleep.  For Crary, “The injuring of sleep is inseparable from the ongoing dismantling of social protections in other spheres.”

I’m awake now in the old world, contemplating the injury – and how much coffee it takes to bandage it – and wondering if I really was, yesterday morning, in the New World. What day was that the morning of?  And thinking of the magnificent ending of Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus:

“Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos,⁷¹ affords no advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon,⁷² I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes.⁷³ The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.⁷⁴ But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?”

 

 

The drive in experience

 Like many another whelp of the golden age of the American car, I remember drive in movies. In that toddlerhood which comes back to me in bits, a kind of primeval soup of dreamlike images, I remember suffering the passion of Ole Yeller at some drive in probably located, at the time, in the York Pennsylvania metro area, and now no doubt a parking lot or dump. There the dog faithfully defended its owners, there the dog, in a drizzle of images (sound via a gizmo one attached to the car door – and how my father, psychorigid about all things appertaining to paint scratches and fingerprints on windows, approved this I do not know), lived out the last of his, alas, one dog life, and there we cried. It is an incident, the popcorn, outdoor screen, car, that comes together as a hieroglyph of a certain kind of life, dead now as an Egyptian mummy. I also remember a certain erotic feeling aroused by another film from about the same time, a Disney film called, improbably, The Love Bug – could it have been about a Volkswagen? I’m not looking this up on IMDB. Let personal myth remain personal myth.

In a novel the paperback version of which I often press on friends (where it is destined to gather dust, no doubt, an alien to be pitched out or traded when the time comes to get rid of the junk in the house), Lookout Cartridge, the narrator is obsessed by an image:
“Or the Landslip Drive-in Movie, whose monumental screen under clean and clement American stars and in front of you and a hundred other cars without audible warning one summer night began to lower, to tilt back hugely and drop as if into a slot in the earth.
The image became yours even more surely by disappearing. It disappeared with a distinguished rumble mixed with what still came out of the speaker draped over the edge of your car window. An actress and actor in the corrected colors of the spectrum had been touching each other’s colossal faces and their breaths kept coming faster and more intimately loud to bring right into your car this whopping slide of mouths and fingers and nostrils inserted into the night-pines and sea-sky above the locally well-known clay cliffs that had just enjoyed their first clear day in two weeks. But now for the first time since before World War II a section of cliff gives way and the famous faces are swept as if by their camera right up off the monumental screen…”
The author, Joseph McElroy, was obsessed, in this stage of his career, with the media-mediated collectivity of images just beyond the proprioceptive zone, images that we barely but distinctly recognize as part of our “experience”, that word no longer denoting our face to face and tactile immersion in what is, but the immersion in what is represented, our, so to speak, zones of interest as subcontracted to the prevailing media regime.
My experience of the drive in was renewed – and Adam’s was initiated – last night in a field outside of Jackson Iowa, easily reached by way of State Highway 71 from the Iowa Great Lakes region. Adam, on this trip to America, has been longing for a drive-in movie, an item on his extensive trip bucket-list. A storm made that impossible in Georgia. Here, though, was an apparently clear evening, so we drove out and Adam got the hotdog, popcorn, fries, coke and ice cream sandwich that lays a ring of sugar and fat around our spectatorship. I warned, just like Dad did long ago, against letting any of that stuff drip onto the car seat. The Drive-in movie screens look a little anamolous out there amidst the corn and soybean fields. The man at the booth told me that there were only 230 left in the whole of the States, and we both agreed it was Covid’s fault. Instead of a gizmo, what you do for the sound is you tune in to a dedicated FM channel. Sweet! And it was thus that we beheld the wonders of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, a remake, as Adam reminded us. It was fun and cheesy and at a certain point the clement sky was overshadowed by clouds and lightning began to play on the horizon – not a bad addition to a haunted house movie. Just as the hero was embracing the heroine in the inevitable ending, the rain began to fall. Thus, in an additional dollop to the memory this will become for Adam, the parents scouted their way cautiously through a cloudbuster of a storm, across various bridges. As a driver, I’m on the spectrum with the Ancient Mariner – so cautious I’m a danger, or at least an irritant, to the poor unfortunate behind me. So we crept the 14 miles to home. And so to bed.

on the Des Moines glacial lobe

 

13,000 years ago, the Lake I look at from the dining room window would have been embodied in an ice sheet, around 1300 feet thick, the 'Des Moines Glacial Ice Lobe'. A mere millenium later, the ice wall had retreated north – glaciers have the attributes of troops on a battlefield, they are always advancing or retreating – leaving the depression into which water found its way.

The Ice Age! I love that term, and associate it with the American contribution to geology – via Agassiz. Who actually hypothesized the ice age in Switzerland.

‘On July 24, 1837, the Societe Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles ha its annual meeting in Neuchatel and Agassiz gave his opening addres known as the Discours de Neuchatel, which is the starting point of that has been written on the Ice-Age.” This I break off from Albert Carozzi’s “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: the Ice-Age.”

Like many a European scientist, Louis Agassiz eventually came to the United States – in search of proof for his glacial hypothesis. Carozzi sees, exactly, the romantic aesthetic behind Agassiz’s striking proposal.

“During his stay in America, Agassiz never lost sight of the traces glacial action, which had caught his attention the moment he land in the fall of 1846. Here is a striking account of his first impression:

"When the steamer stopped at Halifax, eager to set foot on the new continent full of promise for me, I sprang on shore and started at a brisk pace for the heig above the landing. On the first undisturbed ground, after leaving the town, I w met by the familiar signs, the polished surfaces, the furrows and scratches... so well known in the Old World; and I became convinced of what I had already anticipated as the logical sequence of my previous investigations, that here also this great agent had been at work.”

We could be reading the words of Dr. Frankenstein, in search of his great agent.

Hard to believe in ice on this sunny morning. But I must mention one other great agent in this dimly rhapsodic string: Marianne Moore. Her poem, the Octopus, is, to my mind, the most enigmatic of the American attempts to saw the epic into a form fit for the American tongue. It was one of John Ashberry’s totems, with its bristle of indirections and the babble of its mysterious citations. No other poem gets so close to seeing America as a poem, a geological, botanical, political epic, with all its bloody edits. Eliot might quote Dante; Moore would quote “W. P. Taylor, Assistant Biologist, Bureau of Biological Survey, U. S. Department of Agriculture.”

Hard to believe in ice. The lake bears its speedboats, water skiers, and lilly pads, made of some foamy material, perfect tabs for young swimmers to leap around on. Last night, in the storm, it was all bustling with white caps, and today it is placid and flat. We’ll soon take a boat and dock over at Arnold’s Park and go to the Nutty Bar.

 

The Ice. It is melting in the background, the planetary background, even as I type. But I like to think of Agassiz and Moore today. Vacation is made of blissful, intentional ignorances.

 

The fir trees in “the magnitude of their root systems,”

rise aloof from these maneuvers “creepy to behold,”

austere specimens of our American royal families,

“each like the shadow of the one beside it.”

 

The drunken boat on vacation

 

Leon Edel makes a shrewd juxtaposition between the fate of Charlotte Verver in the Golden Bowl and the consequent voyage to America of the hero of his biographical trifecta,  Henry James, quoting Fanny Assingham: “I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country. State after State – which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.”

Henry James’s travels in the U.S. in 1904, 21 years after he’d been there last, make up that bundle of impressions, The American Scene. James is the Silenus of expatriates – we all bow down to his altar, sooner of later. State after State – this was the great “subject” he was after, another writer – like Kerouac or Whitman, Mailer or, why not, Jane Smiley – in search of the real American thing, a story to pull out of the terrible vastness. On his first day, disembarked in New Jersey, James could already feel it:

Nothing was left, for the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of appreciation a mild, warm wave that broke over the succession of aspects and objects according to some odd inward rhythm, and often, no doubt, with a violence that there was little in the phenomena themselves flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all that day and the next ; so that I still think tenderly for the short backward view is already a distance with "tone" of the service it rendered me and of the various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water, that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step ashore.”

What expat come home has not surfed on that wave? Has not felt some lost familiarity in its motion and temperature? Some intervening distance that puts one on one side, the stranger at the party?

But Charlotte Verver and Henry James came home from a Europe that was truly distant – when distance was the experience of days and tossing currents, not of today’s menu of movies and tv shows and jet lag – an utterly new experience of time. I arrived in Atlanta a little sick, but soon cast off the threatened cold and plunged as directly as I could, with a casting off of newspaper headlines, into the “subject”. It is a plunging that requires cars, and getting used to vast, cathedral like grocery stores all over again. For Adam, the New Jerusalem is all about his bucket list of fast food places, as well as going, in Atlanta (and Athens, visiting his cousins), to comic book stores and parks and even visiting the King memorial down on Auburn Street. We are in Iowa now, and the bucket list consists of  swimming for three hours a day in Lake Boji  and amusement park rides in Arnold’s Park.

Myself, I am pretty amazed by the unconscious affluence here, the cheapness in the Walmart and the expensiveness of the restaurants; I’m tickled by the voices, by the way that the grocery store clerk can decide to tell you the story of her dog’s funny habits while ringing you up, just because; and I’m amazed at feeling so very American myself, as through bursting through the thin layer of the French quotidian.

Feeling American does not mean feeling kin to the official face America shows the world, or the unofficial American buzz on social media. I know that’s there. That’s always there. But that is not the wave. The wave is what I am interested in, more, at the moment.

The methods of truth are stranger than the methods of fiction - or maybe not

 

1.

“Truth is stranger than fiction” – such is the truism. About truisms, one never says that they are stranger than fiction – on the contrary, a truism banalizes truth. They are, definitionally, obvious, self-evident. They are even, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, hardly worth stating. The energy used to state them could be used elsewhere – for discovery, for instance. Invention. To bring to light something previously not known. Not known to be true. Truism then exists on the lowest level of organization, as material to use in organization and not itself to be organized. It is not “worth” paying attention to, or at least for too long. In this way, some critics say – Karl Kraus being the chief of this number – the truism can operate as a disguise.

Truism, under the pressure of such intelligence, an intelligence that I would suggest is “modern”, reveals itself as unheimlich, uncanny. It brings out, so to speak, the truth’s unconscious lie, in bringing out the system in which the truth operates.

I mentioned Kraus, but I could mention Swift. Swift is, of course, an odd liminal figure in the rise of the modern, being committed as he was to the ancient. But the tools he employed, from picaresque satire to the essay-prank to the adventure novel, are all very modern – as is his prose, a prose that could have been recommended by the historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat. As a complete social fact, a surroundsound of all possible circumstances, the modern can only be fought, by the  reactionary – and Kraus falls in this character often enough – by  taking up shock, the most modernist stylistic device. It is a style that begins to diffuse through cultures that, for one reason or another, contain massive demographics that are existentially offended by the modern.

I diverge, I diverge from the question I meant to pose at the very beginning, the question about the truism about the true: by what measure is the truth stranger than fiction? In fact, the formalists say that making strange, estrangement, is one of the great devices of art to advance the “true” – in the sense of the authentic. Truth, here, emerges from the particular to the level of the entire circumstance, or the Gestalt.  Skhlovskii defines that strangeness as a form of de-routinization. A part of the world – a tree, say – is given a presence that seems to depart from the routines to which trees in the human world are subject – chopping them down, planting them in groves or along streets, cooling ourselves in their shade, etc. The tree in Tolstoy’s short piece, Three deaths, for instance, is given a more tragic and meaningful death than the two human beings who also die in the sketch, even though the tree is in no way anthropomorphized.

And is this only a fictional device? Isn’t it rather one of the great devices of journalism? Here is a field where, surely, the claim that  fiction is less strange than truth is abundantly verified by the truths that pour off the newspaper page or, now, the cable tv – internet!

Yet these outrageous, scandalous or simply weird truths gain that quality partly through the aids of fiction, through being mediated by devices that are, in their nature, rhetorical. The ancestor of the news, that unwelcome primitive at our table, is rumor. And rumor, as any glance at the recent history of the U.S. – or any “Western” country – will show, is a mighty force still, not a vanquished oral phenomenon of the villages. The blood of the serfs runs within us.

2.

There are the truths that we know, and the truths that we fear.

Although rumor is characteristically “word of mouth”, the letter and the vocable are not so easily divided, one from the other.

In B. Janine’s  “memories of a private detective”, published in Police Magazine in 1935, there is a story about a detective agency in Paris that drummed up business by sending anonymous letters to various likely clients, and then sending advertisements for the agency that mentioned, among the agency’s specialties, the tracking down of the truth of anonymous letters.

This strategy was eventually exposed by the police, with the help of another private detective: “This singular agency had to close its doors. Its director confessed that by this little game, he had garnered 100,000 francs per month.”

France has a strong culture of the anonymous letter. Poison pen  epistoliers even have a nickname: corbeau – crow – from the movie by Clouzot, which was based on the famous case of Angele Laval, who between 1917 and 1921  flooded her village, Tulle,  with 13,000 inhabitants,  with a constant stream of anonymous denunciations – at least one hundred letters have been counted -  that caused a panic. “ The apotheosis of this odious campaign was achieved in 1921, when a large poster was pasted up on the door of a local theater, on which were listed the names of 14 illegitimate couples, which is, at that time, evidently of the nature to provoke a scandal.” When Angele was put under investigation, she really showed her true psycho colors:  she « convinced her mother to commit a double suicide with her in a local pont. But everything indicates that, in reality, she never had any intention of putting the quietus to her life. Her mother drowned herself under Angele’s eyes who watched her drown without ever immersing herself totally in the water.”

Surrealism, as we all know, was just realism in France.

Rumor by letter has a voice – or a distinct graphology. A criminologist named Edmond Locard became a celebrity for, among other things, his graphological detecting – notes, letters, jottings all revealed their authors before his eyes. The slant of the “t”, the capital letter “E” – these, given a larger writing sample, would sort themselves out prettily, leading to the perpetrator.

In one of his famous interwar cases, he intervened in another corbeau-esque panic in 1933 in Toulon. In this case, the accused was again a woman – Germaine Pouliot – and Locard pursued her relentlessly through the “buckles of her Ts”. These letters apparently lead to Germaine – although she had an odd defender in Aux Ecoutes. Aux Ecoutes fascinates me: that Maurice Blanchot edited this scandal sheet, known for publishing rumors and for orienting itself to an audience of stock market punters, is rather like Maurice Blanchot editing National Enquirer in its glory years. Alas, in Blanchot scholarship, attention has fixed on his essays in the paper, his columns, rather than the context.

In the Toulon case, the “corbeau” was particularly malevolent with the wife of a well known lawyer, Madame Septier, accusing her of adultery and general lasciviousness. The journalist from Aux Ecoutes takes as his starting point, oddly enough, that Toulon is a veritable Sodom, where bourgeois families go to church and then the local brothel together – etc. What really infuriates this anonymous journalist, however, is the supposed method of the famed Locard.

“Dr. Locard, in his report, claimed that all the buckles of the T were always shortened in the anonymous letters, as in the letters of the accused. To the courtroom Madame de Rous showed him one of the threatening letters, which contained 26 instances of the letter T. 17 times the “always” of Dr. Locard is wrong.”

 

In spite of this, Germaine Pouliot was condemned – although the sentence was only a suspended  six month sentence. But as Aux Ecoutes noted, in 1934 – by which time Blanchot was the editor – the sentence was overturned when it was discovered in Pouliot’s dossier some documents containing  certain words resembling those of the poison letters that were definitely not Pouliot’s letters. The judge of the appeals court agreed, as did the prosecutor. As the newspaper noted: “Rarely has the problem of the responsibility of experts and the reform of expertise been posed in terms as troubling as this!”

3.

In the intersection between rumor and text culture, between the courtroom and the mailbox, it is true: the methods of truth are as strange as the methods fiction. Or, to quote from the “Postman of the Truth” concerning letters, purloined or not  – a matter addressed  by the great masters, from Poe to Lacan to Derrida -  “it belongs to the structure of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving…”